Months later, a Washington newsman confirmed at least part of the lake story. When he first related it, I thought he had fallen for a gag. “I heard that yarn,” I said. “Don’t tell me you believe it?” “I come from Idaho,” he told me. “And I happen to know the fellow who took the picture. Maybe it wasn’t a disk, but something fell into that lake.” “Did you see the picture?” “Yes, at the Pentagon.” At my surprised look, he added, “That was long before they clamped down. I was talking to an Air Force officer about this lake thing, and he showed me the picture.” “What did it look like?” “You couldn’t tell much about it-just a big splash and a blur where something went under. Maybe a magnifying glass would bring it out, but I didn’t get a chance to try it.” It was early in 1950 when he told me this. I asked at the Pentagon if this picture was in the Wright Field files, and if so whether I could see it. My inquiries drew blank looks. No one remembered such a photograph. And even if it were in the Project “Saucer” files, I couldn’t see it. This was more than two months after Project “Saucer” had been officially closed and its secrets presumably all revealed. The rest of my interviews during this 1949 trip helped to round out my picture of Project “Saucer” operations. Some witnesses seemed afraid to talk; a few flatly refused. I found no proof of official pressure, but I frequently had the feeling that strong hints had been dropped. Though one or two witnesses showed resentment at investigators’ methods, most of them seemed more annoyed at the loss of time involved. One man had been checked first by the police, then by the sheriff’s office; an Air Force team had spent hours questioning him, returning the next day, and finally the F.B.I. had made a character check. What he told me about the Air Force interrogation confirmed one of Art Green’s statements. “One Intelligence captain tried to tell me I’d seen a weather balloon. I called up the airport and had them check on release schedules. They said next day it didn’t fit any schedules around this area. Anyway, the wind wasn’t right, because the thing I saw was cutting into the wind at a forty-five-degree angle.” Other witnesses told me that investigators had suggested birds, meteors, reflections on clouds, shooting stars, and starshells as probable explanations of what they had seen. I learned of one pilot who had been startled by seeing a group of disks racing past his plane. Air Force investigators later suggested that he had flown through a flock of birds, or perhaps a cluster of balloons. On the flight back to Washington, I reread all the information the Air Force had released on Project “Saucer.” Suddenly a familiar phrase caught my eye. I read over the paragraph again: “Preliminary study of the more than 240 domestic and thirty foreign incidents by Astro-Physicist Hynek indicates that an over-all total of about 30% can probably be explained away as astronomical phenomena.”