Combs chased the weird object for over ten minutes, during which it appeared to evade every move he made. Once, its speed was nearly six hundred miles an hour, as closely as he could estimate. In a final attempt to identify it, Combs zoomed the T-6 up at a steep angle and flashed his landing lights on it. Before he could get a good look, the globe light whirled off to the east and vanished. Since Combs’s story had been in the newspapers, Project “Saucer” evidently had felt in wise to give some explanation. When I read it, in the preliminary report, I was amazed. Here was the concluding sentence: “The mystery was cleared up when the object was identified positively as a cluster of cosmic-ray research balloons.” Even one of the giant balloons would have been hard to take as the explanation. Combs was almost sure to have collided with it in his head-on passes. But an entire cluster! I tried to picture the T-6 zooming and twisting through the night sky, with several huge balloons in its path. It would be a miracle if Combs got through without hitting one of them, even if each balloon was lighted. But he had seen only one light; so had Lieutenant Jackson. That would mean all the rest of the balloons were unlighted—an unbelievable coincidence. It was not until months afterward that I found Project “Saucer” had withdrawn this “solution.” In its final report, this case, Number 207, was listed in the “Unidentified” group. How the balloon-cluster explanation ever got into the first report is still a mystery. When I talked with Gorman, I told him I was baffled by the idea of a light maneuvering through the skies with no airfoil to support it. “I know,” he said. “It got me, too, at first.” “You mean you know the answer?” I demanded. “It’s just my personal opinion,” said Gorman. “But I’d rather not have it printed. You see, I got some ideas from all the questions those Project teams asked me. If my hunch turns out to be right, I might be talking about an official secret.” I tried to pry some hint out of him, but Gorman just smiled and shook his head. “I can tell you this much,” he said, “because it’s been mentioned in print. There was _thought_ behind every move the light made. It wasn’t any radar-responder gadget making it veer away from my ship.” “How do you know that?” “Because it reacted differently at different times. If it had been a mechanical control, it would have turned or climbed the same way each time I got near it. Instead, it was as if some intelligent mind was directing every turn like a game of chess, and always one move ahead of me. Maybe you can figure out the rest.” That was all I could get out of him. It bothered me, because Combs’s report indicated the same thing. I had a strong temptation to skip the space-plans research and tell Redell what Gorman had told me. But Redell had an orderly mind, and he didn’t like to be pushed.