When the jets had reached 30,000 feet, ground radar informed them that they were almost on target, which was still moving southwest at the same speed. A few seconds later, the returns from the jets and the UFO blended on the radarscope and the operator advised the pilots that they would have to continue the search visually. At this moment, unfortunately, the ground radar suddenly failed. Soon after communication between ground and air had ended, the lead pilot observed a silver-colored sphere several thousand feet above him. Both jets went after it but although they climbed to their maximum altitude, 40,000 feet, neither could get close enough to identify the object, which was still some 30,000 feet above them. One pilot, however, managed to expose several feet of film with his gun camera. At the same moment the warning light on his gunsight radar blinked on to indicate it detected a solid object. At this point the jets broke off the intercept and started back to Wright-Patterson Field. Both pilots then realized that, although they had been chasing an unknown for some ten minutes, they were still northwest of the base in almost the same area where they had started the intercept. This surprising fact seemed to indicate that the unknown had slowed down from its original speed of 525 miles an hour, to hover in the sky nearly motionless. In flying saucer circles, this series of events was regarded as an iron-clad case of a physically material UFO observed simultaneously by radar, the human eye, and the camera. After sifting the evidence, ATIC investigators eventually found the more prosaic though complicated solution to the puzzle: 1) The object picked up on ground radar had actually been a jet plane, flying out of Cleveland. It had not been identified immediately because the Bellefontaine station had not received its flight plan. At 10:45 that morning the jet had been north of Dayton, flying at low altitude on a southwest heading, at a speed of around 525 miles an hour--the exact time, position, and speed of the radar unknown. 2) The pilots of the interceptors never saw this jet. What they saw, what their gun radar detected, and what their gun camera photographed was a twenty-foot radiosonde balloon that had been released from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base that morning shortly before the sighting. Ground radar, on the other hand, never picked up the balloon. 3) The chief reason for the confusion was that ground radar did not have a height-finding device. When the operator notified the pilots that his scope showed a blending of the returns produced by the pursuit jets and by the unknown, neither he nor the pilots had any way to tell whether the unknown was directly above or directly below the pursuing jets. At 30,000 feet the pilots were too high to see the Cleveland jet far below them. But they did see the balloon above them and naturally assumed that it was the object they were supposed to be chasing.