Under headlines such as “Mystery Object Stalls Autos in West Texas,” these stories hit newspapers all over the nation. The news spread fast. All day Sunday dozens of persons in Texas and New Mexico were relating that they, too, had seen fiery objects and flashes of light in the sky the night before. An amazingly large number of citizens seem to have been out late that stormy Saturday night, but apparently none of them noticed any ordinary lightning--only phantom “somethings” variously described as a burning mass, a big light, an egg-shaped object 200 feet long lighted up as though it were on fire, something like neon lights, objects that were red, glowing, brilliant, fiery, bluish-green, or pulsating green. Not surprisingly, with all this publicity, the original incident quickly began to take on new dimensions. Saucedo amplified his first statements and recalled that the object had been “torpedo-shaped,” “like a rocket, but much larger,” and that lights on the object had seemed to be winking on and off[IX-4]. For days the Russian satellites had to share the spotlight with the American flying eggs, while both amateur and professional investigators tried to solve the mystery. The proponents of UFOs deduced the presence of a flying saucer with E-M powers. Various astronomers, when urged by newsmen, reluctantly advanced off-the-cuff theories based on the meager printed accounts. Dr. La Paz, of the Institute of Meteoritics in New Mexico, suggested that the things seen at Levelland might have been fireballs. A reporter assigned to the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatories to cover Moonwatch observations of the new Sputnik gave a sketchy summary of the incident to Dr. Menzel, who also concluded that Saucedo might have seen an unusually bright meteor and, startled by its brilliance, might accidentally have killed the engine. Lacking news of Sputnik II, the reporter sent in a facetious story asserting that, according to the director of the Harvard College Observatory, the flying eggs were mirages that so frightened the drivers that they reacted by pressing a “nervous foot” on the accelerator and killing the engine. When the weather conditions at Levelland became known, of course, the meteor theory was immediately discarded. Dr. Nininger, of the American Meteorite Museum in Arizona, made the best guess of all: Saucedo had observed an example of that rare phenomenon, ball lightning[IX-5].