The next incident to gain publicity in this amazing week occurred on Thursday (or Wednesday) evening when a UFO allegedly landed in Ohio and then vanished. Driving home in the early evening along a country road, a Mr. Olden Moore saw a glowing UFO in the sky. At first it looked small, like a star, but it rapidly increased in size and split apart in the air as it descended and apparently landed in a nearby field. Moore stopped his car, intending to investigate, but for some reason he changed his mind and instead drove on home to get his wife. When they returned and searched the field they found nothing. Nevertheless, they reported the incident to the authorities and next day a Civilian Defense official, arriving to check the ground where the UFO supposedly had landed, reported the level of radioactivity “far above normal.” A woman living half a mile away from the field in question reported that, although she herself had not seen a UFO, her TV set had blurred at about the time of the sighting, and on the following day she found that her car, parked near the house, was pockmarked. Applying his Geiger counter to the car, the Civilian Defense official pronounced it radioactive[IX-16]. This UFO apparently possessed highly selective E-M powers: it did not stop the engine of Mr. Moore’s car but did interfere with the operation of a TV set half a mile away! Air Force investigators patiently collected and sifted the facts. The supposed landing site showed nothing abnormal--the grass was not burned, the earth was not disturbed, no foreign material could be found. The normal radioactivity of the ground in the area measured .18 milliroentgens; at the supposed landing site the measure had been .20 milliroentgens. This difference of .02 is not “far above normal” but well within the probable error in the calibration of the instruments. Interviews with other Ohioans who had also seen the glowing unknown provided the answer: the UFO was a large meteor, conspicuous in the dusk of early evening. Traveling directly toward the witness, it had looked like a glowing sphere suspended in the air and rapidly increasing in brightness. Near the end of its flight it split into two or more pieces and fell silently to the earth, not “in the next field” but perhaps many miles away. The blurring of the TV set may have been mere coincidence or, if the meteor had actually passed close by, may have resulted from the ionized trail of the meteor (see _Chapter_ V). _Saucerdom’s Miraculous Electromagnetic Force_ Most of us remember the nursery tale of Chicken-Little, who started a panic in the barnyard kingdom with her eyewitness report that the sky was falling: “I saw it with my eyes, I heard it with my ears, and a piece of it fell on my tail.” Calm was restored in the kingdom, after a time, when the prosaic truth came to light: a falling acorn, not a piece of the sky, had grazed the credulous chick.