The sheriff can now reconstruct the peculiar combination of events that produced the “tiger” theory. He knows that the section of Highway X where the truck stopped runs parallel to the far side of the farmer’s cornfield. The newspaper account tells him that a giant eland is a large antelope with short, twisted horns and a tawny-colored coat with dark stripes. He concludes that the farmer, having only a few seconds’ glimpse of a strange animal among the corn, had observed the eland’s stripes but had failed to notice its horns, and had therefore mistaken it for a tiger. _The Role of Unusual Coincidence_ Analogous unlikely coincidences account for many flying-saucer reports. The factors that encourage the misinterpretation may be the particular time or place at which the phenomenon appears, the kind of weather, the experience, physical state, or mood of the observer, his unawareness of a certain fact, or any combination of these and other relevant circumstances. A fairly simple case of this type was the reported landing of a spacecraft near an Army barracks (often referred to in saucer publications as the “Nike site”) in a rural area of Maryland, shortly before dawn on the morning of September 29, 1958. The sergeant on duty that morning left the orderly room at 4:25 A.M. and started to the barracks to waken the troops. The sky was clear, with bright moonlight. Hearing a whirring sound like a pitched baseball with a loose cover, he looked up toward the west to see a brilliant round white object soaring through the sky from north to south, and breaking up into smaller pieces as it traveled. It disappeared behind the roof of the mess hall, directly to the west, after being in view about two seconds. Hurrying around the south side of the mess hall to search the western horizon, he observed a very bright white, pulsating light at ground level, apparently in a wooded area some four or five miles west of the battery site, as though the glowing object had landed there. He reported the incident to an officer, who measured the azimuth position of the unknown. The glow remained in one place but diminished with increasing daylight until it was no longer visible.