Most of these witnesses were veteran airmen, well able to recognize conventional phenomena in the night sky. Studying their reports, officials at Patrick Air Force Base decided that the similarity of the descriptions warranted further investigation. In the preliminary study, an Intelligence officer took up a B-57 aircraft in the vicinity of Fort Pierce, while ground radar at Patrick Air Force Base kept his plane under constant surveillance. At 7:20 P.M., when at 25,000 feet, he saw the UFO, a white light three times brighter than the brightest star. It appeared in the western sky and was moving north to south. When viewed with the naked eye, the light looked like a star that dimmed and brightened in a regular cycle; through binoculars it also displayed the red and green navigation lights of a plane. Soon after the visual sighting, the ground radar informed the investigating pilot that the object was approximately fifty nautical miles from his plane and was a jet airliner bound for Miami; the jet was observed for approximately ten minutes as it descended toward the Miami airport. The investigating plane remained in the air and, about five minutes after the jet had landed, observed a second, similar, high-intensity light that appeared in the western sky, moving from north to south. The radar at the Miami air-traffic control center positively identified this light as a Delta Airline jet, Flight 833, proceeding southeast. From these facts the officers concluded that the UFOs seen in Florida that week had been produced by commercial jet airliners[XII-1]. Two questions remained: How had the experienced pilots and ground observers failed to recognize so familiar a phenomenon as a night-flying jet? What accounted for the unprecedented turbulence experienced by one pilot, and the burned-over ground below the region of the sighting? The first question was soon answered. ATIC investigators telephoned the Federal Aviation Agency and learned that experiments with a new type of anti-collision beacon were being carried out from various field offices, and that several jet airliners as well as some turboprop aircraft were using the new light. The standard beacon was a rotating sodium light, whose color is yellow. The new beacon was an intense white light which, viewed at a slant, becomes a spectacular phenomenon even more brilliant than Venus or Jupiter seen rising or setting through a hazy atmosphere. Since the witnesses were not familiar with the appearance of the experimental beacons, they had not recognized the newly equipped jets.