The answer to the second question came later, an example of the “luck” required to solve some of these UFO puzzles. Major W. T. Coleman, then Air Force Information Officer for the UFO project, was flying over the Fort Pierce region on the afternoon of April 29 in calm, clear weather when his plane ran into moderate turbulence of the short-wave type, “like riding in a car over a washboard road.” The wind-shear component was not large enough to explain the turbulence, and though a cold front was approaching from the Gulf of Mexico, it was still far out on the edge of the western horizon. Then, being a native of Florida, he suddenly remembered that muck fires were fairly common in the Everglades region, which lay below the plane. Peering down at the glades, he noticed a very large muck fire. He concluded: “Now, as typical with a cold front situation, the surface wind was blowing from the east pushing the smoke and heat toward the west coast of Florida. This relatively warm air naturally was lifting in the surrounding cool air. When the continuing warm air rose rapidly to the higher altitudes it ran into the reversed upper winds (high altitude westerly). In the process of being lifted the smoke filtered and cleared, yet the air remained relatively heated. It was moved directly across our course, thereby causing turbulence.”[XII-4] The fires explained both the turbulence reported during the week of the UFO sightings and the burned-out area below the region of turbulence. Thus these Florida UFOs were not spacecraft watching the earth, but were a special effect created by the chance combination of unrelated factors: a new and unfamiliar anti-collision beacon, an advancing cold front, and fires in the Florida swamps. _Inversions in California_ An unusually complex combination of events produced an epidemic of UFO sightings in northern California during the week of August 12 to 20, 1960. Nearly every night dozens of reliable citizens throughout Tehama County and the Mount Shasta region (long famous for its mysterious lights) reported UFOs at various times and of various descriptions: round, bright, metallic UFOs glowing with a reddish-purple fluorescent type of light, cigar-shaped UFOs trailing a long fiery exhaust, oval UFOs with red lights at each end and white lights in between, yellow-colored UFOs like a flying railroad car with flashing red lights at each end and white lights glowing at the windows. Radios roared with static and radar sets were plagued with phantoms, as the state was apparently invaded by a whole fleet of patrolling saucers.