Shortly after 8 P.M. E.S.T. the plane was cruising on automatic pilot at about 8000 feet over Chesapeake Bay, and approaching Norfolk, Virginia. The sun had set and the night was almost entirely dark, although the coast line was still visible. Fortenberry, sitting at the right as copilot, was making his first run on this particular course and Nash, in the pilot’s seat at the left, was pointing out the cities and landmarks of the route. Nash had just called attention to the lights of Newport News and Cumberland, ahead and to the right of the plane, when at 8:12 a brilliant red glow suddenly appeared in the west, apparently between Newport News and the aircraft, and so low that it might almost have been on the ground. One of the men exclaimed, as have so many incredulous witnesses on first seeing a UFO, “What the hell is that?” [Illustration: _Figure 18._ Reported movements of the Chesapeake Bay disks. A, Disks at first approach; B, they flip over and reverse order; C, they change direction and recede.] Looking through the front windows of the cockpit, they watched the unidentified light traveling northeast at incredible speed on a horizontal course roughly a mile below the plane. Almost immediately they perceived that the unknown was actually a procession of six red-orange lights, glowing like hot coals. Shooting forward like a stream of red tracer bullets, the line of lights moved out over Chesapeake Bay until they were only about half a mile away from the plane. They appeared to be sharply defined, large, circular disks, arranged in a narrow echelon formation--like a set of stairs tilted slightly to the plane’s right, with the leader at the lowest step, each following disk slightly higher and to the rear, and the last disk at the highest point (see Figure 18). Realizing that the line was apparently going to pass under the plane at the right on the copilot’s side, Nash flipped off his seat belt so that he could move to the window on that side. During this brief interval he was not able to see the objects, but Fortenberry kept them in view. As he later described their amazing behavior, all the disks simultaneously turned up on edge, like coins, so that the glowing surfaces were tilted to the right. Still on edge, they suddenly reversed their relative places so that disk 1 now occupied the last place in line and disk 6 became the leader.