Few sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena have been more clearly described. Both witnesses were experienced pilots. Nash had flown more than 10,000 hours at altitudes of 7000 to 8000 feet and had held the rank of captain for eight years. Both men had been trained to observe accurately, to check and double-check every factor that might affect safe flying, and to regard the word “assume” as a potential killer. They shared the attitude of all cautious airmen: “In God we trust--everyone else, we check.”[XII-5] Unlike many UFO descriptions, their report distinguished rigorously between fact and inference, and it included the exact time of the sighting as well as the position, height, speed, and direction of flight of their plane. Using a kind of “instinct-judgment” gradually developed during their many hours in the air, they had made careful estimates of the position, height, speed, and direction of flight of the unknowns. Nevertheless, no reasonable explanation of the disks was found. At the time of this incident flying saucers had been big news for many weeks. Both _Life_ and _Look_ magazines had recently published serious discussions of the possibility that flying saucers came from other planets, and newspapers were printing dozens of reports of weirdly glowing machines trailing fiery exhausts, streaking through the air at meteoric speeds (see _Chapter_ VII). At ATIC, the small staff of nine men was swamped with saucer reports, far more than they could deal with properly, and some of the investigators were privately convinced that UFOs did come from outer space[XII-6]. For those or other reasons, the Norfolk sighting unquestionably received a less adequate study than would a similar incident today. The case was dropped and filed as an Unknown. The incredible velocity and instantaneous change of course reported were obviously impossible for any earthly vehicle; no known metal could have escaped being melted by the frictional heat produced during so swift a passage through the dense atmosphere at 2000 feet, and no human flesh and bone could have survived the smashing inertial forces involved in the instantaneous change of direction. Nash and Fortenberry frankly stated their own conviction: “Though we don’t know what they were, what they were doing here or where they came from, we are certain in our own minds that they were intelligently operated craft from somewhere other than this planet.”[XII-7] _A Possible Explanation of the Nash-Fortenberry Disks_ In the hope of solving the mystery, even though a decade has passed, the authors of this book have made a thorough study of the available evidence and present the results in the pages that follow.[D]