Although Tombaugh had been too startled to count the number of rectangles or to note some other features he wondered about later, he immediately recorded the facts of the observation, sketched the pattern of the formation, and noted his impression that the lights had been part of a rigid structure. He added, “I have done thousands of hours of night sky watching, but never saw a sight so strange as this.” A report of this sighting was forwarded to Air Force officials, who could find no explanation. UFO enthusiasts unhesitatingly pronounced the phenomenon a huge flying saucer--an interpretation that the witness himself never made. The accounts given to the public unfortunately suffer from various distortions of fact. In its Cassandra-like warning of possible visitors from other planets, _Life_ magazine included the Tombaugh sighting as one of the key cases and in a ten-sentence description managed to include at least six misstatements, some of which added to the “uncanny” nature of the incident. According to this summary[XII-11] the year was 1948 (it was 1949); the time was about 11:00 P.M. (it was 10:45 P.M.); the lights were traveling south to north (they were moving northwest to southeast); the object had an oval shape (Tombaugh did not specify a shape); the lights exhibited a glare (they were of low luminosity); their speed was too fast for a plane, too slow for a meteor (no estimate of speed was given). On a nationwide TV show broadcast in 1958 one of the speakers stated specifically that Tombaugh had observed a cigar-shaped object with lighted portholes[XII-12]. An “artist’s conception” of the UFO in one publication[XII-13] depicts a long, tapered ship with a line of lighted windows, wholly unrelated to Tombaugh’s own sketch, which shows no unifying structure, merely six small rectangles arranged as though each one were at the corner of a hexagon (see Figure 20). [Illustration: _Figure 20._ Tombaugh’s rectangles. Top, when first seen at zenith; bottom, a few seconds later at 50° above horizon. (Based on sketch by C. W. Tombaugh.)]