In the autumn of 1947, during the first months of the saucer scare, many such UFOs were reported. One experienced observer, formerly a combat pilot, reported a flying saucer overhead at a height he estimated as 5000 feet. More careful study showed that the object was at a height of only about 250 feet and was suspended from small balloons. Later he learned that, as a joke, some boys had launched a paper saucer carried by helium-filled toy balloons. During this same period when everyone was talking about flying saucers, spaceships reported over an Iowa town one night turned out to be glowing bits of paper drifting from a fireplace chimney[III-13]. On March 16, 1961, according to the British radio, a resident of East Suffolk reported to the police that he had seen a spaceship land in a nearby field. Investigators soon found the craft: a fuel tank that had fallen from a passing plane. A fleet of UFOs appeared late one afternoon in July 1961 to an observer driving west along Highway 54 from El Paso, Texas, to Alamogordo, New Mexico. It had been raining in the mountains, and wind and dust storms had forced the driver to stop several times during his trip, but now the sun was shining between patches of dark cloud in the western sky. Driving toward the outskirts of Alamogordo, he was startled to see a V-shaped formation of huge saucers flying directly toward him. Stopping his car, he saw that they were glowing a deep red, were moving at high speed, and seemed to be as high as the clouds. When they had reached a point nearly overhead, they suddenly seemed to drop down toward the observer. Rapidly revising all his first estimates of size, height, and speed, he recognized their true identity. They were merely a group of tumbleweeds that had been carried aloft in the strong winds and were soaring past at a height of only 100 feet. Illumination from the setting sun had produced their weird reddish glow. A spectacular flying saucer hovered near the Smithsonian satellite-observing station in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles, on the night of October 17, 1961. The station crew observed it with binoculars, by apogee telescope, and photographed it with the Baker-Nunn satellite camera. A brilliantly glowing object, it shone in the eastern sky, moving erratically and fluctuating in brightness. After watching it for nearly an hour and finding that the nearby airport could not observe the object, the observers concluded that it must be less distant than it seemed, and set out by car to try to get a closer look. About a mile and a half from the station they stopped, and solved the mystery. A plantation manager and his servant stood in a field, hanging on to one end of a 1200-foot kite string. At the other end, high in the sky, soared a kite; hanging from it was a lighted pressure lantern[III-14] (see Plate IIa).