“I wondered if the thing might be a hallucination, brought on by fatigue. After all, we had been in the air almost seventeen hours. I cleaned my spectacles and rubbed my eyes, but the Saucer was still there, pacing the plane and bobbing up and down as the plane itself occasionally wove or dipped. My next thought was to eliminate all possible chance that the thing was an internal reflection. I pulled my fur parka up over my head and put my face smack against the bulging surface of the blister that formed the window. Thus shielded from all internal illumination, I could still see the glowing object. I next drew a pencil from my pocket and held it out at arm’s length, and was surprised to find that the glowing disk was somewhat smaller than the eraser. I made a rapid calculation and concluded that if the sphere was actually 300 feet away, as it seemed, then it was only a foot or two in diameter, not much larger than a basketball. My next thought was whether one of the radio parachutes had somehow or other got attached to the plane by the string. These objects, brilliantly lit by an electric light, can be quite startling. But it had been nearly half an hour since the last parachute release and the meteorologists were just getting ready to lower another through the trap. I decided to call the meteorologist to look at the thing. But before I could call out, as if it had read my mind the object suddenly took off at top speed and disappeared. Now I was really concerned. In less than two seconds the UFO had vanished over the coast of Siberia, some 200 miles away. It must have been traveling at the fantastic speed of more than 100 miles a second. The Korean War was over but our relations with the Soviet Union were still tense, and I wondered if the object might be a secret Russian missile on reconnaissance. I kept my eyes glued to the point where the saucer had disappeared and suddenly, a couple of minutes later, it shot back toward the plane, more brilliant and spectacular than the first time. “You can perhaps imagine my relief when I suddenly realized what the object was, and at the same time realized that I had hit on the answer to a great many flying-saucer reports of a similar nature. Only someone familiar with the constellations could have identified the object. It was a mirage of Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens. Actually Sirius was slightly below the horizon at this time, but the bending of the light had raised the image above the horizon and had diffused the beam into the saucerlike form. The flashing red and green lights were common phenomena associated with star twinkling, and the apparent structure, including the whirling propeller, resulted from distortion by the earth’s atmosphere.