The frightened pilot jerked on the controls in an attempt to dodge the object, but almost before the plane could respond the unknown had disappeared. It had been in sight about three seconds. In his official report he estimated that the object had been the size of a pool ball held at arm’s length and that it had been not more than a mile away. The copilot, however, did not agree. A man with special training and unusual experience in the study of UFOs, he estimated the object to be the size of the head of a pin held at arm’s length and the distance to be at least 300 miles. The extreme brilliance of the object against the night sky, he thought, had made it seem larger. In his opinion, supported by Air Force investigation, the unknown had been a fireball at least fifty miles high that had burned out and vanished as they watched. As in the Chiles-Whitted case, ground observers also saw the object and thus provided independent confirmation of the analysis. A member of the Ohio State University reported to the Harvard College Observatory that on the night of January 8, at approximately 6:15 P.M. E.S.T., he had watched a brilliant bluish-white meteor streak across the sky over Columbus and vanish within a few seconds. The fireball must indeed have been high and spectacular to be visible at the same moment from points nearly 300 miles apart. _Other Flaming UFOs_ Not all spectacular UFOs are meteors, of course, any more than they are all planets or balloons or rockets. Sudden brilliant illuminations of the night sky can have any one of a dozen or more explanations. The atmosphere is crowded with potential Unknowns, more than at any time in man’s history. The air surrounding our planet plays host not only to meteors and fireballs, birds and insects, but also to military and commercial planes, private planes, jets, helicopters, weather balloons, experimental rockets, and an ever-growing number of artificial satellites. An ear-shattering detonation that rattles a house or breaks a window may come from an exploding fireball or it may come from a jet penetrating the sound barrier. Without an exact knowledge of all the circumstances, only the foolhardy would attempt to say positively what caused any given unusual aerial phenomenon. Let us consider a sighting that might have received various wrong interpretations and would probably have become one of the most famous of the UFOs cited by saucerdom, had investigators lacked full information.