northwest cities. The rapidly growing reports were met with mixed
ridicule and alarm. One of the skeptical group was Captain E. J.
Smith, of United Airlines.

"I'll believe them when I see them," he told airline employees, before
taking off from Boise the afternoon of the Fourth.

Just about sunset, his airliner was flying over Emmett, Idaho, when
Captain Smith and his copilot, Ralph Stevens, saw five queer objects
in the sky ahead. Smith rang for the stewardess, Marty Morrow, and the
three of them watched the saucers for several minutes. Then four more
of the disks came into sight. Though it was impossible to tell their
size, because their altitude was unknown, the crew was sure they were
bigger than the plane they were in. After about ten minutes the disks
disappeared.

The Air Force quickly denied having anything resembling the! objects
Captain Smith described.

"We have no experimental craft of that nature in Idaho--or anywhere
else," an official said in Washington. "We're completely mystified."

The Navy said it had made an investigation, and had no answers. There
had been rumors that the disks were "souped-up" versions of the Navy's
"Flying Flapjack," a twin-engined circular craft known technically as
the XF-5-U-1. But the Navy insisted that only one model had been
built, and that it was now out of service.

In Chicago, two astronomers spiked guesses that the disks might be
meteors. Dr. Girard Kieuper, director of the University of Chicago