laughed and said that a dozen people a week asked that question, but when I told him who I was and why I was interested, his attitude changed. He said that he’d never seen a UFO but he knew a lot of pilots on United who had. One man, he told me, had seen one several years ago. He’d reported it but he had been sloughed off like the rest. But he was so convinced that he’d seen something unusual that he’d gone out and bought a Leica camera with a 105-mm telephoto lens, learned how to use it, and now he carried it religiously during his flights.
There was a lull in the conversation, then the captain said, “Do you really want to get an opinion about flying saucers?”
I said I did.
“O.K.,” I remember his saying, “how much of a layover do you have in Chicago?”
I had about two hours.
“All right, as soon as we get to Chicago I’ll meet you at Caffarelio’s, across the street from the terminal building. I’ll see who else is in and I’ll bring them along.”
I thanked him and he went back up front.
I waited around the bar at Caffarelio’s for an hour. I’d just about decided that he wasn’t going to make it and that I’d better get back to catch my flight to Dayton when he and three other pilots came in. We got a big booth in the coffee shop because he’d called three more off-duty pilots who lived in Chicago and they were coming over too. I don’t remember any of the men’s names because I didn’t make any attempt to. This was just an informal bull session and not an official interrogation, but I really got the scoop on what airline pilots think about UFO’s.
First of all they didn’t pull any punches about what they thought about the Air Force and its investigation of UFO reports. One of the men got right down to the point: “If I saw a flying saucer flying wing-tip formation with me and could see little men waving—even if my whole load of passengers saw it—I wouldn’t report it to the Air Force.”
Another man cut in, “Remember the thing Jack Adams said he saw down by Memphis?”
I said I did.
“He reported that to the Air Force and some red-hot character met him in Memphis on his next trip. He talked to Adams a few
