back. The pattern of the scorch showed that the hat was flat when it was scorched, but the burned holes—the lab found some minute holes we had missed—had very probably been made by an electrical spark. This was all the lab could find.
During our previous visit we repeatedly asked the question, “Was the hat burned before you went into the woods?” and, “Had the cap been ironed?” We had received the same answers each time: “The hat was not burned because we [the boy scouts] were playing with it at the scout meeting and would have noticed the burns,” and, “The cap was new; it had not been washed or ironed.” It is rumored that the cap was never returned because it was proof of the authenticity of the sighting. The hat wasn't returned simply because the scoutmaster said that he didn’t want it back. No secrets, no intrigue; it’s as simple as that.
Everyone who was familiar with the incident, except a few people in the Pentagon, were convinced that this was a hoax until the lab called me about the grass samples we’d sent in. “How did the roots get charred?” Roots charred? I didn’t even know what my caller was talking about. He explained that when they’d examined the grass they had knocked the dirt and sand off the roots of the grass clumps and found them charred. The blades of grass themselves were not damaged; they had never been heated, except on the extreme tips of the longer blades. These had evidently been bending over touching the ground and were also charred. The lab had duplicated the charring and had found that by placing live grass clumps in a pan of sand and dirt and heating it to about 300 degrees F. over a gas burner the charring could be duplicated. How it was actually done outside the lab they couldn’t even guess.
As soon as we got the lab report, we checked a few possibilities ourselves. There were no hot underground springs to heat the earth, no chemicals in the soil, not a thing we found could explain it. The only way it could have been faked would have been to heat the earth from underneath to 300 degrees F., and how do you do this without using big and cumbersome equipment and disturbing the ground? You can’t. Only a few people handled the grass specimens: the lab, the intelligence officer in Florida, and I. The lab wouldn’t do it as a joke, then write an official
