At the time, I was a Senior Airman with the 2164th Communications Squadron. I was a Radio Relay Repairman. On the first night, Christmas night if I'm not mistaken, I was at the Weapons Storage Area working on a piece of equipment in the [security] tower, trouble-shooting it. I think it was a motion-detection component, used for the security of the weapons. At midnight, the guy who was going to relieve me, ---- -------, called and said that he would come out to the area. So, I went back to the wide-band radio shop and finished up some paperwork.

Now, I don't remember how much later it was, but he called me at the shop and said, 'We just saw a UFO!' He meant himself and the security guards. He was in the security tower cab at the time he called. You could plainly tell he was excited and maybe kind of anxious. He sounded matter-of-fact but also kind of half-scared. I asked, 'What did it look like?' He said, 'It was so bright that you couldn't look directly at it.' So I didn't get any details about its shape, how large it was, any of that. It was just a really bright light. He said it was hovering there for just a few seconds, then it went toward Woodbridge so, maybe, that would be in a southwesterly direction.

So, then I asked him, 'Did everybody see it?' He said that everyone had. Then he asked me, 'How am I going to report this?' I said, 'Is anyone else going to report it?' He said, 'No, they're not going to report it.' So, I said, 'How are you going to look, if the others who were right there in the area aren't going to report it? You're going to be on your own. If it were me, I would let it go.' I was the ranking person on that night, so I told him, 'I would advise against it, but it's up to you.'

When I saw ---- later that night-he had to order a part for the tower, so we crossed paths-he told me that he'd decided not to report the incident. At the time, we didn't know that the other base was involved. We had no idea that there had been some security police hunting it down, or whatever, in the woods.

I guess it was two nights later, the part for the equipment in the tower came in. We got notified about that just as ---- was coming on shift, at midnight, so he said he would go out and install it. I stayed at the radio shop. A little while later, it had to past 12:30 [a.m.] since he had to pick up the part first, he called, really excited, and told me that he had just seen another UFO. It had followed the runway, which runs more or less east and west, then it turned, uh, then it turned again and flew directly over the Weapons Storage Area. He said it came right at the tower and was so low that he and the guard hit the deck! He said it had hovered [nearby] for a few seconds, he couldn't say how long, then it slowly moved off, over the trees. He said it was just above them, but then it dropped down into the trees. He didn't see it come back up, so that's when he called me on the landline. He said he heard a bunch of chatter on the radio in the tower-the guard there was talking to someone-and said [the Security Police] were going to have to report it this time because it went down into the woods.

The next time I saw ----, he told me that he had to file a report along with the Security Police, at their headquarters. It was only, maybe, 300 yards from the Weapons Storage Area. Later on, it seems like it was a week or so later, he had been called by our squadron commander, Major Cossa, and told to report for a briefing. He was gone most of an afternoon but when he came back he was really agitated. I asked him, 'What's up?' He said, 'We're not to speak about the UFO.' Then he said, really angry, 'I know what I saw!'

He said that during the briefing, someone-he assumed it was the Office of Special Investigations-told everyone there that night they hadn't seen anything. I think that upset ---- more than anything. They called all the police liars, and all that. He said, 'They told us that we did not see it, and were never to speak of it.' He was really upset. He said [the OSI agents] had talked to them as a group and then talked to them individually. You know, went over their statements with them. He said they told him he was a liar, that he would never have a career, and all that. You know, threatening him. But he told me that he couldn't get into the details. We never talked about it again.

A while later, I tried to ask some of the Security Police about the incident, when I saw them at the Weapons Storage Area, but they were fairly tight-lipped about it. They just told me that when they went into the forest [on the night of December 27/28] they took Light-Alls with them. They said all of a sudden, the lights quit working, the vehicle engines quit, and the radios had a lot of static on them. Then, after a few minutes, everything just started up again. I didn't know much more than that until I saw all of the reports from Colonel Halt and the others on TV. That's about all I can think to tell you.

I asked Thompson, "How do you know the first incident happened on Christmas night?" He replied, "Well, I'm not positive it did, but it was definitely during the holidays, the 25th, the 26th, because ---- and I were working a longer shift on both of those nights. We were single and [our sergeant] asked us to volunteer for that, so the married guys could be with their families during Christmas. In return, we got some days off in January."

I then asked Thompson if ------- had described seeing one or more beams of light coming from the UFO, down into the WSA, on either night. He replied, "No, he didn't say anything about that."

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