UFOs in the daily Press:

Flying Yo-Yo Is Admitted Prop-Wash

Mystery of at least one "flying saucer" was solved last night by an apologetic vice-president of the Fairchild Photogrammetric Engineers Co., Los Angeles, who took just two minutes by long-distance telephone to explode employee Pilot Vernon Baird's story of the "flying yo-yo" that came apart in his prop wash.

L. T. Eilel, the Los Angeles executive who killed the latest, and best, flying saucer story, didn't know anything about those seen in other sections of the hemisphere, but he had the low-down one the one that "overtook" Baird's P-38 near the Tobacco Root Mountain in Western Montana.

"There's not a word of truth in it," said Eliel. He explained that Baird's dramatic tale of adventure 32,400 feet up had been simply a case of imaginative pilots "shooting the breeze."

(Pilot Baird's story told of a "pearly-grey, clam-shaped airplane, with a plexiglas dome on top... about 15 feet in diameter and about four feet thick" which had overtaken him during a photographic flight. He had, said Baird, taken evasive action and the yo-yo "came apart like a clamshell, the two pieces spiralling down some place in the Madison Range.")

Eliel explained that the pilots at Belgrade Field, near Bozeman, Mont., had been in the habit of kidding each other, letting their imaginations run wild when they gathered for a couple of cool ones at the end of the day. Baird, with photographer George Suttin, had been mapping the area between Helena and Yellowstone Park for the Reclamation Bureau.

"it's most unfortunate this got yout," said Eliel. "It was never intended to go beyond the circle of pilots at the field. This chap, trying to tell a better one than the others, was telling his story when some outsider apparently overheard it. After that the story spread very rapidly and in no time it was in the newspapers. I don't know whether any apologies are needed, but if they are I'm ready to make them.