The article below was published in the daily newspaper The Edmonton Journal, of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, on April 28, 1966.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP). -- Governor Haydon Burns of Florida saw a funny thing on his way to the capital - an unidentified flying object.
The governor ordered his airplane pilots to give chase, but the object's lights winked out and it disappeared - upward bound - as Burns' Convair bore down on it.
So says Burns, his assistant, a highway patrol captain and four newspaper men who were flying with the governor to Tallahassee from a re-election campaign session at Orlando recently. The sighting was at 6,000 feet.
"I much prefer to let the newspaper representatives be quoted," he said. "I will confirm that I saw the unidentified flying object they have alluded to in their writings."
The sighting was about 90 minutes after the flash of a vivid fireball, described by scientists as a meteor, excited thousands from the Carolinas to Toronto and as far west as Ohio.
Burns' executive assistant, Frank Stockton, estimated the distance the lights travelled with the plane as "at least 40 miles."
Co-pilot Herb Bates said he radioed air traffic control at Miami and was told it had the Burns plane on radar but nothing resembling the object as Bates described it.
