Paul R Hill's own account:

The data will partly consist of my own observations during a stormy afternoon in Hampton, Virginia, in 1962. The time was about 4:00 p.m. and the storm was clearing. A heavy cloud layer with a bottom at about 3,000 to 4,000 feet altitude lay over the lower end of Chesapeake Bay and over Hampton Roads, which is the body of water where the famous battle between the Merrimac and the Monitor took place during the Civil War. The rain had stopped, and the air beneath the cloud cover was clean and clear. I was heading west on Chesapeake Avenue, which is on the north shore of Hampton Road and was near the intersection with La Salle Avenue. Although I was a front seat passenger in an old Dodge sedan, I had a practically unobstructed view of the southern Bay and entire Roads area, which I was scanning to inspect the cloud formation.

Looking back over the southern end of Chesapeake May, I was surprised to see a fat aluminum- or metallic-colored "fuselage" nearly the size of a small freighter, nearly shaped more like a dirigible, approaching from the rear. It was at an altitude of about 1000 feet and was following a path about parallel to the ship channel and parallel to Chesapeake Avenue. It was moving slowly, possibly 100 mph or a little more. When it was first seen it was a couple of miles back over the Bay in a front-to-quartering view by which one could tell it was round in cross-section. I kept staring at this unusual object as it approached. It took about a minute to reach Fort Wool, which marks the beginning of the Roads. Its shape was clearly visible in good lighting, with its bright surface contrasting the darker cloud cover, and there was ample time to study it in changing perspective.

Puzzled, I asked the driver to look for a wing or other appendages to this strange vehicle. It looked like a big, pointed-nose dirigible, but had not even a tail surface as an appendage. The puzzling thing was that the big dirigibles had disappeared from the scene many years before; in fact, the big dirigible hanger at Langley Field had even been torn down. Had this been the blimp, I could have read GOODYEAR, but it was much longer. The driver didn't take time to look, as there was some traffic.

Soon after passing the area of Fort Wool and Fort Monroe, and when it was about opposite La Salle Avenue, it began to accelerate very rapidly and at the same time to emit a straw-yellow, or pale flame-colored wake or plume, short at first but growing in length as the speed increased until it was nearly as long as the object. Also, when it started to accelerate it changed from a level path to an upward slanting path, making an angle of about 5 degrees with the horizontal. It passed us traveling at an astounding speed It disappeared into the cloud layer opposite the Newport News Coal Loading Docks in what I estimated to be four seconds after the time it began to accelerate. The accelerating distance was measured by the car odometer to be 5 miles. If the acceleration was uniform, to cover 5 miles in 4 seconds with a 100 mph start means an acceleration of 100 times earth gravity at a speed at disappearance into the cloud layer of 8900 mph. But just as astounding as the performance figures was the silent operation. Not a sound was heard. This was surely a sophisticated performance, to make the understatement of the year.

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