In 1966, a string of UFO sightings in Massachusetts and New Hampshire provoked a Congressional Hearing by the House Committee on Armed Services. According to attachments to the hearing, the Air Force had at first stated that the sightings were the result of a training exercise happening in the area. But NICAP, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, reported that there was no record of a plane flying at the time the sightings occurred. Another report alleged that the UFO was actually a flying billboard advertising gasoline. Raymond Fowler (of NICAP) added his own interviews with the locals, who saw Air Force officers confiscating newspapers with the story of UFOs and telling them not to report what they had seen. Two police officers who had witnessed the UFOs, Eugene Bertrand and David Hunt, wrote a letter to Major Quintanilla stating that they felt their reputations were destroyed by the Air Force. "It was impossible to mistake what we saw for any kind of military operation, regardless of altitude," the irritated officers wrote, adding that there was no way it could have been a balloon or helicopter.