Back in the mid-'60s, I was an Air Intelligence Specialist assigned to the Alaskan Command. One of the tasks my outfit was tasked with was to investigate suspected UFO sightings.
One sighting we looked into was reported by a couple that lived across the bay from Elemendorf AFB. Their place was really in the bush of Alaska, just a little southwest of the Sleeping Lady (the name Alaskans gave to a range of mountains across Cook Inlet from Anchorage that resembled a lady laying down--you could see her hair flowing to the west, her facial features, and to the east were two...you get the picture; one of the two was actually a volcano that made small eruptions about twice a year. During one of the eruptions, our neighbor [and landlord] Wilmer came over and got my wife and took her to Cook Inlet to watch the eruption; some of the ash blew across the bay, and my wife thought that seeing the eruption was cool, which it was).
The couple reported their sighting over a short wave radio (this was before satellites, when getting a telephone in Anchorage cost $100.00, and each phone call to the "lower 48" [the continental United States] cost about $10.00 a minute), with something like, "You can see the mother ship from here, and at night, you can see the flying saucers leaving the mother ship almost all night long."
Colonel J wasn't too happy about the prospects of an invasion (which, by the way, had managed to evade our radar systems) from outer space, so he dispatched our investigation team again, and reminded us to take out maps of the area so we could triangulate our position. This time we were able to land near their cabin, but we had to stay until dark before we could see the phenomena for ourselves. About 2100 hours (it was in the fall, and in land of the midnight sun, the daylight hours were becoming shorter), we could see the mother ship, complete with a blinking light on its top and a circle of lights around its middle. It seemed to hover about 50 ft above the ground, and sure enough, you could see the lights on the flying saucers as they left the mother ship (some every two minutes, others every 10 minutes or so). We watched until about midnight, but we could never seem to see any of the flying saucers return to the ship. I can still remember the somber voice of my captain, "This is really strange." We thanked the couple for all of their help (and supper) and returned to Elmendorf.
We plotted the position of the couple's cabin, but we were stumped for a couple days. No other reports of the mother ship had come in, not even from any of our Air Force pilots. We checked every map we had, plotting the azimuth from the cabin to the mother ship. It wasn't until we pieced together maps that gave us the scale we needed to plot their position and the Air Force base. Once we did this, it was evident that what they were seeing were the lights of our Air Force aircraft taking off; what wasn't evident, however, was what the "mother ship" was...until we went to the end of the runway, which lined up perfectly with the azimuth from their cabin--when we looked in the other direction, we could see the water tower, which was about a thousand yards from the runway, on top of a hill overlooking the base (and it had a blinking light on its top, and it was ringed with lights, too). By coincidence, the water tower, the runway, and the cabin were all aligned. Since airplanes don't turn on their warning lights during the day time, there's no wonder the couple couldn't see our F-104s taking off during daylight hours.
All in all, Colonel Johnson was glad to hear that there wasn't an invasion after all.