The central incident in the story you are about to hear actually took place. The time and the location are authentic but this is not true of the people involved, every one of them is a fictional character.

The things that made it, that created the nightmare took shape slowly that morning at widely separated points. At 10:45 a jet interceptor carrying two people took off to make a routine check of its radar equipment. Thirty minutes earlier at forty-five miles to the south a plane left the Santa Monica airport. By 11:15 both planes each unaware of the other crashed midair and landed in a field near a school. This story tells the anguish of two parents whose young daughter goes to that school.