The comment by R. L. Dowden does not properly represent the results presented in our recent paper [Inan et al., 1995> and attempts to prematurely classify the VLF events reported in our papers as being produced by elves. There is no experimental evidence that the VLF events reported in our papers are necessarily associated with the optical phenomena of elves. In our recent paper [Inan et al., 1996a> we provide a physically based mechanism which accounts for the forward scatter property of the VLF events observed in our data. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1996