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Title: The World of Flying Saucers: A Scientific Examination of a
Major Myth of the Space Age

Author: Donald H. Menzel
Lyle Gifford Boyd

Release date: November 1, 2021 [eBook #66639]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Doubleday & Company, 1963

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD OF
FLYING SAUCERS: A SCIENTIFIC EXAMINATION OF A MAJOR
MYTH OF THE SPACE AGE ***

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THE WORLD OF FLYING SAUCERS

The World of
Flying Saucers

A SCIENTIFIC EXAMINATION OF A
MAJOR MYTH OF THE SPACE AGE

Donald H. Menzel
AND
Lyle G. Boyd

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC., GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 63-12989
Copyright © 1963 by Donald H. Menzel and Lyle G. Boyd
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America

To Fred L. Whipple, whose studies have added much to our knowledge of
meteors—which have furnished more than their share of UFOs.

Contents

xiii
PREFACE

i. THE SAUCER WORLDS 1

UFO Reports and the Air Force—The Scientist’s View—The
Question of “Evidence”—Various Types of UFO—Descriptions
of UFOs—A “Baedeker’s Guide” to Saucerdom

ii. LO! 13

Arnold’s Nine Disks—The Great Shaver Mystery—The Maury
Island Fragments—Science Fiction Adopts the Saucers—Mirage
or Wave Clouds?

iii. AIR-BORNE UFOS: BALLOONS TO BUBBLES 31

The Mantell Tragedy—A Probable Solution of the Mantell Case
—A Radiosonde over Virginia—Skyhook and Pibal UFOs—The
Guantánamo “Dogfight”—The Wallops Island UFO—Weather
Balloons and Saucers—Plastic UFOs and the “Stack of Coins”—
Jets and Contrails—The Killian Case— ... And Kites and Soap
Bubbles

iv. THE SPANGLED HEAV’NS: STARS AND 60
PLANETS
A Mirage of Sirius—Earth’s Distorting Atmosphere—The
“Whipping Girl” of Saucerdom—The Ryan Case—Venus as a
Morning Star—Venus as an Evening Star—The Rotating Lights

of Japan—UFOs and the Opposition of Mars—The Gorman
“Dogfight”—Only a Balloon?—Jupiter through a Jet Trail

v. OUT OF THE SKY: METEORS AND FIREBALLS 88

Stones from Heaven—Meteor Streams and Showers—The Green
Fireballs—Meteors in the Records—Fallacies about Meteors—
Facts about Meteors—Unusual Fireballs—Great Meteor
Processions—The Chiles-Whitted Sighting—Other Flaming
UFOs

vi. LIVING LIGHTS 118

The Luminous Owls of Norfolk—Things That Glow in the Dark
—Sea Gulls as UFOs—The Lubbock Lights—The Lubbock
Pictures—Other Winged UFOs—The Tremonton Movies

vii. PANIC 133

Growth of a Panic—The Scoutmaster’s UFO—Monster in West
Virginia—The Panel of Civilian Scientists

viii. PHANTOMS ON RADAR 145

Radar as a Reporter—The Principle of Radar—Weather and
Radar Echoes—The Kinross Case—The “Invasion” of
Washington, D.C.—Radar Experiments in Washington
—“Simultaneous” Radar-Visual Reports—“Ghosts” and “Angels”
on Radar—The Rapid City Sighting

ix. E-M AND G-FIELDS IN UFO-LAND 172

Stormy Weather in Texas—The Phenomenon of Ball Lightning—
E-M and Non-E-M Saucers—The Saturnian Visitors—
Surveillance by Flying Eggs—Saucerdom’s Miraculous
Electromagnetic Force—Effects and Causes—“G-Fields” and

UFO Propulsion—The G-Field Myth—Electricity, Magnetism,
and Gravity

x. CONTACT! 198

Earthlings and Extraterrestrials—The “Contactees”—Adamski’s
Travels—Photography and the UFO—The Isle of Lovers Hoax—
The Trindade Island Saucer—The Brazilian Naval Ministry—The
Icarai Submarine Hunting Club—The Trindade Photographs—
Project Ozma

xi. ANGEL HAIR, PANCAKES, ETC. 219

Angel Hair and Spiders—Other Varieties of Angel Hair—The
Wisconsin Pancakes—The Moon Bridge—“Pieces of Saucers”—
Silver Rain in Brazil—Other Mysterious Fragments

xii. SPECIAL EFFECTS 238

The Role of Unusual Coincidence—The Problem of Unknown
Lights—Michigan’s Flying Bird Cage—UFOs from Reflections
—Sundogs in Utah and France—Bright Spots on Films—
Unfamiliar Lights on Planes—Inversions in California—The
Chesapeake Bay Case—A Possible Explanation of the Nash-
Fortenberry Disks—Other UFOs in “Stack” Formation—The
Tombaugh Rectangles

xiii. INVESTIGATORS: AIR FORCE AND CIVILIAN 271

Official Study of UFOs—Civilian Saucer Groups—NICAP—The
“Conspiracy” Fantasy-UFO at Sheffield Lake, Ohio—“The
Fitzgerald Report”—The Open Mind

291
APPENDIX

295
INDEX

Acknowledgments

PLATE I: a, The Seattle Times. b, A Shell Photo
PLATE II: a, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. b, Wide World Photo
PLATE III: a, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. b, Gilberto Vazquez,
El Imparcial, San Juan, Puerto Rico
PLATE IV: a, Wide World Photo. b, Wide World Photo. c, David Atlas, Air
Force Cambridge Research Center, Bedford, Massachusetts
PLATE V: a, Bernd T. Matthias and Solomon J. Buchsbaum, Bell Telephone
Laboratories. b, Dr. John C. Jensen, Nebraska Wesleyan University
PLATE VI: a, United Press Photo. b, United Press Photo
PLATE VII: a, C. L. Johnson. b, Mrs. William Felton Barrett
PLATE VIII: a, United Press Photo. b, Wide World Photo
Figure 18. Courtesy True, The Man’s Magazine. Copyright 1952, Fawcett
Publications, Inc.

Drawings by Cushing and Nevell

PREFACE
Both as scientists and as devotees of science fiction, we have long been
interested in space travel. When reports of unidentified flying objects began
to increase in the years between 1947 and 1952, one of us (D.H.M.)
collected and studied the limited information available about the sightings.
He soon concluded (with a slight feeling of disappointment!) that the flying
saucers were not vehicles from other worlds but were only mundane objects
and events of various kinds, some of them commonplace, some familiar
chiefly to meteorologists, physicists, and astronomers.
At a conference with Air Force officials in Washington in April 1952, he
presented his idea that planetary mirages, sundogs, reflections, and other
astronomical, atmospheric, and optical phenomena probably accounted for
a large percentage of the mysterious UFOs. This suggestion met with strong
skepticism from some of the conferees who at that time were sympathetic to
the interplanetary hypothesis and were, of course, better acquainted with
military than with physical science. Other conferees, however, wished to
consider and test the theories offered. Proof obviously required a
knowledge of all the facts of a given sighting, facts that often were not
available to the public. The Air Force therefore granted access to the file of
UFO cases. At the same time, since many of the cases were then classified
as secret, the Air Force imposed the condition that security regulations must
be strictly observed.
D.H.M. was then preparing a book to present his explanations of flying
saucers. Acceptance of the Air Force offer, with the accompanying
restriction, would have prevented his publishing analyses based on material
in the files. It would also have hindered any future public discussion of the
UFO problem. For these reasons he felt compelled to decline the
opportunity.
In the spring of 1959 as we began planning the present book, we again
requested permission to study the Air Force records of UFO sightings. This
time the officials generously opened their files to us without restriction.

Thus we have been able to include detailed studies of particular incidents,
to give the explanations found for most of them by Air Force investigators,
to explain the causes of some hitherto unsolved cases, and to suggest highly
probable solutions for several classic “Unknowns.”
To discuss each one of the thousands of unidentified flying objects
reported during the last fifteen years is obviously impossible. We have
therefore chosen to describe the common types of sighting and to analyze
some of the representative and most interesting cases in each category. In
general we have avoided using the names of the persons involved; but when
the names are well known to the flying-saucer public and have previously
appeared in print, we have felt no obligation to disguise them.
Many persons have contributed to the material in this book. Members of
the United States Air Force have generously helped us to collect the basic
facts, and have shown amazing patience in answering hundreds of small
questions of detail. In particular, we wish to thank Col. Philip G. Evans,
Col. Edward H. Wynn, Lt. Col. William T. Coleman, Lt. Col. Robert J.
Friend, Lt. Col. Lawrence J. Tacker, Major Carl R. Hart, and Sgt. David
Moody.
Others who have helped us in various ways include Dr. Isaac Asimov,
Mr. Carleton Atherton, Miss C. M. Botley, Mr. Wilfred J. Chambers, Mr.
Albert M. Chop, Dr. Leon Davidson, Mr. Charles W. Dean, Mr. John F.
Gifford, Mr. Richard Hall, Mr. Theodore Hieatt, Prof. Seymour B. Hess,
Prof. J. Allen Hynek, Dr. Luigi G. Jacchia, Mr. Craig L. Johnson, Dr. Urner
Liddell, Mr. Oscar Main, Prof. Charles A. Maney, Dr. Richard E.
McCrosky, Mr. John W. McLellan, Capt. William B. Nash, Dr. Thornton W.
Page, Dr. Vernon G. Plank, the late Dr. H. P. Robertson, Dr. Donald H.
Robey, Dr. Carl Sagan, Dr. Clyde W. Tombaugh, Mr. John Walkin, Prof.
Fred L. Whipple, and Mr. John G. Wolbach.

D.H.M.
L.G.B.

THE WORLD OF FLYING SAUCERS

Chapter i
THE SAUCER WORLDS

Thousands of reports of “flying saucers,” “unidentified flying objects,” or
“UFOs” have appeared in print during the last fifteen years. Although most of
the things seen have later been explained as unusual but normal phenomena,
some enthusiasts continue to regard them as mysterious, and thus help
perpetuate the myth that the “saucers” are actually spaceships from other
planets, busily carrying out a patrol of the earth.
This saucer myth owes an unacknowledged debt to Charles Fort, a talented
reporter, writer, and self-appointed gadfly of science. With a strong curiosity
about the world of nature but without training in the disciplines of research,
Fort liked to challenge scientists in general and astronomers in particular with
tales of “impossible” happenings culled from books of folklore, old journals,
and newspapers. He mistrusted orthodox knowledge because, he believed, it
smugly damned to oblivion all reports of marvels that it could not explain:
pyrogenic persons; rains of fish, frogs, and stones; accounts of telepathy,
teleportation, the vanishing of human beings, luminous objects in the sky.
Although he never claimed that he believed the stories himself, Fort enjoyed
collecting them and before his death in 1932 had completed four volumes of
these anecdotes.
Science-fiction writers have found an inexhaustible mine of ideas in The
Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo!, and Wild Talents, which also provide
the chief elements of the saucer myth:
“Unknown, luminous things, or beings, have often been seen, sometimes
close to this earth, and sometimes high in the sky. It may be that some of them
were living things that occasionally come from somewhere else in our
existence, but that others were lights on the vessels of explorers, or voyagers,
from somewhere else.”[I-1] These extraterrestrials may have been in
communication with earthmen for many years, Fort suggested, and they may
sometimes kidnap and carry away human beings.

UFO Reports and the Air Force

Most flying-saucer reports have come from reliable citizens who have seen
something extraordinary, something they do not understand. Genuinely
puzzled, they often report the incident to the nearest Air Force base. The
evaluation of such cases is the responsibility of the United States Air Force.
Since the beginning of the saucer scare in 1947, the chief investigating agency
has been that at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio, and has borne
a succession of names—Project Sign, Project Grudge, Project Blue Book, and
the Aerial Phenomena Group of the Aerospace Technical Intelligence Center,
usually known as ATIC. Until recently this group operated under the
jurisdiction of the Assistant Chief of Staff, Intelligence. On July 1, 1961, it was
transferred to the jurisdiction of the Air Force Systems Command. To simplify
discussion in this book, however, the group that investigates unidentified aerial
phenomena is generally referred to as ATIC.
In military parlance the phrase “unidentified flying object,” abbreviated as
UFO, is used to indicate any air-borne phenomenon that fails to identify itself
to, or to be identified by, trained witnesses on the ground or in the air who are
using visual or radar methods of observation. Created in the early days of the
saucer era, the term UFO is unfortunately misleading because it seems to
imply that the unknown is a solid material object. Many of them are not. The
more dramatic phrase “flying saucer” is similarly misleading because not all
the unknowns are shaped like a saucer, and not all of them are flying. Since no
one has been able to devise a more accurate brief term that will apply to all
reports in this category, both “UFO” and “flying saucer” have remained in
common use.
Air Force investigators and scientists have been able to account for almost
every reported “spaceship” as the result of failure to identify some natural
phenomenon. Some were the product of delusion or deliberate hoaxes. A few
remain technically “Unknown” because, although the probable explanation is
obvious, too few facts are available to permit a positive identification. No such
report suggests the possibility that interplanetary craft are cruising in our skies.

The Scientist’s View

If a spaceship from another planet should ever visit the earth, no one would
be more eager to acknowledge it than our government officials and our
scientists. All governments would feel their responsibility to protect the human
race if necessary, and to establish diplomatic relations with the alien race if
possible. The scientists would want to study, analyze, and try to understand the
nature of both the ship and its occupants.
Many persons, sincerely believing that flying saucers do exist, berate the
investigator who denies their reality and characterize him as stupid, willfully
obtuse, or intellectually dishonest because he does not accept the saucer
reports at face value but weighs them by the same methods most of us use in
weighing evidence in everyday life. When told there’s a horse in the bathtub,
for example, the sensible man realizes that the alleged visitation, while not
impossible, is extremely improbable. Therefore he does not immediately begin
speculating on the color of the horse, where it might have come from, what its
purpose may be, and whether it will wreck the bathroom. Instead he adopts the
scientific method and first goes to find out whether the horse is really there.
Like Fort, some flying-saucer believers are consciously or unconsciously
antagonistic to the scientific method and resent its restrictions as a child
objects to discipline. Suggesting that a strictly logical approach deprives us of
valuable truths about the nature of the universe, and bluntly asserting that
present-day physicists and astronomers have closed their minds to the
possibility of new knowledge, these enthusiasts imply that we should require
less rigorous proof for the reality of saucers than for other types of physical
phenomena.
Because so many amateur investigators have misunderstood,
misrepresented, and condemned the scientists’ attitude, the authors of this book
(asking the indulgence of their colleagues) will briefly outline the principles a
researcher ordinarily applies to the study of any new problem—the nature of
radioactivity, the cause of a disease, or the origin of flying saucers.

The Question of “Evidence”

Most physicists, chemists, biologists, and astronomers will agree that life
in some form probably exists in other parts of the galaxy. These other life
forms, if they exist, may or may not have a kind of intelligence similar to our
own; if they have, we might or might not be able to recognize it. Such

speculations, while fascinating, lie entirely in the realm of theory. They are not
facts and do not provide the slightest support to the often stated corollary that
intelligent creatures do live on other planets and frequently visit the earth.
In approaching the spacecraft hypothesis, the scientist asks first: What facts
are we trying to account for? And second: Does the spacecraft theory account
for these facts better than the normal explanations that are already available?
After studying hundreds of UFO reports, however, he concludes that much of
the startling “proof” that saucers are spacecraft is merely inference. Of the
established facts, none requires a new theory to account for it; and no evidence
exists that even faintly suggests, to the expert, that interplanetary visitors are
involved.
In the study of UFO phenomena this question of “evidence” is crucial. The
careful investigator tries always to distinguish sharply between an observed
fact, which is evidence, and an interpretation of that fact, which is not evidence
no matter how reasonable it may seem.
As a simple analogy, consider this situation: A man is sitting in his living
room late at night; the rest of the family have gone to bed. Suddenly he is
startled by a loud noise somewhere upstairs. Trying to account for the noise, he
thinks of various possible causes—a burglar, the “settling” of the house, a
mouse in the wall, someone dropping a shoe, the wind rattling a door, the sonic
boom from a distant plane. If, without having further information, he decides
that any one of these is the true cause, he is accepting a guess as though it were
a fact. The real cause of the noise may be one of these or it may be something
else that he hasn’t even thought of.
Amateur investigators of UFOs publish many reports which they
characterize as absolute proof that spaceships exist. The expert, analyzing the
same reports, finds no proof at all because the actual facts and the
interpretations of the witnesses are hopelessly confused. An early UFO case
provides a typical example.
According to Air Force records[I-2], on the morning of December 6, 1952,
a B-29 bomber was over the Gulf of Mexico returning from a training mission.
At 5:25 a.m. the student radar operator, using an uncalibrated set, observed
four bright blips (radar jargon for bright spots on a radarscope; such a spot
indicates the presence of an object reflecting the radar pulses, but does not
reveal the nature or shape of the object). The blips were apparently returns
from objects about twenty miles away, in no specific group, which rapidly

moved off the scope. Similar groups of fast-moving blips appeared at intervals
during a period of about five minutes, and appeared also on two auxiliary
radarscopes. After the first set was calibrated, the blips reappeared; none was
observed after 5:35 a.m. From the radar data estimates of size and distance
were made; calculations based on these estimates indicated a probable speed of
5000 to 9000 miles an hour. During the ten-minute period two visual
observations were made, lasting about three seconds, which bore no obvious
relation to the radar observations: at the right of the plane one crewman saw a
single blue-white streak going from front to rear under the wing, and another
crewman saw two flashes of blue-white light.
An explanation of the incident was not found immediately, and ATIC at
first classified it as an Unknown. Some saucer enthusiasts interpreted the facts
to mean that several groups of saucers had been in the area, machines flying so
fast that they were visible only as blue-white streaks, whose presence was
confirmed by radar. These conclusions were merely deductions from fact, not
observed facts. The radarscope is not a camera and does not, at least at present,
picture the shape or physical structure of the phenomenon it reports; it shows
only spots of light that change position and size. Similarly, the blue-white
streaks were mere flashes of light without size or shape.
In a later study of the evidence, the Air Force experts recognized this
incident as one of false targets on radar (see Chapter viii). The radar phantoms
may have been caused by beacon returns triggered by another radar; by
variations in the atmosphere; or, if “ducting” conditions existed, by reflections
from objects that were far beyond the normal range of the radar set. The blue-
white flashes had no relation to the radar returns and were probably meteors;
the date corresponded with the beginning of the annual Geminid shower (see
Chapter v).
This Gulf of Mexico incident is neither complicated nor puzzling. We
mention it chiefly to illustrate why the saucer enthusiasts so often disagree
with the conclusions reached by the Air Force experts. The amateur assumes
that the instrument operated faultlessly and detected a solid object; he uses
these assumptions to interpret the data, uses the interpretation as fact, and by
this “bootstrap” process deludes himself into thinking he has proved what he
assumed in the first place.

Various Types of UFO

A biologist trying to identify a group of unusual animals which are said to
represent a new species begins by collecting all possible information about
their appearance and behavior. After he has determined their typical size,
shape, color, mode of reproduction, manner of locomotion, etc., he compares
these characteristics with those of animals of known species and eventually
classifies the strange specimens. In a similar way the professional investigator
of UFO phenomena begins by asking the question: What is a typical
unidentified flying object?
The published reports comprise a heterogeneous collection of facts, fiction,
and guesses. The investigator must first separate and discard accounts that are
obvious hoaxes or delusions. There are many of these. The remaining material
he divides into two classes. The first includes statements made by competent,
careful witnesses, describing what they have seen and heard—for example, “I
saw a brilliant light moving swiftly without sound.” The second class includes
statements of opinion or belief about the thing seen—for example, “The
strange light obviously was controlled by intelligence.” Putting aside this
second class of material for the time being, he looks at the information in the
first and immediately faces an awkward conclusion: apparently no “typical”
flying saucer exists.

Descriptions of UFOs

No two reports describe exactly the same kind of UFO. There are dozens
of types of saucers, resembling each other as little as turnips do comets.
Hoping to find some consistent pattern, the investigator opens his notebook
and starts listing the data.
Shape—The flying saucer varies greatly in shape (see Figure 1). At
different times and places it may be a circular disk like a saucer, often with a
small protrusion in the center like the knob on a tea-kettle lid; elliptical or
bean-shaped like a flattened sphere; a circular base supporting a dome-like
superstructure; a sphere surrounded by a central platform, like Saturn in its
rings; long and thin like a cigar; a tapered sphere like a teardrop; spindle-
shaped, with or without knobs on the ends; or a double- or triple-decked form
like a stack of plates.
Size—The saucer varies greatly in size. Estimated diameters range from 20
or 30 feet to several thousand. While under observation it may instantaneously

increase or decrease in size.
Color—The saucer varies greatly in color. It may be white, black, gray,
red, blue, green, pink, yellow, silver; may be luminous or dull; may be a solid
color; may be circled by a central band of different color; may display flashing
lights of various colors. It may change color or luminosity while being
observed.
Motion—The saucer displays a wide variety of motions. It may travel very
slowly; very fast, approaching the speed of light; at jet speed; at meteoric
speed; may hover motionless over one place. At any speed it can
instantaneously change velocity and direction of motion—can move
horizontally, vertically, toward the observer, away from the observer, in a
straight path, a zigzag, a spiral. Like the Cheshire cat, it can vanish instantly or
slowly fade away.
Means of propulsion—Unknown. Some saucers move in complete silence;
others produce noises: a hiss, a whistle, a roar, a thunderclap, or a detonation
like a sonic boom.

Figure 1. Shapes of various reported UFOs.

Incidence—Saucers may appear at any hour of the day or night, but they
appear most frequently in the hours before and after sunset, and before and
after sunrise. Their numbers may suddenly increase at certain places and
certain times. The objects can appear singly, in random groups, in groups
showing a geometrical pattern. A single object may split and multiply into a
group, or a group may merge into one. Saucers almost always appear in the air,
rarely on the earth’s surface or in bodies of water. They almost never come
within touching distance of the observer. The length of their stay varies greatly,
from about two seconds to two or three hours.
Structure—Unknown. A saucer may be visible or invisible to the observer;
visible to the human eye but not to the camera or radar; visible to the camera
or radar but not to the eye. Some obey the laws of gravity and inertia, others do
not.
Purpose—Unknown. No officials in the government, the press, the
churches, or the universities have received any attempt at communication. No
saucer has produced intelligible visible, audible, or radio signals.
Long before finishing this tabulation the investigator realizes that he is not
dealing with one thing but with many. No single phenomenon could possibly
display such infinite variety. However, before he starts trying to classify the
descriptions and to explain them, he takes a look at the second class of
material—the conclusions offered by saucer enthusiasts. Leaving the realm of
observation for that of interpretation, he is suddenly catapulted into a world of
fantasy.

A “Baedeker’s Guide” to Saucerdom

One of the commonest themes in science fiction is that of parallel
universes—a number of nearly identical worlds coexisting in alternate space-
time continua. Occasionally, at a vulnerable spot, the barrier between two of
these worlds will dissolve so that they overlap near the point of contact. After
such an accident a man may find himself unhappily living two lives at once,
identical in some ways but so different in others that if one is real, the other
cannot be. Until the break is repaired and the incompatible worlds are safely
separated once more, the man exists in a state of desperate confusion and
performs agonizing mental acrobatics, trying to maintain a foothold in both
worlds until he can decide which one is valid.

From the “damned” phenomena collected by Charles Fort, plus the legends
of Atlantis, Mu, and Lemuria, flying-saucer addicts have constructed a
multiplicity of such alternate worlds. Although they differ in minor ways, all
are in direct conflict with the real world known to science. Let us ignore, for
the moment, the descriptions given by the “contactees” (Chapter x) and
consider only the beliefs and/or theories offered by serious proponents of the
interplanetary theory and publicized by writers such as Donald E.
Keyhoe[I-3, I-4, I-5] Aimé Michel[I-6], and Morris K. Jessup[I-7]. A
“Baedeker’s Guide” to saucerdom based solely on statements and speculations
in the books published by these investigators would portray a fantastic
universe:[A]

[A]
Following common practice in scientific
discussion, we originally included the specific sources
of important and/or controversial ideas described in this
book and, for maximum accuracy, often used the
original phrasing of the several authors involved. In this
and certain other sections, however, we have been
forced to abandon the more scholarly method of
presentation because one author (Major Donald E.
Keyhoe) refused permission to quote from his works.

“In saucerdom, alien spacecraft continually visit the earth and have done so
for centuries. Constructed and controlled by intelligent extraterrestrial beings,
the craft perhaps come from secret bases on artificial earth satellites; on the
moon; on Mars; on Venus; on Jupiter; perhaps on the planets supposed to be
orbiting the binary stars 61 Cygni and 70 Ophiuchi; or from planets supposed
to be in orbit around the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, about eleven light-
years distant from earth. Radio transmitters serving as beacons for space
navigation may exist on both Venus and Jupiter.
“These spacecraft can perform maneuvers that, on earth, are possible only
for rays of light. They fly at speeds of many thousands of miles an hour, can
reverse direction instantaneously at any speed, ascend or descend vertically,
and hover motionless in the air. They accomplish these feats perhaps by using
the power of cosmic rays and by generating and manipulating artificial

gravitational fields, which they could also use to prevent the transmission of
sound waves and to become invisible.
“The extraterrestrial visitors may be explorers sent to study the earth,
descendants of a race living thousands of light-years away from the solar
system. They may be the ancestors of the human race, which itself is a remnant
of a colony established on earth thousands of years ago and then abandoned.
More than 300,000 years ago the inhabitants of earth had found the secret of
space travel, and human beings mapped the earth by an aerial survey at least
5000 years ago. It is also possible that these craft come not from space but
from time; they may be earthmen of the future who have traveled backward
through time to explore their own past.
“The purpose of these visitors is still unknown. They shun close contact
with human beings, rarely if ever land their ships, and never allow close-up
photographs, perhaps because they are afraid of human savagery or are afraid
of starting a panic. Nevertheless they attempt to signal to earthmen in various
ways: they have caused the production of gigantic letters of the alphabet [U
and Z] on earth radarscopes; from a material that radiates light they have built
an enormous letter W, spanning more than 1000 miles on the surface of Mars;
they have sent out wireless signals in Morse code to represent the letter S.
They may occasionally abduct earthmen in order to use them as language
teachers.
“Although these visitors are probably not hostile to human beings, they
often manifest their presence in destructive ways. They cause many airplane
crashes; seize and carry off ships, human beings, and airplanes; destroy flocks
of birds; interfere with the operation of radio, TV, gasoline and electric motors;
pelt the earth with rocks, metal, and strange organic substances; create loud
noises and detonations; damage the windshields of cars; set fire to highways;
hurl various types of missiles; drop chunks of ice; cause storms; and cause
radioactive rain.
“One of the most peculiar features of saucerdom is the role played by
government officials and scientists who, knowing the space visitors are real,
yet deny their existence and unite in a gigantic conspiracy to deceive the
public.”

* * * * *

These excerpts from a hypothetical Baedeker have summarized the ideas
publicized by the most literate and most persuasive advocates of the saucer
theory. The chapters that follow will examine certain flying-saucer cases. As
the discussion continues and is able to account for specific UFOs in terms of
normal physical phenomena, these anarchistic worlds of saucerdom will
gradually dissolve and merge with reality as we know it—a world that holds
many mysteries but is still subject to the laws of nature.

[I-1] Fort, Charles. Lo! New York: Claude H. Kendall, 1931.
[I-2] Air Force Files.
[I-3] Keyhoe, D. E. The Flying Saucer Conspiracy. New
York: Henry Holt & Co., 1955.
[I-4] —— Flying Saucers from Outer Space. New York:
Henry Holt & Co., 1953.
[I-5] —— Flying Saucers: Top Secret. New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1960.
[I-6] Michel, A. The Truth about Flying Saucers. New York:
Criterion Books, Inc., 1956.
[I-7] Jessup, M. K. The Case for the UFO. New York: Citadel
Press, 1955.

Chapter ii
LO!
The overture to the Flying Saucer opera took place in the summer of
1947, presenting the main themes that were to develop with fantastic
variations during the fifteen-year-long drama that followed: mysterious
apparitions in the sky, alleged interplanetary visitors, government
investigators, growing public excitement, civilians who zealously
encouraged the hysteria, and, as a climax, an elaborate hoax that produced
material “evidence” to prove the existence of spaceships.

Arnold’s Nine Disks

The first man to report a flying saucer was a veteran pilot named
Kenneth Arnold, representative of a fire-control equipment firm in Boise,
Idaho. On the afternoon of June 24 Arnold was flying a private plane on his
way from Chehalis to Yakima, Washington. Above the Cascade Mountains
at about 9200 feet, he noticed a series of bright flashes in the sky off to his
left. Looking for the cause, he saw what appeared to be a formation of
peculiar aircraft approaching Mount Rainier at fantastic speed. There were
nine very bright, disk-shaped objects which he estimated to be twenty to
twenty-five miles away, forty-five to fifty feet long, and traveling at a speed
of almost 1700 miles an hour. Talking with a reporter that evening, Arnold
said that the objects “flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the
water.” In a later report to Air Force Intelligence he stated: “They flew very
close to the mountaintops, directly south to southeast down the hogback of
the range, flying like geese in a diagonal, chainlike line, as if they were
linked together.... They were flat like a piepan and so shiny they reflected
the sun like a mirror.”[II-1]

Newspapers all over the country picked up the story and printed it under
headlines describing flying pies, flying piepans, and flying saucers. Alert to
the possibility that the objects might have been a new type of aircraft of
Russian origin, investigators from Military Intelligence interviewed Arnold
and officials from Air Technical Intelligence requested a report.
No one doubted Arnold’s word. He was an experienced pilot, a
respected citizen, and a careful observer. Nevertheless his description
showed some inconsistencies that made it difficult to decide what the nine
disks really were. If they had actually been forty-five or fifty feet long, they
must have been much closer than he thought; objects that size would not
have been visible at a distance of twenty to twenty-five miles. However, if
the estimated distance was correct, then in order to be visible the objects
must have been much larger, at least 210 feet long. One of the estimates
must be wrong—but which one? Until that question was settled, the
computed speed was meaningless, since to estimate the velocity of a
moving object an observer must know either its true distance or its true size.
Even after a careful study, Air Force investigators could not identify the
disks; they might have been clouds, a mirage, or some kind of aircraft, but
no definite answer was possible from the evidence available.
Predictably, after so much publicity, a rash of similar sightings broke
out all over the country and continued for the rest of the summer. During
the hot months of the “silly season,” newspapers are traditionally hospitable
to tales of barnyard freaks, sea serpents, and man-bitten dogs. Such stories
were now shoved aside as people in every state began to report unorthodox
objects sailing through the sky—flying disks, flying dimes, flying ice-cream
cones, flying shoe heels, and flying hubcaps. Seeing saucers became a
national pastime, but Arnold, who had reported the strange objects in all
good faith, resented the implied ridicule. Deluged with telephone calls and
mail, he resolved to keep silent in the future even if he should happen to see
a ten-story building flying through the air.
In spite of the publicity, the flying-saucer scare would probably have
died with the first frost of autumn but for the efforts of a talented writer,
editor, and publisher of science fiction, Raymond A. Palmer. Among the
many letters Arnold received was one from Palmer, then editor of Amazing
Stories. Tired of being laughed at, Arnold found the tone of “sincere
interest” so appealing that he answered the letter[II-2]. After a second letter

a week later, he changed his mind about keeping silent and agreed to sell his
story for publication.
Under the title, “I Did See the Flying Disks,” the article appeared in the
first issue of a new magazine, Fate, which published “true stories of the
strange, the unusual, the unknown.”[II-3] Although Arnold was not a
professional writer, he had the assistance of an expert and produced a vivid,
clearly written story—Palmer had had unusual experience in helping
fledgling authors tell their tales. Interesting differences between Arnold’s
original statements and those in the magazine version demonstrate how
much he must have owed to editorial help. Without it, he might not have
included certain colorful details that he had apparently overlooked earlier.
In his original reports, for example, he said that he had at first supposed the
disks to be some type of experimental aircraft; in the magazine version he
added that, even at the time, the objects had given him “an eerie feeling.” In
the intervening months he had also remembered more about their shape (see
Figure 2). He no longer described them as saucerlike, flat and shiny like
piepans. Instead, a drawing based on his revised account shows an object
like the crescent moon with a sharp protrusion on the inner, concave side
and a dark, mottled circle marking the center of the top surface.
Furthermore, he told the readers of Fate, one object had been darker than
the others and of a slightly different form—a detail he had forgotten to
mention to reporters, to military officials, to his friends, or even to his wife.
Arnold had never been much of a reader and was not a science-fiction
fan, but his interests were obviously widening. The next two issues of Fate
carried other articles under his name. Palmer’s growing influence is
suggested by the titles: “Are Space Visitors Here?”[II-4] and “Phantom
Lights of Nevada.”[II-5]

Figure 2. Arnold’s flying saucers. Left, as first described; right, as later
sketched.

The Great Shaver Mystery

Ray Palmer lays claim to being “the first flying saucer
investigator”[II-6], although he frankly admits his debt to the writings of
Charles Fort. Any full account of the saucer era must include the names of
other enthusiasts such as Adamski, Bethurum, Scully, Cramp, Keyhoe,
Jessup, Michel, and Wilkins, but none merits so much credit for keeping the
saucers flying as does Palmer. He not only opened the pages of his
magazines to the first saucer reports but also, in the beginning, paid the
witnesses for their stories.
In 1947 Palmer was the editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic
Adventures, two of the great magazines of science fiction in which stories

of spaceships and interplanetary travel have long been commonplace. For
several years he had been hinting to readers of these magazines that alien
spaceships might actually be cruising in our skies, but Fate was the first
magazine that seriously promoted the idea. No man was better qualified to
glimpse the dramatic possibilities of flying saucers. Born in Wisconsin in
1910, Palmer had begun reading Amazing Stories soon after it started
publication in 1926. Turning to writing, he showed the remarkable
persistence that has characterized his life. Although he received 100
rejections before he sold his second story, he stubbornly kept on until he not
only achieved success as an author but also, in 1938, became managing
editor of Amazing Stories for the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. Under
Palmer’s guidance, “... the entertainment side of science fiction took over....
Gone were the ponderous styles, the verbiage, the highly technical
explanations of what mattered little in the first place. The stories took on
pace and excitement, the characters in them were faced with human
problems, the dialogue was realistic....”[II-7]
Alert to the tastes of his readers, Palmer carried the magazine to new
heights. Many science-fiction fans (including the present authors) still
remember that golden age around 1940 when Amazing came out every
month with 146 pages full of startling, fantastic, wonderful stories of how
life might be on other worlds and in other galaxies.
In January 1944 began the publishing drama that for a time changed the
direction of Amazing and heralded the advent of flying saucers. The
“Discussions” department that month included a letter captioned “An
Ancient Language?” which introduced what came to be known both as the
Great Shaver Mystery and the Great Shaver Hoax. Signed “S. Shaver,” the
letter began:
“Sirs: Am sending you this in hopes you will insert in an issue to keep it
from dying with me. It would arouse a lot of discussion.”[II-8]
It did indeed. The letter announced the discovery that words and
syllables of the ancient Atlantean language still exist in English today;
hence the legends of Atlantis must be true and a “wiser race than modern
man” must once have existed on the earth.
Richard Sharpe Shaver was then living in Barto, Pennsylvania, and
operated a welding machine in a war plant. In writing to thank the editor for

publishing his letter, he enclosed a manuscript called “Warning to Future
Man” which purported to give his memories of life in the fabled continent
of Lemuria. The information had been preserved in “thought records”
hidden in secret caves. By “telaug,” a kind of audio-visual telepathy, he had
begun to remember his forgotten past when, through the noise of his
welding machine, he heard voices. After visiting Shaver and probing his
“memories,” Palmer bought the story. He didn’t like the way it was written,
however, so he rewrote it, added material that expanded it to three times its
original length[II-9], changed the title to “I Remember Lemuria,” and
started advertising it well in advance of publication as a true story:
“Twelve thousand years ago the Lemurians and the Atlanteans
disappeared from the Earth. Where and why did they go?”[II-10] This story
would show that Newton and Einstein were all wrong, Palmer promised,
and would reveal new concepts of gravity, the nature of matter, and the
foundation for physical mathematics.
Thus began the controversy that rocked the world of science fiction.
Since Palmer has affirmed that “Flying saucers are a part of the Shaver
Mystery—integrally so”[II-11], we turn to the old files of Amazing Stories
to trace their development.
The first of the Shaver series, “I Remember Lemuria” appeared in
March 1945[II-12], along with “Mantong, The Language of Lemuria,” an
article signed by both Shaver and Palmer, and other stories followed
quickly in succeeding issues of Amazing. The basic themes were shopworn
—a jumble of Fortean ideas, Plato’s fables, and mystic science—but when
brightened by Palmer’s magic pencil, they seemed fresh and exciting: The
earth had an ancient past, now forgotten. The lost continents of Atlantis,
Lemuria, and Mu had been colonized many thousands of years ago by
superior beings from another planet who could travel through space by
utilizing forces unknown to present-day earthmen. Eventually these noble
aliens had been forced to abandon the earth to escape evil radiations coming
from our sun, but they had left descendants who still lived on earth in
concealment in great subterranean cities that could be entered through
certain caves. The underground dwellers in the hidden world had retained
all the secret powers of their ancestors. They could communicate by thought
transference, could speak to earthmen by mental “voices,” and could travel
on beams of light because they understood the true nature of gravity and

magnetism. These creatures were divided into two opposing groups, one
good and one evil. The dero (detrimental robots) were the bad guys and
they caused all the unexplained accidents and misfortunes that happen to
human beings. The tero (integrative robots) were the good guys; they
warned earthmen of danger and tried to protect them from the destructive
forces of the dero.
Reader response to these fantasies was phenomenal. Fan mail zoomed
from 40 or 50 to 2500 letters a month[II-13], and the magazine’s circulation
increased by some 50,000. As the records of “racial memory” continued to
appear, connoisseurs of good science fiction began to cry “Hoax!” but their
protests had no effect. Thousands of new readers were buying the magazine
and many of them were beginning to recall and report “memories” of their
own. Since the “Discussions” columns could not take care of so many
letters, Palmer opened a new department, “Report from the Forgotten
Past”[II-14], and urged the readers to send in their personal experiences
with the hidden world. Did they ever hear strange voices? Receive
mysterious messages through the air? Suspect that they were being affected
by strange rays? Feel that they had been put on earth for some special
mission? Have dreams that they could not explain? Have a strong urge to
explore caves? Have memories of other lives? The editor was eager to learn
of all such incidents. Through the Shaver stories, Palmer was already
promoting the idea that interplanetary craft do visit the earth:
“There are many mysteries of the past that have intrigued investigators
to an almost unbearable point.... What were the glories of Babylon? What
truth is there in the Chinese legend of being the people of the Moon, and of
coming to Earth in rocket ships? What was the mystery metal of the
Lemurians, orichalcum? What was the secret of their airships that walked
on beams of light?”[II-12]
When one correspondent informed him that space travel was possible
“if one travels through curves but not through angles,” Palmer replied,
“Your editor is sincere—and he’d like to know everything you know.... For
instance, please explain this space-travel business—about curves and not
angles.”[II-15]
For more than three years the columns of Amazing continued to assert,
not as fiction but as fact, that interplanetary travel is a present reality and

that the laws of physics are not valid. In a mystic mumbo jumbo the readers
were told that the velocity of light, for example, was not the ultimate speed:
“Light speed is due to ‘escape velocity’ on the sun, which is not large.
This speed is a constant to our measurement because the friction of exd,
which fills all space, holds down any increase unless there is more impetus.
The escape velocity of light from a vaster sun than ours is higher, but once
again exd slows the light speed down to its constant by friction, so that
when it reaches the vicinity of our sun, no appreciable difference is to be
noted. A body can travel at many times the exd constant, under additional
impetus, such as rocket explosions. A ship whose weight is reduced to a
very little by reverse gravity beam can attain a great speed with a very small
rocket.”[II-12]
Devotees of reasonable science fiction (who include many leading
scientists) were writing angrily to Palmer, protesting that the Shaver hoax
had gone too far, but their letters seemed only to amuse him:
“There have been some odd reactions, one of them being a promise by a
fan group to ‘expose’ our ‘hoax’ (which was a compliment, by the way,
because it was termed the ‘biggest ever attempted in modern science fiction
history’). We are waiting for this expose, [sic] with interest—because we
are curious to know how a hoax which is not a hoax can be exposed as a
hoax. We realize that a lot of our readers find it difficult to believe that we
ourselves believe one single word of what Mr. Shaver tells us in his stories,
but we’ll keep on presenting the evidence as it comes in, and you can judge
for yourself.”[II-14]
Readers continued to object and many stopped buying the magazine, but
Palmer persisted with ambiguous hints that spaceships were really here. A
full year before the first flying-saucer report he wrote:
“If you don’t think space ships visit the earth regularly, as in this story
[‘Cult of the Witch Queen’], then the files of Charles Fort and your editor’s
own files are something you should see.... And if you think responsible
parties in world governments are ignorant of the fact of space ships visiting
earth, you just don’t think the way we do.”[II-16]
In succeeding months he became more and more explicit. In September
1946 he told one correspondent, “As for space ships, ... personally we

believe these ships do visit the earth. You, or any observer, would be
inclined to call it something else if you did see one.”[II-15] In the spring of
1947 he replied to a reader who asked for concrete evidence that Shaver’s
stories were true: “... the mystery is not just ‘are there caves with dero and
tero in them?’ but it has to do with space ships, other inhabited worlds, and
so on.”[II-17]
In June 1947, the month the first flying saucers were reported, the issue
of Amazing Stories was an addict’s dream[II-18]. The cover featured “The
Shaver Mystery, the Most Sensational True Story Ever Told”; the four
stories, 90,000 words, were all under the byline of Richard S. Shaver. The
entire magazine—editorial comments, discussion columns, and most of the
feature articles—was devoted to the supernatural world of Shaver.
But the end was near. Amazing published its last Shaver story, “Gods of
Venus,” in the summer of 1948; as far as the magazine was concerned, the
mystery was dead.
Who or what killed it? One version says that the publisher, William B.
Ziff, ordered the series stopped because so many fans had quit buying the
magazine. Palmer himself has given various explanations. He stopped the
stories, he said at first, when he realized that such material did not really
belong in a fiction magazine. Later he explained that he killed the mystery
because he intended to go into publishing for himself and didn’t want to
leave his successor to handle “this hot potato.”[II-19] Later still, he implied
that publishing the stories was dangerous; that he had learned too much
about the “hidden world,” the sinister forces responsible for the plane crash
that followed the Tacoma hoax. Said Palmer, “I wanted no more dead men
on my hands.”[II-11]

The Maury Island Fragments

The Maury Island Mystery, a complex and eventually tragic affair,
occurred near Tacoma, Washington, less than 100 miles from the place
where Arnold had sighted the nine disks. In this mystery, too, Palmer was
involved. According to their story, two harbor patrolmen named Harold A.
Dahl and Fred L. Crisman on June 31 had observed a group of six flying

disks that hovered over their boat near Maury Island and jammed their radio
when they tried to notify the authorities. One of the disks had seemed to be
disabled, had showered down lavalike metallic fragments that damaged the
boat and killed the dog on board; the disks had then disappeared but the
fragments remained as proof of the visit. The men also claimed to have
taken some pictures that showed the six objects but were fogged as though
by radiation. Back on shore, they had not telephoned the newspapers nor
had they notified any government officials. Instead, they had mailed a box
of the fragments to Ray Palmer, to prove that they had actually seen an
accident to a flying saucer[II-20].
Crisman was no stranger to Amazing Stories. A science-fiction fan, he
apparently had accepted the Shaver stories as literal truth. More than a year
before the Maury Island episode he had written to Palmer, warning him that
the knowledge contained in the Shaver stories was too dangerous to print.
Identifying himself as an ex-Air Force pilot who had flown the Hump,
Crisman explained that when he was in Burma, he had been exploring a
cave when a dero attacked him with a mysterious ray that made a hole the
size of a dime in his arm. Palmer had kept up the correspondence[II-21]
and, some months later, received a telephone call from Crisman, then in
Texas: for $250, said Crisman, he would descend into a cave and take some
actual pictures of the mysterious underground machines that Shaver had
described. The result of this offer is not known, but in July 1947 Palmer
received another letter from Crisman; he had witnessed an accident to a
flying saucer and was sending a box of the fragments as proof[II-22].
Palmer considered buying the story for Fate, but first he asked Arnold,
living close to the scene, to investigate the tale. Arnold agreed. Thus the
first man to report flying saucers became also a victim of the first flying-
saucer hoax.
With an advance of $200 for expenses, Arnold flew to Tacoma and into
a nightmare of mystery. The two men were elusive, their story full of
discrepancies, their manner evasive. Wondering at first whether the affair
was a hoax, Arnold finally attributed the strange behavior of the men to
their fear of hostile saucers. Alarmed, he called in the help of Army
Intelligence. Two officers arrived from Hamilton Air Force Base,
California, and made a careful investigation. They found that Dahl and
Crisman were not “harbor patrolmen” but salvagers of floating lumber;

their boat was scarcely seaworthy and showed no evidence of major repairs;
they couldn’t remember what they had done with the pictures they
mentioned; and although the saucer accident was supposed to have occurred
nearly six weeks earlier, they had never notified the authorities or even
mentioned it to a reporter. The only evidence offered for the truth of their
tale was the collection of “strange” fragments which were later found to be
slag from a local smelter plant. Similar fragments could be found by the ton
on Maury Island[II-20].
The officers concluded that they had wasted their time on a flagrant
hoax, but the bewildered Arnold insisted that they take some of the
fragments for analysis. Unhappily, on the way back to the base the plane
crashed and although two passengers parachuted to safety, both officers
were killed. At once fantastic rumors sprang up: that the Tacoma “disks”
had been spaceships, and that the beings who operated the craft had been
forced to arrange the plane crash so that no one could analyze the fragments
of their disabled spaceship. Arnold himself seemed to believe that the crash
had resulted from extraplanetary sabotage, but investigation showed a more
ordinary cause. A burned exhaust stack had set the left wing afire; the
blazing wing had then broken from the fuselage and torn off the plane’s tail.
For a time government officials considered placing a charge of fraud
against the two men who had started the unhappy chain of events. After
further questioning, both had admitted that their “sighting” had been a hoax,
planned merely to make their story more salable, but when first Arnold and
then Military Intelligence had entered the picture, the hoax had simply
gotten out of hand. Since the men obviously had never intended the tragic
outcome and were not directly responsible for it, the idea of prosecution
was abandoned[II-1].

Science Fiction Adopts the Saucers

No longer editor of Amazing, Palmer continued to promote the cause of
flying saucers in the pages of Fate. During the early nineteen-fifties, the
boom years of science fiction, he started other magazines—Search, Mystic
Universe, Other Worlds Science Stories. After a time, Fate began to

concentrate on tales of the mystic and occult, while Other Worlds
eventually took over the flying-saucer theme.
Starting as an orthodox magazine of science fiction, Other Worlds
flourished until the general slump in the market caused it to suspend
publication. Revived after a time, it has undergone several changes of
editorial policy reflected in its changing names: Other Worlds Science
Stories, Flying Saucers from OTHER WORLDS, FLYING SAUCERS from
Other Worlds, Flying Saucers the Magazine of Space Conquest, and, since
the spring of 1961 when the magazine became pocket-size, just Flying
Saucers. Classic science fiction long ago vanished from its pages and all
articles are “true” accounts of flying saucers and similar Fortean incidents.
Flying Saucers is probably unique in modern publishing history. Issued
monthly or bimonthly at a price of thirty-five cents, the magazine does not
pay its authors because, as the editor explains, “Flying Saucers is not a
commercial project.” Published by Palmer Publications, edited by Palmer,
containing liberal amounts of editorial comment and at least one article by
Palmer, a typical issue in 1960[II-6] contained sixty-six pages and carried a
small number of advertisements for telescopes, binoculars, Rosicrucian and
similar mystic publications. The remaining ads featured books and
magazines issued by Palmer Publications, Amherst, Wisconsin; books
issued by Amherst Press, also of Amherst, Wisconsin; Saucerian Books,
published under the aegis of Gray Barker, a contributing editor to Flying
Saucers. “Austrogen,” described as a face cream or clay for skin ailments,
was obtainable from Palmer at a dollar an ounce. Another ad recommended
something (the wording does not specify exactly what, perhaps a powder?)
that helps make good chili. Readers could buy this too, from Palmer, for a
dollar a pound or $3.50 for five pounds. A combination dandruff remover,
itch preventer, and restorer of hair color personally recommended by
Palmer sold for $5.00 a bottle, number of ounces not specified.
The dandruff remover was also recommended by Kenneth Arnold,
whose flying disks had started the saucer epidemic. Arnold was advertising
his “World Society of Flying Saucer” which would “hold no meetings, no
minutes, no by-laws, no restrictions or regulations, no records outside of
actual membership, no presidents, no vice-presidents, no secretary, or board
of directors.” For only $5.00 those who joined the society would receive
twelve issues of Flying Saucers (which if ordered from Palmer Publications

would have cost $4.00), plus an official membership card. Arnold also
offered for sale a crescent-shaped lapel pin in solid silver, supposedly just
like the “original” saucers he had sighted in 1947; and, for the ladies, the
saucers in pendant form. The addition of seven-point diamonds was
optional.
The magazine has grown smaller, but its main theme is still flying
saucers, which until recently have been interpreted as interplanetary
vehicles. In December 1959, however,[II-23] Palmer announced in a lead
article that flying saucers were not from outer space after all; instead, they
came from secret earth bases located under the north and the south poles.
The earth is actually shaped like a doughnut, not like a pear, he says, and
has openings at both poles where the saucer people reside. Whether they are
manned by dero or tero he has not said.
In the autumn of 1962, Arnold entered the arena of politics and was the
Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of Idaho, but lost. Shaver
became a dairy farmer, a Wisconsin neighbor of Palmer’s, but in science-
fiction circles his name will never die. Recently he has been advertising the
sale of alleged pre-Deluge and pre-Ice-Age “art stones” described as rare,
voluptuous, exciting, and usable as ornaments for wall or mantel, or simply
as book ends.
Palmer has now revived the Shaver Mystery and is reprinting the entire
series in book form “with the fiction removed,” under the general title of
The Hidden World. In advertising the new project he stated, “This magazine
concerns flying saucers. Flying saucers are a part of the Shaver mystery—
integrally so.” He abandoned the stories in Amazing, he says, not because
an outraged publisher insisted, but because he believed the stories to be
true. “That is the true motive. I was convinced that not only was there a
‘hidden world,’ but it was one of immense ramification, and the caves of the
dero, flying saucers, military espionage, the political science of the world,
and even some phases of religion, specifically those of the ‘cult’ variety,
were inextricably linked.” In announcing that he intended to end the secrecy
that had existed for so long, and to tell the truth after seventeen years of
“sugar-coating” the facts, he did not explain exactly why he feels it is safe
to publish the “truth” now, when it was not safe seventeen years ago. He
says only, “... there have been good reasons for the delay—had it been done

from the beginning, the pitfalls that would have crushed it could not have
been avoided.”[II-11]
At the tenth annual World Science Fiction Convention, held in Chicago
in September 1952, fans and fellow editors awarded to Palmer a bronze
plaque honoring him as a “son of science fiction,”[II-24] a citation he fully
merits. As long as flying saucers continue to make good copy and sell
magazines, Palmer will probably keep them soaring—whether their home
bases are other planets or polar caves. As one of his colleagues once
commented:
“... in these times of drab and unconvincing falsehood, there is still
something to be thankful for. A Palmer promotion has the touch of genius. It
has zing, sparkle, and true showmanship. It can be spotted a mile away by
the bright lights. The thing to do is sit back and enjoy it.”[II-19]

Mirage or Wave Clouds?

What did Kenneth Arnold actually see, that June afternoon in 1947? No
absolutely certain answer is possible after so long a time. The disks were
probably a mirage (see Figure 3) in which the peaks of the mountains
seemed to float above the mountain chain[II-25]. An alternative but much
less probable explanation is that he observed orographic clouds, a type
unique to mountainous country, which often appear to stand more or less
motionless and can assume dramatic shapes. “Grindstone” clouds, shaped
like thick, solid disks (see Plate Ia), are common phenomena in the valleys
just east of the Sierra Nevada in California and in the mountainous regions
of Washington, Colorado, and New Mexico—areas where flying-saucer
reports have tended to concentrate[II-26]. One of the most spectacular types
of mountain cloud, it closely resembles the “pile d’assiettes” or “stack of
plates” formation in which the cloud assumes a flat, round shape like a plate
or a saucer, and two or more are piled together in a neat stack, as in
Plate Ib[II-27]. Another picture of a “stack of plates” (which some
observers reported as a hovering flying saucer) was made on May 31, 1953,
near Jindabyna, Snowy Mountains, New South Wales, and reproduced in
Weather in November 1954 Plate 47. The cloud formed over a tub-shaped

depression in the mountains and remained stationary for more than an
hour[II-28].

Figure 3. Mirage of mountain peaks. Top, normal view of mountain chain;
bottom, mirage in which some of the peaks seem to be detached and above
the peaks, like saucers.

Such clouds reflect the undulations of lee waves formed in the
atmosphere when stable currents of air flow over obstacles such as hills or

mountains. An up-and-down wave motion may be impressed upon the air,
provided that temperature and wind conditions are suitable. As the air
describes its wavelike path, it alternately warms and cools, the warming
taking place as it sinks into the wave trough and the cooling as it ascends to
the wave crest. If the air is very dry, the undulating current will not be
visible to the eye, although the updrafts and downdrafts will readily be felt
by aircraft that chance to pass through them. On the other hand, if the air
before entering the wave is moist enough, the cooling in the wave crest will
cause water droplets to condense and a cloud to appear.
In the vicinity of an isolated peak the cloud may assume the form of a
cap covering the summit, or it may be displaced slightly downwind and
resemble a lens or disk. Not infrequently a series of lenticular clouds will
appear, trailing downwind at regular intervals of a few miles. Although
these wave clouds are usually stationary, they sometimes move at great
speed, especially when the air temperature is changing rapidly.
From a study of a remarkable photograph made in 1956, R. J. Reed of
the University of Washington has offered the suggestion that the disks
Arnold saw were actually wave clouds in rapid motion.
On the afternoon of December 29, 1956, a photographer for the Seattle
Times was on top of Pigtail Peak near White Pass, Washington (not far from
the area where Arnold’s nine disks had appeared), taking ski pictures for the
rotogravure section of the Sunday Times. The weather was beautiful. Down
in the pass temperatures hovered near freezing, but the slopes were warmed
by sunlight that filtered down through thin cirrus clouds and raised the
temperature to a balmy fifty degrees. Just at sunset a strange object
suddenly appeared off toward the northeast horizon. Several skiers urged
the photographer to take a picture of the “flying saucer,” but since it was
still far away and indistinct, he waited. The first object, now followed by a
second one, moved rapidly toward Mount Rainier, began to sharpen in
outline, and both were soon so clearly visible that he was able to snap his
unusual picture. The photograph shows two apparently solid, disklike
objects, flattened, brilliantly white but dark at the bottom, apparently linked
together by white streamers, skimming toward the mountain peak (Plate Ia).
Recognizing the close resemblance between the objects in the
photograph and those Arnold described, Reed made a full analysis of the

weather conditions prevailing at the time the picture was taken. From
radiosonde data provided by the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, he obtained
measurements of the size of the clouds, their height above the mountains,
wind directions, and temperature and humidity at mountain height and
cloud height. Obviously the pattern of weather conditions that prevailed that
day was suitable for the formation of saucerlike clouds.
To test the hypothesis that Arnold also had seen such clouds, he then
obtained records of the weather data for June 24, 1947, to determine
whether atmospheric conditions on the two dates were basically similar. “To
be comparable, winds would have to be blowing from the north or
northwest in Mr. Arnold’s case since the objects were sighted to the south
and southeast of the peak. The air would have to be dry at lower elevations
and moisture would have to be spreading in at higher levels. An inspection
of the historical maps reveals that, indeed, all these conditions were
met.”[II-29]
Reed concludes that, although we can never know for certain, the
implication that the Times photographer and Kenneth Arnold viewed
essentially the same phenomenon seems “inescapable.” This interesting
hypothesis, however, requires the presence of undulating air currents and
turbulence great enough to endanger a plane in flight. Since Arnold
specifically mentioned the smooth, calm flying, the mirage explanation
remains the most probable one.

[II-1] Air Force Files.
[II-2] Arnold, K., and Palmer, R. A. The Coming of the
Saucers. Amherst, Wisconsin: privately printed, 1952.
[II-3] Fate, Vol. I, No. 1 (Spring 1948).
[II-4] Fate, Vol. I, No. 2 (Summer 1948).
[II-5] Fate, Vol. I, No. 3 (Fall 1948).
[II-6] Flying Saucers, The Magazine of Space Conquest
(June 1960).

[II-7] Amazing Stories, Vol. XXX, No. 4 (April 1956).
[II-8] Amazing Stories, Vol. XVIII, No. 1 (January 1944).
[II-9] Amazing Stories, Vol. XIX, No. 4 (December 1945).
[II-10] Amazing Stories, Vol. XVIII, No. 5 (December
1944).
[II-11] Flying Saucers, The Magazine of Space Conquest
(November 1960).
[II-12] Amazing Stories, Vol. XIX, No. 1 (March 1945).
[II-13] Palmer, R. A. “An Open Letter to Paul Fairman,”
Other Worlds Science Stories (June 1952), pp. 151–56.
[II-14] Amazing Stories, Vol. XIX, No. 3 (September
1945).
[II-15] Amazing Stories, Vol. XX, No. 6 (September 1946).
[II-16] Amazing Stories, Vol. XX, No. 4 (July 1946).
[II-17] Amazing Stories, Vol. XXI, No. 2 (February 1947).
[II-18] Amazing Stories, Vol. XXI, No. 6 (June 1947).
[II-19] Fairman, P. W. “Personalities in Science Fiction,” If
(May 1952), pp. 63–67.
[II-20] Ruppelt, E. J. The Report on Unidentified Flying
Objects. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1956.
[II-21] Flying Saucers, The Magazine of Space Conquest
(December 1958).
[II-22] Flying Saucers from Other Worlds (June 1957).
[II-23] Flying Saucers, The Magazine of Space Conquest
(December 1959).
[II-24] Other Worlds (July 1953).
[II-25] Tacker, L. J. Flying Saucers and the U. S. Air
Force. Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960.

[II-26] Ives, R. L. “Areas of Occurrence of ‘Grindstone’
Clouds,” Weatherwise, Vol. XI (1958), p. 201.
[II-27] Scorer, R. S. “Lee Waves in the Atmosphere,”
Scientific American, Vol. CCIV (1961), p. 124.
[II-28] Kraus, E. B. “Flying Saucer?” Weather (November
1954).
[II-29] Reed, R. J. “Flying Saucers over Mount Rainier,”
Weatherwise, Vol. XI (1958), p. 43.

Chapter iii
AIR-BORNE UFOS: BALLOONS TO BUBBLES
In the year 1948 the “Skyhook” balloons were an official secret. These
giant plastic bags, shaped something like a teardrop, a hundred feet and
more in diameter, were part of a classified research project sponsored by the
United States Navy, and few except the researchers and technicians
involved knew of their existence. Carrying cases of heavy instruments, the
balloons were launched from various Air Force bases to collect information
about the atmosphere high above the earth, the winds in the stratosphere,
and the incidence of cosmic rays. Soaring upward, they traveled in courses
determined by the winds and changed in direction and speed as they shifted
from one wind stream to another. Even at heights of 60,000 feet these
objects with their highly reflecting surfaces could be seen from the ground
(see Figure 4). Such balloons were especially noticeable against dark-blue
skies, which are much more common in the western United States than in
the eastern areas. They could reach heights of 100,000 feet, higher than our
planes could go. Once considered as a means for collecting information for
Military Intelligence, a task later assumed by the U-2 jets, they could travel
across the entire continent and even across the oceans. If the plastic skin
developed a leak, the resulting loss of gas altered both the appearance and
the behavior of the balloon; if the leak became great enough the balloon
shriveled and eventually fell to the earth. At high altitudes where the cold
was extreme, the skin might become brittle and the balloon would burst into
fragments to be dispersed by the winds and vanish.

Figure 4. Shapes of various balloons. A,
Skyhook at launching; B, Skyhook at high
altitude; C, radiosonde or pibal; D, balloon
cluster; E, blimp or sausage-shaped balloon.

Although these balloons were sometimes visible at distances of fifty or
sixty miles and were very conspicuous, officially they did not exist until
1950 when Dr. Urner Liddel of the Office of Naval Research released the
facts behind the Skyhook balloon program. He pointed out then that the
balloons had given rise to many reports of flying saucers. If the Skyhook
project had been public knowledge in 1948 and if information about their
launching and movements had not been a matter of security, a courageous
pilot might still be alive today and the infant flying-saucer myth would have
died long ago. There can be little question that Captain Mantell crashed in
trying to intercept a Skyhook balloon, an object he had never heard of.

The Mantell Tragedy

The basic facts of the Mantell case, the second of the “classic”[B] UFO
sightings, are familiar to all who have studied flying-saucer
phenomena[III-1, p. 51]. Early on the afternoon of January 7, 1948, the
Kentucky State Highway Patrol received a large number of calls from the
towns of Maysville, Owensboro, and Irvington, reporting a strange object
moving west at high speed. Alerted by the police, officials at Godman Air
Force Base, near Ft. Knox, began looking for the unknown craft. They soon
located the object but could not identify it. Watching it through binoculars,
various observers described its shape as circular, like a teardrop, or rounded
and tapered like a parachute or an ice-cream cone. At about 2:30 p.m. (all
times in this account are E.S.T.), as they were discussing the object, a flight
of four P-51 planes approached the base from the south. Led by Captain
Thomas Mantell, the planes were being ferried from Marietta Air Base,
Georgia, to Standiford Field near Louisville. The tower operator at Godman
thereupon radioed Captain Mantell for assistance:

[B]
A “classic” in the literature of flying saucers is a
particularly dramatic UFO incident whose specific
cause has not yet been found or, if found, cannot be
absolutely proved from the evidence available.
Lacking a completely airtight explanation, official
investigators classify the case as Unknown. Saucer
fans classify it as proof that flying saucers exist.

“We have an object out south of Godman here that we are unable to
identify and we would like to know if you have gas enough and if so could
you take a look for us if you will.”
The ferry had been planned as a low-level flight and none of the planes
had been serviced with oxygen. Captain Mantell, a combat pilot in World
War II, nevertheless agreed to help out: “Roger. I have the gas and I will
take a look for you if you will give me the correct heading and any
information you have on locating the object.”
The talk between Godman tower and Captain Mantell was not recorded
and transmission was sometimes garbled. Although many persons heard the
exchange of remarks during the next critical minutes and agreed on the
general content, no two remembered exactly the same words; therefore the
official reports[III-2] represent only the best possible reconstruction of the
conversation that took place.
One plane, short of fuel, continued on to Louisville. The other three
circled and began to climb. At about 2:45 Mantell notified the tower that he
was at about 15,000 feet: “I have an object in sight above and ahead of me,
and it appears to be moving at about half my speed or approximately 180
miles an hour.” One of his wing men said: “What the hell are we looking
for?” When Godman asked Mantell to describe the object, he said: “It
appears to be a metallic object, or possibly a reflection of sun from a
metallic object, and it is of tremendous size. I’m going to 20,000 feet.”
The other two pilots, who had seen nothing and were alarmed at flying
so high without oxygen, leveled off at 15,000 feet. Mantell was then above
22,000 feet and still climbing. In ship-to-ship conversation he said that he

would go to 25,000 feet for about ten minutes, then come down. When all
further attempts to call Mantell went unanswered, the other pilots
discontinued the search and went on to their base; although one returned
after refueling and equipping himself with a mask and oxygen, he found
nothing in the area.
At about 3:15 Mantell radioed that the object was “directly ahead of me
and slightly above, and is now moving at about my speed or better. I am
trying to close in for a better look.” He did not call again. Less than an hour
later searchers found the crashed plane. Mantell was dead. His shattered
watch had stopped at 3:18.
During the period of search, ground observers at Godman Field had
been able to watch the UFO, gradually diminishing in size, and about 3:50
it disappeared from view. Within a few minutes, however, observers farther
south in Kentucky and Tennessee were reporting an unknown object in the
sky.
A hundred rumors sprang up immediately after the tragedy: that the
UFO was a Russian missile; was a weird machine from outer space that had
deliberately or accidentally knocked the plane out of the air when it got too
close; that Captain Mantell’s body was riddled with bullets; that the plane
had completely disintegrated before striking the ground; that the wreckage
was radioactive.
Investigators rushed in to find the cause of the fatal crash and brought
confusion with them. Some facts could be quickly established. There were
no bullet wounds. The plane had not burned on impact and was not
radioactive. The left wing had come off while in the air and landed 100 feet
from the main crash area. Parts of the plane were scattered on a line north to
south within six tenths of a mile of the central wreckage. The emergency
canopy lock was in place and apparently no attempt had been made to
release it. The throttle was set at one fourth open, mixture control at “Idle
cut-off,” and prop control at “Full increase r.p.m.”
From this evidence investigators concluded that because of lack of
oxygen Mantell had lost consciousness at about 25,000 feet, while his plane
continued to climb to about 30,000 feet; leveling off, it then began a gradual
turn to the left because of engine torque, and went into a spiraling dive that
produced a speed and a structural stress greater than the plane could stand

—the plane was “red-lined” (Air Force jargon for the limit of safety) at 525
mph. Pilots who have flown the P-51 in combat conditions have agreed
with this conclusion and have suggested that, as the plane fell, Mantell may
have regained consciousness, realized what was happening, pulled the
throttle back and tried to pull back on the control, thus producing a stress so
great that the wing was torn off and the plane then fell vertically.
As an immediate result of this tragic accident, Air Force officials
recommended that all pilots be briefed again on the use of oxygen and the
effects of lack of oxygen. New orders were issued; that no pilot go above
12,000 feet without oxygen under any circumstances; that no aircraft be
cleared for cross-country flight unless it had been serviced with oxygen;
that classes in the use of oxygen start immediately for all pilots and crew
members; that all aircraft be equipped with oxygen; and that all pilots carry
mask, helmet, goggles, and gloves on all flights.
The cause of the crash was known. But investigators had still to solve
the problem: what was the unknown object that Mantell had been chasing?

Figure 5. UFO sightings in the Mantell case. The broken line indicates the
path a balloon would have followed.

An Air Force official had announced to the press that the unknown had
been the planet Venus. This explanation, while not impossible, was not very
probable. The position of Venus that afternoon had indeed been very close
to that of the unknown object. But with a stellar magnitude of -3.4, less than
half its maximum brilliance, in the daylight sky the planet would have been
visible, if at all, only as an exceedingly small, bright point of light.
Furthermore this answer did not fit the pattern of sightings. The
accompanying map (see Figure 5) of the Ohio-Kentucky-Tennessee region
illustrates the succession of events:

1:15 p.m., Maysville, Kentucky. Strange object sighted moving
west.
1:35 p.m., Owensboro and Irvington, Kentucky. Circular object
sighted, 250 to 300 feet in diameter, moving west.
Shortly before 1:45 p.m., Godman Air Force Base, Kentucky.
Circular or parachute-shaped object sighted; in view for about two
hours, slowly moving south.
4:00 p.m., Madisonville, Kentucky. Strange object; through
binoculars identified as a balloon.
4:45 p.m., Nashville, Tennessee. Strange object sighted; through
binoculars identified as a balloon.
5:00 p.m., Lockbourne Air Force Base, Columbus, Ohio. Round
glowing amber object sighted on southwest horizon in horizontal
flight; in view about twenty minutes, then disappeared below the
horizon.

All but the last observation in this series suggested a balloon flight, but
a quick check with the weather stations in the area failed to turn up any
record of a routine launching. Air Force investigators knew about the
Skyhook project and could have obtained information on secret launchings,
even though it was classified. But, since many of the investigators in these
early days of the saucer era were more than half convinced that the
unknown had been an interplanetary vehicle, they abandoned the inquiry at
this point and officially labeled the case an Unknown. Flying-saucer addicts
pounced on this conclusion as proof that the object had actually been a
spaceship, that the Air Force knew it to be a spaceship and was deliberately
concealing the news from the public.

A Probable Solution of the Mantell Case

Although the case remained unsolved for nearly four years, the original
analysis of the evidence, carried out by Dr. J. Allen Hynek, scientific
consultant for the Air Force, made certain facts clear from the beginning.

The final sightings in Ohio, so inconsistent with the general pattern of the
other observations, obviously were not related to the reports from Kentucky
and Tennessee. The object seen at Columbus had undoubtedly been the
planet Venus, glowing brilliantly on the sunset horizon (see Chapter iv). But
the object that traveled southwest over Kentucky and Tennessee had almost
certainly not been Venus. At least two objects—balloons or other aircraft—
must be involved. It was possible, though not probable, that the unknown
over Godman Field had been the planet Venus, or it might have been still a
third object. The senior author of this book, after studying the facts
available at the time and analyzing the weather conditions prevailing that
winter afternoon, suggested that the object could have been a “mock sun”
created by ice crystals in the cirrus clouds at high altitudes[III-3, p. 22].
The final solution of these UFO mysteries often depends on one key
fact. Without it, the puzzle may never be solved. With it, all the pieces fall
into place. The “mock sun” theory (see p. 244) remained the most probable
explanation until, some time after the Skyhook project had been
declassified, ATIC investigators discovered the key fact: At the time of the
Mantell crash, the Clinton County Air Force Base, in southern Ohio, had
been a launching site for Skyhook balloons. Unfortunately records for the
day of Captain Mantell’s death were not available, and the men who had
worked on the balloon project could no longer remember whether they had
launched a Skyhook on that particular day. If an unacknowledged balloon
had been in the area, however, only one more piece was needed to complete
the puzzle: What path would the balloon have followed?
The records at Wright-Patterson Field show that the winds that
afternoon would have carried a balloon over exactly the course the UFO
followed: from southern Ohio west into Kentucky. It would have climbed
rapidly and at about 35,000 feet would have entered the southward-flowing
jet stream; shifting direction, the balloon would have traveled south at a
high rate of speed, still climbing. Somewhere south or southwest of
Godman Field it would have climbed through the jet stream to enter a
region of calm at about 60,000 feet; slowing down, it would have drifted
south or southeast into Tennessee. Of its fate after that we can only
guess[III-4, p. 19].
Without the Skyhook records for the day in question, this solution
cannot be called absolutely certain. But the chances of its being correct are

overwhelmingly high—infinitely higher than the probability that Mantell
died while chasing a spaceship from another planet.

A Radiosonde over Virginia

In the years that followed, the pattern of sightings in the Mantell case
has often reappeared but, fortunately, without the same tragic outcome.
After each Skyhook launching, a flood of UFO sightings came in to ATIC
from towns that lay under the path of the balloon. The Skyhook project
sometimes was able to relocate a “lost” balloon by following newspaper
reports of flying saucers.
By the summer of 1952 the existence of giant balloons was no longer
classified information. When on June 15 an unidentified flying object
appeared over several towns in Virginia and followed a course that closely
resembled that of the Mantell UFO, Air Force investigators recognized the
pattern and began looking for a balloon as the probable explanation. The
reports were as follows[III-1, p. 192]:

3:40 p.m., Unionville, Virginia. Very shiny object sighted at high
altitude.
4:20 p.m., Gordonsville, Virginia. Round, shiny object sighted in
the southeast.
4:25 p.m., airliner near Richmond, Virginia. A silver sphere
sighted at eleven o’clock high.
4:43 p.m., south of Gordonsville, Virginia. Jet pilot sighted and
tried to intercept a round, shiny sphere.
5:43 p.m., south of Gordonsville. An Air Force jet pilot sighted
and tried to intercept a shiny sphere; at 35,000 feet the object was
still above him.
7:35 p.m., Blackstone, Virginia. A round, shiny object with a
golden glow sighted, moving south.
7:59 p.m., radio station at Blackstone. Shiny object sighted.

8:00 p.m., Blackstone. Jets from Langley Air Force Base tried to
intercept object.
8:05 p.m., object disappeared.

Investigators first of all checked with officials at Lowry Air Force Base,
which served as a plotting center for all Skyhook balloons, but there were
none in the East that day. Next they checked the possibility that the UFO
had been a weather balloon, but nearby weather stations replied that none of
their balloons could have been responsible for the sightings. After calling
other stations within a 150-mile radius of Gordonsville with negative
results, investigators called the weather station at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
A radiosonde (a small balloon attached to an instrument for taking
soundings in the upper atmosphere) had been released that afternoon, but
had been lost about sixty miles southeast of the station when it apparently
sprung a slow leak and leveled off at 60,000 feet. The weather man at
Pittsburgh offered to plot its probable course as determined by the
prevailing winds, and soon telephoned Dayton to report that the UFO was
probably their balloon.
Southeast of Pittsburgh above 50,000 feet there was a strong current of
air that fed into a stronger southerly stream flowing parallel to the Atlantic
coast, just east of the Appalachian Mountains. The balloon would have
floated along in this current like a log floating down a river, and should
have arrived in the neighborhood of Gordonsville and Blackstone in the late
afternoon or early evening. The UFO had been sighted near Gordonsville
between 4:43 and 5:43 p.m., and near Blackstone between 7:35 and 8:00
p.m. The unknown was thus clearly identified as the lost radiosonde.

Skyhook and Pibal UFOs

The year 1952 was a big year for experimental balloons—and for UFO
sightings. Weather balloons in clusters, 100-foot Skyhooks, radiosondes,
pibals (pilot balloons sent up to show the direction and speed of the wind)
were released on schedule all over the continent. Launchings were recorded
and the balloons were tracked, as far as possible, so that for any given day

or area ATIC could consult a map and try to correlate the position of a
known balloon with that of a reported flying saucer. When a balloon was
lost, any UFO sightings it caused were not always easy to account for until
—and unless—the balloon could be found again.
These spheres of gas vary in size from a few inches in diameter to some
two hundred feet. Often they look and behave very unlike the popular
concept of a “normal” balloon, and under the right conditions they can fool
even the most wary observer—particularly if he is more or less expecting to
see something strange.
A man on the ground or even in a plane, watching the maneuvers of an
object some 20,000 to 100,000 feet above him, finds it impossible to make
an accurate estimate of its true height, diameter, distance, or speed. Strong
windcurrents can change the orientation of the sphere, and the particular
angle of vision of the observer can make the object look wholly unlike a
balloon. It may assume the shape of a disk, a lens, a teardrop, a parachute, a
sausage. Temperature inversions can produce a double image of a balloon
so that it looks like a linked pair. Balloons released in pairs or clusters may
seem to be traveling in formation under intelligent control. Sunlight,
moonlight, or the lights of a city reflected from the surface may cause them
to look white, gray, amber, red, silvery, or metallic. Since balloons often
carry a heavy instrument load, they may give a radar return that indicates a
solid object.
When balloons develop a leak, they may drop some distance at high
speed and then level off, as though under intelligent control. At the extreme
cold of high altitudes they may burst and suddenly vanish. High in the sky
at morning and evening twilight they may appear to be self-luminous,
taking their light from the invisible sun just as our artificial satellites do.
They often travel high above the air lanes, higher than any plane can go,
where varying wind streams may propel them at great velocities, slow them
until they seem to hover and be almost stationary, abruptly change the
direction of their motion so that they reverse course, dive toward the earth,
or ascend rapidly into the sky.
At night all these illusions are magnified because the observer has fewer
visible reference points by which to evaluate the true shape, distance, and
type of motion of these wandering spheres. They can deceive even the most

hardheaded and able pilot. The pilot is only human when he doubts that any
balloon can fool him—until it does.

The Guantánamo “Dogfight”

An American Navy pilot, practicing night flying over the Guantánamo
City base in Cuba on the night of September 24, 1952, engaged in a
“dogfight” with a balloon that exhibited all the characteristics associated
with this type of flying saucer. It seemed to take evasive action, deliberately
elude the pilot, make head-on passes, and respond to every move of the
plane with a countermove.
The pilot was at 4000 feet and slowly climbing when he spotted an
orange light approaching the city from the east at 10,000 to 15,000 feet.
Realizing that the object was not a Navy plane, he tried to intercept it, but
the light had started a left turn and he could get no closer than eight to ten
miles. The object appeared to be as large as a Navy bomber and had a
greenish tail five or six times the diameter of the light, visible only
intermittently. When he reached 10,000 feet, the light was still circling left
and climbing in a ten- to fifteen-mile orbit. To keep the nose of the
relatively slow TBM on the light required about 40 degrees of bank. At
12,000 feet the light was still climbing faster than the plane; the pilot then
stopped climbing and reversed from a left to a right turn. The light seemed
also to reverse direction.
All attempts at interception seemed to be met by purposeful evasive
action, and the object seemed to be guided by intelligence. When the pilot
followed the light to the north, it shifted to west, then south, at about 25,000
feet. Suddenly it began to climb at an angle of approximately 60 degrees
and at a terrific rate. Although it had been a large bright glow, it now
appeared as a very small red point which would have blended with the stars
had it not been moving. It then started a rapid descent. By this time the pilot
was over the base and headed northeast to intercept the light as it
descended. He described the ensuing “dogfight”[III-2]:
“The light appeared to level out rapidly, and I missed it on the first run
and started a tight port turn. As I headed for a point that would give me a

90-degree collision course for the light, it appeared to accelerate and
crossed my bow at an incredible speed. I immediately went into a tighter
turn and the next intercept was the same except that I was almost on the
light, as it flashed from starboard to port. At this close range nothing but the
light could be seen, and it was a brilliant white, approximately fifteen feet
in diameter. After each run, the light appeared to go out one-quarter to one-
half mile, and slowing in speed, continuing in a port turn. As I pulled out of
the third run the light appeared to start another rapid descent towards
Caimanera. This time I went into a steep dive to follow, when the light
appeared to shallow its dive and head towards the control tower. My
altitude was 6000 to 8000 feet, descending at a speed of better than 200
knots. The light was below me and going at more than twice my speed. As I
approached the north shore of the Bay, at approximately 2000 feet
descending, the light seemed to veer to port, pass over the army dredge,
steady out on an easterly heading, level out over the mangroves, slow down
rapidly over the cove ... hover over the water momentarily, and then fade
from sight.” After the plane landed, harbor police searched the area but
found nothing.
When the pilot was informed that he had been fighting a lighted weather
balloon, released that night from the Naval Air Station at Guantánamo Bay,
he may very naturally have felt incredulous. Instead of arguing, however, he
helped carry out an experiment. On the following night the station released
another lighted balloon, at about the same time, and the pilot took off to try
an intercept. After comparing the experience with that of the night before,
he concluded that he had indeed fought a balloon:
“Many of the illusions seen on the previous night could be duplicated
by maneuvering the plane appropriately. I tracked the balloon to 12,000 feet
and made runs on it from as far away as ten miles. I could always intercept
and pass it at any predetermined position, as against the fact that I could not
get close to the other light, which at the time appeared to be moving away
at each attempt at approach.”
There were other differences, too. The rate of ascent was faster on the
first night, and the second balloon did not exhibit a tail. Discussion with
members of the Aerology Department brought out the explanation of these
differences. The first night had been clear, with a bright moon that
transformed the accompanying light into a flickering tail. On the second

night the dew point was higher and the atmosphere was hazy so that no tail
was visible, the balloon looked smaller, and showed an orange glow instead
of a bright white.
The rapid climb of the first balloon could be attributed to a vertical air
current, or to an air layer of variable density, or both. A balloon often
develops leaks at high altitudes and then descends to an intermediate
altitude where the loss of gas and the denser atmosphere cause it to hover.
One wind balloon, released earlier from the same base, had developed a
leak, started spinning, covered a horizontal distance of about a mile, and
then dropped into the water. Similarly, the first balloon probably developed
a large hole and fell very rapidly for a while until the loss of gas and the
increase in atmospheric pressure caused it to shrink and close the hole,
slowing its descent.
Some of his impressions, he decided, were the result of making tight
turns at high speed: “The last fast descent could be due to the fact that I
may have cut the balloon with my prop on the third run, causing the light to
fall free. My last three-quarter turn was diving to port in a position
northeast of the light, which could have produced the illusion of the light
arcing across Caimanera and the Bay and settling into the water. The light’s
crossing from starboard to port could have been the result of my plane
being in a vertical turn and the light descending straight down instead of
going horizontally. At the time of intercept I thought my wings to be almost
level, the light traveling in a flat circle, but due to the afore-mentioned
vertigo, a pilot cannot rely on his senses to establish attitude.”
The pilot concluded: “Considering all the facts and an observation of
known light on the night of the twenty-fifth, it is my opinion that the light
on the night of the twenty-fourth was a balloon, with its accompanying
light, which had been released from the Naval Air Station.”[III-2]

The Wallops Island UFO

Perhaps the most spectacular (and short-lived) UFO in history appeared
at 6:55 p.m. E.S.T. on April 1, 1960, along the east coast. A bright-yellow
streak of fire shot up from the horizon into the eastern sky and slowly

changed into a huge zigzag pattern. With the streak of fire appeared a large
reddish sphere, reported by some observers to be as large as the full moon
and many times brighter than a planet. Visible along the entire eastern
seaboard, the brilliant object slowly moved eastward, followed by a trail of
greenish sparks. While still at high altitude out over the Atlantic Ocean, it
suddenly vanished—as though it had simply taken off into outer space.
Switchboards in eastern cities were jammed as witnesses called
newspapers, universities, and nearby observatories to report a comet, a
fireball, or a flying saucer.
Newspapers immediately printed a full explanation of this April Fool’s
Day apparition: a scheduled but unannounced rocket launching from
Wallops Island, Virginia. The yellow fire was debris from the rocket,
reflecting the rays of the setting sun; contrary winds in the upper
atmosphere produced the zigzag form. The luminous globe was a full-scale
model of the Echo satellite—an inflated balloon 100 feet in diameter,
carried aloft by the rocket. Dry powder escaping through holes in the
balloon produced the greenish tail. The object had “vanished” when the
balloon fell back into the earth’s shadow and was thus no longer visible.
Although the newspapers published a full explanation within a day or
two, some saucer enthusiasts continued to treat the apparition as a mystery.
In its Special Bulletin for May the National Investigations Committee on
Aerial Phenomena (see Chapter xiii) included the incident under “Recent
UFO Sightings.” Three months after the launching the organization
conceded (UFO Investigator, July-August, 1960) that the UFO of April 1
was probably the giant balloon sent up from Wallops Island.
On August 12, 1960, the counterpart of this balloon went into orbit and
became the satellite Echo, which is still circling the earth, shining like a star
of the first magnitude near dawn or sunset.

Weather Balloons and Saucers

In the early years of the saucer era balloons accounted for some 25 per
cent of the unidentified flying objects reported to ATIC. The pattern of these
sightings is unmistakable, and the identity of balloon and UFO is often

certain—as certain as any evidence can be. Nevertheless many such
identifications are resolutely rejected by the saucer enthusiasts. It would be
pointless to discuss all the UFO reports of this class, but we can summarize
a few of the most famous.
In the winter of 1953, a flying saucer was reported to have circled
around a B-36 bomber and blinked a light as though signaling. Investigators
from ATIC determined the following facts:
At 1:13 a.m. on February 6, 1953, the pilot of a B-36 plane bound for
Spokane, Washington, was near Rosalia when he sighted a round white light
below him, circling and rising at a speed estimated at 150 to 200 knots as it
proceeded on a southeast course. The B-36 made a sharp descending turn
toward the light, which was in view for a period of three to five minutes,
but the pilot could not identify it.
At 1 a.m., thirteen minutes before the sighting, the United States
Weather Bureau station at Fairchild Air Force Base had released a pibal
balloon. Winds aloft at altitudes of 7000 to 10,000 feet were from the
northwest with a speed of about fifty knots. Computations showed that the
existing winds would have carried the balloon to the southeast, and it would
have been over Rosalia, which is 12.5 nautical miles southeast of Fairchild
Air Force Base, in about fifteen minutes. The plane sighted the unknown
near Rosalia thirteen minutes after the launching. The balloon carried white
running lights which accounted for the blinking described, and the circling
climb of the UFO is typical of a balloon’s course. Thus all the evidence
supports ATIC’s conclusion that the UFO was a weather balloon[III-2].
A similar sighting had occurred near Hamilton Air Force Base,
California, on the afternoon of August 3, 1952—toward the end of the
summer’s saucer scare (Chapter vii)—when several pairs of saucers
supposedly engaged in dramatic duels in full view of the base. Ample
evidence supports the Air Force conclusion that the UFOs were balloons.
The two objects were first seen at 4:15 p.m. Ground observers at the Air
Force base, with the aid of binoculars, described them as silver in color,
circular in shape, 60 to 100 feet in diameter, and traveling from east to west
at an estimated speed of 400 to 450 miles an hour. One object was at about
12,000 feet, the other at about 18,000 feet; as they moved to the west a
distance of about fifteen miles, passing over the heads of the observers (but

not circling the base), the higher object dived to about the level of the
lower, and they bobbed about each other for about an hour and a quarter.
Toward the end of this period they were visible only intermittently because
they were seen against the sun. Three additional pairs of objects (a total of
eight) came into view fifteen to twenty miles west of the observers and,
buffeted by the winds, appeared to carry on a dogfight; momentarily they
appeared in a “diamond” formation extending over an area of about four
miles. Since the witnesses were looking into the sun at objects fifteen or
twenty miles away, they found it difficult to follow the course of any one
for any length of time.
The objects looked like balloons, behaved like balloons, and weather
balloons had been released in the area that day. Conclusion: the saucers
were weather balloons[III-2].
A number of other publicized cases listed as “Unknown” were in all
probability balloons. Since a probability, however good, is not the same as
an established fact, these sightings remain in the Unknown category even
though their actual explanation is reasonably certain. Such a case was that
near Hermanas, New Mexico, which, like that a few weeks earlier at
Hamilton Air Force Base, may have been stimulated by the 1952 saucer
panic in Washington (Chapter vii).
On August 24, 1952, an Air Force colonel was flying from California to
Georgia in an F-84-G plane at an air speed of about 290 miles an hour. At
10:15 a.m. M.S.T., when near Hermanas, New Mexico, he observed two
round, silvery objects about six feet in diameter some two miles north of
him and traveling east at high speed; they showed no trail or exhaust.
During the three minutes they were in view, one object suddenly began a
right turn while the second accelerated rapidly; they changed in shape and
in color, became elongated and gray, and then disappeared. A few minutes
later over El Paso, Texas, he saw two similar silvery objects, also traveling
east. During the ten minutes they were in view, one object seemed to climb
straight up for 2000 or 3000 feet, followed immediately by the second one.
Assuming that the same pair of objects was involved in both sightings, the
observer concluded that they were going much faster than any plane, and
reported the incident to ATIC.

The behavior described is typical of that of balloons. Rising into a new
wind stream, they may move rapidly and change their orientation so that
they look sausage-shaped instead of round; reflecting the sun at a different
angle, they look gray rather than silver. Investigators checked with Biggs
Air Force Base, White Sands, and El Paso International Airport; both White
Sands and El Paso had released weather balloons at 8:00 that morning
which had traveled southeast and burst some time before the sighting at
Hermanas. Since no single recorded balloon could account for the sighting,
it was listed as Unknown[III-2].
This inquiry can scarcely be called thorough. No check seems to have
been made at Holloman Air Force Base or at more distant bases whose
weather balloons might well have traveled into the area. The investigators
apparently accepted the pilot’s assumption that the objects in the two
sightings were identical and were therefore traveling at incredible speeds;
yet there was no evidence to support the assumption. It is far more probable
that he was observing two sets of objects, not one. The estimates of size,
distance, and speed are all uncertain because no fixed reference point
existed. The report does not state whether the objects seemed to be above or
below the plane, and does not give the exact heading of the objects.
The objects looked and behaved like balloons. Another possibility is
that they were fragments from the balloons that had burst earlier. But the
explanation of this incident remains unknown because too few facts were
determined.

Plastic UFOs and the “Stack of Coins”

A burst balloon has caused many a saucer scare, but the invasion of
Farmington, New Mexico, on Saint Patrick’s Day 1950 was one of the most
dramatic. The “saucers” began to fly about 10:15 a.m. M.S.T., and soon
filled the air. In numbers estimated from 500 to thousands, for the next hour
the gleaming saucer-shaped objects soared over the town, moving
erratically at incredible speeds, darting in and out among each other in what
one writer has called “the greatest exhibition of magnetic flight that has
ever happened in this universe.”[III-6] (See Chapter ix.)

The explanation is more prosaic. A Skyhook balloon had been launched
that morning from Holloman Air Force Base near White Sands, New
Mexico. Near Farmington, in the cold atmosphere at 60,000 feet the balloon
had become brittle, burst, and disintegrated into hundreds of tiny pieces of
plastic. Light as feathers, shining in the sunlight, they floated over the town
and away[III-1, p. 106].
A similar episode occurred on July 27, 1952, the day after the second
Washington “invasion.” The dramatically named “stack of coins” sighting
at Manhattan Beach, California, was reported by an aircraft engineer,
formerly a Navy pilot, and was confirmed by seven other witnesses.
At 6:35 p.m. P.S.T., just before sunset, a bright silvery object appeared
high in the sky, elliptical in shape and apparently solid. The size was
estimated to be about that of a dime held at arm’s length. As the observers
watched, it turned to the south and gracefully broke apart into seven smaller
objects, as smoothly as a stack of coins separating. The three lead objects
assumed a V position, the others followed in two pairs, and the whole
formation then turned northeast and quickly disappeared. ATIC
investigators, still buried in a mass of equally spectacular reports, could
provide no solution to the mystery, and another fleet of saucers had
apparently been added to the summer’s list.
Immediately concluding that the objects were from outer space, UFO-
philes pondered the meaning of the incident. One author suggested that the
disks might have been seven different ships that, when first observed, had
been stacked like coins and attached to each other by some magnetic force,
so that all could be directed as one[III-5].
This sighting has remained technically an unknown chiefly because the
descriptions fail to give the necessary information. What direction did the
object come from? How long was it in sight? What balloons had been
released in the area that day? At what time? What were the winds at high
altitudes? The winds at low levels were from the west, and at altitudes from
20,000 to 50,000 feet they were from the east; but what were they in the
region above 70,000 feet, the probable location of the object? Even without
these facts, a reasonable explanation can be offered: the unknown was a
radiosonde balloon that burst at a high altitude.

The sun was low on the western horizon. A balloon at a great height
reflects the sun brilliantly from its rubber or plastic skin and gleams like a
giant metallic sphere. These balloons usually soar to 70,000 to 90,000 feet
before they burst from the cold. The fragments then disperse in an
impressively uniform pattern, and may disappear quickly. The radiosonde
package and attached parachute fall rapidly at such heights. They are not
noticed by the witnesses because the chute usually does not open fully until
after the package has fallen some distance into the beginning twilight near
the earth’s surface.
This explanation of the “stack of coins” cannot be proved, of course, but
every detail of the incident is consistent with the behavior of a bursting
balloon[III-2].

Jets and Contrails

Weather balloons are not the only air-borne objects that have been
mistaken for interplanetary craft. Flying saucers reported over Durango,
Colorado, early in August 1952 turned out to be four T-33 Air Force jets
flying at 30,000 feet, so high that no sound reached the ground.
A low-flying jet, enveloped in an aura of cloud made by the jet itself,
can look like a strange object. This condensation phenomenon, called a
contrail, occurs when areas of low pressure develop on the wing surface;
the air cools by expansion in the slowly moving boundary layer in contact
with the wing. Both the depth of the boundary layer and the drop in
pressure increase with increasing air speed, but each depends very closely
on the aerodynamic qualities of the wing. An excellent photograph of one
such disk produced by a Canberra jet was taken on February 4, 1956, along
the coast of Africa near Accra on a morning when the condensation
phenomenon occurred several times during air maneuvers. The weather was
fine, the sky cloudless with a few patches of haze over the sea, and
visibility was more than eight miles. During the display the air speed of the
jets was usually too low or the air too dry for the aura to form. “But over
the cliff edge where the sea-breeze was just beginning to break through in
patches the air would be moist enough to condense about 1½ gm. of water
droplets in each cubic metre of air, quite sufficient to produce the observed

effect. The effect is increased by higher speeds at the end of a dive (when
the angle of incidence of the aerofoil is least) ... but it is likely that the
patchy onset of the sea-breeze was the most important contributing
factor.”[III-7]
A flying saucer reported from Johannesburg, South Africa, on April 11,
1958, belongs in this category. Hundreds of witnesses reported a mysterious
starlike object maneuvering in the northern sky on three successive nights at
speeds in excess of 2000 miles an hour. Most observers agreed that “The
Thing” could not have been any known aircraft because its speed was too
great; it sometimes hovered stationary in the air, and repeatedly changed
color from white to red to deep scarlet. One member of an Interplanetary
Club who watched it through binoculars described the UFO as saucer-
shaped, with a rim like a soup plate around the edge.
Members of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
Minitrack Station, near Johannesburg, were amused by the variety of
reports on “The Thing.” The mysterious object in the night skies was in fact
a South African Air Force Dakota aircraft, flying back and forth so that the
Minitrack Station could test the calibration of its tracking instruments. In
addition to the usual navigation lights, the aircraft had carried a bright,
flashing light so that it could be photographed[III-7a].
A flight of bombers refueling in mid-air at night can be a startling
spectacle and more than once has been reported as a gathering of flying
saucers.
Such an incident occurred in Florida on October 31, 1955, when a disk
jockey at Gainesville broke into his radio program about ten o’clock in the
evening to announce that flying saucers were over the station. Many of his
listeners hurried out of their houses to look at the Halloween visitors,
clearly visible in the night sky. One reporter stated that he had seen four to
six objects, oblong in shape, brilliantly glowing, red and orange, traveling
soundlessly in a straight-line formation that later changed to a V[III-8].
Both the radio station and the police station were swamped with telephone
calls from frightened citizens, most of whom calmed down when they
learned the explanation: a flight of bombers had been refueling at an
altitude of 32,000 feet.

The Killian Case

The most famous UFO sighting of this type is the Killian case. On the
evening of February 24, 1959, an American Airlines plane was flying from
Newark to Detroit. At about 8:45 p.m., when the plane was near Bradford,
Pennsylvania, the pilot, Captain Killian, noticed some puzzling lights above
and to the left of his plane. There seemed to be three, their colors changing
from yellow to light orange, dimming and brightening in intensity and
shifting their relative positions. At first he supposed he was looking at the
constellation Orion, for the lights had the same configuration as the stars in
Orion’s “belt,” but when the lights changed position and he could see Orion
itself in addition to the lights, he discarded his first theory. He considered
the possibility of a jet tanker refueling operation, but decided the lights
were moving too slowly. He couldn’t think of any ordinary explanation—
but he had long wondered what truth there was in the idea of flying saucers
and had thought there must be something to it.
Over the loud speaker he remarked to the passengers that American
Airlines had a special treat for them which they could see by looking out of
the left windows. He continued to watch the lights as he flew west toward
Detroit, and radioed two other American Airlines planes in the area.
Learning that their pilots were also watching the unusual spectacle, he
notified Air Traffic Control (ATC) in Detroit. The lights remained in view
for about forty minutes, all the way to Detroit, and the pilot lost sight of
them only when he began to let down through the haze for a landing.
Reporters and photographers were waiting to interview him, and next
day’s Detroit Times carried a banner headline, “Mystery Discs Trail Plane
Here,” over a picture of Captain Killian flanked by the plane’s two pretty
hostesses, all three smiling as they held up to the camera three ordinary
kitchen saucers[III-9]. After checking with the Detroit ATC, who did not
know of any scheduled refueling operation, the pilot reported his experience
to officials of American Airlines, and next day returned to New York where
again he was besieged by reporters and photographers. Meanwhile,
following standard CIRVIS procedure (Communication Instruction for
Reporting Vital Intelligence Sighting from Aircraft), the manager of
operations of American Airlines reported the incident to ATIC at Wright-
Patterson Air Force Base.

In New York the day after the sighting Captain Killian gave a telephone
interview to Radio Station WCHS, Charleston, West Virginia, describing his
experience. Following the customary procedure, intelligence officers from
Mitchell Air Force Base questioned him and filled out the usual report
form[III-2]. In the radio interview and in the talk with intelligence officers
Captain Killian made the same statements he had made to American
Airlines officials: he didn’t know what the lights were, and he couldn’t tell
how far away they had been because he didn’t know their size or their
altitude[III-10].
Not for months had such a good flying-saucer story appeared, and the
newspapers made the most of it. Among the first to assert that the unknown
lights had been flying saucers was the UFO Research Committee of Akron,
Ohio (see Chapter xiii). Members of the committee had received the news
by telephone, even before Captain Killian’s plane landed at Detroit, from
the pilot of a United Airlines plane who had watched the lights on his flight
to Akron. During the days following, Captain Killian’s copilot gave an
interview on Long John Nebel’s after-midnight radio program in New York.
Captain Killian himself described the UFOs to members of a New York
UFO organization, Civilian Saucer Intelligence (CSI), and appeared on
several radio and TV programs. Both saucer addicts and newsmen besieged
Air Force representatives, demanding an immediate explanation of the
sighting. Finally, on February 28, only two days after receiving the report
from American Airlines, ATIC yielded to public pressure and produced a
tentative theory: it was possible that the pilots might have sighted the stars
of Orion, as Captain Killian had first suggested. However, the release
added, no definite conclusion could be reached until all the facts had been
studied.
Promptly rejecting the possibility that he might have been looking at
Orion, Captain Killian stated in an interview with the New York Herald
Tribune, “I am sure there are people on other planets and that they have
solved the problem of space travel.... I sincerely believe that their vehicles
are coming close to earth.”
While the saucer believers were keeping the story alive, applauding
Captain Killian and denouncing the Air Force, the experts at ATIC had been
collecting facts and trying to analyze them. The basic piece of evidence was
Captain Killian’s own report to American Airlines, made a few hours after

the incident took place. After describing the circumstances of the sighting,
the appearance and behavior of the lights, the statement continues:
“The only possible explanation other than flying saucers could be a jet-
tanker refueling operation. Never having witnessed refueling operations at
night, I am not aware of the lighting of the jet tanker.
“My air speed during this complete flight was 250 knots indicated. I
also do not know the air speed of tankers during operation if this could be
so. I contacted ATC to find out if they had any airplanes on a clearance and
no three airplanes were given.
“In summary, it was difficult for me to believe they were jets because of
low speed and configuration. If they weren’t jets I still don’t know any
more than I did before even though I watched them for forty minutes
before. Due to the dark and strong lights I was not able to ascertain any size
or shape. The altitude of the objects was 30 degrees above my horizon.
Distance away is unknown.”[III-2]
Almost equally important was the evidence of other witnesses. During
the forty-minute period of observation, the crews of five other planes, all
flying west in the Pennsylvania-Ohio region, had watched the lights for
varying lengths of time. Several persons on the ground in and near Akron
had seen them between 9:15 and 9:30.
Air Force investigators methodically gathered the facts and made their
analysis and on March 16, only twenty days after the sighting, they released
a summary to the press. The mysterious lights belonged to normal terrestrial
aircraft. Although ATC at Detroit had apparently not had the information
when first asked, three B-47 bombers of the Strategic Air Command had
been carrying out a night refueling operation from KC-97 tankers at the
time and place reported. The tanker has several groups of lights which, from
a distance, can seem to be one or more lights, and would have looked very
much like the three objects described by Captain Killian. Such a refueling
operation takes from about forty minutes to more than an hour.
Captain Killian had been flying at an altitude of 8500 feet, and he had
given the location of the unknowns as 30 degrees above his horizon; this
agreed with the position of the tankers, which were operating at an altitude
of 17,000 feet. Captain Killian had been flying west at an indicated air

speed of 250 knots; the refueling tankers had also been flying west at a true
air speed of 230 knots (ca. 270 mph). Since the courses of plane and tankers
were roughly parallel, the tankers had remained in view and would have
arrived over Akron at about 9:15, the time that ground observers reported
the lights.
Everything checked. Every detail of the incident was accounted
for[III-11]. Nevertheless the solution caused an explosion in the camps of
the saucer enthusiasts, who called it, among other things, imaginative.
Forgetting that the “Orion” theory suggested immediately after the sighting
had been only tentative, UFO addicts ridiculed it and asked why the experts
had later offered a different explanation—which they greeted with equal
ridicule[III-12].
Captain Killian, too, had apparently forgotten his first report. On March
24, a month after the sighting, in an interview by the Long Island Daily
Press he stated that the things he saw could not have been tankers; that he
knew what B-47 bombers and KC-97 tankers looked like, and how they
looked in operation at night (Original statement to American Airlines:
“Never having witnessed refueling operations at night, I am not aware of
the lighting of jet tankers.”) Also, he told the Daily Press, the objects he
saw were at least triple the size of any known tanker or bomber. (Original
statement to American Airlines: “Due to the dark and strong lights I was not
able to ascertain any size or shape.”) Furthermore, he asserted, the
unknowns had been far too fast for a tanker, and had moved at a speed of
about 2000 miles an hour. (Original statement to American Airlines: “... it
was difficult for me to believe they were jets because of low speed.”)
In rejecting the Air Force explanation of this incident, flying-saucer
addicts ignored several embarrassing questions: If Captain Killian actually
saw interplanetary craft, how did he fail to see the earthly aircraft operating
at the same time and place? If the unknowns moved at a speed of 2000
miles an hour, how did Captain Killian and the crews of several other
planes, flying at less than 300 miles an hour, keep the unknowns in sight for
forty minutes? In that length of time the UFOs should have covered most of
the distance to the Pacific.
Few persons, given the facts by responsible officials, would persist in
denying the reality of the tankers and conjuring up a fleet of flying saucers

to occupy the relevant cubic area of space. To the true enthusiast, however,
these refueling planes remain incontrovertible proof that spacecraft are
among us.

... And Kites and Soap Bubbles

Objects need not be as large as Skyhook balloons or jets to start a
flying-saucer scare. Brightly illuminated advertising blimps have caused
many UFO reports. Unfamiliar circumstances or a faulty perspective can
manufacture spaceships out of things as small as seeds, spider webs, scraps
of paper, or toy balloons.
In the autumn of 1947, during the first months of the saucer scare, many
such UFOs were reported. One experienced observer, formerly a combat
pilot, reported a flying saucer overhead at a height he estimated as 5000
feet. More careful study showed that the object was at a height of only
about 250 feet and was suspended from small balloons. Later he learned
that, as a joke, some boys had launched a paper saucer carried by helium-
filled toy balloons. During this same period when everyone was talking
about flying saucers, spaceships reported over an Iowa town one night
turned out to be glowing bits of paper drifting from a fireplace
chimney[III-13].
On March 16, 1961, according to the British radio, a resident of East
Suffolk reported to the police that he had seen a spaceship land in a nearby
field. Investigators soon found the craft: a fuel tank that had fallen from a
passing plane.
A fleet of UFOs appeared late one afternoon in July 1961 to an observer
driving west along Highway 54 from El Paso, Texas, to Alamogordo, New
Mexico. It had been raining in the mountains, and wind and dust storms had
forced the driver to stop several times during his trip, but now the sun was
shining between patches of dark cloud in the western sky. Driving toward
the outskirts of Alamogordo, he was startled to see a V-shaped formation of
huge saucers flying directly toward him. Stopping his car, he saw that they
were glowing a deep red, were moving at high speed, and seemed to be as
high as the clouds. When they had reached a point nearly overhead, they

suddenly seemed to drop down toward the observer. Rapidly revising all his
first estimates of size, height, and speed, he recognized their true identity.
They were merely a group of tumbleweeds that had been carried aloft in the
strong winds and were soaring past at a height of only 100 feet.
Illumination from the setting sun had produced their weird reddish glow.
A spectacular flying saucer hovered near the Smithsonian satellite-
observing station in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles, on the night of October
17, 1961. The station crew observed it with binoculars, by apogee
telescope, and photographed it with the Baker-Nunn satellite camera. A
brilliantly glowing object, it shone in the eastern sky, moving erratically and
fluctuating in brightness. After watching it for nearly an hour and finding
that the nearby airport could not observe the object, the observers
concluded that it must be less distant than it seemed, and set out by car to
try to get a closer look. About a mile and a half from the station they
stopped, and solved the mystery. A plantation manager and his servant stood
in a field, hanging on to one end of a 1200-foot kite string. At the other end,
high in the sky, soared a kite; hanging from it was a lighted pressure
lantern[III-14] (see Plate IIa).
In 1954 malfunction of a sewage-disposal plant in western Pennsylvania
produced one of the most spectacular saucer reports on record. An
oversupply of detergent, whipped by a stiff breeze, foamed into a
mountainous tower of bubbles. A sudden gust of wind broke the tower and
launched a colossal mass of bubbles as large as a ten-story building. This
brilliant, scintillating, super-giant bubble bath rose to great heights and
drifted for miles. Widely reported as a UFO, this apparition was merely an
unusual by-product of modern technology. The UFOs photographed over
Kentucky on July 7, 1947, were probably vapor trails, a less familiar sight
then than now; or they might possibly have been the smoke trails from an
exploding meteor (see Plate IIb).
A saucer incident that might have become a classic Unknown occurred
in Denver at 10 a.m. on a summer’s day in 1950. A man was sitting on the
shady porch of his house, reading. Beyond the porch roof the sun shone
brightly. Glancing up from his book, he was startled to see a formation of
perhaps a dozen spherical objects, shining iridescently, traveling toward the
distant mountains. As he watched, those in the front of the procession
seemed to vanish instantly while others appeared out of nowhere to join the

parade at the rear. Measuring their size against the mountain background, he
decided they were “immense” and they moved at fantastic speed, covering
the thirty or so miles to the mountains in a matter of five or six seconds.
Too stunned to take action, he was still numb from shock when he heard
a faint “Hello,” and looked up—to realize that the little girl across the street
was blowing soap bubbles. If the man had jumped up when he first saw the
objects and had rushed into the house to telephone the nearest saucer club,
he might never have found out that the “spaceships” were only
bubbles[III-15].

[III-1] Ruppelt, E. J. The Report on Unidentified Flying
Objects. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1956.
[III-2] Air Force Files.
[III-3] Menzel, D. H. Flying Saucers. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1953.
[III-4] Tacker, L. J. Flying Saucers and the U. S. Air Force.
Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960.
[III-5] Keyhoe, D. E. Flying Saucers from Outer Space.
New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1953.
[III-6] Scully, F. Behind the Flying Saucers. New York:
Popular Library, Inc., 1951, p. 144.
[III-7] Sarson, P. B. “Aircraft Condensation Aura,”
Meteorological Magazine, London, Vol. LXXXV (1956), p.
217.
[III-7a] Johannesburg Star, April 14, 1958.
[III-8] Case 142, CRIFO Orbit, Vol. II (March 2, 1956).
[III-9] Detroit Times, Feb. 25, 1959.
[III-10] Barker, G. “Chasing the Flying Saucers,” Flying
Saucers (July 1959), p. 24 ff.

[III-11] Kirsch, F. A. “Air Force Right on Killian
‘Saucer’?” Flying Saucers (August 1960), p. 17 ff.
[III-12] “Report on Unidentified Flying Objects Observed
Feb. 24, 1959, by American-United Airline Pilots.” Compiled
by Unidentified Flying Objects Research Committee, Akron,
Ohio, Feb. 24, 1960.
[III-13] Wylie, C. C. [Speech] Popular Astronomy, Vol.
LVI (1948), p. 217.
[III-14] Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, The SAO
News, Vol. I, No. 6 (November 1961).
[III-15] Dean, C. W. Personal communication.

Chapter iv
THE SPANGLED HEAV’NS: STARS AND PLANETS
Shortly before dawn on March 3, 1955, a spectacular flying saucer
appeared over Alaska. The witness, a civilian scientist with the rank of
Commander in the United States Navy, was returning from the North Pole
on the daily Air Force Ptarmigan weather flight; his mission had been to
study the effect of the aurora on radio propagation, for the Department of
Defense. He described his experience as follows:

A Mirage of Sirius

“We were flying southwest of Point Barrow, Alaska, not far from Bering
Strait, en route to Eielson Air Force Base in Fairbanks, and our course was
roughly southeast. The night was clear and the stars shone brilliantly. I was
looking out of the western bomb blister when suddenly I saw a bright object
shoot in at tremendous speed from the horizon, directly toward the plane. At
first I thought it was a meteor or a fireball and I instinctively ducked, but
the object came to a sudden skidding stop about 300 feet away, thereafter
riding along with our plane and keeping pace with our speed. I could
scarcely believe my eyes. The thing possessed green and red signal lights
that flashed back and forth, and something that looked like a lighted
propeller on the top. Beyond question, it was a flying saucer.
“I wondered if the thing might be a hallucination, brought on by fatigue.
After all, we had been in the air almost seventeen hours. I cleaned my
spectacles and rubbed my eyes, but the Saucer was still there, pacing the
plane and bobbing up and down as the plane itself occasionally wove or
dipped. My next thought was to eliminate all possible chance that the thing
was an internal reflection. I pulled my fur parka up over my head and put
my face smack against the bulging surface of the blister that formed the

window. Thus shielded from all internal illumination, I could still see the
glowing object. I next drew a pencil from my pocket and held it out at arm’s
length, and was surprised to find that the glowing disk was somewhat
smaller than the eraser. I made a rapid calculation and concluded that if the
sphere was actually 300 feet away, as it seemed, then it was only a foot or
two in diameter, not much larger than a basketball. My next thought was
whether one of the radio parachutes had somehow or other got attached to
the plane by the string. These objects, brilliantly lit by an electric light, can
be quite startling. But it had been nearly half an hour since the last
parachute release and the meteorologists were just getting ready to lower
another through the trap. I decided to call the meteorologist to look at the
thing. But before I could call out, as if it had read my mind the object
suddenly took off at top speed and disappeared. Now I was really
concerned. In less than two seconds the UFO had vanished over the coast of
Siberia, some 200 miles away. It must have been traveling at the fantastic
speed of more than 100 miles a second. The Korean War was over but our
relations with the Soviet Union were still tense, and I wondered if the object
might be a secret Russian missile on reconnaissance. I kept my eyes glued
to the point where the saucer had disappeared and suddenly, a couple of
minutes later, it shot back toward the plane, more brilliant and spectacular
than the first time.
“You can perhaps imagine my relief when I suddenly realized what the
object was, and at the same time realized that I had hit on the answer to a
great many flying-saucer reports of a similar nature. Only someone familiar
with the constellations could have identified the object. It was a mirage of
Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens. Actually Sirius was slightly below
the horizon at this time, but the bending of the light had raised the image
above the horizon and had diffused the beam into the saucerlike form. The
flashing red and green lights were common phenomena associated with star
twinkling, and the apparent structure, including the whirling propeller,
resulted from distortion by the earth’s atmosphere.
“But why had the image taken off the way it did, and then rushed back?
The moving plane of course was continually changing position relative to
the ground features. A mountain peak on the distant horizon had briefly
come between the plane and the star, obscuring the light. The light was not
cut off all at once, however. Thus as the image dimmed it seemed to shrink,

as though it were racing away. This temporary barrier also explained the
sudden stops and starts and the tremendous instantaneous acceleration the
object seemed to make at the instant it appeared. The large atmospheric lens
was simply focusing the light of the star in the general direction of the plane
and thus it was centered with my eye. That is why the object seemed to
duplicate the motion of the plane.
“I watched the object for several minutes after its return. I was able to
get full confirmation of this identification when the star rose over the
western horizon; it rose in the west because the southward motion of the
plane more than compensated for the westward rotation of the star. And as
Sirius came up from the horizon, the ‘flying saucer’ sank back into the
brilliant hemisphere of stars, where it belonged.” (The witness in this case
was the senior author of this book.)
Sirius has inspired many UFO reports. On December 10, 1952, at 7:15
p.m. P.S.T., the pilot and radar observer of an F-94 on routine patrol duty
were over the town of Odessa, Washington, at about 26,000 feet when they
saw a large white light in the east[IV-1]. Dim reddish-white lights seemed
to be coming from “windows,” and no trail or exhaust was visible. The pilot
attempted to intercept but the object performed amazing feats—did a
chandelle in front of the plane, rushed away, stopped, and then made
straight for the aircraft on a collision course at incredible speed. The pilot
banked away to avoid collision, and afterward was not able to locate the
object. The radar man then got a brief return but soon lost contact. Although
the visual and radar contacts had not coincided, both men assumed that they
referred to the same object[IV-2, p. 65].
Investigators suggested at first that the object might have been one of
the Telemuk balloons, but this idea had to be discarded and the sighting was
listed as Unknown. A review of the evidence by the present authors
suggests a highly probable explanation. Above the low cloud cover at 3000
feet the night was clear and moonless. In the east, Sirius was just rising over
the horizon at the exact bearing of the unknown object. Atmospheric
refraction would have produced exactly the phenomenon described. The
same atmospheric conditions that caused the mirage of the star would have
caused anomalous radar returns (see Chapter viii).

Earth’s Distorting Atmosphere

In everyday life we often look at familiar objects through a distorting
medium. Houses and persons seen through a pane of poor window glass
look peculiar and wrongly shaped, and images of trees and clouds reflected
in a pool or a stream of rippling water may continually shift and break, but
these distortions do not deceive us because we are used to them. The child
who stands before the crazy mirrors in an amusement park may laugh at
himself for looking so fat or so thin, so tall or so short. Knowing that the
image is only a ludicrous approximation to his real appearance, he is able to
recognize himself without difficulty. But a stranger, placed so that he could
see only the distorted image and not the person who made it could not make
the necessary corrections and probably would not recognize the child if they
met in the street.
Like window glass, water, or mirrors, a mere layer of air can distort an
image. For the astronomer, the earth’s atmosphere is a lifelong frustration.
Acting as an imperfect lens, it continually falsifies the true position, color,
size, and shape of the heavenly bodies he tries to study. Under certain
conditions it can change the image of a star or a planet into an
unrecognizable stranger. When light enters the atmosphere, the rays are bent
or “refracted” so that the image is moved upward, somewhere above the
true position of the star (see Figure 6). When we are admiring a sunset and
think we are watching the very top rim of the sinking sun as it drops below
the horizon, we are actually seeing only its projected image. The sun itself
has already set, but its light is bent upward by the air that clings to the
earth’s surface. The greater the density of the air, the greater the
displacement of the image. If there were no air at the earth’s surface, the
sun would vanish and darkness would come instantaneously, with no
intervening period of twilight.

Figure 6. Bending of light by the atmosphere. A star below the horizon is
visible because refraction raises the image.

A star’s light does not bend uniformly, however. Light rays of different
wave lengths bend at different angles, so that when white light is scattered
or “dispersed” into its component colors, the blues and greens are bent more
than the reds. The density and the temperature of the air also affect the
beam, so that as a star’s light travels from the thin upper atmosphere to the
denser air near the earth, the colors shift constantly and the star seems to
twinkle, flicker, and change in color and brightness.
Such changes are most noticeable when a star is low on the horizon at
dawn or at dusk, so that its light reaches us only after traveling through
miles of dense atmosphere. The sun displays these effects dramatically. At
sunrise and sunset its scattered light may illuminate the entire horizon.
Clouds turn red and gold, hills and the tops of buildings take on a ruddy
glow, and the entire sky may flame. The red wave lengths remain, while
most of the blues and greens have been scattered out of the beam or may
appear briefly at the top of the sun’s disk, as a “green flash,” at the instant it
sinks below the horizon.
Similarly, a star or planet observed low on the horizon at sunrise or
sunset may appear extraordinarily large and brilliant. It may seem to have
structure, showing an intense red glow at the bottom and bright blue at the
top. Watching it, the startled observer may see the object apparently in

motion, hovering, pulsating, and flashing red and green lights. If he is so
inclined, he can easily interpret the image as a strange machine, the red as
the glow from an exhaust, and the blue as the illumination system of an
interplanetary craft.

Figure 7. Displacement of light image by temperature inversion.

Normally the air is warmest at the surface of the earth and steadily gets
colder at greater and greater heights. Sometimes this condition is reversed,
particularly in the broad deserts and prairies of the Southwest, where the
changes between the day’s heat and the night’s cold may be sudden and
extreme. The ground cools off rapidly during the night and imparts this
coldness to the layer of air immediately above. Thus the air may be warmer
some distance above the ground. When such a “temperature inversion”

occurs, light going through the air bends in a peculiar way (see Figure 7), so
that the image is displaced far more than normally. The inversion may
produce fuzzy or greatly distorted images, and when there are several layers
of alternating hot and cold air, the effects may be spectacular. At the
boundaries between the layers the distortion and displacement increase
greatly. A star or a planet seen through such an atmosphere may display
apparently violent motions, peculiar shapes, and fantastic color changes;
light clouds drifting over the bright stars may increase this illusion of
motion[IV-3]. The rising or setting sun, although actually below the
horizon, may project upward several images of itself, one on the top of
another, to form a kind of Chinese pagoda, or a “bell pepper.” And the
twinkling top rung of the pagoda may simulate a whirling propeller.

The “Whipping Girl” of Saucerdom

The planets are wanderers. Each day they move to a new position
among the constellations. Astronomers and navigators have learned the
paths of the planets and the positions of the brightest fixed stars, but most of
us, when we look up at the night sky and see a brilliant stranger among the
familiar star groups, must cudgel our brains to account for it. According to
our dispositions, we may consult a newspaper or telephone an observatory
to find out the name of the intruder, or we may conclude that the unknown
is an alien spacecraft.
The planet Venus has been chased at least once by patrolmen in a squad
car, has several times caused the scrambling of jet interceptors, and has
been named the culprit in so many UFO mysteries that saucer enthusiasts
somewhat cynically refer to it as “the whipping girl” of saucerdom.
The brightest of the planets and the closest to earth, Venus never moves
more than 45 degrees from the sun and thus is most often visible in our
skies near sunrise or sunset, preceding or following the sun. The apparent
size of the planet varies according to its distance from the earth and its
phase. When it is farthest from the earth, the disk has a diameter of ten
seconds; at its closest, the diameter has grown sixfold, to sixty-four
seconds. The human eye and the ordinary camera see it as a brilliant white
star. Being nearer the sun, Venus receives almost twice as much light from

the sun as does the earth, and when at greatest brilliance, can be seen in the
daytime sky. Viewed momentarily through rapidly moving cirrus clouds, it
may seem to be racing across the sky like a flying saucer, but a longer look
will reveal that the object is actually making very slow progress, like a
planet[IV-4].
To the airman in the cockpit of a plane, the planet in the dawn sky can
be a breathtaking sight. As one veteran pilot has described the experience,
“Venus rose to signal me from the eastern horizon, so brilliant and
inconsistent in color, changing at once from yellow to green to purple and
then reversing the show, that I thought for a time it was another aircraft
equipped with special lighting devices. But Venus steadied in time, proving
its identity.”[IV-5]
During the spring of 1956 Venus stimulated an unusual amount of
flying-saucer excitement. About 9:00 E.S.T. on the nights of March 20, 21,
and 22, dozens of persons in Cincinnati, Ohio, telephoned the newspapers
and the local headquarters of Civilian Research Interplanetary Flying
Objects (CRIFO), to report an unidentified flying object that was burning
“like a beacon” in the western sky. A reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer
stated: “To the naked eye, the object appeared to be an extraordinarily
intense bluish white light ... through binoculars, the object appeared to be a
compact galaxy of lights, changing form as they revolved slowly. At one
point, with binoculars set slightly out of focus, it assumed the appearance of
a diamond brooch ringed with emeralds turning lazily on an eccentric axis.”
The object was visible for nearly an hour, moved slowly to the northwest,
and disappeared.
Astronomers quickly identified the unknown as Venus. To the saucer
enthusiasts, however, it appeared as a low-flying luminous object with
swept-back wings, hovering in the west, making no sound, and displaying
colors that changed from red to white. While admitting that some of the
reported sightings might have been Venus, the editor of Orbit (the official
publication of CRIFO) argued that an object that changed shape and
sparkled like diamonds and emeralds could not possibly be Venus. He stated
“that the public should know that out of seventeen UFO reports received for
a three day period, ten were explainable as Venus but six were not! These
stubborn six defied all conventional explanation.”[IV-6]

While the fate of the seventeenth UFO may require further explanation,
the flying saucer reports did not offer a real puzzle. The time, the position,
the colors, and the apparent motions of the object were entirely consistent
with those expected for the planet under the prevailing atmospheric
conditions. Dr. Paul Herget of the Cincinnati Observatory had easily
identified the “mysterious” object. He added that Venus would continue to
get brighter and brighter until the middle of May, and that the number of
UFOs sighted would probably increase correspondingly.
He was right. Less than three weeks after the excitement in Cincinnati,
Venus inspired one of the most notorious “Unknowns” in the history of
saucerdom, one that evoked charges of fraud, falsehood, and conspiracy on
a grand scale.

The Ryan Case

An American Airlines plane had just taken off on a flight from Albany
to Syracuse, New York, on the night of April 8, 1956. The sky was clear
with a very thin overcast. At 10:15 E.S.T., while at about 6000 feet over
Schenectady, Captain Ryan and his first officer sighted an unidentified
flying object and reported it to Griffis Air Force Base. Bright orange in
color, it glowed ahead of the plane in the northwestern sky. At first it
seemed to be traveling at great speed, 800 to 1000 miles an hour. Then it
appeared to slow down to the plane’s speed, about 250 miles an hour, and
thereafter kept a steady distance ahead. The tower operators at the Albany
and Watertown airports also saw the object, as did the crews of four other
plane flights, who decided it was probably a star or a planet.
The shift supervisor on duty in the tower at Griffis Air Force Base,
alerted by Captain Ryan, was able to observe the unknown through
binoculars. He described it as apparently round, larger than any star, at an
estimated altitude of 3000 or 4000 feet; when first sighted it looked white
with an orange tint but after about ten minutes changed to orange with a red
tint. During the twenty-three minutes he watched it, the unknown slowly
descended over the horizon. Interceptors from Griffis Air Force Base were
scrambled (Air Force jargon meaning to take off and pursue as quickly as
possible) at 10:48 and 10:52, but returned to base without finding anything.

Captain Ryan, having watched the object during most of the flight, landed
his plane at Syracuse and made the customary report.
The newspaper accounts that followed caused a short-lived flying-
saucer scare, but when officials from ATIC investigated they had no
difficulty in solving the mystery. The evidence was plain and unmistakable.
The object was the planet Venus. According to the reports of Captain Ryan
and the other observers in the air and on the ground, the object was low in
the northwest; estimates of its azimuth varied from 290 to 330 degrees. A
plot of the planet’s actual position at 10:20 p.m., when the UFO was first
picked up by the tower operator at Griffis Air Force Base, showed that
Venus was slightly above the horizon at an azimuth of 301 degrees, and that
it set at 304 degrees at about 10:42 (when allowance is made for the effects
of atmospheric refraction)—the time the UFO disappeared from the view of
the Griffis observers. Of the four other commercial and military pilots who
reported the object, all described it as essentially stationary, and all
positively identified it as Venus. In confirmation, the glowing light
reappeared the following night at the same time and position. The
intercepting jets had not been able to find the alleged UFO because by the
time they left the ground, around 10:50, the planet had already set[IV-1].
There the matter should have ended. The puzzle was solved, and
forgotten by all but a few saucer addicts. Some twelve months later,
however, Major Donald Keyhoe reopened the case. As the new Director of
the National Investigations Committee for Aerial Phenomena, commonly
known as NICAP (see Chapter xiii), he charged the Air Force with
concealing the true facts of the incident, and himself tried to get in touch
with Captain Ryan to obtain information to support the charge. Receiving
no answer to letters or telephone calls, Major Keyhoe then gave his story to
certain government agencies. Using as evidence a newspaper account[IV-7]
and interpretations of Captain Ryan’s remarks in a TV interview, NICAP
alleged that the object sighted on April 8, 1956, had been a UFO; that the
captain, on orders from Griffis Air Force Base, had abandoned his
scheduled route to chase the unknown craft, had lost it somewhere over
Lake Ontario, had then turned back and landed at Syracuse and, finally, that
his flight log must have been falsified to conceal the facts of this
pursuit[IV-8].

The original question, the identity of an unknown object, was all but
forgotten. In letters, telegrams, and telephone calls to various officials of
American Airlines, Congress, the Air Force, the Civil Aeronautics Board,
and the Civil Aviation Authority, NICAP requested an official investigation
of the incident. The first requests evoked no response but continued efforts
were successful. After hints of publicity and of possible senatorial interest,
the beleaguered agencies at last yielded to NICAP pressure and reopened
the case. Captain Ryan, a reliable officer with twenty-three years’
experience as a pilot, was subjected to official interrogation. Busy
government bureaus were forced to invest further time, money, and energy
to confirm facts that had never been in doubt.
To the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), Captain Ryan replied that he
had observed an unidentified object, but that he had not altered the course
of his flight. He repeated this explicit statement to officials of the Civil
Aeronautics Board (CAB) and of American Airlines. Airline records
provided independent confirmation. Since the scheduled time of the flight
between Albany and Syracuse had been 49 minutes, and the actual time
elapsed on the night in question had been 48 minutes, he could not possibly
have spent time in making a detour over Lake Ontario as alleged.
These declarations, according to NICAP, were worthless. They merely
proved that Captain Ryan had given false answers to his questioners; that
the government agencies involved knew the answers were false; and that a
gigantic conspiracy existed to suppress the truth. Among those suggested as
possible members[IV-8] were the American Airlines Company, the Civil
Aeronautics Board, the Civil Aviation Agency, the United States Air Force,
and possibly even the Central Intelligence Agency and the National
Security Council!
Saucer publications still list this sighting of Venus as an Unknown.

Venus as a Morning Star

One of the “best” UFOs of the year 1950 appeared when Venus
performed in plain sight of the ATIC offices at Wright-Patterson Air Force
Base, Dayton, Ohio[IV-2, p. 103].

About midmorning on March 8 a TWA plane, coming in to land at
Dayton municipal airport, was circling to get into the traffic pattern when
both pilot and copilot noticed an extremely bright light hovering in the
southeast. Much brighter and larger than a star, it appeared and disappeared
in the high, thick, scattered clouds. The tower operators, who also saw it,
immediately telephoned the Ohio Air National Guard and officials at ATIC.
Within minutes the UFO had attracted an audience of exceptionally well-
qualified observers. Air Force experts on unidentified flying objects
watched it from the ground, technicians studied returns on the radar screens
at the laboratory at Wright Field, and the pilots of two hastily scrambled F-
51s tried to intercept it.
The radar operators, who reported returns from both UFO and pursuit
planes, called the pilots and vectored them in toward the target. Both pilots
could see the light at first, but when they had climbed to about 15,000 feet
they found themselves in clouds so thick that neither could see the other
plane, and the unknown was no longer visible. Since ground radar reported
that the planes were getting closer to the target, the pilots decided to
continue, on instruments, but they separated to avoid the danger of colliding
with each other. In a few seconds they were deep in dense cloud. Flying
conditions were far worse than they had expected and the planes were icing
up fast. Nevertheless the pilots kept climbing until ground radar advised
them that they were almost on target. Realizing that if a solid object actually
were ahead of them they would hit it before they could see it, the pilots
immediately descended to below the clouds and circled, hoping for a break
in the overcast, until ground radar reported that the target was fading fast.
The planes then landed. When the clouds broke momentarily, after about an
hour, the UFO was not visible.
A conference took place at ATIC that afternoon to discuss the identity of
the mysterious light and the cause of the radar echoes. A check showed that
the position of the UFO had been identical with that of Venus. The light, the
conference concluded, had been Venus. One pilot later disagreed, arguing
that the light had not looked to him like a planet and that if the object had
been Venus it should have appeared, but did not, at the same time on the
following day. But the weather conditions the first day would have distorted
the image and made it unlike the pale light of Venus occasionally visible in

the daytime. It was not visible at all the following day because of different
weather conditions.
The radar returns, the investigators found, had come from the ice-laden
clouds and were unrelated to the light. Both planes had encountered
unexpectedly severe icing conditions which increased as they approached
the center of the cloud. Radar, tracking their course during these moments,
had shown the planes approaching close to the unknown target. All the
evidence, the radar experts agreed, indicated that the unknown target was
ice[IV-1].

Venus as an Evening Star

In the spring of 1959 Venus again, this time in the evening, caused
reports of flying saucers. At 6:20 p.m. on March 13, a clear evening with
visibility of about fifteen miles, an unidentified flying object was sighted in
the western sky near Duluth, Minnesota[IV-1]. Witnesses described its
shape as tubular or round and its color as red, orange, green, or white. Two
interceptors of the Air Defense Command were scrambled to investigate
and headed for the object at top speeds, but they could get no closer and
eventually gave up the chase and landed. Military personnel at ground
stations and in the air observed the object visually and picked up radar
returns; it disappeared, after about thirty minutes, by fading from sight.
Although this spectacular unknown had seemed to keep pace with the
aircraft, at times rushing toward the planes on a collision course and at
other times reversing direction and racing away, all witnesses agreed that
the object had remained at a magnetic bearing of approximately 300
degrees.
The radar screen at the ground station had been photographed and the
film was forwarded to ATIC at Dayton. Analysis showed that the echoes
had not come from a real target but were “angels” caused by interference
(see Chapter viii). Some operators had reported sharp contacts, others
fuzzy; on some sets the target had faded suddenly, on others it rushed off
the scope at incredible speeds. Contact was intermittent, for short periods of
from ten seconds to a minute, and each new contact gave a different
position for the target.

At the time of the sighting Venus was just on the western horizon, at the
same position occupied by the unknown, and probably would have been
invisible except for the refraction by the earth’s atmosphere. Layers of air
with different temperatures had produced the apparent motion and changes
in color. The object had maintained the same size and relative position
during the entire period of observation; it disappeared by fading from sight,
sinking farther below the horizon. The following night, under similar
atmospheric conditions, the object reappeared in the same position. The
unknown was positively identified as Venus.
Venus was again reported as a UFO on the night of October 19, 1959, in
Korea. An observer reported a crescent-shaped silver object moving very
slowly toward the west. Observing it for three hours and twenty minutes
through the telescope of a transit, he obtained very exact data on the bearing
and altitude, which provided the facts required for identification. The object
moved westward at a rate of approximately 12 degrees an hour, a rate close
to the rotational velocity of the earth and the apparent rotational velocity of
the stars. Venus at the time occupied exactly the same position as the object,
and went below the horizon shortly after the reported sighting[IV-1].

The Rotating Lights of Japan

One of the most famous exploits of Venus took place over Japan and
Korea in December 1952 and January 1953. The resulting UFOs, publicized
as “The Rotating Lights of Japan,” were automatically identified as
spaceships by saucerians. Noting the similarity to the “foo balls” often seen
by airmen during World War II, however, Dr. Menzel concluded that the
lights were probably a type of foo ball, “an exceptional mirage.”[IV-9, p.
96] The rotating cycle of colors suggested that the atmosphere was acting to
break up and disperse the component colors of a luminous image, displaced
from its true position. Without precise information on the time, position,
and direction of motion of the unknown, this theory could not then be
substantiated. During the preparation of this book, however, the authors
were able to examine the original data on file at ATIC and to obtain the
facts necessary for a complete solution.

The drama began on December 29, when UFOs were reported at many
points over northern Honshu, the main island of Japan, and continued with
similar sightings, particularly on January 9 and January 21. On the evening
of December 29 the pilot of an F-84-G plane, engaged in local-area night
flying, overheard a radio-telephone conversation between another plane and
a radar station on the ground reporting an unusual light in the western sky.
Although the sky was thinly overcast at 8000 to 10,000 feet, he was far
above the clouds, flying in brilliant moonlight with a visibility of at least
forty miles. At 7:48 p.m. local time, while at 27,000 feet, he observed an
unidentified object above and almost due west of his plane. Turning off all
his lights to make sure that the object was not merely a reflection of his own
canopy, he climbed after the unknown and kept it in view for three minutes,
then lost it briefly. He soon located it again at 35,000 feet, when he seemed
to be level with the object and tried to close in on it. During this second
sighting he observed it for about five minutes before the light disappeared
in the west.
The pilot was a man of unusual experience, in command of a fighter
escort wing, and well aware of the illusions a flyer can experience at night.
He was also a remarkably accurate and resourceful observer, so that his
report to Intelligence investigators is a model of exact statement. If all such
reports were similarly precise and complete, few UFOs would remain
unidentified and the civilian saucer groups would have to disband (see
Chapter xiii). Carefully separating what he observed from what he
concluded, the pilot stated that the object looked larger than the stars or any
planet; he assumed that it was circular, but could not determine the actual
shape. He could not determine whether the object was silent or noisy
because the noise of his own motors would have prevented his hearing any
sound from the unknown. The object seemed to show a cluster of lights,
red, white, and green, which slowly rotated in a counterclockwise direction
from east to west; one complete cycle of revolution required a time
estimated at four to eight seconds. The shifting of the three colors during
the cycle resembled the rotating colors in some jukeboxes, and the effect
was phenomenal. “As these colors rotated in the body of the object, at times
the entire body was one solid color, either white, green, or red, but in the
process of completing a revolution the body was frequently fractionally red,
white, or white-green, plus the other possible combinations of the three
colors.” Also there seemed to be three beams of white light radiating out

from the main body in straight shafts which, unlike the colors, did not
change their relative positions but remained constant at positions of roughly
11:00, 5:00, and 7:00. No phenomenon that might be an exhaust was
observed. As to motion and behavior, the object seemed to travel exactly
parallel to the plane and maintained a constant distance in spite of the
pilot’s attempts to intercept it at speeds of around 500 miles an hour. At no
time did it execute any maneuvers except for a gradual change of direction
during the two observations. The sighting ended when the lights vanished in
the west[IV-1]. These rotating lights were also seen by the crew of an F-94
interceptor who watched them for about forty minutes, by the crew of a B-
26 bomber who watched them for about seven minutes, and by various
ground observers.
To make a positive identification, the investigator must know the
weather conditions, the bearing of the observing aircraft, and the position of
the object. Atmospheric conditions were found to be conducive to the
formation of mirages. At the time of the first sighting on December 29, the
observing plane was headed slightly to the east of north; the UFO was in
the west, apparently traveling north on a course parallel with that of the
plane. After the pilot lost sight of the object, he circled and hunted and was
flying slightly east of south when he again picked up the object, which was
still in the west.
A check of the astronomical situation showed that the sun had set about
three hours before the sighting. Venus was following roughly three hours
behind the sun and was extremely brilliant, with a magnitude of nearly -4.0.
At 7:48 p.m., when the pilot sighted the unknown, the planet was about 3
degrees above the western horizon. When Venus finally sank beneath the
horizon and disappeared, the “unknown” also vanished.
The similar UFOs reported from Japan during the same period, on
January 9 and January 21, 1953, were also mirages of the planet Venus. The
cases of “The Rotating Lights of Japan” in the Air Force file on UFOs have
now been shifted from the category “Unknown” to the category “Solved.”
In many other UFO cases of the “rotating lights” variety, the Air Force has
positively identified the unknown as the planet Jupiter.

UFOs and the Opposition of Mars

Venus is not the only heavenly body to simulate a flying saucer. Jupiter
and even Mercury, the smallest of the planets, have inspired their share of
UFOs. Mars, which can also be very bright, has frequently been reported as
a spaceship.
On June 21, 1952, an F-47 aircraft was on routine patrol over the
Atomic Energy Commission installation at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, when at
10:58 p.m. a spotter from the Ground Observer Corps informed the pilot that
a slow-moving craft was moving in the area at very high altitude. At about
the same time the pilot observed a blinking white light, of no definite shape
and with no exhaust or trail, apparently making passes at him. For the next
eighteen minutes the pilot tried vainly to intercept the unknown. The plane
was at 15,000 feet, moving at about 250 knots. As the pilot turned to meet
the pass, the UFO would pull up some 4000 to 5000 feet above the plane
and then move in again. When the plane reached 22,000 feet, the UFO
appeared to make a final dive from 28,000 feet, pulled back up to its
previous altitude, and then disappeared. The pilot’s reaction is indicated by
his answer to one of the routine questions on the Air Force report form:
“Did you stop at any time during the sighting?” His reply read: “Ha Ha!”
Investigating the incident, officials from ATIC at first suspected that the
object might have been a balloon, released as a hoax; only a few weeks
earlier a crank had launched a flight of balloons near Oak Ridge and had
been caught. But after interviewing the witnesses, the investigators
concluded that the UFO was far more probably the planet Mars. As so often
happens, however, they could not convert the “probable” into a “positive”
identification because they lacked one essential fact: the bearing of the
aircraft[IV-1].
Some flying-saucer enthusiasts consider Mars as the probable home port
of many spaceships, which allegedly visit the earth in particularly large
numbers when Mars is in opposition—the point in its path that is nearest the
earth; these ships supposedly seize the chance to hop over to earth when the
distance between the two planets is at a minimum.
It is to be hoped that the Martians, if any, are more competent
navigators than the terrestrial saucerians who propose this theory. No

sensible Martian would plan a journey scheduled to land him on earth
during the few weeks when the two planets are closest. Traveling between
Mars and earth is not like jumping across a mountain stream where the
banks remain stationary: the jumper, of course, chooses the narrowest part
of the stream and leaps across in a straight path. But in space travel both
planets are moving; they travel in elliptical orbits of different sizes and at
different speeds. To reach earth, the Martian, too, must get into an elliptical
orbit of a size and shape that will eventually intersect the earth’s orbit.
According to calculations by terrestrial rocket experts, the path that requires
the least fuel is about 735 million miles long—some twenty times the
distance between the two planets when they are closest. To follow this
course, which takes 260 days of travel, the Martian must leave 260 days
before the day that his ship and the earth will converge and meet at a
particular position in space. Therefore he plans to blast off at a time when
earth in its orbit is 76 degrees of arc behind Mars in its orbit (see Figure 8).
By the time he lands on earth, the planet Mars is lagging 44 degrees of arc
behind the earth[IV-10].
Any increase in UFO reports that may occur when Mars is in opposition
should be attributed not to spaceships but to the heightened brilliance of the
planet itself glowing in the night sky.

The Gorman “Dogfight”

One of the most puzzling of the classic saucer mysteries began on the
evening of October 1, 1948, when George F. Gorman, manager of a
construction company and a lieutenant in the North Dakota Air National
Guard, was returning to Fargo, N.D., from a cross-country practice flight in
an F-51 fighter. About 9:00, Lieutenant Gorman called the control tower at
the local airport for landing instructions, and asked the identity of a moving
light that was blinking on and off in the air below him. Informed that a
Piper Cub was coming in from the south, he continued to circle, and at 9:05
again called in to report that he could see the Cub below him at about 1000
feet. He could also see an unidentified light moving rapidly at about the
same altitude.

Figure 8. Orbit of spaceship. Mars1 and earth1,
positions of planets when ship leaves Mars; Mars2 and
earth2, positions when ship lands on earth.

The assistant traffic controller then walked to the south window of the
tower and looked out. He could see the Cub in the air and, a little above it, a
clear white light. The light was moving swiftly to the north, then shifted and
continued in a straight line toward the northwest. After watching it for
several seconds, he returned to his post. A few minutes later Gorman called
the tower for the third time to say that he was going to try to close in on the
unknown. The traffic controller then stepped to the south window of the
tower. Through his binoculars he could see a light moving rapidly over the
field in a straight line toward the northwest. It had no particular shape and

was merely a clear white light about the size of a plane’s tail lamp. After a
few seconds he returned and resumed communication with Gorman.
The pilot of the Cub glimpsed the light briefly as he was landing his
plane. He supposed it to be the tail light of another ship going very fast in a
straight line in a westerly direction, and was puzzled by the fact that an
army plane seemed to be pursuing it. After landing he delivered some
bottles of Coca-Cola to the tower operators and, overhearing the
conversation between them and Gorman, stepped to the balcony at the
southeast corner of the tower to see what was happening. From there he
could see the light going west, with the army plane after it. The light shifted
briefly to the southeast but almost immediately resumed its northwest
course and disappeared after a few seconds.
Lieutenant Gorman, meanwhile, had begun a weird “dogfight.” The
UFO seemed to be at an altitude of about 1000 feet, was traveling about 250
miles an hour, and was blinking off and on. As he approached, the light
banked to the left. Gorman dived after it but could not catch up. The light
then began to climb in a rapid turn. Attempting to turn with it, Gorman
blacked out temporarily from the excessive speed.
Continuing the chase, this time at 5000 to 7000 feet Gorman noticed
that the light was now traveling fast, apparently faster than the F-51 could
go, so he began trying to cut it off in turns with his fighter at full power. As
the object circled to the left, Gorman cut back to the right for a head-on
pass. When collision seemed inevitable he dived and the light seemed to
pass over his canopy at a distance of about 500 feet. According to the
description he later gave the Air Force, the unknown at this closest
approach seemed to be a round white light, somewhat flattened, from six to
eight inches in diameter—about a quarter the apparent size of the full moon.
Gorman then made a climbing turn. When he could see the light again it
suddenly reversed direction and headed straight for the plane, attempting to
ram. It was no longer blinking off and on but was a steady white. Just
before collision it pulled up and Gorman, too, pulled up. The light went
straight up, with Gorman following until, at 14,000 feet, his plane went into
a power stall while the object circled some 2000 feet above him. As he
resumed the battle, the light seemed to retreat, then attack. Gorman dodged
and circled to the left to get in position for another intercept. Finally, when
these maneuvers had taken him some twenty-five miles southeast of Fargo,

he was at 14,000 feet with the object below him at 11,000 feet. He dived
after it. The UFO turned and started a head-on pass, then broke it off,
climbed straight up, and disappeared. The time was 9:27. Gorman returned
to the Fargo airport and landed, convinced that some intelligence had been
controlling the actions of the unknown[IV-1].
With the memory of the Mantell tragedy (p. 33) and the Chiles-Whitted
sighting (see Chapter v, p. 109) still fresh in mind, officials from ATIC
arrived at Fargo in less than twenty-four hours to investigate this new
incident [IV-2, p. 63 ff.]. They carefully questioned Lieutenant Gorman and
the three other witnesses, but could find no obvious explanation. No other
aircraft had been in the neighborhood at the time of the sighting. The
weather had been clear, visibility unlimited, with some auroral activity in
the northeast. When tested with a control group of five other F-51s that had
flown during the same period, Gorman’s plane showed no more
radioactivity than did the control group—the slightly higher amount shown
by all planes after flight. Gorman’s report was confusing, in parts, and
reconstructing the exact sequence of maneuvers by UFO and plane proved
impossible. There were almost as many theories offered in explanation as
there were investigators, but eventually a reasonable solution did appear.
A lighted weather balloon had been released from the weather station at
Fargo at 8:50, ten minutes before Lieutenant Gorman’s first call. As
observed from the station, the balloon had traveled west and then northwest.
At 9:00 it would have been near the airport about where the unknown light
was first reported. A balloon could well have accounted for the events
described in the first phases of the incident, but less well for those in the
last. Officially, however, the cause was listed as a lighted weather
balloon[IV-2, p. 67]—an answer that was not entirely satisfactory.

PLATE I
a. "Grindstone" clouds over Mount Rainier. (chap. ii)

PLATE I
b. A "stack of plates" near the Maritime Alps northeast of Marseilles.
(chap. ii)

PLATE II
a. Kite with lantern photographed at Curaçao, B.W.I. (chap. iii)

PLATE II
b. UFOs over Kentucky, 10:35 p.m., CST, July 7, 1947. Jet trails? Bolides?
(chap. iii)

PLATE III
a. Meteor trail. (chap. v)

PLATE III
b. Fireball over Puerto Rico, January 12, 1947. (chap. v)

PLATE IV
a. Coast Guard photograph of UFOs over Salem, Massachusetts, July
16, 1952. (chap. vi)

PLATE IV
b. UFO near the village of Arbleterre, in northern
France, October 2, 1954. (chap. vi)

PLATE IV
c. Radar "ghosts" at Salina, Kansas, September
10, 1956. (chap. viii)

Only a Balloon?

A review of the evidence, made by the authors during the preparation of
this book, emphasized some puzzling inconsistencies. Lieutenant Gorman
had had the UFO in view for about twenty-seven minutes. During the first
five or ten minutes it had traveled horizontally at low altitude in a fairly
steady course. Then it had suddenly changed tactics, had climbed to high
altitude, turned, darted in and out, and performed both evasive and
aggressive actions. The three witnesses on the ground, however, did not see
the UFO perform any of these combat maneuvers. It had been traveling
steadily north and northwest and had disappeared from view ten or fifteen
minutes before the aerial dogfight ended.

These differences strongly suggested that two unknowns were involved
in the sighting. According to this theory, the light seen by the ground
observers was the weather balloon; the light first seen over the airfield by
Gorman was also the weather balloon. His adversary during the major part
of the dogfight was a second unknown, not a physical object but some kind
of optical phenomenon, very probably a mirage of the planet Jupiter. The
reconstruction based on this theory would account for all the puzzling
aspects of the case.
As first described by Lieutenant Gorman and by the three witnesses on
the ground, the light was small, bright, and clear; no structure was visible; it
made no noise and left no trail or exhaust. It was south of the control tower,
was traveling horizontally west and northwest, seemingly at high speed, on
a straight course, at low altitude. On these points all the witnesses agreed.
They did not agree in their estimates of its actual distance and height—a
fact that is not surprising when we consider the circumstances. The night
was clear and cloudless. It was also dark. The sun had set more than two
hours earlier and there was no moonlight (new moon on October 2). On a
dark night, the height and distance (and hence the speed) of a moving light
of unknown size are notoriously difficult to estimate. According to
Lieutenant Gorman, the light when he first saw it was about 1000 feet
above the ground and 1000 yards—a little more than ½ mile—from his
plane. The three men on the ground saw the UFO, for a few seconds, at
different times during a period of less than ten minutes. Like Gorman, they
were experienced airmen but they differed from him and from each other in
their estimates. According to the assistant traffic controller, the altitude and
distance from the control tower were 2000–2500 feet and 1–2 miles.
According to the traffic controller, they were 4000–5000 feet and ½ mile;
according to the Cub’s pilot, they were 5000–6000 feet and 1 mile.
In spite of the discrepancies, these estimates are in general agreement
and, together with the details of the UFOs appearance, are consistent with
the description of the weather balloon that had been released at 8:50, about
ten or fifteen minutes before the UFO was sighted from the ground. The
balloon carried a small white light, moved west and then northwest, was at
low altitude and slowly climbing, and would soon have disappeared from
the view of ground observers.

The object that Lieutenant Gorman first saw and pursued was also the
balloon, climbing and turning. As it bobbed and swayed in the air currents it
would have seemed to blink off and on, just as he reported. Underestimating
its height and distance and overestimating its velocity as did the pilot in the
Cuban dogfight (p. 42), he tried to follow its apparent climbing turn and, as
he stated, blacked out briefly because of his excessive speed. During this
interval, short as it may have been, he of course lost track of the object.
Shortly afterward, when the UFO passed over his canopy and he dived, he
again lost sight of the object.
When he resumed the chase he supposed that he had located the same
object he had been following earlier—but the evidence suggests that he had
picked up a different target. The unknown was going much faster than
before, was at a much higher altitude, and shone with a steady brilliance
instead of blinking off and on. In such a tense situation he could
understandably have mistaken one strange light for another. Pursuing an
apparently hostile unknown, less than a year after the still mysterious death
of Mantell in a similar encounter, he might justifiably have been frightened.
The most probable source of the second light is the planet Jupiter. The
sun had set at 6:24 p.m. Following some three hours behind the sun, the
planet had a magnitude of -1.7 and was thus brighter than Sirius, the
brightest star. Shortly after 9:10 when the UFO began its violent maneuvers
(the exact time is not known), Jupiter was very low in the southwest sky,
between two and three degrees above the horizon, at a bearing of about 231
degrees. The UFO was also attacking from the southwest, as is shown by
Gorman’s tactics: in trying to cut it off in circles to the left, he gradually
moved to the southeast.
The weather bureau records for that evening, obtained from radiosonde
observations, show that temperature inversions existed both near the ground
and at higher altitude. Thus conditions were ideal to produce a furiously
twinkling planetary mirage. When a planet is close to the horizon this
twinkling, together with the defocusing action of the earth’s atmosphere,
can spread out the image so that it looks huge, with an apparent diameter as
great as ten minutes of arc. Under such conditions, both the size and the
intensity of the light fluctuate. When they diminish, the object seems to be
racing away from the observer; when they increase, it seems to be rushing
directly towards him on a collision course. The peculiar lens-like action of

the atmosphere makes the image seem to be, not at infinity, but only a few
hundred feet away from the observer.
Seen through the distorting atmospheric lens, the image of Jupiter could
have performed exactly as Gorman described: it would have darted back
and forth, seemed to attack, retreat, and carry out the “controlled”
maneuvers that actually depended partly on the movement of the plane
itself. Gorman apparently assumed that he was dealing with a material
object (as indeed he was in the beginning), and therefore did not consider
the possibility that he was seeing merely an optical image.
The geographical situation would have helped produce the illusion.
Fargo lies at an elevation of about 900 feet and the land rises gradually to
the west. Due west is Bismarck at 1670 feet. To the south lies a series of
buttes, some of them as high as 3500 feet. Thus in the southwest where
Jupiter was setting and where the UFO attacked from, the buttes would
repeatedly have cut off the planet from view as Gorman maneuvered, so
that the image would have seemed to race in and out and perform evasive
actions, just as did the mirage of Sirius in Alaska (p. 60). Since Jupiter was
very low, however, the buttes served to conceal it from the observers on the
ground.

Figure 9. Positions of refracted image of Jupiter from 9:00 to 9:29 p.m. at
Fargo, North Dakota, on October 1, 1948. Azimuth measured north through
east.

The times involved provide the last piece of the puzzle. The dogfight
ended at about 9:27. The time of the geometrical setting of Jupiter was 9:25.
The usual lag due to refraction is between two and three minutes (see
Figure 9). The planet therefore remained visible for about two minutes
longer. The image actually sank below the horizon and disappeared from
view between 9:27 and 9:28, the same time that the UFO climbed straight
up into the sky and disappeared. When Jupiter vanished, the unknown also
vanished and did not return.
Absolute proof of this solution is of course impossible. Nevertheless,
the description of the UFO, its behavior, its direction, its time of
disappearance—all are consistent with its identification as Jupiter. The
Gorman case might reasonably be removed from the “Balloon?” category
and listed as “Balloon plus planetary mirage.”

Jupiter through a Jet Trail

Venus, Mars, and Jupiter seen under unusual conditions can mystify
even the most hardheaded witness. Unrecognized air turbulence and
increased scattering of the light can easily create the illusion of a flying
saucer.
An ex-army man, a trained observer with a good knowledge of physics
and optics, reports the following unnerving experience[IV-11].
“On January 30, 1954, my buddy and I had been fox hunting in
southwestern Indiana. We hunted until well after sundown and headed for
the car. As we neared it, a jet plane thundered through the darkening sky,
from north to south. Placing game and guns in the car, I walked around it to
see if the tires were OK. Happening to glance skyward, I let out a yell.
There it was, and no mistaking it. A flying saucer blazing in the sky. A real
illuminated spaceship. Only it wasn’t moving, just hanging in the sky.
Football-shaped, about as long as the apparent diameter of the full moon, it
showed red, yellow, and bluish green. [Here he sketched a football shape,
glowing red knobs placed at the two ends, yellow lights girdling the middle,
and yellow and green arcs curving between the two ends (see Figure 10).] I
carry an eight-power field glass when hunting and I immediately trained
this on the celestial wonder. The result was weird. It seemed to be pulsating
with a quivering, twinkling light. We watched it for some five minutes,
trying to figure out what we were seeing. Then the spaceship began to get
smaller, simply reducing in size without moving. Smaller and smaller it
became and in another five minutes it suddenly contracted into a planet—
Jupiter, I believe it was. [Jupiter was in the eastern sky 50 to 60 degrees
above the horizon.]

Figure 10. Witness’s sketch of Jupiter
seen through a jet trail.

“When we realized what we were watching we began to try to figure out
the ‘why.’ Suddenly we realized we were looking directly through the path
of the plane at the planet and our best guess was that the atmospheric
turbulence and temperature change caused by the passage of the jet was to
blame for the strange aberration we had witnessed. And we wondered if
refraction of the golden light could cause the reds, greens, and blues. Since
neither of us uses snake-bite medicine in any form, we figured our
observations were about as substantial as our feeble scientific understanding
would permit.
“But anyway, I found out how people may see flying saucers and be
perfectly honest in their incomplete observations. Had a person inclined to
the supernatural taken a good look, jumped in his car, and headed for home

at high speed, he would steadfastly have believed he had seen a flying
saucer which was evidently observing the earth preparatory to an attack
from outer space.”

[IV-1] Air Force Files.
[IV-2] Ruppelt, E. J. The Report on Unidentified Flying
Objects. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1956.
[IV-3] Tacker, L. J. Flying Saucers and the U. S. Air Force.
Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960, p. 59.
[IV-4] Payne-Gaposchkin, C. Introduction to Astronomy.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1954.
[IV-5] Gann, E. K. Fate Is The Hunter. Crest Reprint, New
York: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1962, p. 172.
[IV-6] Case 151, CRIFO Orbit, Vol. III (April 6, 1956).
[IV-7] Buffalo Evening News, April 10, 1956.
[IV-8] Keyhoe, D. E. Flying Saucers: Top Secret. New
York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1960.
[IV-9] Menzel, D. H. Flying Saucers. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1953.
[IV-10] Ley, W., and von Braun, W. The Exploration of
Mars. New York: The Viking Press, 1956.
[IV-11] Main, O. Personal correspondence.

Chapter v
OUT OF THE SKY: METEORS AND FIREBALLS
About one o’clock in the afternoon on November 30, 1954, a
spectacular meteor flared across the southeastern part of the United States
and exploded. Many persons in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi saw the
bright flash high in the sky, followed by a trail of smoke, and heard three
violent detonations. Over the town of Sylacauga, Alabama, a nine-pound
fragment of the falling meteoric body crashed through the roof of a house,
bruised the left arm and hip of the unlucky resident, and came to rest on the
floor. Members of the American Meteor Society collected detailed
descriptions of the event from many witnesses and added this daylight
fireball to the official list of observed meteorite falls from which meteorites
are recovered[V-1, p. 128].
UFO addicts, however, apparently regarded both the meteor and its
fragments as unnatural phenomena, implied some doubt that the fragment
was really a meteorite, and characterized the incident as peculiar[V-2].
To the astronomer who specializes in the study of meteors the only
peculiar aspect of the episode is that saucer publications list so few
mysterious UFOs for that particular week when similar spectacular fireballs
were almost a commonplace in the southeast states. On November 29 a
meteor flew over Alabama at 5:30 p.m., and about two hours later another
with a long trail soared over Florida. On November 30 at 5:00 p.m., a few
hours after the fall at Sylacauga, another bright fireball flashed over
Alabama. Shortly before midnight the same night a meteor flamed over
North Carolina, so brilliant that its copper-green light illuminated the
interior of cars on the highway; blue-green fire shot out above the treetops,
changed to magnesium white, and then slowly faded. Detailed observations
of all these appeared in the scientific journal Meteoritics[V-1, p. 128].

Stones from Heaven

Until roughly a hundred and fifty years ago meteors and meteorites had
the status of cosmic orphans, unacknowledged members of the astronomical
family. Few persons doubted the existence of the fixed stars, the solar
planets, comets, or even of “new stars” or novae, but they rejected a natural
explanation for meteors and interpreted them as falling stars, flying
dragons, or fountains of fire in the sky. Most astronomers as well as laymen
laughed at the recurrent idea that “stones from heaven” could fall on the
earth. Then in 1803 the French scientist J. B. Biot described an
extraordinary rain of meteorites that fell at L’Aigle on April 26[V-3]; he
convinced the French Academy of Sciences that the stones had indeed
pelted from the sky during the great meteor display. Meteoritics is thus a
relatively young science. Much remains to be learned about these cosmic
visitors, but certain basic facts have been established[V-4].
Meteors enter the earth’s atmosphere continually, by day as well as by
night, and they show great variety. Some are so brilliant that they are visible
even in broad daylight. Some are so faint that even in darkness they can be
seen only through a telescope. Others, still fainter, can be detected only by
radar specially designed for this purpose. Because of the friction created
when they penetrate the earth’s atmosphere, most meteors vaporize and
vanish many miles above the ground. We see them as only bright streaks of
light, quickly extinguished. If the meteoric body is large enough, has the
right chemical constitution, and enters the atmosphere at a favorable angle
and velocity, some of it may survive the journey and fall to the earth as a
meteorite. A distinct odor sometimes accompanies the fall—the smell of
sulphur, onions, or cyanide. About 40,000 tons of meteoritic material fall on
the earth each day, most of it in the form of fine dust. The object may be a
chunk of metal or stone the size of a pebble or a boulder, or it may be a
mass weighing several tons, so enormous that it gouges out a crater at the
place where it hits and comes to rest far beneath the earth’s surface. Some
meteors, fortunately extremely rare, apparently can strike the earth and
devastate a large area but, like the wind, leave behind no physical trace.
According to present theory, members of a regular shower are probably
remnants of comets, which have an icy structure, and the minute bits of
frozen debris vaporize in a flash of light high in the atmosphere. Meteors

that survive to reach the earth as meteorites are thought to be fragments of
asteroids, or tiny planets. Meteorites vary so widely in their physical and
chemical structure that they require a complex system of classification.
Nevertheless the specialist can distinguish between a meteorite and earthly
rocks and stones by laboratory tests[V-5].

Meteor Streams and Showers

Any clear night displays its quota of meteors. But at certain times, when
the earth happens to collide with a stream of cosmic debris moving in an
elliptical orbit, a shower of meteors takes place. (For a list of the major
night meteor streams, see Table I.) Most meteor streams probably result
from the breakup of comets; if the debris is distributed uniformly in the
comet’s orbit, a meteor shower occurs each time the earth crosses the orbit.
For example, the Perseids, fragments of Comet 1862 III, have reappeared
every August for more than 1200 years, and the Leonids, debris of Comet
Temple (1866 I), regularly return around the third week in November. Like
the Taurids, another dependable stream, the Leonids are notable for their
brilliant fireballs, which have deposited some of the largest meteorites ever
found on the earth.
Some regular showers produce great numbers of meteors at intervals of
several years. For nearly a millennium, a.d. 902 to 1866, a marked increase
in the number of Leonids occurred every thirty-three years. The display in
1833 was one of the most spectacular in history, and witnesses said that the
“stars were falling” as thick as snowflakes. Before the scheduled major
shower of 1899, however, the main stream was deflected by passing close
to the planet Jupiter and the periodic spectacle did not take place. Since
then, the Leonids have been considered a “lost” stream, but some members
of the shower have continued to appear each November. On November 16
and 17, 1961, they produced an unexpectedly awesome display with many
brilliant fireballs.

TABLE I

MAJOR METEOR STREAMS

Name of Dates of Date of Parent
Remarks
stream occurrence maximum comet

Quadrantids Jan. 1–4 Jan. 3 Observed
longer than
100 years.
Lyrids April 19–23 April 21 1861 I Observed
longer than
2500 years.
η Aquarids May 2–5 May 4 Halley
(1835 III)
δ Aquarids July 14-Aug. July 30
19
ι Aquarids July 16-Aug. July 30
25
Perseids July 29-Aug. Aug. 12 1862 III Observed more
17 than 1200
years.
α Capricornids Aug. 1–21 Aug. 17 1948 n
Cygnids Aug. 9–22 Aug. 17
Taurids Sep. 15-Dec. Nov. 12 Encke (1957
2 c)
Draconids Oct. 9–10 Oct. 10 Giacobini- 13-year period;
Zinner great showers
(1946 V) in 1933, 1946;
none in 1959.
Orionids Oct. 18–26 Oct. 22 Halley
(1835 III)
Leonids Nov. 14–20 Nov. 17 Temple- Observed since
Tuttle A.D. 902.
(1866 I)
Geminids Dec. 7–15 Dec. 14

Ursids Dec. 17–24 Dec. 22 Temple
(1939 X)
The close approach of a comet sometimes causes a fantastic shower of
“shooting stars,” and hundreds or even thousands may be counted in a
single night. At the approach of the debris of Comet Biela on November 27,
1885, some 75,000 meteors were visible from a single place during a period
of an hour. Irregularly occurring or sporadic meteors not associated with a
known comet also occur and pelt the earth unexpectedly.

The Green Fireballs

On the evening of September 18, 1954, a group of astronomers and their
wives from the observatory at Sacramento Peak, New Mexico, were having
a picnic at the White Sands National Monument, near Alamogordo. In this
great desert of pure white gypsum the air is extremely hot during the
daytime but cools to a pleasant warmth after sunset. Supper finished, the
picnickers had taken off shoes and stockings to wade in the soft warm sand.
By 8:30 it was dark and some of the astronomers had already left but others
(including Dr. Menzel) had lingered to watch the stars, which stand out
sharply in the clear skies over the desert.
Suddenly, far to the north, appeared an enormous green fireball. Of
blinding brilliance, it was moving slowly and majestically from east to west
in a substantially horizontal path about seven degrees above the horizon,
leaving behind a luminous trail that persisted for at least fifteen minutes. At
about the same time thousands of other persons on the ground in New
Mexico and Colorado, as well as the crews of several planes in flight, were
observing the fireball. It passed over a crowded football stadium in Santa
Fe, interfered with radio and TV transmission as it appeared over
Albuquerque, and over Denver turned night into day. A United Airlines pilot
at about 15,000 feet near Laramie, Wyoming, saw the blue-green ball
crossing his course and for some ten minutes observed the luminous cloud
it left behind[V-6]. At almost the same instant, the fireball was sighted in
the Bay of San Francisco, 1000 miles away. One publication cited this

meteor as two separate UFOs, one flying over San Francisco, the other over
New Mexico and the Southwest[V-2].
When telephone calls swamped the newspaper offices, reporters
interviewed Dr. Lincoln La Paz of the Institute of Meteoritics at the
University of New Mexico. Although he had not observed this particular
specimen, he had seen similar green fireballs a few years earlier and he
commented that this was no ordinary meteor but something unusual. A new
wave of UFO excitement began to sweep the country. Were mysterious
machines from outer space again patrolling New Mexico?
The astronomers who had admired the fireball at White Sands were
amazed at the public reaction. As professionals who had spent their lives in
observing and analyzing astronomical phenomena, they agreed that the
object had been unusual in its slow movement, its color, and its brilliance.
But an unusual meteor is still only a meteor, not a spaceship, and they easily
recognized it as a green fireball of the type that had appeared over the
Southwest a few years earlier.
The first epidemic of green fireballs had begun in early December 1948,
and for nearly two months the brilliantly burning objects had appeared
almost every night in the skies over New Mexico[V-7, p. 71]. Their
apparent collision course startled plane crews in the air, and their steady,
seemingly purposeful motion frightened observers on the ground. The
fireballs showed a family resemblance in their bright-green color, their great
size and brilliance, their level flight path, their noiseless disappearance, and
their failure to leave material fragments on the ground.
New Mexico was a particularly sensitive area, studded with military
bases and research installations carrying out vital work in ballistics, guided
missiles, atomic energy, and space science in general. Since the unusual
meteors seemed to be concentrating on New Mexico, Air Force Intelligence
had to face the question: Were the fireballs natural astronomical phenomena
or were they experimental guided missiles from another country, perhaps
Russia?
After consulting Dr. La Paz and hearing his evaluation of the evidence,
the Air Force felt growing concern. Perhaps unconsciously influenced by
the general hysteria of the past year, Dr. La Paz concluded that the objects
were not meteors but must be “something unusual” because they differed

from “normal” meteors in their color, trajectory, velocity, size, brilliance,
and apparent lack of fragments.
With very little knowledge of meteors and great faith in machines from
outer space, saucer enthusiasts reasoned that since the fireballs were not
normal meteors they must be artificial objects. Since they were artificial,
they must be under intelligent control. Since they were intelligently
controlled, they must be unmanned missiles or manned vehicles launched
from an alien spaceship hovering hundreds of miles above the earth whose
purpose might or might not be destructive, or they might be merely ranging
devices sent as a warning to earthmen.
The Air Force was not particularly worried about interplanetary visitors,
but it was concerned with the possibility that the fireballs were man-made
vehicles, a potential danger to the country. One scientist had suggested that
the Russians might have constructed a guided missile whose nose cone, the
final stage in a multistage rocket, was made of ice and various other
chemicals. In re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, such a cone would burn
up; the vaporizing ices would account for the green color observed, for the
silent disappearance of the object, and for the lack of material traces on the
ground. Whatever the true explanation, members of the Air Defense
Command could not afford to guess; they had to know.
In mid-February 1949 they assembled at Los Alamos a conference of
military and intelligence officers, physicists, and astronomers, to discuss the
problem of the green fireballs. After two days of studying the evidence,
most of the members agreed that the fireballs were meteors of an unusual
type and, as natural phenomena, not a threat to national security. To take
care of the extremely remote chance that this conclusion might be wrong,
the conference turned over the problem to the scientists at Air Force
Cambridge Research Center which, in the late summer, organized Project
Twinkle to equip and establish three cinetheodolite stations in New Mexico.
Fitted with a diffraction grating to split the spectrum into its component
colors (and thus identify the chemical elements present), the cameras were
to photograph and record the altitude, size, speed, and spectrum of the
luminous objects.
Since the green fireballs, meanwhile, had all but vanished from the
skies, enthusiasm for the research project diminished. Only one camera

(designed by Dr. Menzel) was ever put into operation and it never found
anything to photograph. After two months of futile searching, the Air Force
finally abandoned Project Twinkle as a waste of time.
In the years following, green fireballs occasionally appeared. An
astronomer observed one over Lafayette, Colorado, at 7:45 p.m. on June 4,
1950. One soared over the New England states and eastern Canada on
November 2, 1950, and a year later, on November 2, 1951, a plane crew
over Texas sighted another which was dramatically publicized in Life
magazine, and described in another publication as a missile that ejected
flaming balls. Few other fireballs made the headlines until the one of
September 18, 1954, but even that caused only brief excitement and the Air
Force expressed no alarm.

Meteors in the Records

The American Meteor Society, whose members specialize in the study
of meteors and meteorites, for years have collected reports of such
phenomena. From a large enough number of good descriptions of a given
meteor, astronomers can analyze the data mathematically and determine the
meteor’s radiant—the point in the heavens from which it seems to come.
The meteor is then identified by its radiant and given an AMS number. For
several years the data were published in Meteoritics, a journal issued jointly
by the Meteoritical Society and the Institute of Meteoritics of the University
of New Mexico. Dr. Charles P. Olivier, president of the American Meteor
Society, was a contributing editor.
The records in Meteoritics for the years 1950 to 1955 list dozens of
fireballs, many of them green, that were somehow overlooked by saucer
enthusiasts. On August 11, 1950, during the maximum of the Perseid
shower, a blue-green fireball (AMS 2336) apparently oval- or cigar-shaped
appeared over Washington, Oregon, and Idaho at 7:30 p.m. and was reported
by more than 100 witnesses. So brilliant that it showed a noticeable disk, it
flew in a horizontal path, silently broke into three pieces, and
disappeared[V-8, p. 379].

September 20, the same year, was a big day for meteors. At 1:35 a.m. a
giant fireball (AMS 2326) roared over southeastern Illinois from north to
south, leaving a luminous train visible in five states and illuminating the sky
and countryside from St. Louis to Louisville and from Memphis to
Knoxville. The final detonation, over western Kentucky, was heard over an
area 1000 miles square and shook buildings from Paducah to Memphis.
Fragments showered farms over a twenty-five-mile area, struck five
buildings, and penetrated one roof. About fifty pounds of meteorites
dropped in Murray, Calloway County, Kentucky, and are now in the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington. That same night about 10:45 p.m.,
fireballs were reported by plane crews flying over a six-state area—Idaho,
Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico[V-9, p. 115]. Similar
fireballs that vanished without trace were reported on September 28, 1953
(AMS 2331); October 4, 1953 (AMS 2330); May 15, 1954; and October 27,
1954 (AMS 2337).
The green fireballs still appear now and then, as they always have. None
of them has yet changed into a spaceship.

Fallacies about Meteors

Most flying-saucer enthusiasts still refuse to believe that the green
fireballs were natural phenomena. Misinterpreting or distorting the
statements made by professional astronomers, they cite the unusual nature
of these meteors as proof that they were not meteors at all but machines
from another world. Advocates of this belief need more than a refresher
course in logic; they also need to learn some facts about meteors.
The space-vehicle interpretation rests on a series of mistaken beliefs and
illogical conclusions about the nature and behavior of meteors. These false
premises may be summarized as follows:
1. Color. Meteors do not contain copper; since the peculiar shade of
green shown by the green fireballs could come only from copper, the
fireballs were not meteors but spacecraft.
2. Speed and trajectory. Meteors do not travel at a slow rate of speed
and do not follow a horizontal path; since the green fireballs did both, they

were not meteors but spacecraft.
3. Size and brilliance. Meteors do not show such great size or brilliance
as did the green fireballs, which were therefore not meteors but spacecraft.
4. Sound. Meteors produce a loud noise; since the green fireballs moved
silently, they were not meteors but spacecraft.
5. Fragments. Meteors deposit material fragments on the earth which
can be located if the investigator maps the flight path and makes a search;
since the green fireballs left no fragments, they were not meteors but
spacecraft.
In the pages that follow we shall attempt to correct each of these
mistaken ideas in turn, to present the actual facts known to astronomers,
and to show clearly that the green fireballs were not spacecraft, but meteors.

Facts about Meteors

1. Color. Copper-green meteors are not a new phenomenon. This
unusual shade of green is only one of the many possible colors that meteors
may display—white, green, blue, yellow, orange, red, and all shades in
between. Descriptions received by the Meteoritical Society include
adjectives such as bright-green, copper-green, blue-green, fiery white,
green-white, orange, blue, yellowish, silver, red-orange. Perceptions of
color vary greatly among different observers, so that several witnesses may
choose different words for the color of the same object. The most common
adjective used is “brilliant”; an observer who has only a few seconds to
look at the object often has real difficulty in deciding just what color
accompanied the brilliance. Very common phrases are blue-green, greenish-
white, orange-yellow, orange-red, greenish-yellow, yellow-green.
Both the chemical structure and the velocity of the meteoric body help
determine its apparent color. As the burning object plunges through the
atmosphere and vaporizes, the chemical elements produce their typical
colors. At higher velocities, atmospheric friction heats the body to higher
temperatures and whitens the color; as the body slows down and becomes
less hot, it is apt to appear redder.

In a few instances astronomers have been able to photograph the color
spectrum of a meteor in flight, to analyze the spectral lines and determine
exactly what elements were present[V-10]. As a rule, however, the chemical
content must be found from a laboratory analysis of recovered meteorites.
Some meteors do contain traces of copper, and free nodules of pure copper
have been found in several meteorites [V-5, p. 81]. Magnesium occurs in
fairly high percentages in most meteorites and the amount is unusually high
in green meteors[V-11]. It produces a color almost identical with that from
copper. Seeing the green of a vaporizing meteor, no observer could tell
whether the color came from copper or from magnesium unless he could
photograph the spectrum or make a chemical analysis of the meteorite.
The color displayed by the New Mexico fireballs may have come from
copper, but more probably from magnesium. Another possible source is
frozen nitrogen. Laboratory experiments relating to problems of satellite re-
entry[V-12] have shown that when frozen nitrogen vaporizes, it emits a
brilliant green glow whose wave length is almost identical with that of the
New Mexico fireballs, as judged from the paintings made by witnesses. One
of the prevailing theories suggests that meteors of this type may be icy
“cometoids”—cometary debris, chunks of ice, and frozen gases (including
nitrogen) at very low temperatures. When they enter the earth’s atmosphere
and are slowed down to speeds of several hundred miles an hour, they
become heated and vaporize, and the surface alternately melts and
refreezes; the vaporizing nitrogen would produce the green color seen in the
fireballs. Such a process would account for the color, the short lifetime, and
the lack of fragments of the New Mexico meteors.
To summarize: Meteors can exhibit the particular green color shown by
the New Mexico fireballs. It can result from copper, magnesium, or frozen
nitrogen, which can normally occur in meteors.
2. Speed and trajectory. Meteors vary widely in their velocities and
flight paths. They plunge from space into the earth’s atmosphere at speeds
estimated to range from seven to forty-five miles a second relative to the
earth—from 25,000 to more than 150,000 miles per hour. Members of a
particular meteor stream usually show a characteristic velocity. The
Perseids, for example, travel at high speed, some thirty-six miles a second,
while the Geminids saunter in at a mere twenty-one miles a second. Most of
these “falling stars” become visible to us when they have descended to

around sixty or seventy miles above the earth. Flashing down in a steep
path, they usually burn up and vanish by the time they have fallen to around
fifty or forty miles. The larger the meteor’s body, the longer its life and the
lower its point of disappearance. Most meteors maintain a straight course as
they descend toward earth. A typical path is that photographed by
Smithsonian astronomers in New Mexico on the night of November 23,
1960 (see Plate IIIa). Some fireballs have been reported to change course
after exploding. More probably, the witness is actually observing the
shifting pattern of the smoke cloud left by the meteor. The Puerto Rico
fireball of January 12, 1947, left an erratic trail of this type, which was
photographed ten to twenty minutes after the meteor had disappeared (see
Plate IIIb).
The original entrance velocity, angle of entry, size, and chemical
structure all influence the shape of a meteor’s path and its time of survival.
The apparent angle of descent as seen by the observer depends on the
distance and the direction the object is moving relative to the observer.
When the meteor travels parallel to the observer’s line of sight, it seems
much slower than when it passes the line of sight at right angles. The
greater the distance between the observer and the meteor, the slower its
apparent motion[V-13].
Some meteors move very slowly; traveling at an almost leisurely rate,
they soar through the sky on a long, level path almost parallel with the
earth. The slow fireballs in the great meteor procession of 1913 maintained
a horizontal course over a distance of several thousand miles, from western
Canada to Brazil[V-14].
Astronomical records show that green meteors are usually slow. Some
230 persons reported to the American Meteor Society that on November 28,
1953, at 6:30 p.m., a fireball moved slowly through the sky from
Massachusetts to Pennsylvania. Described as blue-white-green, changing to
orange-yellow-red, it was huge, disk-shaped, and vanished silently without
depositing fragments [V-1, p. 273]. On May 15, 1954, at 11:22 p.m., more
than 100 persons observed (and reported) a slow-moving fireball, blue-
green changing to red, of luminosity so great that it woke sleeping people.
Toward the end of its course it seemed to stop, spiraled a couple of times,
and then simply vanished without leaving fragments [V-8, p. 336].

To summarize: Meteors can travel at low velocities and in apparently
horizontal paths.
3. Size and brilliance. Giant meteors of great luminosity have been
recorded throughout history. Some fireballs have been visible to observers
throughout an area of thousands of square miles. Typical descriptions are:
dazzling, like an airplane falling in flames, bigger than the full moon, of
blinding brilliance, so bright it turned night into day, like the headlight of a
locomotive, as big as the setting sun but three times as brilliant.
The luminosity does not depend on the actual size of the meteoric body.
A fragment no larger than a pinhead can create a brilliant flash as it
vanishes. A spectacular fireball that lights up the country over hundreds of
miles may have a small body that burns up completely miles above the
earth. A larger body can survive longer, so that it continues to flare for
several seconds or more. The larger, long-lasting fireballs may explode into
smaller fragments and cascades of sparks. In exploding, they can produce a
luminous cloud of particles that remains visible for fifteen or twenty
minutes and then peppers the ground with meteorites that fall like hail or
buckshot. A giant fireball can deposit chunks of metal weighing a ton or
more like those found in Mexico, or can leave a truly enormous body that
penetrates the ground and carves out a great crater like those in Arizona and
Texas.
To summarize: Huge fireballs of great brilliance are not new.
4. Sound. Some meteors produce noise; others do not. Most meteors
silently vaporize high above the earth. When one does reach the ground, it
may strike with no noise but the faint thud of its impact. Shooting through
the air, it sometimes makes weak noises that have been described as
rumbling, crackling, rustling, whistling, or hissing.
Meteors sometimes explode with one or more crashing detonations that
rattle or even break windows. The noise has been described as like a heavy
clap of thunder, the explosion of a volcano, or a whir as if a million
bumblebees had been disturbed. The noise from the explosion of the
Siberian meteor in 1908 was heard over a distance of 600 miles, and the
shock registered as an earthquake in England.

Many meteors, like the Pennsylvania fireball of January 29, 1952,
(AMS 2328) are completely silent. This blue-green object, so large that it
showed a definite disk, was reported to the American Meteor Society by
more than 400 witnesses from Maine to Virginia and from New York to
Ohio; none of the observers heard any noise [V-1, p. 264].
To summarize: Some meteors end with a bang, but most of them don’t
even whimper.
5. Fragments. Most meteors burn up high in the atmosphere. A few, if
they are large enough in size (at least ten to twenty pounds) and tough
enough in structure, survive to reach the earth as stony or metallic
fragments. Marked differences characterize the various meteor streams. The
Taurids (maximum November 12) are relatively rigid structures, unusually
tough, and show little tendency to break up in their flight. The many Taurid
fireballs show that fairly large bodies have survived. The Geminids
(maximum December 14) are of average strength but appear to be very
dense, while the Draconids (October 10) are featherlike and fragile, with
low density. Some of the most brilliant fireballs may be structures of ice
and frozen gases which quickly vaporize on reaching the earth and hence
leave no detectable fragments. The fiery object that struck Siberia in 1908
may have been such an “icy cometoid”; although it devastated an area of
hundreds of square miles and uprooted or knocked down some eighty
million trees, it apparently left no physical trace[V-15].
If some of the physical body does survive to reach the earth’s surface,
finding it is still a problem. Recovery is rare even when the fall occurs in
daylight over well-populated country and the flight path can be charted
from the accounts of reliable witnesses. When the fall occurs at night,
recovery is even rarer[V-5]. After dark, even experienced observers find it
difficult to judge true directions and distances, and they may plot a place of
fall that is many miles from the actual point of impact. Meteoriticists know
that there is small chance of finding meteorites that fall at night except in
regions where most of the land is under cultivation. In the fifty years
between 1898 and 1948, of forty-eight recoveries from observed meteorite
falls in the United States, only seven were made from falls occurring after 8
p.m.[V-5].

Recovery depends on many factors: the number of persons who saw the
event, the accuracy of their estimates of distance and direction, the size of
the meteorites, the patience of the searchers, the time and money available
for the search, and, most important of all, just plain luck.
The Norton County fall of February 18, 1948, illustrates both the
detective work and the luck required. At about 4:56 p.m. C.S.T. a brilliant
detonating fireball soared over an area including Kansas, Nebraska,
Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas, and left a large white cloud that was
visible for about an hour afterward. Newspapers publicized the
phenomenon as a flying saucer and a few excited witnesses agreed. One
man affirmed that shortly before the explosion the strange craft hovered
over his yard at eye level, belching fire and showering sparks, then
suddenly took off, climbing fast, and exploded.
Meteoriticists at once recognized the characteristic pattern of an
exploding meteor and determined to find the remains. From newspaper
reports and personal interviews with the witnesses, H. H. Nininger of the
American Meteorite Museum in Arizona plotted the path and determined
that the probable point of explosion was thirteen miles west and three miles
north of Norton, Kansas[V-16]. From similar investigations, Lincoln La Paz
of the Institute of Meteoritics in New Mexico determined the probable place
of impact as an area eight miles long and four miles wide, about thirty-two
square miles, on the Kansas-Nebraska line.
During the Easter vacation a field-survey party from New Mexico drove
north into Kansas to hunt for the meteorite, but blizzards and snow-blocked
roads stopped the work. A second search, begun on April 27, suggested that
the main mass of the meteorite must have fallen somewhere in Furnas
County, Nebraska. When persistent hunting failed to reveal it, the searchers
moved south into Kansas, where a farmer had found a strange stone that
smelled of sulphur and contained metallic specks. Although many stony
meteorites of various weights turned up in this area, the main mass
remained hidden until July 3 when a farmer located it, by accident, in a
field that the official party had already examined and abandoned some three
months earlier. This meteorite, although it weighed more than a ton and had
dug out a six-foot crater in the ground, had eluded the hunters because “at
the time of the fall the only dwelling close to the point of impact was
unoccupied and ... the impact occurred in a field so overgrown with weeds

and stubble that even the large crater made by the record-breaking main
mass of the fall was finally located only when by chance a caterpillar tractor
started to fall into it.”[V-17]
To find these meteorites, several highly trained searchers had spent days
of effort, made a number of field surveys, driven more than 10,000 miles,
and interviewed hundreds of persons who observed the flight of the fireball.
Even so, they counted themselves lucky because many “meteorites of such
composition and structure, although large enough to produce spectacular
light and sound effects in the intermediate layers of the atmosphere, might
disintegrate so completely during transit through the denser lower
atmosphere that only dust would survive to reach the earth.”
The green fireballs of New Mexico were silent; they were probably icy
structures and hence produced no meteorites. Even if they had, locating the
place of fall would have been nearly impossible because the meteors
appeared at night in a sparsely populated area.
To summarize: Many meteors do not leave fragments. Even when they
do, finding the meteorite requires luck as well as hard work.

Unusual Fireballs

The officers and crewmen of a plane in flight have a front-row seat at
the drama of the heavens, where astronomical events seem doubly vivid
against the dark night sky. The pilot has been trained to recognize the major
constellations, the brightest stars, and ordinary phenomena such as meteors
and the Aurora Borealis. As a rule, however, he limits his study to the needs
of the job. The few who have an astronomer’s intimate acquaintance with
the heavens have often made valuable contributions to our knowledge.
Comet 1957d was first observed by an airman and Comet 1948l was
discovered by a pilot flying from the Fiji Islands to Australia. Comet
Wilson, discovered on July 23, 1961 (and reported to the Air Force by some
persons as a UFO), was first recognized by A. Stewart Wilson, navigator on
a Pan American flight over the Pacific. All members of the crew were
skilled and experienced fliers, but he alone was equipped to see the
significance of the intruder in the constellation Gemini[V-18].

One of the most fantastic apparitions to confront a pilot is a group of
luminous objects flaming through the air in more or less geometrical
formation. The objects often seem to be heading directly toward the plane
on a collision course but, as though under intelligent control, seem to veer
off at the last possible instant and then disappear at incredible speed. The
pilot usually recognizes this frightening phenomenon as an exploding
meteor or a cluster of fireballs. Occasionally the sight is so extraordinary
that he insists it could not have been a mere meteor but must have been
some weird spacecraft. Airmen of unquestioned competence have made this
mistake, sometimes because they more than half believed in extraterrestrial
visitors, but more often because they knew less than they supposed about
meteors.
In trying to identify the alarming objects approaching his plane, the
pilot often thinks first of a meteor, then rejects the idea with some form of
the remark, “Whatever it was, it was certainly not a meteor; I’ve seen
meteors and I can’t be fooled.” He usually adds that no meteor could travel
so fast (or so slowly) as the one he saw; so high (or so low); could have
such a color; steer so “obvious” a collision course; fly as part of so orderly a
group; move in so level (or so steeply angled) a path; maintain so steady a
course; change course so abruptly; move so silently; or create so loud a
detonation.
Such an incident occurred on a Pan American flight from New York to
San Juan early on the morning of March 9, 1957. At about 3:30 a.m. when
the plane was off Jacksonville, Florida, the pilot and the flight engineer saw
a burning, greenish-white, round object coming out of nowhere, seemingly
only a half mile away and headed across their nose on a direct collision
course[V-19]. In such a situation a plane’s captain cannot waste time in
analyzing what he sees, but must act. In a violent evasive move he put the
plane into a climb of about 1500 feet, during which several passengers were
thrown out of their seats and injured. At the same moment the crews of at
least seven other flights within an area of 300 miles were reporting the same
object. One witness saw it split in two and the fiery rear section drop away.
About an hour earlier, the pilot of another plane in the area had seen the
breakup of a similar meteor but had not reported it. In spite of all the
evidence that the unknown was a normal meteor, breaking apart as many
meteors do, the Pan American pilot, “having seen thousands of meteors,”

could not accept the object as a natural phenomenon although he did
realize, after he heard the other reports, that he had greatly underestimated
its distance. The object showed all the characteristics of a typical fireball,
but the flying-saucer cultists have still tried to convert this undoubted
meteor into an unknown object.
The number of meteors reported as flying saucers or spaceships has
diminished in the last few years, but the Air Force has continued to
investigate all doubtful or puzzling sightings to determine whether they in
any way represent a possible threat to the nation’s security. Every sure
identification of a UFO as merely a meteor, not a ballistic missile, brings a
certain amount of relief.
A typical case, successfully solved, is that of June 20, 1959. About 2:15
a.m. the pilot of a United Airlines flight over the Pacific reported by radio to
Flight Operations that he had observed an apparent rocket firing about
thirty-five miles west of the plane position; radar detected the presence of a
surface vessel at about the same position. The pilot first noticed a flash of
light, then the entire sky lighted up and he saw four round, fiery globules, of
an intense bluish-white color, with no tails. Flying two by two in a straight
line, they made no sound and disappeared after about two seconds. The
weather was clear and calm, the visibility excellent. The copilot, sitting at
the right, saw only the first flash, but the pilot of another plane some 120
miles to the west reported seeing the same objects at the same time[V-19].
Because this sighting occurred in a very sensitive area where military
officials were expecting a Russian test firing of an ICBM, the Air Force
made an exhaustive study of this report and identified the object as a
meteor. Their evaluation proceeded as follows:
The United Airlines pilot estimated the distance of the objects as only
about thirty miles and their rate of travel as about 15 degrees in two
seconds. These figures indicated a velocity of approximately 14,500 miles
per hour, about the speed of a ballistic missile. But the relatively low
altitude, the flat trajectory, and the fact that a visible “power plant” was
apparently still operating at this stage of flight ruled out the possibility of a
missile. However, if the observer had underestimated the distance and the
objects were actually hundreds of miles away, then the data would indicate
a speed of about 50,000 miles an hour, in the range of meteor velocities.

The descriptions given closely matched that of the classic fireball, whose
colors range over white, blue, green, red, and yellow, and whose luminosity
may be as great as -3 magnitudes. The Air Force concluded that the object
sighted was, in all probability, a meteor.
A similar sighting, which saucer enthusiasts have publicized as a
brilliantly lighted UFO that appeared to hold a definite course, occurred at
3:02 a.m. on July 11, 1959, also over the Pacific[V-19]. The pilot of a Pan
American Airlines flight reported that a mysterious bright object
accompanied at its left by four smaller lights had approached his plane at
“inconceivable speed,” made a sharp right turn, and then disappeared. The
objects seemed to be flying evenly spaced in formation, and the pilot, who
had never seen anything like it in all his years of flying, told the
newspapers, “I’m a believer, now.”
The official investigation began immediately. Four other commercial
flights had reported seeing the object at the same time. In each case, the
pilot stated that the objects seemed to head straight at his plane at high
speed on a collision course, then made a 90-degree turn and disappeared.
The various reports, however, showed significant disagreements. Some
witnesses gave the color as white, some as orange-yellow. Of the several
pilots, each gave a different description of the “formation”: a big light with
four smaller lights flying at the left; a big light surrounded by a cluster of
six or seven smaller lights; a big light followed by four smaller lights; a big
light in the center of a rectangle formed by four smaller lights. Of the five
pilots who made official reports, one said the phenomenon was definitely
not a meteor, two said it could have been a meteor, and two did not venture
an opinion. The pilots of several other flights stated, on landing, that they
too had seen the object but had not radioed a report because they assumed it
to be a meteor.
After mapping and correlating all the observations, ATIC completed the
analysis and released the result to the press on July 14, only three days after
the sighting, a remarkably efficient piece of work. Conclusion: the object
was a fireball[V-20].
The literature of flying saucers contains dozens of similar incidents that
fit perfectly into the meteor pattern. Pointing to this list of “unidentified”

flying objects, saucer addicts still abuse the Air Force for concealing the
“fact” that these UFOs are actually spaceships!

Great Meteor Processions

Even more dramatic than the ordinary exploding meteor whose
fragments naturally fall into a pattern around it, a cluster of fireballs or a
great procession of meteors occasionally startles the world. On December
21, 1876, about 8:45 p.m. such a swarm of fireballs appeared over Kansas
and disappeared some three minutes later over Pennsylvania, having
traveled the thousand-mile distance at a velocity of 20,000 to 25,000 miles
an hour. Hundreds of persons in Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio,
and Pennsylvania saw the display, which included nearly 100 separate
fireballs; the leader was more brilliant than the full moon and many of the
followers were brighter than Venus or Jupiter. Perhaps fortunately for the
nerves of the public, the most recent such display occurred before the
saucers began to fly (March 24, 1933). This cluster of fireballs was visible
chiefly in the skies over New Mexico and left a great cloud that was visible
for at least three hours.
The most spectacular of such formations was the great meteor
procession of February 9, 1913. At about 9:05 in the evening the leader or
leaders appeared in the sky over western Canada, their fiery red bodies
followed by long streaming tails. These immense fireballs showed no
tendency to fall toward the earth but, like the green fireballs of New
Mexico, “moved forward on a perfectly horizontal path with peculiar,
majestic, dignified deliberation,” and disappeared in the distance to the
southwest. No description can surpass that given by Professor Chant[V-21]
who spent two weeks in locating and interviewing many of the witnesses.
“Before the astonishment aroused by this first meteor had subsided,
other bodies were seen coming from the northwest, emerging from
precisely the same place as the first one. Onward they moved, at the same
deliberate pace, in twos or threes or fours, with tails streaming behind,
though not so long nor so bright as in the first case. They all traversed the
same path and were headed for the same point in the southeastern sky.

“Gradually the bodies became smaller, until the last ones were but red
sparks, some of which were snuffed out before they reached their
destination. Several report that near the middle of the great procession was
a fine large star without a tail, and that a similar body brought up the rear.
“To most observers the outstanding feature of the phenomenon was the
slow, majestic motion of the bodies; and almost equally remarkable was the
perfect formation which they retained. Many compared them to a fleet of
airships, with lights on either side and forward and aft;... Others, again,
likened them to great battleships, attended by cruisers or destroyers.”
No other recorded meteors have persisted for so great a distance.
Thousands of persons saw this great procession as it soared over
Saskatchewan, central Canada, Toronto and the Great Lakes region, New
York and Pennsylvania, the shipping lanes from New York to Bermuda, and
on over the South Atlantic, where before it vanished it was observed by
ships as far south as Brazil—a distance of some 5000 miles, one fifth of the
earth’s circumference. The descriptions do not vary significantly and they
all mention the slow, level flight, parallel to the earth’s surface.
Some astronomers have suggested that these unusual meteors may have
been a group of natural satellites deflected by the earth’s gravitation,
slowing down and finally disintegrating as they made their final
revolution[V-14]. But if the UFO cult had existed in 1913, the flying-saucer
enthusiasts would probably have regarded the fireball procession as a fleet
of spaceships, and would have speculated on the problem of what planet
dispatched them and for what purpose.

The Chiles-Whitted Sighting

The Chiles-Whitted UFO, sighted on July 24, 1948, is one of the most
publicized of the classics. Although the object appeared, passed, and
vanished in an interval of roughly ten seconds, and the descriptions given
by the three witnesses differed on several vital points, Dr. J. Allen Hynek,
astronomer consultant to ATIC, in his report of April 30, 1949, identified it
as an undoubted meteor. Nevertheless, not until 1959 did the Air Force

officially accept this solution, and the literature of saucerdom still cites the
incident as indisputable proof of alien spaceships.
On the evening of July 23 an Eastern Airlines DC-3 took off from
Houston, Texas, en route for Boston, with an experienced pilot and copilot
in the cockpit. By 2:40 a.m. C.D.S.T. July 24 the plane was a few miles
southwest of Montgomery, Alabama, flying at an altitude of 5000 feet. The
night was clear, and a bright moon just four days past full shone through a
layer of broken clouds about 1000 feet above the plane. At 2:45 a.m. the
pilot, Captain C. S. Chiles, noticed a dull red glow some distance ahead,
approaching from a little above and to the right of the plane. He remarked
to his copilot, Lieutenant J. B. Whitted, “Look, here comes a new Army jet
job.”[V-19] In the next few seconds, however, he changed his mind about
the identity of the object. As both men watched, the brilliantly glowing
unknown continued to approach with incredible swiftness, apparently on a
collision course; it seemed to veer slightly, passed the plane on the right
almost level with and parallel to the flight path, then seemed to pull up
sharply and disappear into the clouds. Captain Chiles estimated that the
object was in sight for about ten seconds. The one passenger who was
awake, sitting at the right of the cabin, saw the light for only an instant as it
flashed by.
The brief impressions of these three witnesses were the sole foundation
for newspaper stories that the plane had narrowly escaped collision with a
spaceship.
In their official report both pilots agreed on the general appearance of
the UFO: it looked like a wingless aircraft with no fins or protruding
surfaces, was cigar-shaped, about 100 feet long, and about twice the
diameter of a B-29 superfortress. It seemed to have two rows of windows
through which glowed a very bright light, brilliant as a magnesium flare. An
intense dark-blue glow like a blue fluorescent factory light shone at the
bottom along the entire length, and red-orange flames shot out from the rear
to a distance of some fifty feet. Neither man heard any sound and neither
saw any occupants. In their original report to ATIC both men agreed that
“no disturbance was felt from the air waves, nor was there any prop wash or
mechanical disturbance when the object passed.” The third witness, the
passenger, did not report any turbulence or rocking of the plane. Some of
the later versions of the incident gloss over these facts, however, and thus

exaggerate the startling nature of the sighting. One account subtly implies
the presence of a pilot in the UFO and several state that, as the object
passed, the plane hit turbulent air[V-7, p. 61] or was “rocked” by the
UFO[V-20, p. 21].
Like most eyewitness descriptions of a startling event, the testimony of
the three men differed. Chiles stated that at the front of the UFO was a
lighted pilot compartment or cockpit with a “snout” similar to a radar pole,
and that a kind of nozzle projected from the rear from which the flames
fanned out to a width of twenty or thirty feet. Whitted did not see a cockpit,
a snout, or a rear nozzle; he thought the flames flared out from the entire
rear and were never any wider than the width of the UFO itself. The third
witness, the passenger, saw no shape or form, only an intensely brilliant
streak of light that appeared and vanished before he was able to focus his
eyes. As responsible officers, both pilots had obviously tried to separate the
observed phenomena from their interpretation. They differed widely on the
estimated distance of the UFO (the passenger did not offer an estimate).
Chiles thought it passed them with a margin of only about 700 feet, but
Whitted believed the distance to be more than ten times greater, about a
mile and a half. However, when we remember that these men had the UFO
in sight for only a small fraction of a minute and that their study of the side
view (“windows,” “cockpit,” etc.) must have been limited to the instant of
passing, these disagreements are not remarkable.
When Captain Chiles and Lieutenant Whitted reported their frightening
experience, the Air Force made a prompt investigation. Since Captain
Chiles explicitly stated his belief that the UFO was under intelligent
control, the case required careful consideration. A check of the air traffic
showed that no other planes had been in the area at the time, so the object
could not have been a normal aircraft. Furthermore, other equally reliable
witnesses reported seeing unusually bright meteors in the Southeast that
night. Since the bare physical description of the UFO, apart from the
inferences made, was identical with that of a fireball, Dr. Hynek concluded
that it was an unusually bright meteor.
But the climate at ATIC that summer was not friendly to a prosaic
explanation. Remembering the tragic death of Captain Mantell some six
months earlier while he was chasing a UFO, then unidentified (p. 33), some
officials were more than half ready to believe in invading space fleets as the

answer to every puzzling phenomenon in the sky. They rejected the fireball
explanation. Instead of accepting the Chiles-Whitted UFO as a meteor, they
identified the other two meteors seen that night as UFOs!
And yet the evidence is overwhelming that the UFO was a fireball.
The major meteor showers that occur on schedule every year have
accounted for hundreds of alleged UFOs over the last fifteen years. Several
of these showers begin in mid-July; thus July 24 falls in a period of greatly
increased meteor activity, when the earth is moving through the Aquarid
streams and is encountering the forerunners of the Perseids. All during the
year, and particularly during these weeks of shower meteors, amateur
astronomers throughout the country spend many evenings watching the sky,
counting meteors, mapping their paths, and reporting the data to various
observatories. On an average night outside the shower periods, if there are
few clouds and no moon, an experienced watcher may count about half a
dozen meteors in an hour’s time, but during a shower he usually sees many
more. For the week of July 23 to 30, 1948, the records of the American
Meteor Society, the Harvard College Observatory, and the Flower and Cook
Observatory show that, in spite of the interference of a bright moon, large
numbers of meteors were counted and the paths of many of them were
mapped and plotted.
The reports from the Southeast for that week have particular interest for
the Chiles-Whitted case. A regular observer in Alabama counted fifteen
meteors in one hour’s watching on the evening of July 24, and twenty-one
in two hours the following night[V-22]. On the evening of July 26 he
apparently took a holiday, but many other persons saw a huge fireball that
flashed over North Carolina and Tennessee at 9:36 p.m. E.S.T.; its radiant
(AMS 2322), plotted from many reports, showed it to be a member of the
Delta Aquarid stream, then approaching its maximum. Early on the morning
of July 27 another fireball soared over Tennessee and apparently
exploded[V-23]. On the night of July 28 the Alabama watcher recorded
fifteen meteors, from which he obtained the radiants AMS 3269, 3270, and
3271[V-9, p. 521].
These facts alone—the occurrence of scheduled showers and the
number of well-plotted meteors observed during the period—point strongly
to the probability that the Chiles-Whitted UFO was a meteor. The

probability becomes virtual certainty when we examine the available
records for the night of July 23 and morning of July 24, the period when
this particular UFO appeared. The watcher in Alabama was not on duty, but
another observer in Iowa counted fourteen meteors in one hour[V-22], more
than double the rate for an average night. About an hour before the UFO
appeared in Alabama, ground observers at Robins Air Force Base near
Macon, Georgia, reported an unusually bright meteor going from north to
south. A few minutes before the Alabama sighting, two Air Force officers
flying between Blackstone, Virginia, and Gainsborough, North Carolina,
reported an unusually bright meteor traveling in a southerly direction.
When Chiles and Whitted observed their UFO, its appearance and
manner of motion were identical with those of many other bright meteors
but the pilots, startled by the sudden apparition, misinterpreted what they
saw. They probably overestimated the length of time the meteor was in
view and they almost certainly underestimated the distance. Meteors
notoriously mislead even the experienced observer, who often sees them
disappearing “just behind the next hill,” when they may actually be fifty or
a hundred miles away. Although the night was moonlit and clear except for
broken clouds, the witnesses had no fixed reference point by which to
determine either distance or size.
There can be no doubt that Chiles and Whitted misinterpreted the
appearance of an unusually brilliant meteor, its body glowing to white (the
momentarily persisting luminous train of a meteor often has a veined or
fibrous structure that could easily have suggested the “lighted window” and
“cockpit”) and blue incandescence (the glowing “undercarriage”) as it
rushed through the atmosphere some fifty miles or more away, shooting off
flaming gases (the “exhaust”) and vaporizing from the friction of the
atmosphere. Flashing beyond their range of vision (“pulling up into the
clouds”), it probably burned and disintegrated before it reached the earth.
This fresh analysis, based on meteor records for July 1948, has led
ATIC finally to remove the Chiles-Whitted UFO from the category of
Unknowns and, as Dr. Hynek suggested originally, add it to the file of
recorded meteors.
A more recent sighting that closely resembled the Chiles-Whitted
incident occurred on the evening of January 8, 1959, and was promptly

reported to ATIC [V-19]. Two Air Force pilots were flying in a C-45 type of
aircraft from Phillipsburg to Brookville, Pennsylvania, at an altitude of
8000 feet. The night was clear and moonless. At 6:14 p.m. E.S.T. they
observed what appeared to be a brilliantly lighted solid object rushing
toward them. Bluish green in color, shaped roughly like a teardrop and
about 200 feet in diameter, it made no audible sound. Glowing like a small
sun, it seemed to be flying level with the aircraft, less than a mile away and
headed straight for the plane.
The frightened pilot jerked on the controls in an attempt to dodge the
object, but almost before the plane could respond the unknown had
disappeared. It had been in sight about three seconds. In his official report
he estimated that the object had been the size of a pool ball held at arm’s
length and that it had been not more than a mile away. The copilot,
however, did not agree. A man with special training and unusual experience
in the study of UFOs, he estimated the object to be the size of the head of a
pin held at arm’s length and the distance to be at least 300 miles. The
extreme brilliance of the object against the night sky, he thought, had made
it seem larger. In his opinion, supported by Air Force investigation, the
unknown had been a fireball at least fifty miles high that had burned out
and vanished as they watched.
As in the Chiles-Whitted case, ground observers also saw the object and
thus provided independent confirmation of the analysis. A member of the
Ohio State University reported to the Harvard College Observatory that on
the night of January 8, at approximately 6:15 p.m. E.S.T., he had watched a
brilliant bluish-white meteor streak across the sky over Columbus and
vanish within a few seconds. The fireball must indeed have been high and
spectacular to be visible at the same moment from points nearly 300 miles
apart.

Other Flaming UFOs

Not all spectacular UFOs are meteors, of course, any more than they are
all planets or balloons or rockets. Sudden brilliant illuminations of the night
sky can have any one of a dozen or more explanations. The atmosphere is
crowded with potential Unknowns, more than at any time in man’s history.

The air surrounding our planet plays host not only to meteors and fireballs,
birds and insects, but also to military and commercial planes, private
planes, jets, helicopters, weather balloons, experimental rockets, and an
ever-growing number of artificial satellites. An ear-shattering detonation
that rattles a house or breaks a window may come from an exploding
fireball or it may come from a jet penetrating the sound barrier. Without an
exact knowledge of all the circumstances, only the foolhardy would attempt
to say positively what caused any given unusual aerial phenomenon.
Let us consider a sighting that might have received various wrong
interpretations and would probably have become one of the most famous of
the UFOs cited by saucerdom, had investigators lacked full information.
Shortly after midnight one spring morning reliable witnesses on the east
coast, particularly in Connecticut and Long Island, reported a brilliant
bluish-white object flying at high altitude and incredible speed. As it
flashed overhead, it changed color to become reddish, and several smaller
objects apparently detached themselves from the main body and followed it
in orderly fashion. About five minutes later more than fifteen ships in the
Caribbean area observed similar objects soaring overhead but the reports
varied in many details. Ship number two saw brilliant short flames darting
about behind the main body, which had a long, tapered tail. Ship number
four saw a flaming white object more brilliant than the full moon. Ship
number seven reported a flaming green ball followed by a group of several
small objects. Ship number nine observed at least fifteen smaller objects
that suddenly separated from the main body and fell into formation behind
it. Ship number eleven saw an object with a trail several miles long, brilliant
as a peacock’s tail, so luminous that the deck and sea around were bathed in
pale light as the mass crossed overhead. Ship number twelve reported, “The
main body appeared to have a blue-white head, then a short dark space
before the glowing orange-yellow tail. Twenty-seven separate particles
were actually counted as they appeared in the main plume. Each followed
the main body and each developed its own glowing tail on leaving it.” The
main body was several times brighter than Venus, while the offshoots were
each twice the magnitude of Sirius. One observer described it as round on
top and bright blue-white, while the lower half, which was emitting sparks,
seemed to be flattened and reddish in color.

During this period of less than five minutes, similar objects were
observed from the ground by witnesses in the Virgin Islands. One man in
Martinique saw a luminous green globe, brighter than Venus, followed at a
slight distance by a flaming red, enormously long, cigar-shaped object.
Observers in Barbados saw two huge objects followed by from twelve to
eighteen “offspring” shaped like the main body; some of the offspring
subdivided to form two small cometlike objects. The object disappeared
into a cloud bank and vanished. No observations were reported from areas
farther south.
These unidentified objects were reported over an area stretching from
Connecticut to the coast of British Guiana, a distance of about 2700 miles.
They flew in a straight course. All of the objects were noiseless. They were
remarkably brilliant. They seemed to have one or more leaders, to discharge
smaller objects, and to fly in formation. They maintained a substantially
horizontal path, and only the last observers, who saw the things disappear
into the cloud bank, noted any tendency to descend. No fragments were
ever found, and all witnesses agreed that the objects were not like meteors.
If all the observers were describing the same single phenomenon, it was
flying at the incredible speed of more than 16,000 miles an hour.
What was it?
With only these facts to build on, an investigator might interpret the
sightings according to his own prejudices: an invasion fleet from another
planet making a reconnaissance in force, the mother ships discharging the
smaller craft at intervals; a mass hallucination; a peculiar meteoric display.
Without knowledge of one essential fact, some hundreds of landsmen
and seamen in the United States, the Caribbean islands, and the British West
Indies might now feel firmly convinced that they had witnessed a genuine
“Unknown.” The date was April 14, 1958. The privileged observers had
witnessed the death of Sputnik II, the Russian satellite launched on
November 3, 1957[V-24].
The UFO reports inspired by this event presented no problem to the Air
Force. All information on the re-entry of artificial satellites is immediately
accessible to ATIC. Whenever a reported UFO shows any possible
resemblance to a falling satellite, Air Force investigators check at once with
Spacetrack. Astronomers who had been tracking this satellite as it circled

the earth had predicted more than a month in advance that it would spiral
toward the earth and fall sometime between April 12 and April 15. A few
days before the actual event they had refined their estimate and predicted
the time of the fall within a few hours.

[V-1] Meteoritics, Vol. II, 1954.
[V-2] Keyhoe, D. E. The Flying Saucer Conspiracy. New
York: Henry Holt & Co., 1955.
[V-3] Biot, J. B. “Account of a Fire-ball which Fell in the
Neighborhood of Laigle.” Philosophical Magazine, Vol. XVI
(1803), pp. 224–28.
[V-4] Whipple, F.L., and Hawkins, G. S. “Meteors,”
Handbuch der Physik, Vol. LII (1959), pp. 519–64.
[V-5] Nininger, H. H. Out of the Sky. University of Denver
Press, 1952; New York: Dover Publications, 1959.
[V-6] Menzel, D. H. Personal files.
[V-7] Ruppelt, E. J. The Report on Unidentified Flying
Objects. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1956.
[V-8] Meteoritics, Vol. III, 1955.
[V-9] Meteoritics, Vol. I, 1953.
[V-10] Millman, P. M., and Halliday, I. “The Near-Infra-
Red Spectrum of Meteors,” Journal of Planetary and Space
Science, Vol. V (1961), pp. 137–40.
[V-11] Millman, P. M. “An Analysis of Meteor Spectra,”
Annals of Harvard College Observatory, Vol. LXXXII, Nos.
6 and 7 (1917–37), pp. 113–77.
[V-12] Robey, D. H. “An Hypothesis on the Slow Moving
Green Fireballs,” Journal of the British Interplanetary
Society, Vol. XVII (1959–60), pp. 398–411.

[V-13] Krinov, E. L. Principles of Meteoritics. New York:
Pergamon Press, 1960.
[V-14] O’Keefe, J. A. “Tektites and the Cyrillid Shower,”
Sky and Telescope, Vol. XXI (1961), p. 4.
[V-15] Fesenkov, V. G. “Cloudiness of the Atmosphere
Produced by the Fall of the Tunguska Meteorite of June 30,
1908,” Meteoritika, Vol. VI (1949), p. 8.
[V-16] Nininger, H. H. “Tracing the Norton, Kansas,
Meteorite Fall,” Sky and Telescope, Vol. VII (1948), p. 294.
[V-17] La Paz, L. “The Achondritic Shower of February
18, 1948,” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the
Pacific, Vol. LXI (1949), p. 63.
[V-18] Wilson, A. S. [Letter] Sky and Telescope, Vol. XXII
(1961), p. 3.
[V-19] Air Force Files.
[V-20] Tacker, L. J. Flying Saucers and the U. S. Air Force.
Princeton, N. J.: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960.
[V-21] Chant, C. A. “An Extraordinary Meteoric Display,”
Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Vol.
VII (1913), pp. 145–215.
[V-22] Olivier, C. P. “Tables of Hourly Rates Based Upon
American Meteor Society Data.” Interim Report No. 28,
Harvard University Radio Meteor Research Program (May
1958).
[V-23] Whipple, F. L. Personal files.
[V-24] Jacchia, L. G. “The Descent of Satellite 1957 Beta
One,” Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Special
Report No. 15, July 20, 1958.

Chapter vi
LIVING LIGHTS
A gamekeeper in Norfolk, England, in the year 1897 observed the flight
of an unusual luminous object. According to his story, he was “... out one
very dark night stopping up fox-earths. While I was so engaged I saw a very
bright blue light pass close to my face and was very much startled as I saw
it going away from me ... I put it down as some insect.” After the
mysterious light reappeared a few nights later, the gamekeeper prudently
began carrying his gun and eventually he managed a shot at the light. To his
amazement he brought down “a poor old half-starved barn owl, Tyto alba,
whose body continued to glow for some hours after death.”[VI-1]

The Luminous Owls of Norfolk

Some ten years later, on the night of February 3, 1907, another
Englishman and his son while taking a walk observed a similar luminous
phenomenon. Apparently about a quarter of a mile away, it moved
horizontally over a course several hundred yards in length, reversed
direction, then rose into the air to the height of forty feet or more. “It then
descended and again went through the same evolutions many times. The
light was slightly reddish in the centre, and resembled a carriage lamp for
which we at first mistook it. We watched it for twenty minutes and were
quite at a loss to ascertain its cause.
“On December 1st, 1907, when again reaching the top of Twyford Hill,
I noticed what I took to be the lamp of a motor bicycle moving rapidly
along the Bintree road to the south. The light suddenly stopped, rose into
the air above the trees and retraced its course. This it did several times,
sometimes rising twenty to forty feet into the air, and then rapidly
descending. I called my groom and his wife from their cottage a few

hundred yards away, and they watched it with me for several minutes. I then
went to my house about half a mile off, and from one of the attic windows
watched it with my son and three servants for a short time....”
The mysterious light appeared frequently for a period of weeks,
maneuvering silently, its luminosity sometimes so great that “it literally
lighted up the branches of the trees as it flew past them.” Attempts to
identify it through a telescope were unsuccessful but eventually one
observer was lucky enough to hear a sound as the light soared past, and at
once identified it by its unique call as a white owl, Strix flammea[VI-2].
If these sightings had occurred half a century later, the witnesses might
well have called them flying saucers.

Things That Glow in the Dark

The luminous owls of Norfolk have appeared at intervals since 1866 to
frighten the superstitious and puzzle the naturalist, but ornithologists
managed to solve the mystery some years ago[VI-3]. The birds acquire their
temporary luminosity from contact with a common fungus, Armillaria
mellea, popularly known as “honey-tuft.” This mushroom, which
mycophagists prize for its delicious flavor, grows in large clumps on dead
trees and stumps. The dark-brown cap is rough, with fibrous scales, while
the white gills are hooked or toothed at the end and the spores are white.
The dense white lacework of the root system or mycelium, which gives off
a phosphorescent light, may permeate the entire tree and extend even into
the fibers at the base of the tree. Wood infested with the fungus can glow in
the dark, sometimes so brightly that a man could read his watch by its light.
Many of the tales of fox fire, corpse candles, and lanternmen
undoubtedly come from glimpses of this fungoid phosphorescence. Owls
that seek refuge in the dark interiors of hollow trees during the daytime may
brush against the veins of the mycelium, which adheres to the feathered
body. Flitting about at night, the luminous bird becomes the dancing flame
of the will o’ the wisp.
Other luminous mushrooms abound in woods, swamps, and marshy
areas. Decaying, they may produce an unearthly light and can give off a

peculiarly unpleasant odor. Unexpectedly seeing and smelling a bird
touched with the substance, on a dark night, a witness might well feel
bewildered and even frightened. Polyporus sulfureus, which grows in dense
masses on dead trees, often phosphoresces brilliantly in the early stages of
its decay, as does Clytocobe illudens, the jack o’ lantern. In the tropics these
fungi may produce enough light to read by. Birds, insects, and animals that
brush against them can carry away some of the luminous material and thus,
for a time, appear to be luminous themselves.
Most of us recognize fireflies, lightning bugs, or glowworms—which
are not worms but beetles. The wingless females must creep on the surface
of ground or branch, but the winged males flit through the air. These
sparkling creatures form part of the diet of birds and bats, and when carried
aloft to be consumed in flight can make one more mysterious, swiftly
moving light to frighten the apprehensive. The earth teems with other self-
luminous organisms such as frogs’ eggs, which most of us have never seen
and would not recognize. Luminous parasites sometimes live in the feathers
of birds and make them glow. The plumage of the great blue heron, a North
American bird, can emit a pale light sometimes known as the birds’s
“lantern” because it is supposed to help him while fishing. Fish or meat
when decaying can become infected with luminous bacteria and thus shine
brilliantly in the dark. The sea is filled with phosphorescent fish and plants
which help perpetuate tales of sea serpents. Some waters in the Caribbean
contain so dense a population of phosphorescent algae that a bird, dipping
its wings to snatch a meal, will glow for minutes after it soars again into the
air. These luminous birds, innocently fishing for dinner, probably account
for many reports that flying saucers come and go from underwater[VI-4].
Many of the erratically behaving UFOs observed at night over wooded
areas, swamps, and marshes have undoubtedly been one of these will o’ the
wisps—winged creatures glowing with borrowed fire. Unfortunately proof
of this explanation is rarely possible. Before the startled observer can
recover his wits the flitting “saucer” has gone, taking with it the evidence of
its identity.
Fear of the unknown is not confined to Homo sapiens. A news item
published in England a few years ago reveals that the animal kingdom, too,
may have its ghosts. Under the headline, Owl Attacks Luminous Man, the
article reads:

“A Bournemouth long-distance runner, Ken Baily, was attacked by an
owl last night when he was running through the centre of Bournemouth in a
luminous track suit. The bird ripped the front of his suit before it flew back
into the trees.
“Baily said afterwards: ‘I heard it hooting before it attacked. The suit is
luminous so that motorists can see me, but if it attracts owls like this I’d
rather take a chance with the traffic.’”[VI-5]

Sea Gulls as UFOs

Early in the afternoon of December 10, 1941, three days after the attack
on Pearl Harbor, a research technician standing at the fourth-floor window
of a laboratory in Boston saw a number of bright objects maneuvering high
in the sky and slowly descending over the city. Making a quick guess at
their distance, size, and speed, he concluded that the objects were
parachutes, the first of a Japanese invasion. Only after they had dropped to
the level of a nearby church spire was he able to gain the right perspective,
correct his estimates, and identify the objects as sea gulls drifting down
with the winds.
A decade later, the public was no longer worried about danger from
Japan but was concerned about possible invasion from outer space. Sea
gulls flashing in the sun were interpreted not as parachutes but as flying
saucers.
Many luminous UFOs have in fact been ordinary living creatures,
normal inhabitants of the earth—owls that had acquired a temporary
luminosity, sea gulls reflecting the sunlight, flights of birds reflecting the
lights of a town. But in trying to identify them, the witness is influenced by
the pattern of his time. In 1897 and 1907 the world seemed reasonably
secure. Observers of mysterious lights made fairly accurate estimates of
their distance and size and compared them to familiar, everyday things—an
insect and a carriage lamp. In 1941, three days after Pearl Harbor, the world
was at war and the observer’s imagination, stimulated by a hundred rumors
of imminent Japanese invasion, transformed cruising sea gulls into
parachutes. By 1950, when space travel had become at least a theoretical

possibility and scientists were discussing ways to reach the moon, uneasy
persons fantastically overestimated the height and size of mysterious lights
in the sky and sometimes saw birds as spaceships from another planet.
A well-publicized incident took place on the morning of July 16, 1952,
when a Coast Guard photographer at Salem, Massachusetts, happened to
glance out of a window and see four bright, egg-shaped objects moving in
the sky. Grabbing his camera, he managed to take a picture before the
objects were lost from view. According to some saucer enthusiasts, certain
reproductions of the photograph show typical UFOs shaped like two
saucers arranged face to face, as though joined by a ring at the mid-
line[VI-6]. The official Coast Guard photograph however, shows merely
four bright, fuzzy-edged blurs arranged in a rough V formation. Only
imagination could convert these spots of light into spaceships. Many
readers of this book have probably seen similar objects gleaming briefly in
the sun, mysterious for the moment, and then identified them as gulls or
airplanes when a shift in orientation cut down the reflection.
On the morning of the Coast Guard photograph the day was
exceptionally clear, the sun extremely bright, and the sky a deep blue
unusual on the Massachusetts coast. Under these circumstances, objects
reflecting the sun look larger and brighter than normal. Because the picture
was taken with a dirty lens through a window, the images were further
distorted. Since the UFOs did not produce highlights on the tops of the cars
in the foreground, as luminous objects overhead would have done, they
were probably not in the sky at all. Elaborate Air Force experiments with
photo-flood lamps showed that the images were reflections in the window
glass from an interior light source behind the camera (see Plate IVa).
Weird and frightening apparitions do occur; Air Force files bulge with
reports suggesting that unfamiliar objects are moving around us day and
night, by land, sea, and air. Imagination endows them with life or turns
them into mysterious, saucer-shaped craft manned by creatures from Mars,
Venus, or even from some planet of a star beyond our solar system. The
UFO photographed over France on October 2, 1954 (a weekend when every
French village was reporting saucers by the dozen), shows no details and
might be almost anything: a bird, a balloon, a cloud of gossamer, the sun, a
plane, or merely the result of a lens defect (see Plate IVb).

How many of the UFOs listed in the saucer publications originate from
birds, insects, and animals we cannot know, but the number must be large.
Most of us have only a sketchy acquaintance with the non-human forms of
life that share the earth with us. Seeing an unfamiliar creature suddenly, or a
familiar creature under unusual circumstances, we often imagine it to be
whatever we most fear—vengeful spirits of the departed, fire-breathing
dragons, devils, parachutes, or flying saucers.

The Lubbock Lights

The luminous objects sighted in Texas during the last week of August,
1951, would probably have been explained and forgotten in a week’s time,
except for the publication of alleged photographs of the unknowns. This
complication converted a simple incident into a conglomerate of puzzles
which, though actually unrelated, were lumped together to form a classic
Unknown. The most detailed published account of this case[VI-7, p. 133
ff.] contains a number of statements that differ in detail from those in the
official files. When discrepancies exist, the facts as given in this chapter are
those in the original Air Force reports[VI-8].
The Saturday night of August 25, 1951, was uncomfortably hot in the
Southwest, and many persons spent the evening in the relative coolness out
of doors. In the town of Lubbock, a professor of geology was sitting in his
yard with two guests, fellow members of the faculty, discussing
micrometeorites and counting meteors, which for several nights had been
more numerous than usual. The sky was clear and cloudless and seeing
conditions were ideal. About 9:20 the men noticed a group of fifteen to
twenty lights passing silently overhead, going from north to south. They
were obviously not meteors or planes, but disappeared too quickly to be
identified. About an hour later a second group of lights appeared, forming a
rough semicircle or crescent like a string of beads. Shortly before midnight
a third group soared overhead in a random pattern (see Figure 11).

Figure 11. Schematic sketch of lights observed by the professors at
Lubbock, Texas. Left, pattern in the first and third sightings; right, pattern
in the second sighting.

Trying to account for the phenomenon, the men agreed that all three
flights had appeared suddenly, not gradually, in about the same part of the
sky. Only the second had shown any sort of pattern, all had moved silently
from north to south, their luminosity was not constant but had varied in
intensity, and all had disappeared suddenly, not gradually, at about the same
point in the sky. The men did not agree on the color, which they described
as yellowish to white, with a soft glow. The lights had passed too swiftly for
the men to locate them in relation to specific stars and there were no clouds
in the sky; thus they had no known reference points by which to judge
altitude, distance, or size. Since the lights had apparently moved over about
30 degrees of sky in one second, however, and the observers estimated the
altitude as 5000 to 50,000 feet, the unknowns must have had an enormous
size and an incredible speed of from 1800 to 18,000 miles an hour—typical
flying saucers.
Understandably curious, the host telephoned the managing editor of the
local newspaper, the Lubbock Evening Avalanche, hoping that a printed
account would elicit more information from other persons who had noticed
the mysterious lights. The report appeared in the Sunday paper, August 26,
but in the days that followed, no reader responded.

Then on Friday August 31, five days after the original story had
appeared and apparently died, it suddenly came to life. A college freshman
who occasionally sold news photographs to the Lubbock paper brought in
five pictures of a group of mysterious lights he had photographed the night
before. He had been lying in bed next to an open window, he explained, and
shortly before midnight he had observed a formation of brilliant lights
moving rapidly across the sky. Grabbing his camera, a Kodak 35-mm., he
had rushed out into the yard and, after a brief wait, had been able to
photograph two similar flights that raced overhead a few minutes apart.
Each light had been brighter than Venus, they had maintained a perfect V
formation, and had sped from horizon to horizon in a mere four or five
seconds. Yet this amazing apparition had apparently gone unnoticed by all
except the lucky amateur.
Fearing a hoax, both the editor and the staff photographer hesitated but,
since the negatives displayed no obvious evidence of fraud, they finally
bought and printed the pictures and distributed them over the country
through the United Press.
People all over the nation could now argue the question: What were the
Lubbock lights? A few said flying saucers. Many Texans said ducks, plover,
or other migratory fowl. But the things in the pictures didn’t look like birds;
and if they weren’t birds, what were they? Some persons bluntly called
them a hoax.
Impelled perhaps by the growing publicity, the staff photographer of the
Evening Avalanche several times tried to duplicate the pictures by
photographing flights of birds at night. He allowed himself better
equipment—a Speedgraphic camera loaded with a tungsten ASA 80 film,
and a GE no. 22 flashbulb in a concentrating reflector. Opening the camera
to f 4.7 at 1/10 second, he went up to the roof of the newspaper building to
try his luck. After a brief wait he was able to photograph a flock of birds
that appeared high overhead, reflecting the mercury-vapor lights of the
street, flying noiselessly in a “ragged” V formation, but the image on the
negative proved too faint for use. The next night he tried again, using a
Kodak Reflex set at f 3.5, Super XX film, at 1/10 second, plus the flashbulb
and concentrating reflector. The birds appeared on schedule, but again the
images proved too faint for use. The experimenter concluded, probably

correctly, that the amateur must have photographed something much
brighter than birds.
Not until late October, nearly two months after the original incident, did
the Air Force receive official notice of the mystery at Lubbock, and Captain
Ruppelt of ATIC arrived to interview witnesses in Lubbock and the
neighboring towns of Lamessa, Brownfield, and Big Spring. He quickly
discovered that he had two mysteries to solve instead of one since,
according to the witnesses who had started all the excitement, the objects
shown in the pictures were wholly unlike the luminous phenomena
observed by the three professors. The pictured lights formed a perfectly
geometrical, flat V, while the original objects had formed a random pattern.
Furthermore the pictures showed brilliant, sharply outlined lights as intense
as unshaded electric bulbs, while the original objects had been softly
glowing.
Meanwhile the professors themselves had been trying to solve their own
mystery. During September and October they had observed at least a dozen
similar flights, and in an attempt to obtain the true altitude of the objects
they had organized a field survey, operating in the country to achieve better
seeing conditions. Two groups of observers were stationed at two different
points, a measured distance apart, with radio communication between the
two. By making simultaneous observations, they hoped to calculate the true
height of the objects and thus obtain accurate estimates of size and speed.
This well-planned experiment failed because the lights never appeared to
the watchers in the country even on nights when they were clearly visible in
the town. Nevertheless the scientists did establish one fact: the altitude
could not be as high as 50,000 feet, their original estimate. An astronomer
in the group, calculating from the few data available, showed that the height
must have been only 2000 to 3000 feet, less than a tenth of the first
estimate.
Continuing his investigation, Captain Ruppelt found that other persons
had seen the lights on the night of August 25—and identified them.
At Brownfield, Texas, some thirty miles from Lubbock, a rancher and
his wife had been sitting in their back yard when they noticed a group of
fifteen to twenty lights flying overhead from north to south, silently, in no
particular formation. They appeared to be very high and had “a kind of

glow, a little bigger than a star.” Some time later a second group flew over.
When a third group appeared, flying lower, he could see that they were
birds; as they moved on to the south and one of the birds emitted a cry, he
recognized the familiar call of the plover. Plover have a wing span of a foot
and their oily white breasts form an excellent surface for reflecting the
lights beneath them.
Like most old-time residents of the area, the rancher was accustomed to
the yearly exodus of migratory fowl. Traveling at night in groups of six to
twenty, they usually flew at 1000 feet or lower at a maximum speed of
about fifty miles an hour in the weeks from late August to mid-November.
The rancher had read about the professors’ sighting, which sounded exactly
like his own. It would have baffled him, too, he said, if he had not gotten a
good look when the third flight circled the house and if he had not
happened to hear the single call.
Another resident reported, much later, that he had often seen such lights
and recognized them as birds. One night he had noticed “a formation of
ducks pass over so low that you could actually see the whole bodies with
their shiny white undersides glowing.” At other times he had seen ducks
flying at low altitudes with only the undersides glowing and creating an
illusion of objects moving very fast at a high altitude[VI-9].
In spite of the overwhelming evidence that the original objects had been
birds, probably plover, reflecting the city’s lights, Captain Ruppelt chose to
regard them as mysterious and listed the professors’ sighting as an
Unknown. Several years later he wrote that a natural explanation did exist
but, for some reason, he had promised not to divulge it[VI-7, p. 150]. Still
later, he asserted without amplification that the lights had been night-flying
moths reflecting the bluish green of mercury-vapor street lights[VI-10, p.
276]—a surprising anticlimax, in view of his earlier secrecy. In a reanalysis
of the facts made in 1959, Major (now Lieutenant Colonel) R. J. Friend of
ATIC and Dr. J. Allen Hynek, science consultant, determined beyond doubt
that the objects had been plover.

The Lubbock Pictures

The problem of the photographs remained. In Dayton, Air Force experts
studied the four available negatives.
The photographer had used a Kodak 35-mm. camera, lens at 3.5, Plus-X
film, and an exposure time of 1/10 second. The negatives were badly
scratched and dirty from much handling. According to the photographer’s
story, each flight of unknowns had moved from horizon to horizon in four
to five seconds and had passed directly overhead; he had “panned” his
camera with the movement of the objects and had managed to snap two
pictures during one flight and three during the next.
Analysis yielded no suggestion that the negatives had been tampered
with but they offered no clue to the background, identity, height, distance,
or speed of the things shown. The images themselves, however, aroused
some doubts. Each frame showed twenty bright spots against a uniform
dark background. No trace of stars or starlight could be found, although the
sky that night had been clear and cloudless. The spots showed evidence of
slight motion during the exposure but the amount of blurring was amazingly
slight, considering the speed with which the photographer claimed to have
moved his Kodak. Professional cameramen tried repeatedly to duplicate the
performance, but failed. The most successful try produced only two
pictures, badly blurred, in four seconds.
The most crucial discrepancy between negatives and story, however,
was revealed by the pattern of the spots, which formed a flat V. The
orientation of the V was the same on all the negatives. If the formation had
actually passed directly overhead and the photographer had panned with it,
as he claimed, then he must have taken all his pictures either as the lights
approached him or as they receded. If he had taken two successive pictures,
one as the formation approached and the next as it receded, the V would
have reversed position in the second picture—V would have changed to ∧
—unless he had managed to stand on his head while taking the second
picture. And if he had actually taken all his pictures either as the lights
approached or as they receded, he had performed the incredible feat of
obtaining two clear, sharp photographs, while panning, in a mere two
seconds.
Although these facts suggested that the explanation given for the
pictures was at least highly improbable, Air Force experts refrained from

labeling them frauds. Professional photographers can undoubtedly make
various guesses as to how the pictures were made and the possible identity
of the V of bright spots, but proof is impossible. In the Air Force files they
remain in the category of Unknowns.

Other Winged UFOs

During the era of the saucers, winged creatures were responsible for
many UFO stories. But winged creatures do not stay put, and in flying away
they usually take with them the evidence that the alleged spaceships were
actually only birds or insects.
One such incident occurred at Downey, California, on May 29, 1951.
Late in the afternoon three technical writers for North American Aviation
were standing outdoors chatting and looking at the sky when suddenly they
noticed about thirty glowing, meteorlike objects moving in the east, about
45 degrees above the horizon. They made no sound and left no trail.
Emitting an intense electric-blue light, the objects made fantastic right-
angled turns and swept across the sky in an undulating vertical formation,
apparently covering about 90 degrees of sky in about 25 seconds. The
diameters of the objects were estimated at 30 feet and the speed at 1700
miles an hour[VI-11].
Many persons concluded that the unknowns must be interplanetary in
origin because, as Life magazine commented, no natural object hurtling at
such a speed could execute a right-angled turn, and no known machine
could fly so fast without making a sound or leaving a trail. No one could
quarrel with this statement, but it has no obvious relation to the incident in
question. Technical writers are not necessarily trained observers, and these
witnesses had no way to make a reliable estimate of the height of the
objects. Without an accurate estimate of at least one quantity—true altitude,
true size, or true speed—the others are meaningless. The unknowns were
probably birds, but they could equally well have been butterflies, bits of
paper, or merely ashes blowing over the two-story building.
Winged creatures sometimes avoid the interplanetary label only by
staying in sight long enough to be examined. About sundown on May 19,

1955, switchboards at police stations in the Los Angeles area were
swamped by telephone calls reporting a fleet of silvery flying saucers,
changing formation with incredible speeds “as if playing tag in the sky.”
One witness, however, had the presence of mind to get out his binoculars
and look at the objects; they were birds with dark wing tips. Thinking they
might be geese, he called the State Division of Fish and Game, which
identified the “saucers” as a flock of Pelicanus erythrorhynchos, an inland
species of pelican that float on the prevailing wind currents[VI-12].
Sometimes an observer identifies such objects correctly, but later begins
to doubt his own judgment. About 7:30 in the evening of August 26, 1956, a
man driving along a highway in California noticed a flock of about nine
small birds flying northward, dark against the blue sky. In a random group,
they moved freely among themselves as birds do but continued in a
northern direction. The witness watched the birds as carefully as possible,
but the intermittent glimpses possible when a man is driving a car did not
allow him to make good estimates of their size or height. Nevertheless, he
guessed at their distance and calculated that they covered an arc of 60
degrees in five seconds, which would mean a speed of about 1000 miles an
hour.
Instead of questioning the accuracy of his estimate, for some reason he
doubted his first identification. If the objects could fly 1000 miles an hour,
he reasoned, then they were not birds after all, and must be flying saucers!
[VI-13]

The Tremonton Movies

One of the most famous controversies resulting from a flight of birds
centered on the Tremonton, Utah, films of UFOs.
On the morning of July 2, 1952, a Navy photographer and his family
were on their way to California, driving near the town of Tremonton, Utah,
not far from the Great Salt Lake. At about 11:10 a.m. the man’s wife noticed
something unusual in the sky. Stopping the car, the man observed about a
dozen shiny, disklike objects “milling around the sky in a rough formation.”
Getting out his movie camera, a Bell and Howell 16-mm. equipped with a

3-inch telephoto lens, he started photographing the group. Just before it
disappeared toward the west, one object left the main group and headed
east. The photographer obtained about forty feet of film before the objects
vanished. After developing the film, he sent it to the Air Force for
evaluation, together with his opinion that the objects had been huge and had
traveled at very high altitude at supersonic speeds. This was only an
impression, however, for as he told investigators from ATIC: “There was no
reference point in the sky and it was impossible for me to make any
estimate of speed, size, altitude, or distance.”[VI-8] The pictures are of such
poor quality and show so little that even the most enthusiastic home-movie
fan today would hesitate to show them to his friends. Only a stimulated
imagination could suggest that the moving objects are anything but very
badly photographed birds.
The movies show nothing that can be recognized—merely bright blurs
of light moving at random. Their luminosity is not constant, and the spots
fade out and then become bright again. The frames include no clouds, no
trees, no house, no hill—no known reference point by which to calculate
the altitude, size, or distance of the moving lights. After exhaustive study
the photographic experts concluded that the negatives had not been
tampered with and that, unlike the Lubbock stills, the pictures had been
made exactly as described. But pictures of what? The objects were not
balloons and not planes. At the time, the experts also rejected the theory that
they might be birds because, in their [mistaken] opinion, birds could not
produce such bright reflections.
If the Tremonton movies contained no proof that the objects were birds,
still less did they contain proof that they were round machines from outer
space, and ATIC finally classified the sighting as “Unknown.” Later,
however, Captain Ruppelt noted the strong resemblance to sea gulls he
observed “riding a thermal” in the sky above San Francisco. They were “so
high that you couldn’t see them until they banked just a certain way; then
they appeared to be a bright white flash, much larger than one would expect
from sea gulls.” [VI-10, p. 290]
Air Force investigators later concluded that the famous Tremonton
movies show merely the large white gulls that soar near Utah’s Great Salt
Lake. The objects were photographed shortly before noon on a hot
summer’s day, against a deep-blue sky without any clouds to obscure the

high sun. The fading and brightening of the lights, their individual motion
within the group, and the one object that suddenly left the group, all are
consistent with the behavior of a flock of birds, probably gulls, whose
plumage is reflecting the sun. The glossy feathers of these birds can flash as
brilliantly as a satiny metal surface as they circle and change position with
respect to the sun. The birds can be dazzling against the clear, dark-blue sky
of the western states. So brilliant is the flash that it wholly obscures the
object that is reflecting the light.
Like many other puzzling UFO reports, the objects in the Tremonton
movies were living lights—a case for the ornithologist rather than the Air
Force.
A bright light moving erratically as it crossed and recrossed the field of
view caused an experienced pilot and copilot to execute violent and evasive
maneuvers in a flight over the dark Pacific.[VI-14] The errant UFO proved
to be only a firefly inadvertently trapped between the panes of the double
windshield.

[VI-1] Rolfe, F. Eastern Daily Press, January 16, 1908.
[VI-2] Purdy, R. J. “The occasional luminosity of the
White Owl (Strix flammea),” Transactions of the Norfolk and
Norwich Naturalists Society, Vol. VIII (1904–1909), p. 547.
[VI-3] Gurney, J. H. The Zoologist, No. 802 (April 1908),
p. 121.
[VI-4] Boston Traveller, Oct. 30, 1961.
[VI-5] London Daily Telegraph, November 8, 1958.
[VI-6] Maney, C. A., and Hall, R. The Challenge of
Unidentified Flying Objects. Washington, D.C., 1961.
[VI-7] Ruppelt, E. J. The Report on Unidentified Flying
Objects. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1956.
[VI-8] Air Force Files.

[VI-9] Menzel, D. H. Personal files.
[VI-10] Ruppelt, E. J. The Report on Unidentified Flying
Objects. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., reprint, 1960.
[VI-11] Life magazine, April 7, 1952.
[VI-12] Los Angeles Times, May 21, 1955.
[VI-13] Case 201, CRIFO Orbit, Vol. III (Oct. 5, 1956).
[VI-14] Major William T. Coleman. Personal
communication.

Chapter vii
PANIC
The summer of 1952, the period that Captain Ruppelt called “the big
flap,” offers a history of the UFO mania in capsule form. If the newspapers
were to be believed, the heavens were crowded with armadas of spaceships
both visible and invisible. There was even a monster story to add spice to
the tales.
Yet the panic was largely an artificial creation. All spring the nation’s
movie-goers had been flocking to see a well-made thriller, The Day the
Earth Stood Still, in which a mysterious glowing object appears in the sky
over Washington, D.C., and lands in the middle of the city. The object
proves to be a flying saucer from another planet, whose inhabitants want
only to help the human race. Looking something like a huge poached egg, a
hump in the center sloping down to a circular rim, the pictured vehicle
offered a dramatic example to anyone in the mood to see a spaceship but
not quite sure how it should look. In fact, many of the saucers described in
the months and years following were obviously based on this model.
The summer’s hysteria was also nurtured by the fears of some Air Force
investigators who were convinced that UFOs were intelligently controlled
craft originating outside the earth[VII-1, p. 286]. Although these officials
realized that whenever an unusually good saucer story appeared in the
papers the number of sightings increased sharply in the days following, they
apparently did not consider the possibility that the increase resulted from
the power of suggestion. This apprehensive attitude, plus three publications
in the spring of 1952, made the summer’s panic almost inevitable.

Growth of a Panic

On April 4 Life magazine published an article whose title might well
have alarmed the most stolid: “Have We Visitors from Outer Space?”
Presenting ten “insoluble” cases, the article managed to suggest without
exactly saying so that interplanetary visitors were among us. The very next
day, April 5, the Air Force announced a new directive, ordering the
commanding officers of all Air Force installations to make immediate, high-
priority reports of all UFO sightings in their areas[VII-1, p. 178].
Reasonably inferring from the Life article and from the new directive that
Defense officials were concerned by the threat of UFOs, newspapers gave
space to all tales of flying saucers. Look magazine then jumped on the
bandwagon and on June 24 published an article, “Hunt for the Flying
Saucers!” The public responded enthusiastically. Hypnotized by the prestige
of these magazines, whose saucer articles seemed to have the support of the
Air Force, thousands of well-intentioned but poorly equipped observers
joined in the hunt, watched the skies, and began to cry “Tally-ho!” at every
streak of light.
Nature cooperated. As in every summer, she offered a rich display of
regular meteor showers. By mid-July Aquarids in large numbers are
streaking through the sky, to continue into mid-August, and by the
beginning of August the Perseids have arrived to join the summer’s parade.
The records of the American Meteor Society reflect this rise in the number
of meteors. In the nights from July 10 to 31, 1952, five observers stationed
in California, Oregon, Missouri, Iowa, and Long Island, New York, counted
a total of more than 2000 meteors in some eighty-five hours of watching.
The smallest number reported by a single observer in any one hour was
nine; the highest was fifty[VII-2].
Nature not only offered dramatic fireworks in the sky; she also
produced exactly the right conditions for viewing them. During June and
July an unprecedented heat wave lay over the entire East, driving sweltering
citizens out of doors to savor the relative coolness of the night air.
Furthermore, the nights were dark. The moon began to wane on July 7, and
until nearly the end of the month there was little moonlight to dim the
brilliance of the meteors flashing through the heavens. No wonder that
frightened people hunting for saucers should have had so little trouble
finding them, when the sky seemed to be teeming with UFOs.

By the middle of July the nine-man investigating force at ATIC was all
but buried in saucer reports—more than forty a day, far too many to handle
either promptly or adequately. Only a very lengthy history of the saucer era
could describe and account for each one of the hundreds of UFOs reported
during those weeks. A few of the most publicized incidents are listed here:

July 2. A group of UFOs photographed with a movie camera
near Tremonton, Utah (p. 130).
July 5. A UFO reported over an atomic plant at Hanford,
Washington. (A Skyhook balloon.)[VII-1, p. 203]
July 7. Flying saucer reported by hundreds of persons in the
Pacific Northwest. (This spectacular daytime meteor was visible for
a distance of 500 miles on either side of its path and was reported
from Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, California, Nevada,
Utah, and Wyoming. It made no sound and was so brilliant that
observers called it the “Sunshine Fireball.”)[VII-3]
July 12. A flying saucer, glowing blue-white, was reported over
Indiana. (Another fine meteor.)[VII-1, p. 203]
July 13–18. Flying saucers reported from all states in the Union.
(Observers for the American Meteor Society counted an average of
fifteen meteors per hour on those nights.)
July 14. A group of saucers over Chesapeake Bay and Norfolk,
Virginia (p. 256).
July 16. Saucers photographed by Coast Guardsman, Salem,
Massachusetts (p. 122).

The sighting hysteria was approaching the critical mass, and no special
wisdom was required to see that an explosion was inevitable. The only
question was: Where would it occur? The panic finally reached its climax in
the nation’s capital:

July 19. Flying saucers (invisible) invade Washington, D.C. (See
Chapter viii.)

July 26. Saucers again invade Washington (p. 155).
July 27. Saucers over Manhattan Beach, California (p. 49).
July 29. Saucers over Port Huron, Michigan (p. 160).
August 1. Saucer over Bellefontaine, Ohio (p. 162).

Most of these and hundreds of other UFOs were eventually identified as
meteors, stars, balloons, jet planes, birds, searchlights, and radar angels.
About the only aerial phenomenon that was not mistaken for a flying saucer
during these weeks of panic was the planet Venus. Until the end of August it
was too near the sun to be visible.

The Scoutmaster’s UFO

True to the pattern set during 1947, the first summer of the saucers, the
panic of 1952 did not end without an elaborate hoax and a good monster
story.
The famous “Scoutmaster” incident occurred at West Palm Beach,
Florida, on the night of August 19[VII-1, p. 229]. According to the report
given the Intelligence officer at the local air base, the scoutmaster (an ex-
Marine) had offered to drive four of the boys to their homes at the close of
the evening’s meeting. While traveling over a country road bordered by
scrub pine and palmetto thickets, he had noticed some mysterious lights
among the pines and decided he must investigate. Leaving the frightened
boys in the car with instructions to go for help if he had not returned in
fifteen minutes, he took his machete and two flashlights and bravely set off
into the dangerous woods. He was found some time later by the boys, the
constable, and the deputy sheriff, and was apparently terrified. When he
entered the woods, he said, he noticed a peculiar odor and felt an oppressive
sensation of heat. On looking up, he saw hovering above him a dark circular
object with a turretlike dome in the middle, so large that it blotted out most
of the sky. When he went closer, a door opened, a ball of fire emerged and
drifted toward him, enveloped him, and rendered him unconscious. He
called on the boys to confirm the presence of the strange lights and the huge

machine, and as further proof he exhibited burns in his cap and on his face
and arms.
Since scoutmasters are traditionally upright citizens, the story seemed to
merit attention. Investigators from ATIC visited the scene, interviewed all
persons concerned, and sent the cap and the machete to Dayton for analysis.
Very soon, however, the drama began to fall apart. The scoutmaster, after
being interviewed by Air Force investigators, assumed an aura of mystery
and stated publicly that he had been warned not to talk. At the same time he
hired a press agent and offered to sell his story to the newspapers. A study
of the landscape showed that the boys could not have seen any “machine”
from the road. The townspeople did not consider the woods dangerous.
Aircraft preparing to land at the airport regularly flew over the area in
question with their landing lights on; to a person on the road, the lights
might seem to be flitting through the woods. Furthermore the study showed
that the scene had been set in advance for a frightening incident. As they
drove along the lonely road, the scoutmaster had been talking about flying
saucers and, after he stopped the car, had warned the boys that they might
need to go for help. The man’s reputation for veracity, too, began to melt
away, and one townsman remarked that if the scoutmaster claimed that the
sun was shining, he’d look up to see for himself before accepting the
statement. The knife and cap showed no radioactivity. The laboratory report
from the Federal Bureau of Investigation showed that the burn on the cap
was made by a cigarette, and the “burns” on the hand and arm proved to be
only superficial scorching of the hair and could easily have been produced
by the flame of a kitchen match.
This investigation cost the usual amount of time and money, but it was
unquestionably a hoax[VII-4].

Monster in West Virginia

The final incident in the summer’s panic occurred on the evening of
September 12 when a family group near the town of Sutton, West Virginia,
saw a flaming object flash across the sky and apparently land on a nearby
hill. Taking their flashlights, they set out to investigate and, on reaching the
hill, smelled an unpleasant odor. When they turned on their flashlights, they

stated, they saw two red eyes glaring at them; a huge monster, ten feet tall,
breathing fire, with a bright-green body and a blood-red face, waddled
toward them, and they turned and ran[VII-5].
Air Force investigators concluded immediately that the flaming object
first seen was the meteor observed that night by thousands of persons in
Virginia and West Virginia and reported officially to various observatories.
What the frightened family saw when they reached the hilltop and flashed
the light was probably the glowing eyes or body of some mundane creature
of the woods. A local group of civilian saucer investigators rejected this
explanation, as usual, and after making its own study concluded that the
monster story could very well have been true!
The monster is now enshrined in West Virginia history[VII-5], and
forms the subject of a new ballad written by Cindy Coy and set to the tune
of “Sweet Betsy from Pike.” One verse and the chorus will suffice:

The size of the phantom was a sight to behold,
Green eyes and red face, so the story was told.
It floated in air with fingers of flame.
It was gone with a hiss just as quick as it came.

Chorus:
Oh, Phantom of Flatwoods, from Moon or from Mars,
Maybe from God and not from the stars,
Please tell us why you fly o’er our trees
The end of the world or an omen of peace?

The Panel of Civilian Scientists

When after three months of constant threat no flying saucers had yet
tried to invade the country, the acute phase of the panic subsided.
Nevertheless, responsible officials in the Department of Defense were
uneasy, and Air Defense was particularly worried by the problem of the
radar phantoms, whose cause was not fully understood (see Chapter viii).

Even if UFOs proved to be normal phenomena, other very real dangers
existed in the situation. If the public believed in the possibility of
extraterrestrial antagonists, a clever enemy on earth simply by fabricating a
few incidents could easily induce a mass hysteria that might paralyze the
country. Also, if the number of saucer reports should be greatly multiplied
by some artificial stimulus, their sheer numbers would clog communication
channels, interfere with the Early Warning System, and at a time of
imminent attack from another part of the globe might cause a disastrous
three- or four-hour delay in the activation of the Air Force network.
Government officials, uncertain of the facts, were reluctant to decide or
to state whether there was or was not convincing evidence of extraterrestrial
surveillance.
To clear up the potentially explosive atmosphere, the Office of
Scientific Intelligence (OSI), under the Central Intelligence Agency,
decided to consult outstanding civilian experts and invited certain eminent
scientists to study and evaluate the evidence. For this purpose Air Force
investigators assembled the complete data on the cases they considered
most significant. They also prepared, on their own initiative, an unofficial
report setting forth the evidence which, in the opinion of several
investigators, proved conclusively that UFOs were interplanetary objects
operating under intelligent control.
After a preliminary meeting late in November 1952, the panel met on
January 12, 1953, to begin their study. The chairman was the late Dr. H. P.
Robertson, mathematician and physicist, of the California Institute of
Technology at Pasadena. The other members were Dr. Luis W. Alvarez,
physicist, of the University of California at Berkeley; Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner,
an expert on radio propagation; Dr. Samuel A. Goudsmit, physicist, of
Brookhaven National Laboratory; and Dr. Thornton W. Page, astronomer, of
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Also present were several officers of
the OSI. To avoid possible bias, Air Force officers who had actively worked
on UFO cases and civilians who were closely identified with such studies
were not asked to attend. The cases studied included all the “classics,” such
as the Tremonton and other movies, the Mantell and Gorman affairs, the
radar sightings at Washington, D.C., as well as other less well-known
reports.

One incident that particularly engaged the attention of the panel, and
would probably have become a famous classic except that Air Force
investigators had kept it a strict secret, was the sighting at Presque Isle Air
Force Base in northern Maine. On October 10, 1952, at about 10 p.m.
E.S.T., a group of weather observers had noticed a bright-orange object
hovering low on the eastern horizon and had set up a theodolite to measure
its altitude and bearing. As the glowing unknown slowly rose higher above
the horizon and seemed to come closer, it appeared through the telescope of
the theodolite as a circular disk accompanied by four flickering green lights,
two on each side. Alarmed by this spectacular phenomenon, the observers
called the Air Force Base at Limestone, some twenty miles north and east,
to ask whether the object was visible there. It was. Setting up a theodolite,
the Limestone observers measured the height and bearing, and both groups
of observers sent the recorded data to ATIC.

Figure 12a. The Presque Isle sighting from two stations; the erroneous
determination of North at Limestone seems to indicate a nearby UFO.

Here was the kind of situation the investigators had been hoping for:
simultaneous observations of a single object, made from two different
stations a known distance apart. Calculations based on the altitudes and
bearings reported by the two stations yielded fantastic results. In a plot of
the data (shown schematically in Figure 12a) the prolonged lines
intersected, indicating a group of unknowns hovering 100 miles above the
earth and more than 50 miles off the Maine coast, of tremendous size and
moving at high speed. Concluding that the objects must have come from
outer space, or were possibly a new type of orbiting vehicle of Russian
origin, the Air Force had promptly clamped down the security lid. When
ATIC’s science consultant, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, looked at the data, he just as
promptly disagreed with these ideas and clearly identified the unknown as
the planet Jupiter, which had risen at 6:03 p.m. E.S.T. and at 10:00 was the
brightest object in the eastern sky. The believers in the extraterrestrial
theory were then in the majority at ATIC, however. They had refused to
accept the identification, and submitted the Presque Isle sighting to the
panel as a prize example of UFO surveillance.

Figure 12b. The Presque Isle sighting from two stations; the corrected
determination of North indicates Jupiter at infinity.

The panel members quickly disposed of the case. The measurements
reported from Presque Isle obviously pointed directly to the planet Jupiter,
not a mere 100 but millions of miles beyond the earth. If a constant
correction was applied to the bearings from Limestone, they also agreed
with Jupiter’s position. Careless use of the theodolite had produced an error
in the data. To measure the angle of an object above the horizon, the
observer has only to make sure that the theodolite is level, but to measure
the bearing he must align it with true north, a direction that cannot be
determined by guesswork. The Limestone observers had made a mistake in
determining true north and had thus obtained a wrong bearing for the
unknown. When the corrected data were plotted (shown schematically in
Figure 12b) the prolonged lines were parallel, and both pointed squarely to
the planet Jupiter at infinity.

The orange light was unquestionably Jupiter, and the accompanying
green lights were its four bright satellites twinkling through the layers of the
earth’s atmosphere. Amazed that this uncomplicated case, already explained
by Dr. Hynek, should have been offered as evidence for the extraterrestrial
origin of UFOs, the panel extended its investigation to the original
observers at Presque Isle. The witnesses there were bewildered by the
inquiry; they had checked the object when it appeared again on the night of
October 11, they said, and had then identified it as the planet Jupiter, but
they had not thought it necessary to notify the Air Force![VII-4]
For five long days the panel worked, analyzing every available bit of
evidence as it related to four alternative theories: 1) that UFOs were a
supersecret device of some sort being developed by the United States; 2)
that UFOs were a supersecret device being developed by some foreign
power; 3) that UFOs were normal phenomena wrongly interpreted; and 4)
that UFOs came from other planets. As the panel succeeded in explaining
one after another of the fifty or so submitted cases, or was able to suggest a
highly probable solution in terms of normal physical phenomena, the
members reached their conclusion. Theory number one they rejected with
complete certainty; they were 98 per cent certain that theory number two
was wrong, and 99 per cent sure that number four was also incorrect
(scientists are reluctant to accept any negative belief with absolute
certainty). The document submitted unofficially by ATIC investigators they
also rejected for lack of evidence. All the facts, they decided, supported
theory number three, that the reported UFOs were merely natural
phenomena, wrongly interpreted[VII-6].
The panel delivered this evaluation to the Office of Scientific
Intelligence, together with a recommendation that government agencies
should immediately abandon the policy of secrecy regarding UFO reports
and should make public all the facts in every case. Unfortunately this
recommendation was not followed. The report included some rather caustic
comments on the general inadequacy of the investigative techniques that
had been used. As one of the members remarked unofficially, trying to get
to the bottom of some of the sightings was like cutting treacle. The panel
report with its blunt criticisms was of course not intended for public release
and, understandably, was kept classified.

Although the OSI had asked for an expert opinion, some Air Force and
government officials were unwilling to accept the verdict when they got it,
and flatly refused to believe that UFOs were normal phenomena[VII-7].
When echoes of their disagreement escaped the security screen, civilian
saucer enthusiasts concluded with some justification that Air Force officials
were “covering up.” They were. They were not hiding any proof that flying
saucers came from outer space, however, as the saucer addicts charged, but
were merely trying to conceal their own confusion and the panel’s
criticisms.
As one member of the panel later stated to a correspondent, the
explanation of UFO beliefs “lies in a logical defect. It is this: UFOs form a
class of all celestial observations that cannot be immediately explained.
There is no other truly common feature; some manifestations are optical,
others are detected by radar; some are points, others circular, others
patterned; some are seen by night, others by day, etc. The implication that
they are somehow related is a false one, as we know from the large
proportion positively identified after the fact (what relation is there between
Venus and a meteorological balloon?). Calling all unidentified objects in the
sky ‘flying saucers’ or even UFOs (Venus doesn’t ‘fly’ in any proper sense
of the word) is like calling any word I cannot understand ‘Greek.’ The class
of all words I cannot understand would scarcely form a single language.
Therefore, the explanation of UFOs as a class is simply that they are not a
uniform class but a hodge-podge of widely disparate, partly described
phenomena that were seen in the sky.”[VII-8]
Not until April 9, 1958, did the Air Force make public the internal
recommendation made by the panel some five years earlier. If the entire
study had been released earlier, with a full statement of the facts and the
analyses made by the panel, it might have ended the saucer scare at once.
Instead the UFO hysteria continued, with periods of remission, and is still
dying a slow and lingering death.

[VII-1] Ruppelt, E. J. The Report on Unidentified Flying
Objects. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1956.

[VII-2] Olivier, C. P. “Tables of Hourly Rates Based upon
American Meteor Society Data.” Interim Report No. 28,
Harvard University Radio Meteor Research Program (May
1958).
[VII-3] Sky and Telescope, Vol. XI (1952), p. 312.
[VII-4] Air Force Files.
[VII-5] Barker, G. They Knew Too Much about Flying
Saucers. New York: University Books, Inc., 1956.
[VII-6] Robertson, H. P. Personal files.
[VII-7] Chop, A. M. Personal communication.
[VII-8] Page, T. W. Personal files.

Chapter viii
PHANTOMS ON RADAR
The evidence of radar, according to the saucer enthusiasts, provides
final proof that alien spaceships indeed patrol our skies. Because radar is an
electronic device, it allegedly cannot be fooled by mirages, reflections, or
peculiar weather conditions. If radar records an echo from an unidentified
object and, at about the same time, a human witness reports a puzzling light
in the sky, the believers proclaim that the unprejudiced testimony of science
has confirmed the presence of a solid flying saucer. Sometimes a radarscope
reports unidentified objects at a time when observers on the ground and in
search planes cannot see anything unusual in the sky. The believers then
conclude not that radar evidence can be misinterpreted, but that the
operators of the flying saucers may somehow be able to make both
themselves and their ships invisible![VIII-1]

Radar as a Reporter

Any UFO investigator who presumes to evaluate electronic evidence
should have much more than an amateur’s knowledge of the nature and
behavior of radar. Correct interpretation of the signals requires training,
experience, skill, and an expert’s acquaintance with the peculiarities of the
set under varying conditions. But even the expert does not yet understand
the causes of all the phenomena that can appear. He is limited by our still
incomplete knowledge of dynamic meteorology—precise information about
the composition of the atmosphere and how it interacts with microwaves.
With proper instrumentation and first-rate operators, radar can correctly
report the approximate direction, distance, altitude, and rate of motion of
objects within its range. If the returns are misinterpreted, however, radar
can seem to give false reports.

Figure 13. Schematic view of radar targets on successive
sweeps of the antenna.

Radar is not a TV camera or a photographic lens. It does not, at least at
present, produce a picture of the physical appearance, shape, size, or color
of the thing it detects. The scope shows only tiny spots of light on the flat
surface of a screen. A pointer something like a clock hand continually
sweeps around the dial at a given speed. A complete rotation may take from
two to fifteen seconds, depending on the type of the set. This sweep hand
keeps pace with the rotation of the radar antenna as it scans the sky by
sending out radio pulses. When they encounter a solid object, they bounce
off and return to the set as echoes which show as “blips,” or spots of light,
on the radarscope. The operator must interpret these spots and try to
identify them as planes, helicopters, balloons, ships, mountains, clouds,
birds, storms, hurricanes, or phantom echoes of various kinds. Safe
commercial flying depends on the accuracy of these identifications, as does
the security of the country in periods of international tension.

Radar only reports. It does not interpret. If the sweep hand on
successive rotations shows a spot of light apparently moving from position
A to position B, to C, to D, the operator generally concludes that the blips
represent a single object that is moving at a certain speed in a certain
direction (see Figure 13). If successive sweeps show a spot of light that
remains at position A, he usually concludes that it represents a stationary
object. If the blip moves a very great distance in the interval between two
sweeps or seems to jump erratically from one position to another, an
amateur might interpret it as a spacecraft flying at incredible velocity—a
flying saucer. But an expert would probably conclude, especially under
certain weather conditions, that the scope was picking up echoes from two
or more separate objects, one reflecting briefly at position A, another at
position B, and so on.

The Principle of Radar

Radar is an electronic assembly far too complex for detailed description
here, but its basic principle is simple. It is merely an echo machine that
reflects radio waves instead of sound waves. To illustrate by a rough
analogy, let us imagine that a man is standing in the middle of an open field
on a very dark night. He wants to find out something of the contours of the
surrounding country but his only tools are a compass, a watch with
luminous dial and hands, and a large megaphone. He raises the megaphone
to his lips, points it directly north, and gives a sharp and piercing call: “Hi!”
He now cups his hand to his ear and listens for an echo. Hearing no reply,
he deduces that in the north there are no hills, tall buildings, or other
obstructions that might have produced an echo.
Changing his position, he turns to the east and tries the experiment
again. After an interval his call returns as a faint echo: “Hi!” The time
elapsed between call and echo, according to his watch, is ten seconds. His
call has taken five seconds to reach the object and five seconds more to
return. Since he knows that sound travels at the rate of about 1000 feet a
second, he deduces that an obstruction lies in the east, about 5000 feet
away. Slowly changing position, he repeats his call at various points around
the compass. Some echoes take longer to return than others, indicating more

distant objects. Other echoes come back in a fraction of a second, showing
an object very close. Thus he gradually constructs a mental map of the
surrounding terrain.
Radar detects and locates objects in a similar way, by reflecting sharp
pulses of radio waves. But spurious echoes, which sometimes deceive the
operator, can also appear on the scope. These “anomalous” or abnormal
returns may have one of several causes, including the nature of the radar
mechanism itself. To help explain this, let us go back to our analogy of the
man in the open field. Let us suppose that the man has mechanized his
device. To ease the strain on his vocal cords, he has built a megaphone with
a record-playing device. The megaphone rotates automatically and sends
out a recorded “Hi!” once every twenty seconds, as regular as clockwork.
To increase the sensitivity of his hearing, he wears ear trumpets that point in
the same direction as the megaphone. This procedure is more effective than
cupping his ears and eliminates some of the extraneous noise that might
come in from the rear and the sides.
With this improved equipment the man now repeats his experiment. As
before, he gets no signal from the north. When he turns to the east he gets
an echo after ten seconds, just as he did during his first experiment. As he
continues to turn slowly, like a minute hand on a clock dial, he mentally
maps the positions of the echoes as distances along the hand from the center
of the dial, and compares this new map with the crude one he constructed
earlier. Basically the two agree.
But wait! From the southwest he hears a new echo that did not occur in
his earlier experiment. It returns after two seconds and thus apparently
comes from an obstruction 1000 feet away. Puzzled, the man decides to
walk toward the object and check his observation. After he has covered half
the distance he stops, sends out a call, and listens for the echo. The
indicated distance to the echo-producing object is now 500 feet, just as he
calculated. And so he goes on, checking at intervals. When he has covered
990 feet he knows that he should reach the obstruction at any moment and
to avoid colliding with it in the darkness he proceeds with extreme caution
—995, 996, 997, 998, 999 feet. He puts out his hand, expecting to touch a
building or a stone wall, and warily takes the last step. But he finds no
structure of any kind, merely level ground. And at the same moment he
finds to his astonishment that he can no longer detect the echoes he had

been following. What has happened? Has his equipment been
malfunctioning? Or was the unknown structure perhaps a vehicle from
outer space that waited until he was practically touching it and then rose
silently in an enormous burst of speed and vanished?
The man checks and finds that his equipment is functioning perfectly,
since he can still pick up echoes from the terrain he had mapped earlier. He
then walks back ten feet and listens once more for an echo from the
phantom structure. Again he gets a signal, apparently from an obstruction
just ten feet ahead. Has the mysterious object suddenly returned? But how
could it have done so without disturbing the atmosphere or making a noise?
By this time our man is frightened as well as puzzled, but he boldly decides
to make one more experiment. He walks again to the point where the
obstruction should be. Signaling again to the southwest, he now gets a faint
echo apparently from a distance of 10,000 feet. Tired as he is, he starts
walking toward this new obstruction and eventually reaches his goal. He
now finds the true source of the returns—a high hill that rises abruptly from
the plain. The hill is 10,000 feet away from the position indicated by the
original series of echoes, and 11,000 feet away from the place he stood
when he first sent out the signals.
Finally the man figures out the explanation. When he made his first
experiment, with primitive equipment, he had given one sharp shout and
then waited for a long time for the signal to return; thus there was never any
uncertainty about the source of the echo. The time that elapsed between
shout and return had clearly indicated the distance of the echo-producing
object. But the improved automatic equipment of the second experiment
produced a train of signals going out continuously at regular intervals,
twenty seconds apart. Therefore when the sound waves encountered a
definite object, a train of echoes began coming back, twenty seconds apart.
An object at a distance of 10,000 feet would return an echo in twenty
seconds; another object at a distance of 11,000 feet would return an echo in
twenty-two seconds. But an echo from this second object would reach the
listener at exactly the same time as an echo from an object only 1000 feet
away. He now understands why he seemed to detect a structure at a distance
of 1000 feet which disappeared as he approached and then reappeared
10,000 feet farther away. In fact, the object that returned the misinterpreted
echo could have been 20,000 or 30,000 or 40,000 feet farther away—any

multiple of 10,000 feet. Large numbers of signals were returning every
twenty seconds. The man had no way of deciding for certain whether a
particular echo came from the most recent signal and therefore indicated a
relatively close object, or whether it came from an earlier signal and
therefore from a more distant object.
Broadening his experiment our man eventually learned other
characteristics of these echoes. He found that on the average day he was
rarely plagued by this uncertainty in identifying the returns. The second-
round echoes were very weak, almost undetectable, and therefore caused no
major problem. But on other days, under different weather conditions,
sound tended to travel long distances without losing much in intensity. On
such days the echoes were often confusing.

Weather and Radar Echoes

Radar is an echo machine that reflects radio waves instead of sound
waves. Instead of traveling at the speed of sound, about 1000 feet a second,
radio waves travel at the velocity of light, 186,000 miles a second.
Successive pulses go out at very short intervals, perhaps one one-
thousandth of a second apart, so that each pulse is followed by another just
186 miles behind it. If the operator gets a return from an object that is
apparently at a distance of 25 miles, he must sometimes allow for the
possibility that he is getting a secondary echo and that the actual distance
may be different. The object that produces the echo may be at a distance of
25 plus 186 miles, or 25 plus twice 186 miles, or 25 plus any other whole-
number multiple of 186 miles.
Under ordinary circumstances, the reflections from very distant targets
rarely confuse the operator. The curvature of the earth tends to shield the
radiation, and the distance factor alone reduces the intensity to a negligible
value. But weather can cause peculiar returns. A layer of warm air above
cooler air at the earth’s surface has much the same effect on radio waves
that it has on light waves. A temperature inversion can produce radar
“mirages”—commonly called “phantoms,” “ghosts,” or “angels.”
Relatively small amounts of warm air, even mere warm bubbles in a layer
of colder air, will suffice. When the scope records a series of blips, the

operator ordinarily assumes that all are returns from a single object. If
inversions of temperature or humidity exist in the atmosphere, however, the
series of returns may represent several different ground objects rather than a
single object in the sky. Since these inversion layers do not remain fixed but
move, change, and shimmer, on one sweep the radar may reflect one ground
object and on the next sweep some fifteen seconds later may reflect a totally
different ground object five or six miles away from the first. An
inexperienced operator might conclude, wrongly, that both echoes came
from a single object that had traveled five miles in a fraction of a minute
(see Figure 14). Similar mistakes in identity have caused many reports of
radar flying saucers.

Figure 14. Deflection of radar beams by temperature
inversion. Top, radar picks up ground target. Bottom, on
next sweep, radar picks up different ground target, which
seems to indicate a fast-moving UFO.

Such a radar incident occurred at one of our defense installations in
Alaska early in the morning of January 22, 1952[VIII-2]. Shortly after
midnight a bright target appeared on the radarscope, moving down from the
northeast, fairly high, and apparently traveling at about 1500 miles an hour.
Unidentified targets require particularly prompt investigation in this
sensitive area so close to Siberia. Within minutes an F-94 jet was moving in
from a fighter base 100 miles to the south; two other jets were scrambled at
intervals and vectored in toward the unknown target by ground radar. When
radar switched to short range, however, it always lost both the target and the
pursuit plane, even though both were close to the radar site. The first jet
could find nothing in the air, and no echoes appeared on its radar. The
second jet saw nothing in the air, but its radar recorded a brief, weak echo to
the right at about 28,000 feet. The echo faded immediately, returned briefly,
and then disappeared as the jet closed in. The third jet, after cruising the
area for ten minutes without detecting anything visually or on radar,
suddenly got a strong radar return from an apparently stationary target just
as it passed over the ground radar site. The pilot made three direct runs on
the unknown. Each time he broke off the intercept when he got within 200
yards of the target position as shown on his radar, for fear of collision. At no
time did he see anything at the supposed location of the target. (This
experience is somewhat analogous to that of our man who used echoing
sound waves to locate a solid structure only to find, on reaching the
indicated spot, that the structure was not there.)
Captain Roy James, chief of the radar section of ATIC, examined all the
data and the scanty weather reports then available for this Alaskan area, and
concluded that the targets were ghost returns probably from the ground,
caused by peculiar atmospheric conditions—the same conditions that had
interfered with normal operation of the ground radar. Although ground
structures are scarce in that part of Alaska, they do exist, and so do
mountains. The analysis was undoubtedly correct, even though knowledge
of the location and movement of the temperature inversion was too
imprecise for the analyst to plot and locate the true target that produced the
reflections[VIII-3, p. 167].
Some of the nation’s most brilliant physicists have carried out
fundamental research into the behavior of microwaves under varying
conditions. The technical nature of these investigations makes them difficult

to describe in ordinary language, but they provide vital information for the
expert.
One such study has specifically attacked the problem of radar images
that perform rapid and erratic maneuvers at close range and seem to
overtake, fly parallel with, or almost collide with the pursuing aircraft. Such
returns may be caused by the “non-isotropic secondary scattering of
energy” (that is, the radio waves are not reflected in a uniform manner)
from an airplane to a ground object, or from ground object to plane. Under
appropriate weather conditions the plane itself causes the puzzling echoes,
so that the velocity and movement of the radar “saucer” depend directly on
those of the plane. When the aircraft is the first of the two scatterers, the
radar saucer always appears at the same bearing as the plane, and is always
farther away from the detecting radar than is the plane. Thus the path of the
phantom always lies outside the path of the aircraft, and when the jet
performs a 360-degree turn, the phantom also turns, on an outside path.
However, if the jet happens to fly directly over the ground object that is
reflecting the energy, then the observing radar will see the images of the jet
and the phantom flying on what seems to be a collision course.
Conversely, when the ground object is the first of the two scatterers, the
saucer phantom always occurs at the same bearing as the ground object, and
the distance to the phantom is always greater than to the ground object. If
the aircraft crosses the radial line from radar to ground object, at a range
exceeding the range to the object, then the echoes from plane and saucer
almost merge at the point of crossing, in a “near collision.” But if the plane
flies “this side” of the object, then the plane and saucer will never be closer
together than the distance between plane and ground object at the point of
crossing. A height-finding radar, trained on the pursuing plane, would show
the phantom saucer apparently diving toward or climbing away from the
plane, attacking and retreating at very high velocities[VIII-4].

The Kinross Case

Some such mechanism probably explains the radar returns reported in
the Kinross case, which some saucer publications cite as a proved instance
in which a flying saucer attacked a plane. On the night of November 23,

1953, an Air Force jet was scrambled from Kinross Air Force Base,
Michigan, to intercept an unidentified plane observed on radar. The jet
successfully accomplished its mission and identified the unknown as a
Dakota, a Canadian C-47. On its return to the base, however, the Air Force
jet crashed into Lake Michigan and, as often happens when a plane crashes
into deep water and the exact place of the crash is not known, no wreckage
was ever found. As the ground radar at Kinross had tracked the returning
jet, the scope had picked up a phantom echo in the neighborhood of the jet;
the two blips had seemed to merge just as both went off the scope.
Since the crash was not reported as a UFO incident and did not involve
any question of unidentified flying objects, ATIC was not asked to
investigate the problem. The office of the Deputy Inspector General for
Safety carried out a thorough inquiry and concluded that the crash had been
an aircraft accident, probably caused by the pilot’s suffering an attack of
vertigo. As for the two blips shown by radar, the night had been a stormy
one and atmospheric conditions had been conducive to abnormal returns.
The phantom echo had almost certainly been a secondary reflection
produced by the jet itself, and it thus merged with the return from the jet
and vanished with it when the plane hit the water.
Solely on the basis of this radar phantom, some civilian saucer groups
have tried to transform the Kinross crash into a UFO mystery with Air
Force investigators as the villains, and have suggested that the ghost blip
represented an alien spacecraft that happened to be cruising over Lake
Michigan that night and attacked the jet for one of two reasons: 1) The
saucer might have tried to avoid close contact with the jet by employing a
“reversed G-field beam” (see Chapter ix); colliding with this beam as with
a stone wall, the jet crashed. 2) The saucer might have used the G-field to
scoop the plane out of the air and take it aboard the spacecraft; the captured
pilot might have been needed to teach the English language to his alien
captors.

The “Invasion” of Washington, D.C.

The most famous of the radar phantoms are those that “invaded”
Washington, D.C., on the nights of July 19 and July 26, 1952, and terrified a

large number of radar operators, pilots, and Air Force officials who in a
more normal emotional climate would have recognized the “invisible”
flying saucers for what they were—radar angels produced by weather
conditions[VIII-2]. All during July the eastern seaboard had suffered an
unprecedented drought and heat wave. Lack of cloud cover produced
intensely hot days and rapid radiative cooling of the earth’s surface at night.
This situation, combined with the prevailing light winds, was ideal for the
formation of low-level temperature inversions during the hours of
darkness[VIII-5].
The hundreds of flying saucers reported during the summer (Chapter
vii) had produced a state of near-panic which entered its acute phase on July
19, at 11:40 p.m. E.D.S.T., when a group of seven unidentified targets
appeared on the radarscope of the Air Route Traffic Control (ARTC) at the
Washington National Airport[VIII-3, p. 209 ff.]. Similar targets that moved
erratically, appearing and disappearing, were observed on the radars of the
control tower and of nearby Andrews Air Force Base. If the blips were to be
accepted at face value, then a host of aerial objects had invaded Washington
and were cruising over the White House and the Capitol. Traffic control
notified the pilots of commercial flights in the area to keep alert for
unidentified aircraft. Some pilots reported unusual echoes on their plane
radars, some reported only normal returns, and two pilots reported
unexplained lights in the neighborhood indicated by radar. Nobody saw any
strange aircraft. After several requests from ARTC (which unaccountably
did not notify officials in the Air Force Intelligence that an “invasion” was
taking place), a jet interceptor finally arrived about dawn to search the area
but found nothing. Meanwhile the targets had vanished from the
radarscopes.
Next day the report flashed all over the world that a fleet of flying
saucers had invaded Washington, and public tension became almost
tangible. Was the earth doomed? The terror reached its climax on July 26,
just a week after the first incident, when at 10:30 p.m., E.D.S.T., the same
radar operators who had observed the first “invasion” picked up another
group of mysterious blips on their screens. The host of unknowns had
apparently formed a ring around the city of Washington and the surrounding
countryside. This time Air Force Intelligence officers were notified. They
raced to the airport to see the radarscopes for themselves, and concluded

that real saucers must be in the sky. All commercial air traffic was then
diverted from Washington, reporters and photographers were barred from
the radar room, and Air Force jets took to the air to defend the nation. But
against what? The enemy, if there, was invisible. One pilot saw a bright
light that vanished when he began to chase it; later, his radar showed a
return that faded after a few seconds, but he could not find a visual target.
In the hours between midnight and dawn, jet interceptors scoured the skies
looking for mysterious objects that produced returns on ground radar but
not on plane radar, and were invisible to the human eye. They found
nothing.
One pilot who flew this mission, accompanied by a copilot who was
also a radar officer, later described his experience:
“For a period of 1½ hours the B-25 was vectored at altitudes varying
from 1,000 to 4,000 feet MSL to the objects observed on the [ground radar]
screen. The airplane flew circles around stationary blips, flew through and
along with their formations, paralleled their flight, and was observed in the
radar screen to pass directly over, under, or through an angel. At all times
the echo return of the aircraft caused a brighter return on the screen than the
angel. The radar height finder was not operating during this mission, so
exact altitudes of the blips could not be determined.
“No unidentified objects were observed by me or the crew during the
flight. At 2300 E.D.S.T. all angels disappeared from the radar screen and
screen detection returned to normal.”[VIII-6]
By dawn this fantastic war of the angels had ended and the post-
mortems had begun. One radar expert who kept his head in spite of the
hysteria was Captain Roy James of ATIC, who immediately recognized the
targets as caused by weather. A civilian expert on radio propagation, when
consulted, correctly identified the phantoms and explained how they were
produced[VIII-7, VIII-7a]. General Samford, then in charge of the UFO
investigation, concurred. But most newspapers and many government
officials, influenced by the general excitement, ignored the conclusions of
the experts. Saucer enthusiasts regarded the phenomena as a real invasion
from space, and alleged that the Air Force was covering up the truth.
Weeks passed before the facts of the incidents could be separated from
the fancies. Three ground radars had observed unusual targets on the nights

of the “invasion.” Only once, however, did all three observe what was
apparently the same target, and that for a few seconds only. The unusual
radar echoes had no visual counterpart—nobody had seen or heard a
spaceship. A few pilots had reported unidentified lights, but the Washington
area at night displays thousands of lights, and even an unexplained light is
far from being a spaceship. One pilot who took part in this phantom war
reported that, again and again, ground radar had vectored him in toward a
target that proved to be a steamboat making a moonlight trip on the
Potomac!

Radar Experiments in Washington

Immediately after the Washington crisis, the Technical Development
and Evaluation Center of the Civil Aeronautics Authority was assigned the
problem of finding out exactly what had produced the radar returns.
Investigation showed that the phantoms were not a new or unusual
phenomenon. They had appeared on the Washington radars on many nights
before the first “invasion,” appeared twice during the week between the
two, and many times after the second. Abnormal returns are commonplace
during the hot summer months when temperature inversions and
inequalities in the moisture of the air are most frequent. On the nights of
July 19 and 26 the Weather Bureau at Washington recorded small
temperature inversions and an abnormal distribution of moisture in the
atmosphere, conditions that regularly produce radar angels.
The experts also carried out a series of experiments in the Washington
area on several nights in August when conditions of temperature and
humidity closely resembled those on the “invasion” nights. During these
experiments unidentified targets appeared in profusion on the radar screens.
The first observation period began on the evening of August 13, 1952. At
about 9 p.m. E.D.S.T., suddenly “a group of seven strong stationary targets
became visible in an area about fifteen miles north-northeast of the radar
antenna. During the next two or three antenna revolutions, the area on the
scope between Washington and Baltimore became heavily sprinkled with
stationary targets in a belt about six miles wide. A group of additional
targets became visible in an area approximately ten to fifteen miles south of

the radar antenna. This was evidence of the beginning of a temperature
inversion.”[VIII-6] Two temperature inversions were involved, one just
above the earth’s surface, and one at about 8000 feet. The investigators
concluded that the unidentified targets observed on Washington MEW
(Microwave Early Warning) and other radar in the summer of 1952 were to
be attributed to secondary reflections of the radar beam, caused primarily
by temperature inversions[VIII-5].
Saucer enthusiasts protested (and still insist) that the inversions were
not large enough to produce radar anomalies, revealing how superficial was
their acquaintance with radar. Although pronounced temperature inversions
are responsible for the superior and inferior mirages resulting from the
bending of light rays, large inversions are not required to produce the
mirages resulting from the refractive bending of radio waves. At radar
frequencies, refraction is influenced by both temperature differences and the
distribution of water vapor in the atmosphere. A pronounced drop in
moisture content at higher altitudes can easily cause radar rays to bend
earthward and pick up ground targets, even though temperature conditions
in the lower atmosphere are entirely normal.
In December 1952, True magazine published a sensational article that
attacked the Air Force findings, insisted that the radar echoes had been
caused by strange machines and, in effect, accused the official investigators
of releasing an explanation they knew to be at variance with the facts shown
by radar[VIII-8].
Dr. Vernon G. Plank, now at the Aerophysics Laboratory of the Air
Force Cambridge Research Center, was at that time Radar Meteorologist at
Walpole, Massachusetts. A specialist in the science of radar, Dr. Plank had
made a detailed study of the refractive conditions prevailing over
Washington for July 20 and 21, 1952. In a letter (which was never
published) to the editor of True, he pointed out that the saucer theory of the
Washington radar returns had no basis in fact. The material given in the
letter merits quotation:
“The regular Washington radiosonde observations, when converted into
refractive index terms, reveal that a very marked superrefractive condition
(a condition favorable to earthward bending of radar rays) prevailed in the

lower atmosphere during this period. The cause of this superrefractive
condition was primarily the rapid decrease of water vapor with altitude.
“Although this superrefractive layer was not quite intense enough to
cause the radar rays to be bent completely back to earth, the rays would be
very markedly bent downward from their normal position. From past
experience with other situations of this type it is to be expected that certain
regions in this layer might be considerably more superrefractive than others,
or that particular terrain features, such as rivers or small bodies of water,
might create local, transitory conditions favorable to extreme
superrefraction or even reflection. Another factor to consider is that whereas
such local anomalies are usually due to moisture, localized temperature
effects may also create or help create such intense superrefractive regions.
Therefore, it would not be at all surprising that such local anomalies, when
superimposed on the generally superrefractive layer already existing over
Washington, could create a situation conducive to radar echoes of the type
observed.
“Under such conditions the general ground clutter referred to in the
Keyhoe article would not be present and the radarscope would only show
echoes whenever and ‘wherever’ (qualified below) a favorable
superrefractive region occurred. As the radar ray has to travel from the radar
set to the particular region of refraction and thence onward to the ground,
the scope echoes created by such disturbances would occur at an indicated
range of roughly twice the disturbance range.
“Even slow air movements within a localized disturbance (one
sufficiently intense to bend the ray into the ground) would be translated into
enormous movements of the echo over the scope face. Both lateral and
radial movements could be expected and disappearance of echo between
sweeps would not be surprising.
“Of course, the optical effects noted in conjunction with the radar
echoes would depend upon temperature effects. However, the lack of a
temperature inversion in the type of data referred to by Mr. Keyhoe does
not preclude the possibility that extremely sharp and localized inversions
existed over the area, perhaps in close association or in conjunction with the
regions causing the radar echo. The Weather Bureau data cited are not
sufficiently accurate nor do the instruments used in obtaining the data have

a sufficiently rapid response to measure such small inversions. Also, such
data are usually obtained at only two definite periods during each day.
“As the distance between Andrews AFB and the Washington National
Airport is only some few miles, the refractive effects of a given disturbance
might appear to be quite similar, and the position of the resulting ground
echo on the two sets might coincide to a fair degree of approximation.
However, as information about the degree of accuracy maintained in
plotting echo position is not available to me, I cannot comment with any
degree of intelligence. It does seem though, that with the observed echo
speeds and radical direction changes, as well as the echo appearance and
disappearance phenomena, that accurate scope coordination between the
separate fields would be extremely difficult.”[VIII-9]

“Simultaneous” Radar-Visual Reports

On the night of July 29, three days after the second Washington crisis,
the radar installation of the Air Defense Command post near Port Huron,
Michigan, had been tracking three F-94s as they made practice runs on a B-
25 bomber. At 9:40 p.m. C.S.T., ground control picked up an unidentified
target moving from north to south at a speed of about 625 miles an hour.
The operators notified the pilot of one of the F-94s and vectored him in for
an attempted intercept. The plane’s radar did not show the reported target,
but when the plane had climbed to a height of 21,000 feet, both the pilot
and his radar man saw a brilliant multicolored light, many times larger than
a star, close to the northern horizon. At the same time the plane’s radar
picked up an echo in the north; it disappeared after thirty seconds, although
the light was still visible dead ahead. As the pilot began the chase, the light
changed color from bluish white to reddish and slowly diminished in size as
though it were moving away. The pilot pursued the light for about half an
hour without gaining on it, and eventually had to return to base. The ground
radar, meanwhile, had been trying to keep track of events in the sky. When
the chase began, the target appearing on ground radar had first made a 180-
degree turn and reversed direction from south to north; it had then moved
erratically, doubling its speed instantaneously, and then slowing down. It
once seemed to reach a speed of about 1400 miles an hour, then slowed to

about 300 mph, and disappeared from the scope shortly after the plane had
returned to base[VIII-2].
To many persons this incident seemed a simultaneous visual and radar
sighting of a single unknown object but the Air Force soon demolished this
theory. A study of the facts revealed that the movement of the radar target
and that of the mysterious light had not coincided. The radar target had
traveled from north to south, had then reversed direction, had slowed down,
speeded up, and moved erratically. The light, however, had remained
steadily in the north, diminishing in size and brilliance but not vanishing. It
behaved, in fact, like the image of a star or a planet seen through turbulent
atmosphere (see Chapter iv).
For several nights before the sighting, many residents in this part of
Michigan had noticed a similar light that appeared in the northern sky each
evening at about the same time and place, displaying various changing
colors. The investigators were able to identify the shining unknown as the
star Capella. The position of the lights coincided with that of the star for
that time, date, and latitude. Capella was at lower culmination—that is, at
the lowest point of its swing around the pole star, just skirting the horizon
where its spectacular blue, yellow, and red twinkling is familiar to
astronomers of the region. The pilot’s description, and the fact that he could
get no closer to it even after a thirty-minute chase, confirmed this
identification. Neither the brief blip that appeared on the plane’s radar nor
the erratic returns picked up by ground radar had any relation to the star;
they were merely phantom returns caused by weather conditions[VIII-2].
Like this Michigan sighting, many UFO problems are difficult to solve
because they result from more than one cause. The observations seem at
first glance to refer to a single phenomenon, although actually two or more
unrelated phenomena are involved. On August 1, 1952, two days after the
Michigan incident, such a puzzle arose with an impressive radar-visual-
photographic sighting near Bellefontaine, Ohio[VIII-2]. At 10:45 a.m.
C.D.S.T., the radar operator at the Air Defense Command post picked up an
unidentified target north of Dayton, moving southwest at a speed of about
525 miles an hour. Two jets from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base were
scrambled for an intercept and were vectored in by ground control. Since
the ground radar was not equipped with height-finding devices, however,

the operator could not direct the pilots to a specific altitude; he could only
tell them whether they were nearer to or farther from the target.
When the jets had reached 30,000 feet, ground radar informed them that
they were almost on target, which was still moving southwest at the same
speed. A few seconds later, the returns from the jets and the UFO blended
on the radarscope and the operator advised the pilots that they would have
to continue the search visually. At this moment, unfortunately, the ground
radar suddenly failed. Soon after communication between ground and air
had ended, the lead pilot observed a silver-colored sphere several thousand
feet above him. Both jets went after it but although they climbed to their
maximum altitude, 40,000 feet, neither could get close enough to identify
the object, which was still some 30,000 feet above them. One pilot,
however, managed to expose several feet of film with his gun camera. At
the same moment the warning light on his gunsight radar blinked on to
indicate it detected a solid object. At this point the jets broke off the
intercept and started back to Wright-Patterson Field.
Both pilots then realized that, although they had been chasing an
unknown for some ten minutes, they were still northwest of the base in
almost the same area where they had started the intercept. This surprising
fact seemed to indicate that the unknown had slowed down from its original
speed of 525 miles an hour, to hover in the sky nearly motionless.
In flying saucer circles, this series of events was regarded as an iron-
clad case of a physically material UFO observed simultaneously by radar,
the human eye, and the camera.
After sifting the evidence, ATIC investigators eventually found the more
prosaic though complicated solution to the puzzle:
1) The object picked up on ground radar had actually been a jet plane,
flying out of Cleveland. It had not been identified immediately because the
Bellefontaine station had not received its flight plan. At 10:45 that morning
the jet had been north of Dayton, flying at low altitude on a southwest
heading, at a speed of around 525 miles an hour—the exact time, position,
and speed of the radar unknown.
2) The pilots of the interceptors never saw this jet. What they saw, what
their gun radar detected, and what their gun camera photographed was a

twenty-foot radiosonde balloon that had been released from Wright-
Patterson Air Force Base that morning shortly before the sighting. Ground
radar, on the other hand, never picked up the balloon.
3) The chief reason for the confusion was that ground radar did not have
a height-finding device. When the operator notified the pilots that his scope
showed a blending of the returns produced by the pursuit jets and by the
unknown, neither he nor the pilots had any way to tell whether the unknown
was directly above or directly below the pursuing jets. At 30,000 feet the
pilots were too high to see the Cleveland jet far below them. But they did
see the balloon above them and naturally assumed that it was the object
they were supposed to be chasing.
4) Since the ground radar stopped functioning at this point, the operator
could no longer track the course of the unknown or of the interceptors. If
the radar had been working, he would have seen that the target continued on
to the southwest while the interceptors were searching in a different area to
the north.
5) The photographs confirmed this reconstruction of a complicated
series of events. The pictures obtained by the gun camera displayed a round,
indistinct blur. Analysis showed that the size of the object was that of a
twenty-foot sphere—a balloon—photographed from a distance of 30,000
feet.

“Ghosts” and “Angels” on Radar

Every experienced radar man has observed blips on his scope that he
cannot account for[VIII-4], but he recognizes many characteristics of these
“ghosts” or “angels.” They often come from an apparently clear and normal
sky. They are usually concentrated in the lower atmosphere, are weak in
character, and last only a short time. Although they may occur at any time
of the year, they appear most often on summer nights in calm
weather[VIII-10]. Summer atmospheric conditions, in which the air is
relatively quiet but varies in temperature and moisture content, have an
adverse effect on radio and radar transmission and produce many of these
ghost returns.

The uneven distribution of temperature and humidity in the atmosphere
is only one of the many possible causes of the radar angels often labeled as
saucers[VIII-11, VIII-12]. These ghosts may be produced by peculiar
atmospheric conditions, back and forward scatter of radio waves[VIII-13],
smoke, wind-carried debris, moisture-laden clouds, ice crystals in clouds or
air, lightning, meteors, the Aurora Borealis, birds, insects, bats, electronic
reflections from the moon, flares on the sun, or by “chaff” or “window”
(foil dropped from airplanes). A radar operator once picked up a group of
phantom echoes that seemed to form the letters “GI” which, according to
the scope, apparently stretched over a distance of about eighty miles. He
tracked them for two hours, but gave up trying to interpret the message
when he learned that it was produced by chaff dropped from an Air Force
plane during an experiment.
An extremely unusual pattern of “angels” (see Plate IVc) appeared on
the radarscope at Schilling Air Force Base at Salina, Kansas, on September
10, 1956, and was attributed to forward scatter from atmospheric eddies to
ground targets and back[VIII-13].
Many radar angels are caused by insects and birds. Their detection on
sensitive, high-resolution, Q-, K-, and X-band radars has been verified both
observationally and theoretically. Since a radar set surveys a very large
volume of the atmosphere and maps it on a relatively small dial, a
surprisingly small concentration of insects can cause appreciable clutter on
the scope. On sets such as the 0.86-cm TPQ-6 (Cloud Base and Top
Indicator), a single insect of detectable size in a volume of 100,000 cubic
feet of air is enough to fill the scope with return[VIII-4]. Since the guilty
insect would be invisible both to ground observers and to the crew of
pursuing jets, a flying-saucer report inspired by the radar echoes would
remain forever an “Unknown.”
Birds can cause substantial echoes on many radars. Large birds at a
distance of ten miles can give signals equivalent to those from a medium-
sized aircraft at a distance of fifty miles; in fact, even the fading and
fluctuation resemble those of aircraft echoes. On radar, a sea gull may cause
a return equivalent to that of a quart of water flying around. The radar cross
section of the blip may be several times larger than the geometric cross
section of the bird, so that a single adult sea gull at a distance of twenty
nautical miles gives a very large radar return. As few as eight birds per

square mile can completely fill a PPI (Planned Position Indicator) scope
with return[VIII-14]. If conditions were exactly right, the birds might be
visible to an observer and the source of the angel would thus be explained.
But if no one happened to see the birds, the “mysterious” returns could
serve as a basis for still another report of invisible flying saucers.
Birds have also been responsible for some of the “ring” angels that have
been interpreted as fleets of invisible spaceships. In September 1953 several
radar sites in England picked up unidentified objects apparently encircling
the city of London. They performed peculiar maneuvers including,
according to one saucer publication, the formation of the letters Z and U of
the English alphabet. How the correct orientation of this invisible sky
writing was determined has never been explained. If the letters are turned
top to bottom, back to front, or rotated 90 or 180 degrees, they take on new
meanings. Scholars might well argue about whether the first giant symbol
should be interpreted as a Roman Z, a Roman N, a Greek Ζ, or a Russian И;
and whether the second symbol should be read as a Roman U, a Greek Ω,
the mathematical symbol ⊂ standing for “is contained in,” or a Roman C
lying on its side.
On the scope, ring angels produce outwardly expanding rings and arcs
that sometimes move on and off the screen at incredible speeds. Such
echoes have been a fairly common phenomenon in England since 1940 and
1941[VIII-15], and experimental research has shown that many of those
occurring at dawn or at dusk are caused by flocks of starlings. At dawn
thousands of starlings leave the roost in waves at intervals of about half a
minute. The birds in each wave are often closely packed in a tight circle or
semicircle as the wave ascends. All are flying outward, dispersing in all
directions, so that the ring diffuses rapidly on the radar screen and
disappears, but is followed almost at once by a new ring. At dusk the birds
may return separately to the roost during the course of an hour. Sometimes,
however, they assemble first in a field some distance from the roost; they
finally take off at the same time as a group and head for the roost in a single
giant wave, causing a tremendously impressive but quickly vanishing angel
on the radarscope.
Ring echoes observed at Texarkana, Arkansas, have been traced to the
movements of red-winged blackbirds. Thousands of birds flying out from a
common roosting ground a few minutes before sunrise show up on the PPI

scope as an expanding ring that grows broader and more diffuse with time
until the composite echo breaks into individual ones and fades at a distance
of twelve to thirty-five miles[VIII-16].
Other types of ring angels have been observed on radarscopes, but the
causes are not yet fully understood[VIII-17, VIII-18].
Recognizing the true character of these radar angels and spurious
reflections has tremendous importance for the security of the United States.
Our Early Warning System, designed to notify Air Defense of imminent
attacks by intercontinental ballistic missiles, has already had troubles with
such radar ghosts. On October 5, 1960, a signal from Thule, Greenland, to
the North American Air Defense Command flashed the warning, “Massive
ICBM attack is underway.” The Canadian officer in charge had only
seventeen minutes in which to decide whether to order several hundred
bombers of the Strategic Air Command to retaliate against the USSR or to
push the button that would cause our long-range missiles with atomic
warheads to come roaring out of their underground sites. He immediately
asked Washington: Where was Khrushchev? Khrushchev was in New York
at the United Nations: the officer did not push the button that would have
set the world at war.
Later, he learned that radar beams reflected from the moon had
produced the terrifying angels. This incident is only one of the reasons why
the Air Force continues to be interested in radar UFOs. Failure to identify
them correctly could threaten the effectiveness of our patrol system.

The Rapid City Sighting

One of the most complex incidents in saucer history occurred early in
August 1953 near Rapid City, South Dakota. Like the sightings the previous
year at Bellefontaine, Ohio, and Port Huron, Michigan, the presence of a
UFO seemed to be confirmed by several types of evidence. Trained civilian
and military personnel on the ground and in the air observed an unknown
visually and by radar. The blips on the ground radarscope were
photographed and a plane’s gun camera took a picture. If a similar incident
were to occur today, Air Force investigators would probably find the answer

without difficulty. In 1953, however, they were less experienced and finally
classified the case as “one of the best” Unknowns.
It is clearly impossible to solve the mystery with absolute certainty after
nearly ten years, because vital information is lacking. The original records
are no longer on file. Few details are available except those in Ruppelt’s
sketchy summary[VIII-3, p. 303 ff.], and some of these are inaccurate: the
town of Black Hawk, for example, is not west, but northwest, of Rapid City.
Although many questions of fact must therefore remain unanswered—exact
times, directions, sequence of events—we offer here a highly probable
explanation.
The first report came at 8:05 p.m. M.S.T. when a spotter for the Ground
Observer Corps in the town of Black Hawk telephoned the Air Defense
Command post near Rapid City, approximately ten miles southeast of Black
Hawk, to report an extremely bright light hovering low on the horizon to
the northeast. The radar operators at Ellsworth Air Force Base had been
working with a jet patrol flying west of the base. After receiving the phone
call, they shifted the scope to scan the northeast quadrant of the sky and
picked up an unidentified target moving slowly at about 16,000 feet.
Although the controller wondered at first whether the target might have
been due to weather, he decided after a few minutes that it was well
defined, solid, and bright.
Since the ground spotter had a visual target and the traffic controller had
a radar target, he telephoned to compare notes on positions; as they were
talking, the spotter interrupted the conversation to say that the light was
beginning to move southwest toward Rapid City. Checking the radarscope
and finding a fast-moving target the controller sent two of his men running
outside to look at the sky. After a few seconds they reported that they could
see a large bluish-white light moving toward them from the northeast. It
made “a wide sweep” around Rapid City and then returned to a stationary
position in the northeast where it had first appeared. (Unfortunately the
account does not state clearly whether the “wide sweep” was observed
visually or on radar.)
By this time all the witnesses were greatly excited by the UFO. The
master sergeant couldn’t decide what to do next because he kept thinking,
“They’re bigger than all of us!” but the traffic controller notified the F-84

patrolling in the west and asked for an intercept. The pilot soon found the
light, which was still stationary. He began the chase, but when he had
approached to within an estimated three miles, the light rapidly began to
retreat. He continued the chase directly north for 120 miles (during which
both the jet and the UFO went off the ground scope) but he could not gain
on the object. Running short of fuel, he turned back toward the base. The
ground scope soon picked him up again and, a few seconds later, picked up
an unknown target apparently trailing the jet by ten or fifteen miles.
A second jet then took to the air, located the light, and began the pursuit.
Like the first pilot, he could not close the distance between him and the
receding UFO. After performing various tests to convince himself that he
wasn’t chasing a reflection, he finally turned on his radar gun camera. After
a few seconds the red light blinked on, indicating a solid object ahead. The
pilot thereupon asked permission to break off the intercept and, having
taken a photograph, returned to base. As before, the ground scope picked up
the returning jet but this time the UFO did not reappear on the scope. The
controller then called officials at the filter center at Fargo, North Dakota.
They had not received any UFO reports; a few minutes later, however, they
called back to say that spotter posts between the two cities, on a southwest-
northeast line, had indeed seen a bluish-white light.
Investigators from ATIC arrived promptly but they were not able to
explain the sighting. Even the photographs showed nothing useful.
Conclusion: unknown.
The incident remained unexplained chiefly because the investigators,
like the witnesses, apparently assumed that a single unidentified flying
object accounted for all the phenomena observed that evening. Although the
available evidence is somewhat confusing, a careful study shows that, on
the contrary, the visual and the radar targets could not have been the same.
When the ground spotter first reported the UFO, she described it as a
stationary light low on the horizon. The radarscope, however, showed a
target that was moving slowly, at an altitude of about 16,000 feet. Some
minutes later, when the visual target did begin to move, the radar target
speeded up. This was the only instance in which the movements of the two
seemed to be roughly parallel. But in the excitement that followed, all the
witnesses assumed that the two targets were identical. The published

account[VIII-3, p. 303 ff.] does not distinguish clearly between the actions
of the light and the movements of the blips on the radarscope.
Let us begin by reviewing the facts about the visual target. According to
the witnesses on the ground, it was a brilliant bluish-white light that
appeared on the northeast horizon and remained stationary during most of
the period it was observed. At one time it seemed to advance rapidly toward
the witnesses, make a wide sweep around Rapid City, which was a few
miles away from the observers, and then return to its original position.
According to the witnesses in the air, the light did not remain stationary but
retreated from the pursuing plane and followed the returning plane,
duplicating the plane’s speed and keeping the distance between them
constant. The pilots based this interpretation, evidently, on the fact that the
light did not vary in size or brilliance and thus seemed to pace the plane.
These descriptions all point to the same answer: that the light was a star
or a planet. Since it was infinitely distant, the jets could not get any closer
to it and at ground levels the image was distorted by peculiar atmospheric
conditions. Mars had been absent from the night sky for months, and
Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter were then morning stars; therefore the
unknown could not have been a planet. However, the bright star Capella
was on the northeast horizon at a declination of plus 46 degrees and would
have been visible from both Fargo and Rapid City. A check of the Weather
Bureau records shows that the night was clear and dark. The sun had set
about an hour before the sighting began, and at that time in the evening
there was no moonlight because the moon was in its last quarter. Visibility
was about thirty-five miles and the wind was from the northeast, about four
meters per second. There was a marked temperature inversion—9 degrees
—at ground levels. Such an inversion could easily account for the erratic
motions reported for the light.
There can be little doubt that the visual target was the star Capella.
The radar targets also were clearly the result of weather, just as the air-
traffic controller had suspected when he first looked at the scope.
Conditions were ideal—a calm, clear, warm summer night—for phantom
echoes. The first radar target, moving southwest, was probably a return
from some ground object. When the jet took to the air, the scope showed a
different kind of UFO target, one that echoed the movements of the plane

itself—retreating from the pursuer, advancing when the pursuer turned back
—and was always farther away from the ground station than the plane
itself.
Although saucer enthusiasts interpret these maneuvers as proof that the
phantom was under intelligent control, radar experts recognize the familiar
pattern in which a ghost echo is actually a return from the plane itself.
Because of the temperature inversions the radar pulses do not return directly
from the plane to the ground receiver but are deflected from the plane to the
ground, then back to the plane, and thence on to the ground scope. The
phantom echo always occurs from the same direction as the aircraft and is
always “on the other side” of the plane (see p. 153).
This explanation also accounts for the evidence of the jet’s gun camera.
The photographs taken showed nothing, although the radar warning light
indicated a solid object ahead. After the pilot had switched on the set,
however, there had been a brief delay before the red signal blinked on.
During this interval the plane had not come any closer to the unknown light,
but the radio waves had scattered from plane to ground and back to plane so
that the gun radar did indeed detect a solid object—the plane itself!
In short, the evidence supports our conclusion that an image of the star
Capella, distorted by the atmospheric conditions produced by a strong
temperature inversion, accounted for the visual sightings; and that radar
echoes from the pursuing jets, deflected by the same temperature inversion,
accounted for the phantom targets on the ground radarscope and the gun
radar.

[VIII-1] Keyhoe, D. E. The Flying Saucer Conspiracy.
New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1955.
[VIII-2] Air Force Files.
[VIII-3] Ruppelt, E. J. The Report on Unidentified Flying
Objects. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1956.

[VIII-4] Plank, V. G. “Spurious Echoes on Radar, A
Survey.” Astia Document No. AD-215470, AFCRC-TR-59-
210 (May 1959).
[VIII-5] Borden, R. C., and Vickers, T. K. “A Preliminary
Study of Unidentified Targets Observed on Air Traffic
Control Radars.” Technical Development Report No. 180,
Civil Aeronautics Administration, Technical Development
and Evaluation Center, Indianapolis, Indiana (May 1953).
[VIII-6] “Radar Objects Over Washington,” Air Weather
Service Bulletin (September 1954), pp. 52–57.
[VIII-7] Menzel, D. H. Elementary Manual of Radio
Propagation. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
1948.
[VIII-7a] —— “Why Flying Saucers Show Up on Radar.”
Look magazine (September 9, 1952).
[VIII-8] Keyhoe, D. E. “What Radar Tells about Flying
Saucers.” True magazine (December 1952), p. 25 ff.
[VIII-9] Plank, V. G. Personal communication.
[VIII-10] Withrow, S. R. “Angels on Radar Scopes,” Air
Weather Service Bulletin (September 1954), pp. 48–51.
[VIII-11] Atlas, D. “Radar Studies of Meteorological
‘Angel’ Echoes,” Journal of Atmospheric and Terrestrial
Physics, Vol. XV (1959), pp. 262–87.
[VIII-12] —— “Possible Key to the Dilemma of
Meteorological ‘Angel’ Echoes,” Journal of Meteorology,
Vol. XVII (1960), pp. 95–103.
[VIII-13] —— “Sub-horizon Radar Echoes by Scatter
Propagation,” Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. LXIV
(1959), pp. 1205–18.
[VIII-14] Richardson, R. E.; Stacey, J. M.; Kohler, H. M.;
and Naka, F. R., “Radar Observations of Birds,” Proceedings
of the Seventh Weather Radar Conference (November 1958).

[VIII-15] Harper, W. G. “Angels on Centimetric Radars
Caused by Birds,” Nature, Vol. CLXXX (1957), p. 847.
[VIII-16] Ligda, M. G. H. “Radar Observations of
Blackbird Flights,” Texas Journal of Science (December
1958).
[VIII-17] Holzer, R., and Smith, W. (Eds.), Proceedings on
the Conference on Atmospheric Electricity, Geophysics
Research Directorate, Air Force Cambridge Research Center,
AFCRC-TR-55-222 (December 1955).
[VIII-18] Eastwood, E; Bell, J. D.; and Phelp, N. R. “‘Ring
Angels’ over Southeast England,” Nature, Vol. CLXXXIII
(1959), pp. 1759–60.

Chapter ix
E-M AND G-FIELDS IN UFO-LAND
The phenomenon of magnetism has always fascinated both scientists
and laymen. Paracelsus believed that he could use a magnet to draw disease
out from a person, transfer it to the ground, and thus cure the patient. Later
practitioners believed that a sick person could regain his health by sleeping
with head and feet oriented north to south so as to be in line with the earth’s
magnetic poles. Laputa, the saucer-shaped floating island visited by
Gulliver in his travels, was propelled by the attracting or repelling forces of
a large magnet imbedded in the center of the island. In recent years
magnetism has similarly been called on to account for some of the peculiar
maneuvers allegedly performed by UFOs.
In the world of flying saucers an all-purpose electromagnetic (E-M)
force, unknown to earth scientists, is supposed to be able to produce light
and heat, disturb a compass, render an object radioactive, stop a wrist watch
without damaging the man who wears it, interfere with the functioning of
radio and TV sets, turn out the lights of automobiles, stop the action of
gasoline engines, and aid in the creating of artificial gravitational fields (G-
fields) around extraterrestrial spaceships.
UFOs equipped with E-M powers have occasionally been reported in
France since 1954[IX-1], but they had rarely appeared in the United States
until late in 1957 when freak weather in Texas, plus the birth of the space
age, started a new wave of flying-saucer incidents. Few spectacular UFOs
had appeared since the 1952 panic (Chapter vii) and the average citizen had
almost forgotten about flying saucers. Then on October 4, 1957, when
Sputnik I went into orbit and opened the door to outer space, people once
more began to watch the heavens uneasily. Uneasiness became alarm a
month later when, with American satellites still sitting on the launching pad,
Sputnik II roared into space. A ball of fire floating over a field in western
Texas provided the small stimulus needed to turn alarm into hysteria, and

for several weeks people tended to see spaceships in every cloud and every
unfamiliar light in the sky. The reasoning seemed to be that if man with his
limited powers could launch satellites to orbit the planet, why shouldn’t
interplanetary ships already be visiting the earth?
In the months of November and December the Air Force received more
UFO reports than during the entire ten months preceding, and the reports
had their highest frequency in the single week following November
2[IX-2]. For a period of about eight days, if all the stories were true, our
skies were crowded with flying saucers.
Spaceships with electromagnetic powers roved from the Dominican
Republic to Alaska; they stopped automobiles, turned off headlights,
jammed radios and stopped clocks in cars, blurred TV sets in the home,
dimmed the cabin lights in airplanes, and altered a speedometer to register a
dangerously high speed instead of the legal sixty miles per hour. (Whether
the driver in question offered this novel defense to a judge in traffic court is
unknown.) Police in squad cars pursued UFOs in Elmwood Park, Illinois;
Danville, Illinois; and Hammond, Indiana. In Brazil, an orange-colored,
whistling UFO hovered near Fort Itaipu and first caused a temporary failure
of the lights, then knocked out the generating plant for several moments. A
driver in Santa Fe, New Mexico, saw a UFO that not only stalled his car but
also stopped the dashboard clock and the driver’s own wrist watch. A driver
in western Texas saw a UFO that, not content with stopping the engine and
radio of his car, also magnetized the right half of the bumper and a part of
the fender. One driver reported that his car and those of several other
motorists had stalled near Cortez, Colorado; he had not thought of looking
at the sky, but any saucer enthusiast could have told him that a UFO must
have been hovering there.
In addition to these special models equipped with Medusa-like powers,
other spaceships allegedly landed briefly at the military installation at White
Sands, New Mexico; harassed a United States Coast Guard ship in the Gulf
of Mexico; landed in Ohio and raised the radioactivity level of the ground;
and stopped in Nebraska for repairs.

Stormy Weather in Texas

The new type of UFO with electromagnetic (E-M) powers first attracted
notice in this country by allegedly appearing near Levelland, Texas, on the
night of November 2, 1957, a few hours before Sputnik II went into orbit. A
small town with a population of about 8000, Levelland lies on the plains of
western Texas about sixty miles from Plainview, site of a famous meteor
shower, and only twenty-five miles from Lubbock, which a few years
earlier had gained national fame with its “Lubbock lights” (p. 123). The
region is normally an arid one, but at the beginning of November it was
experiencing unusual weather—electrical storms and rain (the month
proved to be the wettest ever recorded in western Texas).
About 11:15 that Saturday night, a farmworker named Pedro Saucedo
(or Saucido) with his friend Joe Palaz (also given in various printed
accounts as Palav, Salav, Salaz, Salvaz) was driving home from Levelland.
A few miles northwest of the town he had turned off Route 116 into a side
road, when both men noticed a flash of light in a field at the right. Evidently
unalarmed, he continued driving and talking until suddenly the engine died
and the lights went out. While trying to restart the motor, Saucedo (the
similarity between “Saucedo” and “saucer” presents a diverting
coincidence) glimpsed over his left shoulder something that looked like a
flaming ball or a fiery tornado drifting rapidly toward the truck. A veteran
of combat in Korea, Saucedo reacted instantaneously to the blazing
unknown. As he described the experience later that night, “I jumped out of
the truck and hit the dirt because I was afraid. I called to Joe but he didn’t
get out. The thing passed directly over my truck with a great sound and a
rush of wind. It sounded like thunder and my truck rocked from the flash....
I felt a lot of heat.” Crawling out and seeing the object disappear in the
direction of Levelland, he restarted the engine and drove back to Levelland
to report the incident to the sheriff[IX-2].
The sheriff was soon receiving reports from other persons who had been
driving in the same area at about the same time. They said that they, too,
had seen a blazing object which they described as a “flying egg” or “egg-
shaped fireball.” Their cars, like Saucedo’s, had stalled and then restarted
when the object disappeared. A number of townspeople telephoned the
authorities to report bright flashes in the sky, and the police comment that
“everyone who called was very excited”[IX-3] was probably an
understatement.

Under headlines such as “Mystery Object Stalls Autos in West Texas,”
these stories hit newspapers all over the nation. The news spread fast. All
day Sunday dozens of persons in Texas and New Mexico were relating that
they, too, had seen fiery objects and flashes of light in the sky the night
before. An amazingly large number of citizens seem to have been out late
that stormy Saturday night, but apparently none of them noticed any
ordinary lightning—only phantom “somethings” variously described as a
burning mass, a big light, an egg-shaped object 200 feet long lighted up as
though it were on fire, something like neon lights, objects that were red,
glowing, brilliant, fiery, bluish-green, or pulsating green.
Not surprisingly, with all this publicity, the original incident quickly
began to take on new dimensions. Saucedo amplified his first statements
and recalled that the object had been “torpedo-shaped,” “like a rocket, but
much larger,” and that lights on the object had seemed to be winking on and
off[IX-4].
For days the Russian satellites had to share the spotlight with the
American flying eggs, while both amateur and professional investigators
tried to solve the mystery. The proponents of UFOs deduced the presence of
a flying saucer with E-M powers. Various astronomers, when urged by
newsmen, reluctantly advanced off-the-cuff theories based on the meager
printed accounts. Dr. La Paz, of the Institute of Meteoritics in New Mexico,
suggested that the things seen at Levelland might have been fireballs. A
reporter assigned to the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatories to cover
Moonwatch observations of the new Sputnik gave a sketchy summary of
the incident to Dr. Menzel, who also concluded that Saucedo might have
seen an unusually bright meteor and, startled by its brilliance, might
accidentally have killed the engine. Lacking news of Sputnik II, the reporter
sent in a facetious story asserting that, according to the director of the
Harvard College Observatory, the flying eggs were mirages that so
frightened the drivers that they reacted by pressing a “nervous foot” on the
accelerator and killing the engine. When the weather conditions at
Levelland became known, of course, the meteor theory was immediately
discarded. Dr. Nininger, of the American Meteorite Museum in Arizona,
made the best guess of all: Saucedo had observed an example of that rare
phenomenon, ball lightning[IX-5].

Within a few days an Air Force investigator visited Levelland to study
the incident. Members of civilian saucer groups complained later that, since
he spent only seven hours in the area, he had obviously not taken the
problem seriously and could not have found the correct solution. Even
seventy hours of labor, however, could not have produced a clearer picture.
Saucedo had unquestionably had a frightening experience, very much as he
originally described it. But as in many UFO sightings, most of the other
reports had been stimulated chiefly by the general excitement. Three
persons, not “dozens,” had seen the phenomenon near the ground. From ten
to fifteen others (including the sheriff) had not observed it at close quarters
but had merely seen brilliant flashes of light in the sky.
After studying the weather reports and the descriptions given by the
various witnesses, the Air Force issued an explanation, unfortunately
ambiguous because it omitted the necessary word “either,” stating that the
phenomenon observed at Levelland had been “ball lightning or St. Elmo’s
fire.” Supporters of the saucer theory seized on this ambiguity to protest,
correctly, that ball lightning and St. Elmo’s fire are two different
phenomena. They went on to conclude by some process of peculiar logic
that neither ball lightning nor St. Elmo’s fire was involved and that the
phenomenon had actually been a flying saucer.
Saucer publications have printed thousands of words to support this
argument. The evidence, however, leads to an overwhelming probability:
the fiery unknown at Levelland was ball lightning.

The Phenomenon of Ball Lightning

Most of us know very little about lightning. On the average, it causes
some 180 deaths each year. Many persons when caught outdoors by a
thunderstorm run to shelter under a tree, not realizing that the tree itself
offers the most attractive target to the electrically charged clouds overhead.
Even the scientists who make a special study of the phenomenon still have
much to learn about the conditions that produce lightning and its various
manifestations[IX-6].

The most familiar type is the lightning we see in stormy weather; it
flashes in brilliant zigzags from zenith to horizon, darts from cloud to
cloud, or strikes like a javelin toward earth. At night, particularly in the
country where no city lights mask its brilliance, lightning can be a
frightening elemental force. A form popularly called “heat” or “sheet”
lightning is a familiar, almost playful phenomenon in the midwest and
southwest, although comparatively rare on the east coast. In hot, humid
weather it flares intermittently near the horizon, noiseless because the
luminous “sheets” are merely reflections of an ordinary zigzag flash that is
too far away to be heard. “Bead lightning” has also been reported,
appearing as a chain of spheroids that gradually fade away as they
discharge. A spectacular display of “pinched lightning,” an even rarer
phenomenon (see Plate Va), was photographed in late August 1961 at Los
Alamos, New Mexico, during a severe thunderstorm[IX-7]. Ball lightning,
which seems to be commoner in Europe than in North America (just as
tornadoes are commoner in North America than in Europe) is so little
understood that some scientists have doubted its reality. In recent years,
laboratory research has added much to our knowledge of ball lightning and
Soviet scientists in particular have studied it as a possible weapon against
enemy planes[IX-8].
Ball lightning is usually described as a luminous ball whose diameter
ranges from a few inches to several feet; the color may be red to orange or
blue to white. These lightning balls appear most frequently toward the end
of an electrical storm when the air is highly ionized, often just after a
nearby lightning flash. They look and act like solid objects. They can hang
motionless or drift in the air, glide along telephone wires or fences, roll
down chimneys and across the floor to radio or TV sets, float a few inches
above the ground or high in the sky. The ball persists as an entity for a time
ranging from several seconds to many minutes; it may then evaporate
noiselessly, or may disappear with an explosive noise and a force that can
damage nearby objects[IX-8a]. One of the few existing photographs of ball
lightning was taken at Lincoln, Nebraska, on August 30, 1930 (see
Plate Vb).
American, European, and Soviet scientists have suggested various
theories, none of them entirely satisfactory, to explain the formation of ball
lightning[IX-9, IX-10, IX-11]. These evanescent fiery globes probably

represent some sort of continuous electric current perhaps held together by
its own magnetic field, like the fabled hoop snake that could roll along the
ground by holding its tail in its mouth.
In 1938 the pilot of a BOAC plane en route to Iraq, flying in dense
cloud and rain at 8500 feet, reported that a ball of fire had entered the rear
cabin and burst with a loud explosion. One or two minutes later it (or
another lightning ball) entered the cockpit through the window which was
open for visibility, singed the hair and eyebrows of the pilot, then bounced
on through the forward passenger cabin and into the rear cabin, where it
again exploded[IX-12].
Similar incidents have been reported by Soviet pilots. In the summer of
1956, a Soviet transport plane flying at about 10,000 feet was struck by ball
lightning during a very rough flight through a stormy cold front. A fiery
red-orange ball ten to fifteen inches in diameter appeared in front of the
aircraft, swerved to the left, struck the left propeller and exploded with a
loud detonation and a blinding white flash. The intense electrical discharge
destroyed radio communication between the plane and the ground and
disabled the radio compass. In attempting to disconnect the antenna, the
radio operator received an electric shock. When the plane landed and was
examined, one of the blades of the left propeller was found to be slightly
damaged and a small fused area and a deposit of soot were found on the
edge of the airfoil a few inches from its end[IX-13].
A similar case occurred in December 1956, when a Soviet jet had
entered a storm cloud and was climbing through it. As the plane reached the
top of the cloud, at an altitude of 12,000 to 15,000 feet, ball lightning
suddenly appeared a short distance ahead and to the right of the plane, and
exploded with a dull but piercing noise and a blinding flash; the ball then
broke into a series of beads. Although one of the engines close to the ball
died at the instant of the explosion, the crew were able to start it again and
the flight continued normally. After landing and finding no mechanical
damage, they concluded that the engine had failed temporarily because the
explosion had formed a region of intense rarefied air that deprived the
engine of oxygen[IX-13].
Ball lightning has often been reported near the ground, as in the
Levelland case. In the summer of 1934 Mr. Durward, a British

meteorologist, while driving along the bank of a lake observed the
phenomenon: “It began to rain heavily, with slight or moderate thunder and
lightning. His son, a boy of twelve, was opening the iron gates, spaced at
intervals on this road, and found one difficult to open. Mr. Durward, while
walking the short distance from the motor-car to the gate to assist his son,
saw among the pine trees on his left what looked like a ball of fire about 12
in. in diameter moving towards them. It struck the iron gatepost farthest
from the latch. There was no noise, but the boy, who had his hand on the
latch, gave a yell; for the next few hours he was unable to lower his
arm.”[IX-12]
In Levelland the night of November 2 conditions were ideal for the
formation of ball lightning. For several days the area had been experiencing
freak weather, and on the night in question had been visited by rain,
thunderstorms, and lightning. Shortly before the glowing sphere approached
the truck, the two men had noticed a lightning flash in a nearby field. The
original description of the phenomenon—a “flaming ball” or a “fiery
tornado” that floated toward and over the truck and detonated with light and
heat—fits the classic picture of ball lightning. The truck’s engine may have
died for one of several reasons. The rain during the evening could have
seeped under the hood and soaked the ignition or dampened the spark plugs.
The feed line may have been clogged. Or the region of highly rarefied air
created by the ball lightning may temporarily have deprived the engine of
oxygen.
Of the other drivers near Levelland that night who reported having
trouble with balky motors and seeing a blazing object like an egg-shaped
fireball, three probably saw ball lightning. Others, after hearing Saucedo’s
frightening story, perhaps unconsciously dramatized their own experiences
and magnified ordinary lightning flashes into attacking fiery objects. It is
significant that although the night was stormy, only Saucedo reported
seeing the ordinary lightning that normally accompanies a thunderstorm.
Since ball lightning is short-lived and cannot be preserved as tangible
evidence, its appearance in Levelland on the night of November 2 can never
be absolutely proved, even though this explanation fits all the facts—facts
that in themselves do not warrant so lengthy a study. Only the saucer
proponents could have converted so trivial a series of events—a few stalled
automobiles, balls of flame in the sky at the end of a thunderstorm—into a

national mystery. Ball lightning doubtless accounts for other UFO reports,
such as the phenomenon observed at Lock Raven Dam on October 26,
1958, when two men returning late at night from a fishing trip saw a
flaming ball hovering above the superstructure of a bridge; the ball
exploded with a loud noise and a brilliant white flash and disappeared.

E-M and Non-E-M Saucers

The next UFOs reported in this series belonged to the old-fashioned,
non-E-M variety. From White Sands Proving Grounds near Alamogordo,
New Mexico, came a report that military police, while patrolling the up-
range in a jeep about 2:30 Sunday morning (a few hours after the Saucedo
incident), had seen a brilliant reddish-orange light, shaped like an egg,
hovering in the sky. From its apparent distance (two to three miles away)
and apparent size (as large as a grapefruit held at arm’s length), the men
deduced that it was a huge object, 75 to 100 yards in diameter[IX-2]. After
remaining motionless for about three minutes, it descended toward the
ground and disappeared. (According to some versions, it later rose into the
sky and then disappeared.) Members of another jeep patrol soon matched
this tale with the report that on Sunday night about eight o’clock they had
seen a bright, glowing object hovering in the sky but, instead of landing, it
suddenly climbed until it got so far up it looked like a star. Both jeeps, it
should be noted, continued to function normally.
Officials at White Sands soon dampened the excitement. The
description of the light that appeared at 2:30 a.m. included certain doubtful
factors. The night had been overcast and so dark that the stars were not
visible, although the cloud cover was broken at intervals. Since the sighting
had not included any object of known distance or known size for
comparison, the estimates of the UFO’s distance and size were of no value.
The light might have been small and close; it might equally well have been
huge and far away. Under the circumstances, the most probable explanation
was that the men had glimpsed the moon (then roughly half full) through
broken clouds, and that the apparent movement was an illusion produced by
the moving clouds. The Sunday evening UFO was unquestionably the
planet Venus. Then nearly at maximum brilliance, it was a conspicuous

object in the western sky after sunset and inspired many saucer reports
during this week of anxiety.
The White Sands incidents had reached the papers, however, and
contributed to the general hysteria. By Monday afternoon, flying eggs were
allegedly stopping automobiles as far north as Canada, but the Southwest
continued to hold the center of the UFO stage against all competition.
On Monday night, November 4, the Alamogordo, New Mexico, radio
station broadcast a dramatic interview with an engineer from Holloman Air
Force Base, New Mexico, describing his sighting of an E-M-radiating UFO
at least 500 feet long. About one o’clock on Monday afternoon, Mr. X
stated, he was returning to base after a weekend in El Paso[IX-4]. While
driving along a desert stretch of U. S. Highway 54 near the town of
Orogrande, he noticed a group of cars stopped ahead of him, their
passengers standing in the road, pointing at the sky. Looking up, he saw an
iridescent egg-shaped object at least 500 feet long—more than twice the
size of the UFOs reported in the preceding two days. As it approached, the
flying egg exerted a force that killed the engine of his car, generated a wave
of heat that gave him a bad burn, and demonstrated a startling new
characteristic: it silenced the radio in his car. (During the next few days,
reports of similar encounters usually included a jammed radio.) When the
UFO took off toward the mountains and disappeared, Mr. X started his car
again and drove on into Alamogordo to the home of a friend, Mrs. Coral
Lorenzen.
One of the most zealous amateur investigators of UFO reports, Mrs.
Lorenzen had founded the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization
(APRO) (see Chapter xiii) in January 1952, and from 1954 to 1956 had
been employed at Holloman Air Force Base. After listening to Mr. X’s story
and examining the notes he had scribbled during the sighting (unfortunately
they proved to be illegible, but for some reason no one has ever suggested
that the pen or pencil was also hexed by the UFO), she hurried him down to
the local radio station where he made the taped interview that was broadcast
later that evening.
A daylight visit by an E-M flying egg 500 feet in length would
supposedly have attracted the attention of many witnesses. Air Force
investigators could find only one: Mr. X. According to his testimony, the

passengers of several automobiles (his estimate of the number of cars varied
from time to time but he eventually settled on ten) had stood in the road
watching the unknown object. A persistent search by Air Force officials
failed to locate any one of these persons. The witness showed no sign of the
burns he allegedly suffered. In short, the only evidence to support his story
was Mr. X’s own and the authorities sensibly concluded that the incident
was either a hoax or a hallucination, inspired by newspaper publicity about
Levelland’s flying eggs.
Tuesday morning’s chief contribution to the UFO epidemic was not to
be laughed off so easily, for it was made by trained military personnel. At
5:10 a.m. on November 5, the Coast Guard cutter Sebago, traveling north in
the Gulf of Mexico, detected an erratically maneuvering UFO on the
radarscope. The swiftly moving object would race across and off the scope,
only to reappear almost immediately from another direction and position
and again move off the scope at incredible speed. After ten minutes the
radar target vanished, but watchers on the deck glimpsed a glowing object,
brilliant as a planet; it streaked across the sky just above the northwest
horizon and vanished. The unknown radar targets then returned and
continued to fill the scope with their incredible movements until 5:37, when
they finally disappeared and did not return.
This mystery, too, yielded to orderly investigation. Air Force radar
experts made a detailed analysis of the data and positively identified the
mysterious returns. They had not come from the complex air traffic
overhead, as had first been suggested, nor from a fantastically
maneuverable spaceship. They were merely false targets produced by the
weather conditions (see Chapter viii). The brilliant light that flashed across
the sky was not reported by the radarscope and had no relation to the radar
returns. In view for a few seconds at most, brilliant in the morning twilight
(the sun rose some fifty minutes later), the flash of light was probably a
distant meteor—November is rich in meteor displays.

The Saturnian Visitors

Tuesday evening while the nation was still wondering about the flying
eggs in New Mexico and the invisible UFOs that buzzed the Sebago,

welcome comic relief appeared. A man named Schmidt, a grain buyer,
announced that during the afternoon he had visited with the crew of a flying
saucer that had landed to make repairs. While driving in the country near
Kearney, Nebraska, he said, he had noticed a bright flash about a quarter of
a mile away. Going closer to investigate, he perceived a huge silvery ship a
hundred feet long, thirty feet wide, and fourteen feet high, which had landed
in a dry river bed. The motor of his car then died. He got out and was
walking toward the ship when a light shot out and paralyzed him. The ship
opened and two men emerged. After searching him for concealed weapons,
they released him from paralysis and invited him into the ship, where he
spent half an hour chatting with these strangers and their female
companions, mostly in High German and English. (He knew that they came
from outer space but not until some weeks later, when they paid him a
second visit, did he discover that they were natives of the planet Saturn.)
[IX-14] After he left the ship it rose straight up into the sky and
disappeared, while he hurried back to town to report to the sheriff, to
broadcast an account of his experience over the local radio, and to give his
story to the newspapers.
It is perhaps a measure of the panic level that week that local officials
actually examined the ground at the “landing” site, looking for evidence.
They found none. The four “hydraulic rams” that allegedly supported the
huge machine had left no imprint on the sand of the dry river bed. Traces of
oil found on the ground were tested chemically and proved to be the same
brand that the witness carried in the trunk of his car.
Gaining national notoriety from this incident, Schmidt soon became a
popular lecturer at flying-saucer clubs, thrilling the audience with tales of
later visits from the Saturnians and his journeys in their spaceship to the
Arctic Circle, through the waters under the North Pole, and even into outer
space. A year or so later his extraterrestrial friends allegedly tipped him off
to the location of certain valuable minerals on earth, including veins of
quartz that had the desirable property of curing cancer. To mine this quartz
and thus make it available to humanity, he enlisted the sympathy and
financial aid of a number of lonely, wealthy widows. Some of these ladies
eventually came to believe that they had been the victims of fraud and, in
1961, a California jury agreed with them. The Saturnians apparently have
not yet reappeared to help their friend out of his difficulties.

Surveillance by Flying Eggs

Wednesday November 6 was relatively calm on the UFO front, although
automobile engines died, radios malfunctioned, and TV screens blurred at
about the time that lights were reported in the sky in Texas, New Mexico,
Illinois, and Canada. Accounts received later by saucer organizations stated
that on Tuesday (or Wednesday) night an orange-colored, whistling, E-M
type of UFO had hovered near Fort Itaipu in Brazil, caused a temporary
failure of the electric lights, and then knocked out the generating plant for
several moments. Since the alleged visitation occurred in a foreign country
it was not, of course, open to study by the United States Air Force. In any
case investigation would have been difficult, since the report failed to
include such facts as the exact time of appearance, position, and direction of
movement of the UFO. The witnesses, whose names were not given,
apparently related the incident under pledge of secrecy to other persons who
insisted on remaining anonymous, who passed the story on to still others
who refused to be named, who in turn gave the news to reporters, who
signed only their initials[IX-15]. So insubstantial a tale obviously does not
merit serious investigation. The dimming of electric lights and the
capricious behavior of a generating system are not extraordinary
phenomena and no UFO is required to account for them.
The next incident to gain publicity in this amazing week occurred on
Thursday (or Wednesday) evening when a UFO allegedly landed in Ohio
and then vanished. Driving home in the early evening along a country road,
a Mr. Olden Moore saw a glowing UFO in the sky. At first it looked small,
like a star, but it rapidly increased in size and split apart in the air as it
descended and apparently landed in a nearby field. Moore stopped his car,
intending to investigate, but for some reason he changed his mind and
instead drove on home to get his wife. When they returned and searched the
field they found nothing. Nevertheless, they reported the incident to the
authorities and next day a Civilian Defense official, arriving to check the
ground where the UFO supposedly had landed, reported the level of
radioactivity “far above normal.”
A woman living half a mile away from the field in question reported
that, although she herself had not seen a UFO, her TV set had blurred at
about the time of the sighting, and on the following day she found that her

car, parked near the house, was pockmarked. Applying his Geiger counter
to the car, the Civilian Defense official pronounced it radioactive[IX-16].
This UFO apparently possessed highly selective E-M powers: it did not stop
the engine of Mr. Moore’s car but did interfere with the operation of a TV
set half a mile away!
Air Force investigators patiently collected and sifted the facts. The
supposed landing site showed nothing abnormal—the grass was not burned,
the earth was not disturbed, no foreign material could be found. The normal
radioactivity of the ground in the area measured .18 milliroentgens; at the
supposed landing site the measure had been .20 milliroentgens. This
difference of .02 is not “far above normal” but well within the probable
error in the calibration of the instruments.
Interviews with other Ohioans who had also seen the glowing unknown
provided the answer: the UFO was a large meteor, conspicuous in the dusk
of early evening. Traveling directly toward the witness, it had looked like a
glowing sphere suspended in the air and rapidly increasing in brightness.
Near the end of its flight it split into two or more pieces and fell silently to
the earth, not “in the next field” but perhaps many miles away. The blurring
of the TV set may have been mere coincidence or, if the meteor had actually
passed close by, may have resulted from the ionized trail of the meteor (see
Chapter v).

Saucerdom’s Miraculous Electromagnetic Force

Most of us remember the nursery tale of Chicken-Little, who started a
panic in the barnyard kingdom with her eyewitness report that the sky was
falling: “I saw it with my eyes, I heard it with my ears, and a piece of it fell
on my tail.” Calm was restored in the kingdom, after a time, when the
prosaic truth came to light: a falling acorn, not a piece of the sky, had
grazed the credulous chick.
In somewhat similar fashion, the hysteria caused by the car-stalling
flying eggs subsided. As the Russian satellites gliding across the night sky
proved more interesting to the public than hypothetical spaceships, flying-
saucer stories occupied less and less space in the daily papers and the

number of UFO reports dwindled. Air Force investigators worked hard at
the job of separating facts from fantasy and by Saturday November 9, 1957,
the end of a wild week, the panic was over. During the two years following,
1958 and 1959, fewer than a dozen E-M-equipped UFOs were reported
over the entire American continent.
The civilian flying-saucer groups, however, rejected the normal
explanations of the November reports except that of the Schmidt-Saturnian
meeting, which all but the cultists indignantly denounced as a hoax
publicized to embarrass sincere students of UFOs. Dissatisfied with the
solutions found by the Air Force, the National Investigations Committee on
Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) carried out an independent study (see Chapter
xiii) of the November sightings, and in June 1960 issued a booklet entitled
“Electro-Magnetic Effects Associated With Unidentified Flying Objects
(UFO’s).” After examining many reports of E-M phenomena and rejecting
an unspecified number as unreliable, members of the investigating
committee studied the evidence in a series of eighty-one incidents occurring
over a period of fifteen years, roughly a third of which were reported during
the week of the Levelland panic[IX-17].
The cases include instances in which, allegedly, electrical appliances
failed to function, at the same time and the same place in which a witness
observed a UFO. In some cases a witness observed electromagnetic effects
but did not see a UFO, at the same time that a neighboring witness saw a
UFO but did not observe electromagnetic effects. The effects in question
include the stopping, missing, sputtering, and near-quitting of automobile
motors; the dimming or flickering of automobile headlights; static, roar, or
fading of car radios; the dimming and brightening of house lights; the
dimming and brightening of cabin lights in airplanes; the blurring of TV
screens; the temporary loss of picture and/or sound in a TV set; the stopping
of watches and clocks; and odd noises over a telephone wire.
This list may astonish the average citizen who has often endured similar
annoyances and never thought of blaming UFOs for his troubles. Most
householders know that watches run down, that houselights dim and
brighten with the changing demands made on the city electrical system, and
that a plane flying over a house can blur the image on a TV screen. There
can be few readers of this book who have not at some time experienced
such brief frustrations with automobiles, radios, TV sets, and timepieces—

the ordinary troubles that keep our repairmen in business without assistance
from UFOs.
To the heterogeneous data provided by these eighty-one cases, the
committee attempted to apply the precise tools of logic and mathematics in
order to establish a correlation between UFOs and electromagnetic effects,
and concluded that a cause-and-effect relationship probably did exist.
With suitable material, statistical methods can suggest a correlation
between any two sets of facts and can estimate the probability that the
correlation is significant and not due to chance. No competent statistician,
however, would try to apply the methods to such amorphous and uncertain
data as those used by the committee. More than a third of the incidents cited
come from newspaper accounts or the private files of saucer organizations
in foreign countries. All leave many unanswered questions. At least two
involve fully identified objects: the great fireball of September 18, 1954 (p.
92), and the three fireballs of April 6, 1955, may well have caused some
radio interference but they were not UFOs. Even with the well-reported
cases, a conscientious historian would find it nearly impossible to determine
precisely what the witnesses saw, what they heard, what they did, and what
they said.
The various printed accounts of the Levelland incidents, for example,
vary in many details. The events took place in an atmosphere of excitement
and the stories inevitably changed slightly with each retelling. The reports
of Air Force investigators, records in the files of civilian saucer
organizations, statements in newspapers, magazines, and books—no two
give exactly the same version of any given incident. Although the points of
disagreement are often trivial, they are sometimes vital to finding the
correct explanation.
Even if, for the sake of argument, a statistician were willing to accept
the evidence of the eighty-one cases at face value, he would still not attempt
to establish a correlation between UFOs and E-M effects. The probability
that a (postulated) UFO will appear at a given time or place is unknown; the
probability that an electrical appliance will fail to work at a given time or
place is equally unknown. Hence the probability that the two phenomena
will occur together at a given time and place is a concept that has no
meaning.

Effects and Causes

Asked to explain what caused the failures of engines, radios, watches,
etc. reported during the week of the Levelland sightings, any high school
physics student who answered, “Some new kind of electromagnetic force”
would properly receive a grade of zero. Admittedly there are physical
phenomena that the scientist does not yet understand, but he does know that
electrical and magnetic forces do not and can not perform all the feats
attributed to them by saucer enthusiasts.
The electrical failures ascribed to E-M forces undoubtedly had a variety
of causes. Automobile engines can stall for many reasons. Rain seeping
under the hood of a car can soak the ignition and temporarily interfere with
smooth operation. Sand or dust or a vapor lock in the fuel line can do the
same. The body of an automobile is metal and completely encloses the
ignition system and the motor. The engine stops if it is deprived of gasoline
or oxygen, but it does not stop if lightning strikes the car. The metal body
acts as a shield that electrical forces cannot penetrate.
Every driver knows that the reception on a car radio normally varies
from poor to fair; it rarely remains constant. While moving beneath a power
line, a car may receive no radio signals at all. A high-tension line can be
surrounded by an electrical field that makes a radio set hum or buzz
raucously and completely jams the reception. Static or a powerful
interfering signal can easily jam a car’s radio, but no electrical field, static
or oscillating, can kill a car’s motor or shut off its lights or stop the
dashboard clock; it could not stop the driver’s wrist watch, and it could not
stop a man’s watch without seriously injuring the wearer, even if he were
standing in an open field.
Radio and TV sets may function badly for one of many reasons. They
may simply need a good repairman! A passing plane, a more powerful
transmitting station on the air, auroral activity, stormy weather, ultraviolet
radiation, or clouds of ejected atoms from the sun—any of these can disrupt
radio or TV communication, but they do not interfere with the operation of
gasoline engines.
All meteors bright enough to be seen can cause some radio and TV
interference—and in the first week of November the Taurid shower is

approaching its maximum. Although meteors do not, by themselves, emit
any appreciable amount of radio energy, the friction between the swiftly
moving meteoric body and the atmosphere produces a train of hot gases that
can momentarily reflect radio waves. The brightest meteors leave behind
them a persistent cloud of luminous, electrified gas that can absorb radio
waves and thus blanket incoming signals for several minutes after the
meteor has passed. A spectacular fireball observed about 8:30 p.m. M.S.T.
on April 18, 1962, momentarily turned off the street lights in the town of
Eureka, Utah; it was so bright that it triggered the photoelectric control, just
as daybreak does[IX-17a].
No imaginable single force—electric, magnetic, or gravitational—could
possibly have caused all the effects attributed to saucerdom’s miraculous
electromagnetic force. An E-M field with the postulated powers is as
improbable as a force that would lift fallen apples from the ground and
draw them up to reunite with the branches of their parent tree.
Let us suppose for a moment, however, that the incidents in the
Levelland epidemic might have occurred just as they are described by the
NICAP committee. If UFOs had been visiting the earth that week,
projecting a force field that performed as claimed, certain other events
should also have occurred.
Thousands of automobiles should have been, but were not, temporarily
disabled in the neighborhood of every car-stopping UFO. Fantastic traffic
jams have sometimes been caused by torrid weather and consequent vapor
locks in the fuel lines of automobile engines. In June 1961, for example, a
sudden heat wave in Boston caused a vapor-lock epidemic that tied up
traffic on the main highways for three hours. On some stretches of road so
many cars were immobilized that, with their hoods up to cool off, they
looked “like a convention of pelicans.” No such traffic jams were reported
in connection with the 1957 UFOs. In South Springfield, Ohio, a car and a
taxicab stalled but the vehicles around them experienced no trouble. One
car stalled in Houston and another in Santa Fe, but the traffic around them
proceeded as usual.
Hundreds of TV sets should have blurred, but did not, in the
neighborhood of every TV-blurring UFO.

Equally surprising, no one complained of UFO interference with hi-fi
sets, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines, irons, freezers, or
electric razors. No airplane, helicopter, motorcycle, or ocean liner reported
engine trouble.
At least two landings were reported, in New Mexico and Ohio. No
physical evidence of landing could be found—shrubs were not crushed,
grass was not scorched, ground was not disturbed.
Except for the Sebago, no radar reported the presence of a UFO.
Moonwatch teams, trained specifically to detect, observe, and plot the
exact path of moving objects in the sky, were on the alert that week all over
the United States and Canada. They did not see even one unidentified flying
object.

“G-Fields” and UFO Propulsion

Even more fantastic than the E-M force that stops cars and silences
radios is the artificial gravitational field or “G-field,” which saucer
enthusiasts call on to account for all UFOs whose reported behavior clearly
contradicts the laws of physics. Employing electromagnetic forces, the
UFOs supposedly can create a variety of G-fields as needed, to be used as a
defense weapon, a means to invisibility, or a method of
propulsion[IX-18, IX-19].
Writers of science fiction have regularly utilized similar handy
expedients such as “gravity shields,” “force fields,” “inertia drives,” and
“space warps” to move their heroes quickly from earth to remote parts of
the galaxy. Physicists, too, dream of revealing new aspects of nature that
would allow man to nullify the effects of gravity and make short cuts
through space, but they realize that such devices, even if theoretically not
impossible, must await unimaginable discoveries about nature and are at
least far in the future.
Unlike the amateur investigator of UFOs, both the storyteller and the
physicist know that if and when such advances are made, they will enlarge
our understanding of the cosmos, as did the creative insights of Galileo,

Newton, and Einstein, but new discoveries cannot invalidate what we have
already learned about how the universe works. Many of the properties
ascribed to UFOs imply a complete breakdown of physical law. They
belong to the realm of magic, not science. Traveling at speeds approaching
the velocity of light, reversing direction instantaneously, achieving
maximum acceleration or deceleration in a fraction of a second, becoming
invisible at will—such feats are impossible for a solid body moving either
in an atmosphere or in space. Most of the serious proponents of the saucer
hypothesis acknowledge that such actions are impossible, according to our
present knowledge, but they argue that alien races more advanced than
earthmen have undoubtedly found new sources of power and developed
new methods of propulsion. Elaborate theories have been constructed,
phrased in nearly incomprehensible scientific jargon, to show that UFOs do
not flout the laws of physics but merely operate under laws that are still
unknown to human beings.
To UFO investigators whose professional training lies chiefly in fields
other than physics—business, the arts, entertainment, military science,
government, the law, medicine, or religion—such theories might well seem
plausible. But to the physicist they seem so irrational that they do not even
deserve discussion, and he dismisses them as nonsense. Saucer believers
thereupon denounce the physicist as a bigot, complain of his “closed mind,”
and piously invoke the ghost of Galileo. They forget, apparently, that the
persecutors of Galileo were specialists in theology and had only a nodding
acquaintance with astronomy.
One of the earliest theories of UFO propulsion suggested that saucers
got their motive power by tapping the lines of force in the earth’s magnetic
field. One author wrote:
“The earth being simply a huge magnet, a dynamo wound with
magnetic lines of force as its coils, tenescopically [the meaning of this
impressive word is unknown to the present authors] counted to be 1,257 to
the square centimeter in one direction and 1,850 to the square centimeter in
the other direction (eddy currents), indicates that natural law has placed
these lines as close together as the hairs on one’s head. And yet they never
touch or cross each other if let alone. If done so by accident the catastrophe
would spread like a searchlight and destroy everything in its path.”[IX-20,
p. 139]

The same author asserts that such a “catastrophe” is the true explanation
of Mantell’s death (p. 33). Supposedly objecting to his close approach, the
occupants of the saucer he was chasing manipulated some of the lines of
force until they crossed in front of Mantell; the resulting surge of power
knocked the plane out of the air. Under some conditions, he adds, the
crossing of the lines can produce desirable effects, such as the Aurora
Borealis, when “we have magnetic lines of force that are crossing one
another at or near the geographic and the magnetic poles and as a result we
see those beautiful colored lights.”[IX-20, p. 141]
To the physicist, these statements are an unsavory verbal hash. Lines of
force cannot provide a source of power and they cannot cause explosions—
they are not even real. Created merely to describe the behavior of magnetic
fields, they have no more objective existence than a train of thought. By
using the convenient fiction that lines of force emerge from the north
magnetic pole, spread apart as they flow around the earth, and then crowd
close together again as they enter the south magnetic pole, the physicist is
able to map observed variations in the earth’s magnetic field. In a similar
way the geographer uses contour lines to map high and low areas on the
earth’s surface.
A spacecraft could not propel itself by hitching to magnetic lines of
force any more than a man could travel from Philadelphia to Peru by sliding
down the 75th line of longitude.
The more sophisticated students of UFO behavior do not propose
magnetic lines of force as a source of power. In fact they skip lightly over
the awkward question of how the saucers are propelled and vaguely assert
that extraterrestrial vehicles obtain energy (apparently without doing
equivalent work) by somehow plugging in to the cosmic rays and magnetic
fields that exist in space. Thus having access to unlimited power, a saucer
supposedly draws on E-M forces to create and enclose itself in a kind of
cocoon of artificial gravity. This G-field cuts off the attraction of the earth
and other heavenly bodies, enables the saucer to attract or repel any
approaching object, and allows it to travel almost as fast as light without
suffering an increase in mass or a transformation into energy[IX-18].

The G-Field Myth

To explain the alleged properties and behavior of flying saucers, a
variety of speculations have been published on the nature and operation of
the G-field[IX-18, IX-19, IX-21]. In the physicist’s view, most of these
ideas belong more to the realm of magic than of science but we shall
summarize them briefly, with a few parenthetical comments.
A UFO supposedly can travel at speeds of thousands of miles an hour
and shatter the sound barrier without making any noise because the G-field
would create a kind of protective envelope around the saucer. But if the G-
field breaks down for any reason, so that the protective envelope is opened,
then the ionized moving air hits ordinary static air and creates the
thunderous detonation produced by some UFOs. (Even with an intact G-
field, a boundary or gradient would always exist somewhere between the air
that was dragged along by the saucer and the air that was not. A thunderous
impact would certainly occur at this barrier.)
The “invisible” UFOs supposedly become so by using the G-field to
bend or deflect rays of light. (It is true that starlight passing near the sun’s
gravitational field suffers a deflection that makes the star appear slightly
displaced from its actual position on the celestial sphere, but a shift in
apparent location does not dim a star and does not make it invisible.
Furthermore the amount of deflection is only 1.75 seconds of arc, less than
half of a thousandth of a degree! To produce even this small deflection, a
covey of saucers would have to be able to increase its mass to equal that of
the sun: 1.97 times 1033 grams! What this increase in mass would do to the
rest of the solar system doesn’t bear thinking of.)
Angel hair (see Chapter xi) is supposed to be a waste product from the
operation of the G-field. The ionization of the air inside the G-field
allegedly would create heavy atoms that reacted chemically with the atoms
in ordinary air to produce a kind of precipitate that falls to the ground and
disappears as the ionization decreases. (In the physics laboratory, ionization
means taking an electron away from an electrically neutral atom. The
resulting atom would not be heavier. The contact between ordinary air and
that in the ionized trail of a meteor has never yet produced “angel hair.” No
laboratory has ever reported that isotopes of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen,

and other elements in the atmosphere can react with their normal analogues
to produce precipitates. A change in ionization cannot make a chemical
compound disappear.)
The envelope of air enclosed by the G-field is supposed to allow a UFO
to accelerate or change direction instantaneously, even when flying at
enormous speeds, because the UFO would not encounter atmospheric
friction. (Vehicles moving in the earth’s gravitational field are also
surrounded by a cushion of air, but they still must overcome friction.)
At this point the whole G-field myth falls apart. One of the fundamental
laws established by Newton, to which no exception has ever been found in
the laboratory, states that a moving object will continue to move in a
straight line unless it encounters an applied force. Let us suppose, for the
moment, that a gravity shield could suddenly be interposed between a
spacecraft and the earth, and thus make the craft reverse its direction of
flight. The occupants would still be subject to the law of inertia. They
would be hurled against the wall of the craft with a violence far greater than
that experienced by a plane crashing to earth from an altitude of 30,000
feet. There could be no cushioning of the blow.
Such dreams demonstrate an almost contemptuous disregard for reality.
Physicists admittedly do not yet understand the basic nature of gravity, but
they do know a great deal about how it acts. Gravity is the force that holds
the universe together. It exerts a pull on all objects in the physical world—
the earth, the moon, the planets, our sun, the distant stars, and even the stars
in other galaxies. All these bodies without exception move according to the
law of universal gravitation as formulated by Newton and refined by
Einstein: Every particle in the universe attracts every other particle with a
force that is proportional to the product of their masses, and inversely
proportional to the square of the distance between them. The magnitude of
the force depends only on the masses of the bodies and on their distances
from each other. It does not depend at all on the nature of the medium that
separates them. It operates unchanged through stone, metal, water, air, or
empty space. With a metal shield we can reduce electrical forces to zero;
with a soft-iron shield we can weaken magnetic forces; but no substance
existing in nature can act as a shield to shut out the force of gravitation.

Electricity, Magnetism, and Gravity

No responsible scientist would assert that man has found out all there is
to know about the universe, and few would insist that some kind of a shield
for gravity is an absolute impossibility. As yet, however, no laboratory has
detected any phenomenon that might be a clue to “negative gravity.” In
recent years nuclear physicists have occasionally caught fleeting glimpses
of what has been called “anti-matter,” electrons with positive charges and
protons with negative charges—the reverse of their charges in the normal
world. Some investigators have speculated on the gravitational properties of
anti-matter, and have wondered whether it might exert a force that would
repel instead of attract.
So far no one has been able to think of an experiment to test the idea.
Even if someone could find a way to collect a thimbleful of anti-matter,
when he brought it into contact with normal matter, it, he, and his
surroundings would instantly detonate like a super-colossal neutron bomb.
Many physicists believe that, since electrical forces operate independently
of gravitational forces, interchanging the charges on protons and electrons
would probably have no effect on the gravitational field. Theoretical study
and computations may someday yield an answer.
For years scientists have been searching for a “unified field theory,” a
single equation that would describe the interrelationship among electrical,
magnetic, and gravitational forces. Such a mathematical statement would
reveal the mysterious bond that holds together the atomic nucleus, imparts
to atoms their unique structure, and keeps the stars in their courses. But this
unifying equation, when it is found, will not make our present knowledge
invalid. Enthusiasts are deluding themselves when they base their belief in
flying saucers on the hope of overthrowing the laws of gravity and inertia.
Gravity, magnetism, and electricity are actual physical forces, as real as
light, air, houses, trees, or persons. They can act only according to the laws
of nature which, unlike the laws passed by legislatures, are not subject to
repeal. No juggling of words, no argument, no wish can change these laws
any more than they can stop the rising of the sun or the waning of the moon.
If man is ever to learn to control the force of gravity, he will succeed not
by denying the reality of the laws but only by finding out what they are and
by trying to understand them.

[IX-1] Michel, A. Flying Saucers and the Straight Line
Mystery. New York: Criterion Books, 1958.
[IX-2] Air Force Files.
[IX-3] El Paso (Texas) Times, Nov. 4, 1957.
[IX-4] Barker, G. “Chasing the Flying Saucers,” Flying
Saucers (May 1958), p. 20 ff.
[IX-5] Denver Post, Nov. 6, 1957.
[IX-6] Viemeister, P. E. The Lightning Book. Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1961.
[IX-7] Matthias, B. T., and Buchsbaum, S. J. “Pinched
Lightning,” Nature, Vol. 194 (1962), p. 327.
[IX-8] Ritchie, D. J. Ball Lightning. A Collection of Soviet
Research in English Translation (1961). New York:
Consultants Bureau.
[IX-8a] Cade, C. M. “Thunderbolts as the X-weapon,”
Discovery, Vol. XXIII (1962), pp. 23–28.
[IX-9] Kapitsa, P. L. “The Nature of Ball Lightning,” Dokl.
Akad. Nauk SSSR, Vol. CI, No. 2 (1955), pp. 245–48.
(Translated in [IX-8].)
[IX-10] Hill, E. L. “Ball Lightning as a Physical
Phenomenon,” Bulletin American Meteorology Society, Vol.
XXXXI (1960), p. 199.
[IX-11] Pierce, E. T.; Nadile, R. M.; and McKinnon, P. J.
“An Experimental Investigation of Negative Point-plane
Corona and Its Relation to Ball Lightning,” AFCRL-TR-60-
354. Bedford, Mass.: Oct. 24, 1960.
[IX-12] Gold, E. “Thunderbolts: The Electric Phenomena
of Thunderstorms,” Nature, Vol. CLXIX (1952), pp. 561–63.
[IX-13] Kogan-Beletskii, G. I. “The Nature of Ball
Lightning,” Priroda, No. 4 (1957), pp. 71–73. (Translated in

[IX-8].)
[IX-14] Schmidt, R. O. “The Kearney Incident,” Flying
Saucers (October 1959), p. 31 ff.
[IX-15] UFO Critical Bulletin, Vol. II, No. 2 (March-April
1958).
[IX-16] “The Case of the Radioactive UFO,” Flying
Saucers (February 1958), p. 30.
[IX-17] “Electro-magnetic Effects Associated With
Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO’s),” Subcommittee of the
National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena
(NICAP), Washington, D.C. (June 1960).
[IX-17a] Sky and Telescope, Vol. XXIII (1962), p. 323.
[IX-18] Michel, A. The Truth about Flying Saucers. New
York: Criterion Books, 1956.
[IX-19] Keyhoe, D. E. The Flying Saucer Conspiracy. New
York: Henry Holt & Co., 1955.
[IX-20] Scully, F. Behind the Flying Saucers. New York:
Popular Library, 1951.
[IX-21] Cramp, L. G. Space, Gravity and the Flying
Saucer. New York: British Book Centre, 1955.

Chapter x
CONTACT!
All fields of human activity have their practical jokers. Elaborate hoaxes
have been perpetrated in music, art, literature, history, religion, science—
and in the world of flying saucers. Although the motives for such swindles
are not always obvious, the trickster is usually trying to promote a cause, to
gain fame and/or prestige, to make money, to satirize a folly, or just to have
some fun at the public’s expense. Some hoaxes, such as Mark Twain’s
petrified man, produce only harmless amusement. Others, planned as
serious deceptions, can cause long-lasting damage. The celebrated Piltdown
man was fraudulently created from an ape’s jawbone, a stray tooth, and a
few chemical staining agents; it gained fame for the scientists involved but
threw the study of human evolution into a confusion that lasted more than
twenty years, until the forgery was revealed in every detail[X-1].
A few hoaxes live on and on even after they are exposed, apparently
because people enjoy believing in them. The Jersey devil, described as a
fire-breathing monster with huge wings and a long tail, was first mentioned
in the columns of a small-town newspaper in New Jersey in 1906. Within a
few days inhabitants of rural areas all over the east coast were reporting
glimpses of the frightening demon and on one particular night it allegedly
terrified citizens in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland.
The panic finally reached such heights that some towns closed their
factories and theaters. This fantastic monster was quickly found to be a
hoax, the brain child of the publicity manager for a Philadelphia museum of
freaks; his sole purpose had been to drum up customers for the museum.
Nevertheless many persons rejected this explanation and continued to
believe that the creature really existed. It was reported again in 1926, in
1930, in 1932, and may reappear again at any time. Obviously the Jersey
devil, though admittedly the product of a hoax, has become a permanent
part of the local fauna[X-2].

Flying-saucer hoaxes are rarely submitted to the Air Force as bona fide
sightings. Of 1500 UFO reports, only forty-two proved to be deliberate
frauds or the delusions of unstable persons. The hoaxer may give his tale to
the newspapers, to a lecture audience, or even publish it in a book, but he
carefully avoids Air Force scrutiny. His story will not hold up under close
investigation, and he knows it.

Earthlings and Extraterrestrials

The fantasies of the obviously deluded are a problem for the clinician
and will not be discussed in this book. Typical is the case of “Dr. X” who
writes to strangers, inviting them to accompany him on his next visit to the
“Brothers” in space and to “join the side of righteousness.” Although Dr. X
has several times set a date for the excursion, he has always had to postpone
it for some reason. He himself, he says, has made more than sixty journeys
on flying saucers and mother ships, and has often taken his automobile
along—just why he needed it he does not explain.
Peculiarly hard to classify are the “contact” reports, in which a witness
affirms that he has had one or more personal encounters with a spacecraft
and that he has communicated with its occupants, who range in type from
ordinary specimens of Homo sapiens to hairy dwarfs and elephant-faced
little men in space suits. He gives a more or less detailed account of the
incident and sometimes offers “proof” in the form of alleged photographs or
fragments of the vehicle. Ostensibly inspired by religious or humanitarian
motives, these “contactees” wholeheartedly support the theory that flying
saucers originate in worlds beyond the earth.
In general the contactees tell essentially the same story, with minor
variations: Earthling (the witness) sees a flying saucer; saucer lands.
Extraterrestrial occupant emerges, extends friendly greetings, confides his
wish to help the human race solve its problems, takes Earthling for a cruise
to another planet, brings Earthling back. After promising to maintain a sort
of guardianship over the earth, the visitor says farewell and flies back to his
home planet.

Although these stories are told in the first person, purportedly as fact,
they perhaps should not be called hoaxes, for they can deceive only the
credulous who want to believe that supermen from other worlds are
hovering near to save our troubled planet. With no suspense, little
characterization, and ludicrously bad science, these naïve accounts are
fiction of such poor quality that they would be rejected by even the most
hard-pressed editor of fantastic tales. Whether from Venus, Mars, Saturn, or
the planets of other solar systems, these gods from the machine all look just
like human beings and either speak the colloquial language of the contactee
or communicate by thought transference. Their physical appearance,
clothing, tastes in food, habits of thought, and ethical values usually seem
indistinguishable from those of the citizens (whether American, French, or
Brazilian) who report the visitors.

The “Contactees”

One man who supposedly was privileged to make contact with visitors
from space was Daniel Fry who, while strolling in the New Mexico desert
on the evening of July 4, 1950, noticed a flying saucer that had apparently
just landed. When he approached and started to touch the ship, he suddenly
heard a voice speaking in friendly caution: “Better not touch the hull, pal,
it’s still hot.” The voice, he discovered, belonged to an extraterrestrial being
in a mother ship that was hovering some 900 miles above the earth. The
craft on the ground needed no crew, for it was a “remote-controlled cargo
carrier,” sent down to collect samples of the earth’s atmosphere.
Communicating by mental telepathy, the spaceman revealed that, although
he came from a remote planet, his ancestors had been earthmen who had
migrated from the island of Lemuria in ancient times (see Chapter ii).
Strangely enough, although the visitor’s first remark had shown a
remarkable command of contemporary English, he did not know what a
roller coaster was! He took such a fancy to Fry that he invited him to enter
the cargo craft and treated him to a quick flight to New York and back, a
round trip of 4000 miles completed in half an hour![X-3]
A contactee whose experience offered variations on the basic theme was
Truman Bethurum, a construction worker. According to his story, he

happened to be looking for sea shells in the Nevada desert sometime before
dawn one morning in July 1952 when he encountered a flying saucer and its
friendly crew. The captain was a female, a “queen among women,” whose
attractive costume included a bright-red skirt, a black-velvet short-sleeved
blouse, and a black beret with red trim[X-4]. Though the grandmother of
two, she was so beautiful that at their first meeting Bethurum was
speechless. Obviously trying to put him at his ease, she smiled and said
encouragingly, “Speak up, my friend, you’re not hexed.” During the
following months, he says, they had several meetings and eventually, at her
invitation, he accompanied her on an enjoyable visit to the saucer’s home
base, the planet “Clarion.” Being placed directly behind the moon and
apparently moving in a parallel orbit, this heavenly body has entirely
escaped the notice of earthly astronomers[X-5].
George W. Van Tassel, operator of a commercial airport, resort, and
guest ranch in California (for some reason most of the better-known
contactees seem to be Californians), allegedly made contact with space
beings of a more ethereal type. Their saucers traveled on power produced
by the “transmutation of hard light particles into soft light particles,” and a
typical vehicle was 1500 feet in diameter, 300 feet thick, and carried a crew
of 7200. Why they needed so much room—more than 70,000 cubic feet per
spaceman—remains a mystery, for both the ship and its occupants were
made of pure light. The mother ships remained thousands of miles above
the earth at substations from which they sent out their “ventlos,” or flying
saucers, to patrol the earth and try to improve conditions here. Speaking
through Van Tassel, the visitors sent many messages such as that of June 28,
1952:
“Salutations. My identity is Qel, 72nd projection, 15th wave, realms of
Schare [a saucer station in space]. We are passing over your cone of
receptivity, 172 thousand miles above you. Our center requests that I inform
you. You will see more of us if you watch the skies.”
Several times the spacemen threatened, if opposed, to launch thousands
of saucers per second against the earth. In January 1953 they warned that
they had three substations in space ready to release 500,000 saucers each;
two months later, in March, they informed Van Tassel that they now had 3½
million saucers in operation around the earth. Somehow or other, this

armada of UFOs seems to have remained invisible to both the United States
Air Force and the public[X-6].
Whether such tales are delusions, fantasies, or hoaxes may be
impossible to determine. Some contact cases, however, undoubtedly contain
elements of fraud. At worst, the witness may be deliberately inventing the
whole story from start to finish; at best, he may feel so certain of the reality
of his experience that he feels justified in manufacturing evidence to
convince possible skeptics. No matter what his motives, when he tries to
add verisimilitude to his narrative by fabricating proofs, he joins the
company of hoaxers[X-7].
In the Maury Island case (see Chapter ii), the witnesses offered alleged
fragments of a disabled spaceship, which turned out to be chunks of slag.
The scoutmaster in Florida exhibited singed hair on his arm and a scorched
cap to prove that he had suffered from the heat rays of a landed flying
saucer (see Chapter vii), and the grain salesman in Nebraska bolstered his
tale of the Saturnian ship by pointing to shallow cracks in a dry river bed
and oil smudges on the grass (see Chapter ix).
A contactee who provided “proof” of his story was Howard Menger,
who specialized in describing visits to the moon. In the moon cities, he said,
he met many earth scientists who enjoyed a delightful, relaxed existence.
The lunar natives use no money, are born without appendixes, and for
entertainment play a game very much like baseball. In science they are way
ahead of us: using saucers equipped with “self-contained gravity” and
propelled by “processed free energy,” they transported him from earth to
moon in only two hours[X-8]. As a trophy of his visit, Menger brought back
a lunar potato. This remarkable vegetable was supposed to have five times
the protein content of an ordinary American potato, but unfortunately it was
not available for analysis. As soon as he returned, he said, he had turned it
over to the United States Government, and the government was keeping it
top secret[X-9].

Adamski’s Travels

Perhaps the best known of the contactees is George Adamski, who on
the night of November 20, 1952, in the desert of Southern California,
supposedly met and talked with the pilot of a vehicle that had just arrived
from Venus. Conversation was no problem; both men simply used telepathy
and sign language when words failed[X-10]. In the years since then
Adamski has reported many other pleasant chats with visitors from Mars
and Saturn as well as Venus, and has allegedly made several journeys in
their spacecraft, including an aerial tour of the moon. On this trip he
observed with surprise that the moon’s hidden side contained fertile country
abounding in lakes, rivers, vegetation, and prosperous cities with people
strolling along the sidewalks[X-11]. He was not at all disconcerted when
the Russian photographs of the moon’s far side showed no trace of these
delightful features. Obviously, said Adamski, the Russians had simply
retouched the pictures before releasing them to the world, in order to
deceive the United States and to conceal the vegetation, trees, and buildings
of the space people who had their bases there[X-12].

Figure 15. Top, schematic drawing of Adamski’s
Venusian saucer. Bottom, schematic drawing of
chicken brooder.

Clearly aware of possible skepticism, Adamski did not ask the public to
accept his experiences on his unsupported word; as evidence, he offered
various photographs showing cigar-shaped objects, a rocky hillside with a
white blob on the horizon, and the drawing of a person apparently clad in
coveralls—without the book’s explanation no one would ever suspect that

he came from the planet Venus. One of the best-known pictures he
published showed a bell-shaped “spaceship” with circular openings near the
top and three large balls on the bottom for landing gear. By an interesting
coincidence, this craft closely resembles a well-known type of chicken
brooder, whose three infrared bulbs at the base look very much like the
“landing gear” of the alleged spacecraft (see Figure 15). When skeptics
doubted Adamski’s claim that he had traveled from Kansas City, Missouri,
to Davenport, Iowa, by flying saucer, he displayed one of the most unusual
items ever called upon to prove the existence of spaceships: his uncanceled
railway ticket, for which he requested a refund![X-13]

Photography and the UFO

Those who believe in flying saucers have long hoped to obtain a good
clear photograph that would establish their existence once and for all. Many
“UFO” pictures show vague specks and blurs whose interpretation is
limited only by the imagination of the viewer. Of the many pictures taken in
good faith and offered in evidence, none shows an indubitable spaceship.
Most of them are genuine photographs showing indistinct images of jet
planes, birds, balloons, and other objects normally in the sky. They are
puzzling only until they are compared with similar photographs of known
jet planes, birds, balloons, and other normal objects; then their identity
becomes obvious.
Trick photography has often been called upon to prove the reality of the
incredible—fairies, ectoplasm, ghosts—and it has also played a part in the
history of flying saucers. While the most detailed contact stories have
usually come from the United States, for some peculiar reason the best of
the faked pictures have come from Europe and South America. A widely
publicized photograph supposedly taken at Taormina, Sicily, in 1954 shows
four men standing on a bridge and apparently gazing at two UFOs soaring
overhead [X-14]. The deep shadows cast by the men and the bridge railing
show that the sun was shining brilliantly, but the objects in the sky, which
look like the inverted covers of teapots or sugar bowls, show only faintly
shadowed areas. Stranger yet, the shady side of one UFO is on the left, that
of the other UFO on the right. The men on the bridge have their heads tilted

at such an angle that they could not possibly have seen the objects pictured,
but are obviously looking at the hill in the background instead of at the sky.
Even a casual inspection exposes this picture as a crude fake (see
Plate VIa).
An even cruder fake was offered as evidence to Dr. Menzel in South
Africa in the summer of 1962. The optimistic photographer insisted that he
had snapped a genuine saucer on the wing, even though the circular object
shown in the print was an unmistakable hubcap, the Chevrolet trade-mark
clearly legible.

The Isle of Lovers Hoax

Some photographic hoaxes are more cleverly executed. In May 1952, a
few weeks after Life magazine had alarmed the world with its article “Have
We Visitors from Outer Space?”[X-15], the Brazilian weekly picture
magazine O Cruzeiro published startlingly clear photographs of an alleged
flying saucer[X-16]. According to the accompanying story, a reporter and a
photographer on the staff of the magazine on May 7 had visited Ilha dos
Amores, an island not far from Rio de Janeiro, to do a feature assignment.
Late in the afternoon, at a moment when the photographer just happened to
have his camera pointed at the sky, the reporter suddenly called his attention
to a passing UFO. During the minute or so the object was in view he
obtained five pictures which, along with the reporter’s eyewitness story,
were released to the public on May 17. If the editors actually believed in the
reality of the saucer, the ten-day delay before informing the world of its
visit is remarkable. The magazine has never admitted that the photographs
were a hoax, but they inspired doubt even in sympathetic
investigators[X-17].
The UFO appears in a dull sky above a mountain peak. In the first
picture the object looks like a jet plane surrounded by an exhaust haze and,
with a little imagination, might be called a Saturn-like object. In succeeding
pictures it resembles the lid of a teapot, or the bottom view of a rubber
stopper for a sink. A study of the shadows quickly reveals the fraudulent
nature of these photographs: the dome on top of the “saucer” casts its
shadow to the right, while the trees and mountains in the foreground cast

their shadows to the left. The picture could be authentic only in a peculiar
world in which the sun shone from the west on objects on the ground, but
shone from the east on objects flying in the sky!

The Trindade Island Saucer

The most famous of all purported photographs of a UFO, the Trindade
Island saucer, also came from Brazil. First published in Brazilian
newspapers on February 21, 1958, the pictures showed dark mountain crags
looming against an overcast sky. Above one peak appeared a startling image
(much like the O Cruzeiro saucer of 1952) resembling the planet Saturn—a
flattened sphere banded round the middle by a dark line that extended like a
platform beyond the curved sides. According to the accompanying news
stories, the UFO had flown over the island of Trindade and had been
observed by the officers and crew of a ship of the Brazilian Navy. The
pictures, taken by a photographer on board, had been examined and
supposedly pronounced genuine by Navy experts before being released to
the press. Since a responsible military organization and a major world
government thus seemed to accept the photographs as proof that flying
saucers actually existed, the incident raised a storm of official inquiry both
in Brazil and abroad. Then, within a few weeks, the storm abruptly
subsided. Although no explanation was given, the object in the pictures was
obviously considered no threat to our planet’s security (see Plate VIb).
Although saucer enthusiasts regard these pictures as genuine evidence
for the reality of UFOs, careful study of the facts strongly suggests that this
case, which rocked the Brazilian Government and created a short-lived but
world-wide saucer scare, was merely an unusually skillful hoax[X-18].
At first glance, the circumstances of the sighting seemed to be entirely
clear and straightforward[X-19]. Trindade is a barren, mountainous island
of about six square miles, about 600 miles from the coast of Brazil.
Abandoned after the end of the Second World War, the island remained
deserted except by sea gulls until October 1957, when the Brazilian Navy
established an oceanographic post and a meteorological station there to
carry out its research for the International Geophysical Year (IGY). To
facilitate the oceanographic studies, the Navy also converted a training ship,

the Almirante Saldanha, into a floating laboratory equipped with scientific
apparatus and photographic darkroom. With a crew of about 300, the ship
routinely traveled between Rio de Janeiro and Trindade Island on its duties
for the IGY.
A major function of the meteorological station was the launching and
tracking of weather balloons; they were painted red, inflated with hydrogen,
and carried radio transmitters. Launched each morning, they were tracked
by radio and optical devices to show the movements of the winds in the
upper atmosphere. At a certain point (when the balloon burst, or at a
prearranged signal) the balloon released a bag of scientific instruments
which, attached to a parachute, floated to the ground to be retrieved.
The Trindade station began operation in November 1957. Almost
immediately, UFOs were reported over the island. (Brazil had not been
immune to the flying-saucer epidemic that had begun in Texas early that
month [see Chapter ix], and sentries at Itaipu Fort, near Santos, on
November 4 had reported a UFO that knocked out the lights and electric
plant.) With weather balloons going up daily, parachutes floating down at
odd times, and sea gulls cruising over the island, the advent of other
“saucers” was inevitable. During November and December several UFOs
were reported by workmen, none of whom were trained observers.
Although neither Captain Bacellar, the commanding officer at the station,
nor his officers saw any unidentified objects, he radioed Rio to report the
incidents and investigated each story. Some he found to be false, some were
based on mistaken identification of gulls and balloons, and in others the
evidence was inconclusive.
Early in January 1958, when the Almirante Saldanha arrived on
schedule at Trindade, it had on board several civilian guests who were to
collaborate in various aspects of the research. Among them was Almiro
Barauna, a professional photographer. After several days at the island, the
ship prepared to leave for the return trip to Rio on January 16. Shortly after
noon Barauna was on deck with his camera, waiting to film the departure.
The sky was thinly overcast, the sea was rough, and waves dashing against
the ship and the rocky shore created a noisy background.
According to the news accounts printed several weeks later, Captain
Viegas, of the Brazilian Air Force, suddenly shouted “Olha o disco! [Flying

saucer!]” Hearing the shout, Barauna peered at the sky and saw a luminous
oval object moving swiftly toward the island. Officers and crewmen on
deck also observed the UFO, he said, and interfered with his aim as they ran
about excitedly. Nevertheless he managed to take six shots of the UFO as it
approached the island, disappeared behind a mountain peak, reversed
direction and reappeared at a lower altitude, retraced its course, and
vanished with incredible speed against the horizon. The unknown had
arrived and departed in a period of about twenty seconds.
According to the news stories, the photographer had retired to the ship’s
darkroom under the supervision of an officer to develop the negative, and
found that four of the six exposures showed the mysterious object. He was
not able to make prints, he said, because the darkroom supplies
unfortunately did not include any photographic paper. However, he did
exhibit the negative, and the officers and crewmen who examined it
allegedly agreed that it showed the same Saturn-like UFO that had flown
over the island. After the return to Rio he made prints and enlargements and
turned them over, together with the negative, to the Brazilian Navy.
The question of authenticity arose immediately. Called down to
Intelligence headquarters for an interview, Barauna underwent a four-hour
interrogation concerning the pictures. During the questioning he was asked,
“If you were going to make a flying saucer appear on a negative, how
would you proceed?” He replied, as he later told a reporter, “Comandante, I
am an able photographer, specialized in trick photography, but I could not
produce one that would withstand close and accurate examination.”[X-18]
In spite of this modest disclaimer, some of the photographic evidence
clearly suggested fraud, and a strong difference of opinion developed
among government officials. Some accepted the pictures as a genuine
record of a flying saucer; others pronounced them fakes. For several weeks
the incident was kept secret, but when eventually someone took the prints to
the President of Brazil, further concealment became impossible. Yielding to
the persuasion of certain military advisers and newsmen, and against the
advice of the Naval Ministry, he released the pictures to the press.

PLATE V
a. Pinched lightning, August 1961. This is believed to be the first
photograph of a pinched lightning discharge. (chap. ix)

PLATE V
b. Ball lightning, Lincoln, Nebraska, August 30,
1930. (chap. ix)

PLATE VI
a. Trindade Island UFO, January 1958. (chap. x)

PLATE VI
b. Taormina, Sicily, UFOs, 1954. (chap. x)

PLATE VII
a. UFO at Boulder, Colorado, February 6, 1959. (chap. xii)

PLATE VII
b. UFO over Norway, July 24, 1957. (chap. xii)

PLATE VIII
a. Images produced by lens defects, Hamilton, Ohio, steel plant. (chap. xi)

PLATE VIII
b. Ghost images produced by internal reflections in lens system. (chap. xii)

The Brazilian Naval Ministry

The photographs were published on February 21, five weeks after they
were taken. Since the President had apparently accepted them at face value,
the Naval Ministry was obviously in a difficult position; through an
unofficial spokesman it issued a statement notable for its lack of
enthusiasm:
“On the morning of January 16, 1958, over the island of Trindade, the
crew of the school ship Almirante Saldanha sighted an unidentified aerial
object for a few seconds. A civilian who was aboard the ship took some
pictures of the object. The Navy has no connection with the case, and its
only connection with the occurrence was the fact that the photographer was
aboard the school ship, and came back with the ship to Rio.”[X-20]

On the same day another Navy spokesman released a similar unofficial
statement to O Globo:
“The news about a flying saucer sighted over the Island of Trindade was
received here with utmost reserve. There will be an investigation to verify
the authenticity of the sightings and photos. No officer or sailor from the
N.E. Almirante Saldanha witnessed the event.”[X-20]
Immediately an international furor broke out. Were these pictures
indeed proof of extraterrestrial spaceships, or were they a hoax, with the
Brazilian President and the Brazilian Navy as victims? Who were the
witnesses, and exactly what did they report? In the United States, high
officials asked for copies of the pictures. An editor of Look magazine asked
Dr. Menzel to fly to Brazil to evaluate the evidence, but later canceled the
plan when the Rio office advised that the photographs were generally
considered fraudulent. Public excitement in Brazil became so great that on
February 23 the Naval Ministry released an official statement, distinguished
by its air of caution, which concluded:
“Clearly this Ministry will not be able to make any pronouncement
concerning the reality of the object seen because the photographs do not
constitute sufficient proof for this purpose.”[X-18]
The day after the pictures were published the Almirante Saldanha,
which had been lying outside the harbor at Rio, received orders to sail. Not
until February 24, when the ship docked at Santos, did newsmen have a
chance to interview the officers and crewmen who allegedly had observed
the Trindade saucer and could support Barauna’s story. None of them, it
turned out, had actually seen the object.
The Assistant Naval Attaché of the United States, who was then in
Santos in connection with the visit of the U. S. Coast Guard cutter
Westwind, visited the Brazilian ship to collect information about the
Trindade saucer, but with little success. The commanding officer stated that
he had not seen the alleged UFO; he had seen the pictures but refused to
express an opinion on their authenticity; he stated that his secretary might
have seen the UFO but the secretary, when questioned, preferred not to
discuss the matter. The executive officer said that he had not been on deck
at the time of the sighting, but that other persons might have seen the
object.

During the next week arguments for and against the authenticity of the
photographs filled the Brazilian papers, and O Globo published deliberately
faked views of a “flying saucer”—a china plate tossed into the air. A federal
deputy in an official note to the Naval Ministry deplored their amazing
failure to procure sworn statements from the officers and crewmen who
were reported to have witnessed the UFO.
In spite of the widespread and increasing skepticism, the weekly
magazine O Cruzeiro used the Trindade pictures for its lead story in the
issue of March 8. “Once bitten, twice shy” apparently did not apply to its
editors, who seemed instead to adopt the principle, “In for a penny, in for a
pound.” The photographs, they remarked editorially, not only proved the
existence of flying saucers, they also established the authenticity of the Ilha
dos Amores pictures published several years earlier. As though to
emphasize this point, the magazine assigned the Trindade story and the
interviews with witnesses to the same staff reporter who had described the
Ilha dos Amores saucer in 1952. The Naval Ministry refrained from further
comment and, since the military authorities showed no alarm about the
possibility of extraterrestrial patrols, public interest in the pictures quickly
died.
The report sent home by the U. S. Naval Attaché included the comment:
“There appear to be only two explanations for this peculiar incident, and
the peculiar handling of it by the Brazilian Government: (a) Some
overwhelming power has told the Brazilian Navy not to verify this incident
officially (which they should easily be able to do, if it actually occurred) or
to deny it (which they should easily be able to do if it is a fake). I personally
do not believe that anyone has told the Brazilian Navy to keep quiet about it
because there has been no hint of such suppression in either Brazilian or
United States circles. I also doubt that their control of the individual officers
and men would be good enough to hold the line in any event. (b) The whole
thing is a fake publicity stunt.... This seems more likely....”[X-18]

The Icarai Submarine Hunting Club

The accounts originally printed in the Brazilian papers and in O
Cruzeiro contain a number of significant details that have been glossed over
or ignored by UFO enthusiasts, both in Brazil[X-19] and in the United
States[X-21], who apparently accept the Trindade saucer at face value. A
study of the available news stories, facts gathered by Intelligence officers,
and of the photographs themselves leads inescapably to the conclusion that
the Trindade Island photographs were almost certainly a hoax.
Almiro Barauna was a free-lance photographer. A professional of
unusual skill, he had long been interested in flying saucers and, some time
before the Trindade incident, he had published a purposely humorous
magazine article entitled “A Flying Saucer Hunted Me at Home” and
illustrated by admittedly faked photographs. He had also published trick
photographs of “treasure chests” lying on the ocean bottom. In addition,
Barauna specialized in underwater photography and was a member of the
Icarai Submarine Hunting Club, a group interested in skin diving and the
study of life on the ocean floor.
When the Almirante Saldanha left Rio for its historic January visit to
Trindade Island, the ship had on board, as guests of the Navy, five members
of the Icarai Club. Among the five, in addition to Barauna, were Amilar
Vieira Filho, captain of the group, and José Teobaldo Viegas, a retired
captain in the Brazilian Air Force[X-22]. On January 16 when the ship was
getting ready to leave Trindade, these three friends were on deck, Barauna
with his loaded Rolleiflex camera, the other two standing some distance
away. Suddenly Vieira remarked on a big sea gull in the sky. Looking up,
Viegas immediately shouted, “Flying saucer!” and Barauna snapped his
pictures.
No other eyewitnesses have been found, even though the deck was
crowded with sailors. The ship’s dentist has been listed as a witness (in one
document he appears as two persons, under two different versions of his
name) but no newspaper yet examined mentions his story. Captain Bacellar,
returning from his post as commander of the Trindade station, has also been
listed as a witness but, according to his statement, he was not on deck when
the incident occurred.
Vieira, the first man to sight the object, had called it “a big sea gull.”
When interviewed five weeks later, in the midst of the saucer excitement,

he had changed his mind about its being a sea gull, but he was no longer
certain just what he had seen. He stated that the unknown had been in view
for twenty seconds at most, and had disappeared too quickly for him to note
any details; it was simply an oval gray object that seemed to flash briefly
before it vanished. He did not mention the Saturn-like bands around the
middle that are a conspicuous feature of the photograph.

The Trindade Photographs

Accounts of the Trindade affair often remark that the photographs must
be genuine because no opportunity for fraud occurred. On the contrary,
there were ample and repeated opportunities. Since Barauna was not under
observation when he loaded his camera, he could easily have inserted a
prepared film, with no one the wiser. With the type of camera used, the
operation would have been simple. He was again free from observation
when he developed the negatives. Captain Bacellar escorted him to the door
of the darkroom but remained outside, on guard at the door. The only
person to accompany Barauna inside (to help by holding a flashlight) was
his friend Viegas—the same man who had cried “Flying saucer!”
When Barauna emerged with the dripping film, Bacellar examined it but
what he expected to find is a question, since he had not observed the UFO.
The witnesses allegedly agreed, however, that the negatives showed the
object they had seen in the sky—an amazing feat when we remember that
the Rolleiflex film frame is small, only about 2.25 inches square.
In the print of Frame 3 shown in O Cruzeiro[X-22], the UFO is slightly
more than ¼ inch long and less than ⅛ inch thick. Assuming an enlargement
factor of a little more than three, we find that the UFO on the negative
would have appeared merely as a pale blur about 1/16 of an inch in length
and no thicker than a pencil line. Miraculous eyesight would have been
required to distinguish a “Saturn-like” or any other shape.
The Navy’s officers on board showed astonishingly little interest in the
film and did nothing to prevent the possibility of fraud. All during the
homeward trip the photographer had both the camera and the negative in his
own possession. When the ship stopped at Santos, he and his fellow club

members were allowed to debark (with camera and negative), and they
completed the journey to Rio by bus. The ship had been anchored at Rio for
two days before Captain Bacellar, of the Trindade station, finally called on
Barauna and asked to see the prints so that he could show them to the Navy.
Thus the photographer had been free of supervision for days. In that time he
could have produced pictures of little men from Mars, if he had wanted to.
The pictures themselves raise many questions. The three witnesses had
emphasized the brilliance of the UFO, yet the prints show merely a gray
shape with no suggestion of luminosity. Barauna had used a Rolleiflex
camera, 2.8 Model E, f/8 lens, set at 125. Finding that he had overexposed
the film, he said, he had treated the negative with silver salts after
development in order to increase the contrast. (During this procedure he
was, again, without official supervision.)
The prints used in O Cruzeiro have obviously been cropped since,
unlike the film frames, they are not square. Frame 1 shows the UFO above
the sea, some distance from the island; Frame 2 shows the UFO above
rocky crags, at the right of a peak. Frame 3 shows it at the right of the peak
but at lower altitude. Frames 4 and 5, not reproduced, did not show the
object, and in Frame 6 the UFO is a mere speck low on the horizon.
Frame 3, the only one showing the Saturn-like shape, deserves special
attention. In the published print the mountains in the foreground are quite
clear, while the UFO is little more than a dark line with an indistinct
beginning and end, with a faint suggestion of rounding at top and bottom;
without the dark line the curves would scarcely be visible, so completely
does the object merge into the background of overcast sky. The picture
widely distributed by news agencies is a further enlargement of the section
containing the UFO. In the enlarged section, the foreground rocks are a
mere black blur, but the UFO has gained greatly in clarity. The central band
is darker, particularly at the left, and the outlines of the object are no longer
vague.
The Navy’s study of the negatives revealed several dubious features.
The details of the land in the foreground were very sharp but the UFO disk
was hazy, showed little contrast, and was essentially without shadows. The
object in Frame 2 seemed to have been inverted, as compared with Frames
1 and 3. From the reported high velocity of the saucer and the fast shutter

speed, some lateral haziness might have been expected, but no such blurring
appeared.
Exactly when and how the fraudulent images were produced—if they
were fraudulent—cannot be known. Experienced photographers can easily
think of a dozen possible devices. The probability that they were faked is
overwhelming and, but for the embarrassing fact that the Brazilian
President had seemed to sponsor them publicly, the Naval Ministry would
undoubtedly have exposed the entire hoax.
In summary, the facts are these: The man who made the Trindade
pictures had no connection with the Brazilian Navy; he was a professional
photographer noted particularly as an expert at trick photography. No
officer or crewman of the Brazilian Navy reported seeing the UFO; in
addition to the photographer, only two persons are on record as actual
eyewitnesses; both of them were personal friends of the photographer;
neither of them had any connection with the Brazilian Navy. The
photographer had ample time and many opportunities to fake the pictures. A
Rolleiflex camera can easily be used for double exposures. A series of
pictures of a model saucer against a dark background could be rerolled and
exposed a second time to provide the background, an old and well-known
photographic trick. The pictures themselves show internal inconsistencies.
The Brazilian Naval Ministry never accepted the pictures as authentic
records of a flying saucer.[C]

[C]
During a visit to Rio de Janeiro in February
1963, Dr. Menzel discussed this case with some of
Brazil’s leading astronomers; they concurred in the
view that the Trindade saucer was a hoax.

The final paragraph from a United States Intelligence report provides
perhaps the most appropriate comment on the affair:
“It is the reporting officer’s private opinion that a flying saucer sighting
would be unlikely at the very barren island of Trindade, since everyone
knows that Martians are extremely comfort-loving creatures.”

Project Ozma

Astronomers have found no evidence suggesting that intelligent life
exists on any of earth’s sister planets. Most scientists would agree, however,
that life of some kind probably does exist in other parts of our galaxy and in
other galaxies. Even if this probability were certainty and space travel were
possible over the vast distances we measure in light years, the chance that
earthman and alien will ever establish physical contact remains
infinitesimally small. An explorer (whether from earth or from a planet of
another sun) would have to begin by locating, among the millions of stars in
the heavens, a particular star that had a family of life-bearing planets. If he
were able to identify one of these needles in the cosmic haystack, he would
next have to find out which of the planets supported living, intelligent
organisms. If he could find the planet and set down his spaceship, the
explorer would then have to try to identify and to communicate with
creatures that might be unimaginably strange—so strange that he would not
recognize them as either living or intelligent.
At present, only light waves and radio waves can bridge the immensities
of space. Physical travel to other star systems is not now and may never be
possible. Nevertheless, men are making attempts to find out whether other
intelligent beings do exist outside the solar system and, if so, where. The
earliest effort, known as Project Ozma, started a few years ago at the
National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia. As
the first step in a systematic search, the astronomers began to listen for
possible radio signals from the neighborhood of certain stars. Tau Ceti,
Epsilon Eridani, and 61 Cygni were chosen as the first targets because they
lie within range of our radio telescopes—ten to eleven light years distant—
and because they resemble our own sun in age and type and therefore might
have planetary systems not unlike our own. So far, the radio telescopes have
detected no phenomena that might be interpreted as artificial signals.
The problems involved are incredibly difficult. A background of radio
noise—“swishes,” “whistles,” “tweeks”—comes in constantly from the
universe at large. Deliberate signals, if they occurred, would be hard to
distinguish from the random noise. Even if signals came in and were
detected, they might still be indecipherable just as the written records of
some early civilizations on our own planet remain a mystery. Egyptian

hieroglyphs were meaningless pictures for millennia until the Rosetta stone
provided the key, less than 200 years ago. The many pages of text and
pictures left by the Mayan Indians cannot yet be read, except for some dates
and a few astronomical symbols. Hundreds of inscriptions exist in the
Etruscan language, written in an alphabet that resembles the familiar Greek,
but scholars have deciphered only a few words.
If we are not able to interpret the records devised and set down by
human beings like ourselves, we will not easily understand signals that
might possibly be broadcast by aliens from the planets of other suns.

[X-1] Wiener, J. S. The Piltdown Forgery. London: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1955.
[X-2] MacDougall, C. D. Hoaxes. New York: Ace Books,
1958.
[X-3] Fry, D. W. The White Sands Incident. Los Angeles:
New Age Publ. Co., 1954.
[X-4] Redondo Beach (Calif.) Daily Breeze, September 25,
1953.
[X-5] Bethurum, T. Aboard a Flying Saucer. Los Angeles:
De Vorss & Co., 1954.
[X-6] Van Tassel, G. W. I Rode a Flying Saucer. Los
Angeles: New Age Publ. Co., 1952.
[X-7] Cahn, J. P. “Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little
Men,” True magazine (September 1952).
[X-8] Menger, H. From Outer Space To You. Clarksburg,
West Virginia: Saucerian Publications, 1959.
[X-9] Peterborough (N.H.) Transcript, Oct. 30, 1958.
[X-10] Leslie, D., and Adamski, G. Flying Saucers Have
Landed. New York: British Book Centre, 1953.

[X-11] Adamski, G. Inside the Space Ships. Abelard-
Schuman, 1955.
[X-12] —— Flying Saucers, Farewell. Abelard-Schuman,
1961.
[X-13] UFO Investigator (June 1959).
[X-14] Michel, A. The Truth about Flying Saucers. New
York: Criterion Books, 1956.
[X-15] “Have We Visitors from Outer Space?” Life
magazine (April 4, 1952).
[X-16] Rio de Janeiro: O Cruzeiro, May 17, 1952.
[X-17] Civilian Saucer Investigations Quarterly Bulletin
(September 1952).
[X-18] Air Force Files.
[X-19] UFO Critical Bulletin (March-April 1958).
[X-20] Fontes, O. T. “The Brazilian Navy UFO Sighting at
the Island of Trindade,” Flying Saucers (February 1961), p.
27 ff.
[X-21] Maney, C. A., and Hall, R. The Challenge of
Unidentified Flying Objects. Washington, D.C., 1961.
[X-22] Rio de Janeiro: O Cruzeiro, March 8, 1958.

Chapter xi
ANGEL HAIR, PANCAKES, ETC.
If thousands of aircraft from other planets have indeed been patrolling
the earth for many years (according to some authors, for centuries), they
have achieved an incredibly perfect safety record. Disabled or wrecked
flying saucers have occasionally been reported, but the debris and bodies to
be expected from such incidents have never been located.
A “mummified man,” sometimes referred to as proof of such a
catastrophe, may be seen at Caspar, Wyoming. Found in the Rocky
Mountains in the autumn of 1932, this little creature measures 6½ inches
high in a sitting position and weighs three-quarters of a pound.
Paleontologists recognize it as Hesperopithecus, an anthropoid denizen of
earth during the Pliocene period. The mummified body of another such
creature, supposedly found in Arizona, has also been called the remains of
“a little green man.”[XI-1] In 1952 four spaceships were supposed to have
crashed in the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, carrying the bodies of
thirty-four “little men”[XI-2], but the only evidence offered for this disaster
was a chunk of “unknown metal” that proved to be ordinary aluminum, and
the entire drama was shown to be the work of a known hoaxer[XI-3].
Although a few flying-saucer organizations regard such “humanoid”
evidence with some doubt, others, such as the Aerial Phenomena Research
Organization (APRO) are less skeptical of the reality of “little men.”[XI-4]
UFO publications have reported the finding of various substances
alleged to have been produced by UFOs. The offices of Air Force
investigators at Dayton house a small museum of such “pieces of
saucers”—old batteries, meteorites, parts of primitive radios, rocks,
corroded lead pipe, tangles of wire, strips of tin foil. Although a few of
these specimens have been sent in by optimistic hoaxers, most of them have
been submitted by genuinely puzzled citizens. When analysis shows the
normal origin of such an object, the finder usually accepts the verdict

calmly, whether he is disappointed or relieved, but occasionally he rejects
the identification and indignantly accuses the Air Force of theft,
substitution, or plain lying to suppress the “truth.” Nevertheless, not a
single fragment studied so far—animal, vegetable, or mineral—shows any
evidence that it grew or was constructed on an alien world.

Angel Hair and Spiders

Some centuries ago the primitive inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands,
observing the feathery, hairlike threads of volcanic glass left on the ground
from ancient eruptions, accounted for the substance by the legend that the
goddess Pelee had once stopped somewhere in the neighborhood to comb
her hair. “Angel hair,” a term in UFO parlance used to describe any
unfamiliar fibers, strands, threads, liquids, granules, and powders found on
the earth and supposedly deposited from flying saucers, offers an interesting
analogy.
Fils de la Vierge—the hair of the Virgin Mary—is the usual French
phrase for gossamer or cobwebs, whose origin was long a mystery.
Similarly the English “gossamer” commonly means cobwebs. According to
one source, the word may be derived from gaze à Marie—the gauze of
Mary. According to legend, cobwebs were formed from threads that fell
from the shroud of the Virgin Mary on her Assumption. UFO enthusiasts in
France began to use fils de la Vierge in 1952, to describe the cobwebby
material that allegedly fell from flying saucers. Translators of the French
UFO publications, instead of using the English equivalent “gossamer” or
“cobwebs,” chose to create the new term “angel hair” which, unlike the
French, implies an entirely strange substance, one that has no apparent
connection with such ordinary earthly phenomena as spiders.
Two remarkable falls of angel hair were reported in France on October
17 and 27, 1952. In both incidents, witnesses observed in the sky a
strangely shaped, cottony cloud at a height of several thousand feet. Above
it was a long, narrow, cylindrical object trailed by a white plume, moving
slowly across the sky and accompanied by twenty or thirty smaller objects
that looked like puffs of smoke. Following a broken path, they made rapid
zigzag motions, and left a broad ribbon of white substance that slowly

drifted to the ground and clung to trees, telephone wires, and roofs of
houses. These masses of white threads were described as like wool, nylon,
or Fiberglas. When rolled into a ball they became gelatinous and
disappeared within a few hours; set on fire, they burned like cellophane.
One witness was able to disentangle a single strand more than ten yards
long. None of the material, unfortunately, was preserved for study.
Students of UFOs pondered the unusual phenomenon: “If the observers
really did see what they described, and if all these objects were machines
guided by a single intelligence, then what mysterious experiment were they
performing? What purpose was served by the strange ballet of paired
saucers? What was the meaning of the whitish streak appearing between
two saucers on separation? What, finally, was the ‘angel’s hair’ that
sublimed so readily in the air?”[XI-5, p. 150] UFO enthusiasts have
suggested various theories of the nature and origin of the mysterious
substance. According to one hypothesis[XI-5, p. 149], angel hair might be
produced in the wake of a spacecraft moving in a force field; ionization of
the atmosphere would produce ultraheavy particles which would react with
ordinary air to form a kind of precipitate-angel hair—which would
disintegrate as ionization decreased (see Chapter ix). Another theory
suggests that angel hair might be a chain polymer of cellulose containing
radioactive carbon 14 (the carbon 14 being produced by the action of
cosmic rays on atoms of nitrogen in the atmosphere), hydrogen, and oxygen
from moisture in the air, the three elements combining under the action of
ultraheavy particles produced by ionization[XI-6]. This theory overlooks
the fact that cellulose is not formed from a combination of carbon dioxide,
oxygen, and hydrogen in air. Rather, it is made by living organisms in a
series of complicated enzymic reactions. Even if cellulose could be made
by the hypothetical reaction suggested, it would contain no more carbon 14
than does the ordinary carbon dioxide in the air.
To French entomologists, the angel hair seen in October 1952, was no
mystery at all. The objects dancing the strange ballet were not spaceships,
but spiders. Far from performing a mysterious experiment, they were
merely carrying out the well-established routine of migration.
Each year the young spiders of most species leave the nests of their
infancy and prepare to establish their own homes. Crawling by the hundreds

or the thousands to the tops of fence posts, walls, or trees, they spin long
silken webs which, inflated by the air, carry the tiny emigrants up from the
ground. These gossamer parachutes drift up and along on rising air currents,
sometimes to great heights; they may soar for a few yards or for many miles
over hills and valleys. These migrating balloonists have been observed as
high as 14,000 feet, and at sea 200 miles from any land. Eventually drifting
back to earth, the spiders detach the now useless parachutes and move off to
build new nests for the coming year, while the abandoned gossamer may
pile up in great masses on trees, fences, telephone wires, and ground, to
decay and vanish in a matter of hours. These gossamer showers sometimes
include so many outworn webs that the filmy blankets of fine silk may be
several inches deep and may cover an entire landscape like snow.
These migrations occur in spring or, more frequently, in autumn—but
only when the weather is exactly right. Spiders may sit patiently for days,
waiting for a calm, clear, windless day. On such days the steady upward
currents of air from the sun-warmed ground carry the spiders gently
aloft[XI-7]. The association of angel hair with UFO sightings is completely
natural. The drifting patches of gossamer reflect the sun brilliantly. A whole
armada of saucers can appear overhead and then vanish as the gossamer
cascades to earth.
The description of the material and the date of the fall both indicate that
the angel hair observed in France in October 1952 was of arachnid origin.
Even the weather was exactly right—“superb, with a sky of cloudless
blue”—for the migration of a smother of spiders.
A similar fall of angel hair occurred in the United States on October 22,
1954, near a school in Marysville, Ohio. At afternoon recess the pupils of
the Jerome Elementary School noticed a dazzlingly bright object in the sky.
It disappeared, and for the next forty-five minutes both children and
teachers watched white, cottonlike tufts floating slowly down to the ground.
The material was in long strands, very fine and soft, could be stretched and
rolled into a tiny ball, but quickly vanished to nothing and left a green stain
on the hands. The stuff clung to grass and cars, draped the telephone wires
for a distance of three miles, and was like a misty canopy over the
road[XI-6].

Unfortunately none of the material was preserved and no analysis was
possible. Marysville is near Columbus, Ohio, an industrial center, and the
stuff might have been waste products from one of the many factories. Since
similar falls were reported in Indiana during the same period, the substance
more probably was gossamer. As in the French incidents, the time was late
October and the weather was perfect, a warm autumn day with a sunny,
cloudless sky. Both the time and the weather were ideal for migrating
spiders to take to the air, float down to earth on their fluffy parachutes, and
then discard the no longer necessary fils de la Vierge.
Many falls of angel hair that occur in the warm days of Indian summer
are probably abandoned gossamer. It is significant that of fourteen such
incidents reported in Europe and the United States, all but three took place
in October and November, the season of spider migration[XI-6]. In one of
the three incidents reported in other months (Horseheads, New York,
February 21, 1955) the angel hair was identified as waste products from the
local milk plant.
One of the most recent reports of angel hair came from Sebree,
Kentucky, on September 11, 1962, when state police and the local Civil
Defense director were called in to investigate a strange substance that
looked like spun glass, which had been floating down near the residence of
Mr. Y in great quantities for more than an hour. The Air Force, when called
for advice, suggested three possibilities: the material might be chemicals
used in cloud seeding, might be refuse from a defective filter in a chemical
or industrial plant, or might be gossamer formed by migrating spiders. The
first two possibilities were quickly ruled out. The witnesses, when
requestioned, remembered that they had indeed noticed spiders clinging to
several bits of the material they had picked up. The troopers’ report
concluded, “It is the belief of this unit the substance observed was gossamer
formed by huge quantities of migrating spiders moving, which is normal for
this season.”
The yearly migration of spiders and sloughing of gossamer is an
established fact. As an explanation of angel hair it is far less fantastic than a
still-hypothetical cruising spaceship.