Chapter X: Preface (7)

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].