Chapter XI: Preface (8)

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 10^{33} 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_