Chapter XIII: Preface (10)

Professional astronomers, queried about the mysterious bridge, pointed out that sunlight could not have produced the phenomenon in the way described. When a bright lamp shines through an open doorway into a darkened room, the light spreads out like a fan into the shadowed area because the light source is very near. But the supposed light source in this case was the far-distant sun. If a shaft of sunlight were shining under a huge lunar arch, as claimed, the opposite boundaries of the illuminated area would be essentially parallel, not divergent like the fan-shaped region described. Examining the Mare Crisium wall through the fifteen-inch Harvard telescope, Dr. Menzel (who was therefore labeled “one of the Army stooges”[XI-16a]) concluded that the bright area observed by the amateurs must have been a high plateau that was still illuminated by the setting sun while the rest of the crater wall was already in darkness. The roughly curved boundary of the illuminated plateau, seen against the shadowed mountains, had been mistakenly interpreted as a bridge. Dr. G. P. Kuiper, one of the world’s leading authorities on the moon, also studied the area with the eighty-two-inch reflecting telescope at the McDonald Observatory, and reached the same conclusion.

One writer offered further proof (derived from an unnamed source) for the reality of the new bridge. Astronomers at Mount Palomar Observatory, he asserted, had made a secret study that confirmed the presence of the structure; furthermore a spectrographic analysis was supposed to have proved that the bridge was made of metal[XI-16].

Sensible comment on these statements is not easy. A “secret” study would be impossible since the moon’s face is obviously open to all viewers, and the purported chemical analysis is sheer nonsense. The spectroscope can tell the physicist what luminous gases are present in the atmosphere around a heavenly body, but it cannot reveal the composition of a solid object on the surface of the body, unless the object is first heated until it vaporizes and is transformed into gas. Before a physicist could make a spectrographic analysis of the alleged lunar structure, he would have to land on the moon and chip off a piece of the “bridge” itself.

“_Pieces of Saucers_”

In UFO publications, any oddly shaped chunk of rock or metal is likely to be described as a fragment of an interplanetary craft. A six-inch meteorite that fell at Sylacauga, Alabama, (_Chapter_ V) has been classified in one saucer book as an “unidentified crashed object.”[XI-16] By peculiar reverse logic, sometimes the absence of a solid fragment is adduced as equally valid evidence of flying saucers. The green fireballs of New Mexico (_Chapter_ V) were identified as spacecraft partly because they did not leave material traces on the ground. Similarly, when a small object apparently struck and went through a metal signboard in New Haven, Connecticut, on August 19, 1953, the object itself could not be found. Nevertheless, from a study of the size and shape of the hole and the material around the hole, saucer investigators, with more than Sherlockian skill, concluded that the object must have been a missile from outer space.

To identify “pieces of saucers,” a new pseudoscience has now developed which we may call “xenochemistry,” the interpretation of substances allegedly from other planets. In xenochemistry, a full qualitative and quantitative analysis is usually not performed and exact results are not made public. From an identification and sometimes a quantitative estimate of one or two of the elements present in the specimen, the investigator infers the nature of the rest and treats the inference as proved fact. On the basis of this “analysis” he concludes that the object, before it entered our atmosphere, must have had a certain chemical composition that is unknown or impossible on earth and that the object therefore came from another planet.

_Silver Rain in Brazil_

One of the most publicized substances to be analyzed in this way was the “silver rain” that allegedly fell from an unidentified flying object in Brazil. The incident occurred on December 13, 1954, in the city of Campinas and the witness was a housewife but, as in many UFO sightings, exactly what happened is not easy to find out[XI-17]. UFO publications in England, New Zealand, and the United States reported that the sighting had occurred at night but, in spite of the darkness, the witness had observed the objects in detail. She described three gray-colored, circular flying saucers; each was made up of two sections or plates, one placed on top of the other; the top plate rotated continuously and sent out a strong light. Moving soundlessly and in close formation, the three saucers had performed fantastic acrobatics over the city, apparently unnoticed by the other residents. Suddenly one of them had peeled off and dived low over the roof of the woman’s house, lighting up the whole neighborhood with the brilliant glare of its rotating section; then, going into a high-speed climb, it dropped at her feet a liquid substance that fell “like silver rain.”

According to the more generally accepted and more probable version, the incident occurred in the morning in full daylight. The housewife was feeding her poultry when she heard a noise on the ground near her feet. Stooping down, she observed a pool of shiny liquid, like silver rain, which solidified within a few seconds. Looking up, she saw three large objects moving rapidly high in the sky and they looked to her like flying saucers.

A reporter on the Campinas _Correio Popular_, hearing rumors that a flying saucer had dropped strange material “something like lead,” interviewed the woman, collected some fragments that a neighbor had picked up, and took them to a local chemist for analysis. The newspaper then reported that the stuff was absolutely pure tin--that is, it was about 90 per cent pure tin and the rest was either oxidation or metal alloys that were unknown on earth[XI-17, XI-18, XI-19].

Understandably interested in this report, members of the Brazilian Air Force also interviewed the witness and collected some of the fragments she showed them, as well as other fragments that had fallen about the same time in other parts of the city. Laboratory analysis showed the material to be merely solder. Several large airports not far from Campinas might well have had large planes in the air; they could have dropped the solder. The Air Force obviously saw no need to invoke the presence of extraterrestrial vehicles to account for the incident and considered the problem solved, but Brazilian saucer enthusiasts refused to accept this explanation. In their opinion the Air Force had either gotten hold of the wrong material or was covering up the true facts.

Two years later, in the autumn of 1956, the reporter who had ordered the original analysis received another collection of fragments and turned them over to a group of civilian investigators of UFO phenomena. Although he did not know the full history of the new fragments (unfortunately he had forgotten the names of the persons who gave them to him), he himself was convinced that they were part of the original shower of silver rain. Accepting this theory, the civilians sent the fragments to the United States for analysis: one part to a sympathetic scientist at an Ohio college, who asked a chemist colleague to test the material, and another to a commercial chemist in New York. When the New York chemist, like the Brazilian Air Force in 1954, reported that the material was an ordinary tin solder, the UFO group concluded that the fragment sent him must have been spurious, and refused to accept his findings. The Ohio chemist reported that his specimen contained tin, did not contain antimony, and had a density of 10.3. Since the density of tin is 7.3, the sample obviously contained other elements in addition to tin.

With the reports in hand, the editor of the Brazilian _UFO Critical Bulletin_ published the xenochemical conclusion under the headline, “Stuff Analyzed by American and Brazilian Scientists Proves the UFOs Are Non-Terrestrial Flying Machines.”[XI-18]

The full facts on which this conclusion rests should presumably be available for study, but they have never been published. The origin of the 1956 fragments is unknown; they may or may not have been part of the 1954 fall. But the 1954 incident at least offered an apparently ideal chance to establish beyond doubt the exact composition of a substance that fell from some object in the sky, and to determine whether it came from earth or from beyond. The material did not deliquesce or disappear, as gossamer and industrial waste may do, but remained available for analysis. Incredibly, this ideal chance was lost. Of the several chemists involved, none made a complete qualitative, quantitative, and spectroscopic analysis, and none published his complete data. The Ohio chemist, busy with ordinary duties, had time to make only a preliminary analysis of the 1956 fragment. He did not determine the amount of tin present and did not determine what elements other than tin were in the sample. The density of the 1954 sample is not known and the results of the complete qualitative, quantitative, and spectrographic tests, if performed, are not available.

When a businessman sends a specimen to a commercial chemist for analysis, he expects to receive a specific list of exactly what elements it contains and in what percentages. If he received, instead, results such as those of the silver-rain analysis, plus the chemist’s opinion that the specimen used to consist of something else in different proportions, the businessman would very properly refuse to pay.

No competent chemist would use the meager data available to assert that the 1954 and 1956 fragments had an identical origin, or that they were originally composed only of pure tin. A quantitative analysis theoretically could show that a given sample is composed entirely of a certain element such as tin, but if the sample contains only 90 per cent tin, 10 per cent obviously consists of other elements, and the specimen is not 100 per cent pure tin.

With so few facts available, the actual identity of the silver rain can only be guessed at, but overwhelming evidence indicates that it was made right here on earth.

The _Handbook of Chemistry and Physics_ lists a large number of possibilities. At least 5 alloys of tin and lead, without antimony, have densities between 9.43 and 10.33, like the 1956 fragments. Ordinary “plumber’s solder” is 67 per cent lead, 33 per cent tin, and has a density of 9.4. “Tinman’s solder” is 67 per cent tin and 33 per cent lead. Many aluminum solders have neither antimony nor lead, but contain tin in percentages ranging from 50 to 97 per cent, combined with varying proportions of zinc, aluminum, copper, cadmium, or phosphorus.

One judicial-minded investigator of flying saucers gently pointed out to the editor of the _UFO Critical Bulletin_ that the use of the word “proved” for the extraterrestrial origin of the silver rain was premature, and suggested the need for obtaining and publishing a complete analysis before drawing any conclusions. The editor responded with the peculiar logic of the xenochemist:

“What more is necessary to convince so severe and thickheaded person as Dr. ----? Would be necessary a statement in conjunction with some highly worldly considered scientist? ... Would be necessary a statement in conjunction from Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the Pope?--This he’ll never get of course. Would be necessary a UFO landing on his private garden?”[XI-17]

Another type of colored substance is the “blue rain” that sprinkled a thirty-mile stretch of countryside near London on September 9, 1962. Falling without warning from clear skies, it left a blue stain that wouldn’t wash off. Investigation showed that the substance came from jet planes taking part in Britain’s annual giant air show at Farnborough. The jets were using the blue dye to color their vapor trails and make a more spectacular display.

_Other Mysterious Fragments_

In the spring of 1960 Mrs. Coral Lorenzen, director of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, publicly challenged the truth of the Air Force statement that “no physical or material evidence, not even a minute fragment of so-called ‘flying saucer’ has ever been found.”[XI-20] Mrs. Lorenzen announced that she had in her possession two fragments of an extraterrestrial vehicle that had met with disaster in the earth’s atmosphere. Without specifying the date and location of the event, the identity of the witnesses, or any corroborative details of the alleged disaster, she merely said that several persons had witnessed the catastrophe. She went on to assert, somewhat astonishingly, that “the gratifying aspect of this case, however, is that we do not have to depend on the testimony of witnesses to establish the reality of the incident for the most advanced laboratory tests indicate that the residual material could not have been produced through the application of any known terrestrial techniques.”[XI-21]

Sending a letter and two photographs of the fragments to Colonel Lawrence J. Tacker, then in the Office of Information, United States Air Force, she simultaneously released to the press copies of both letter and photographs, and suggested that the Air Force could “vindicate” itself by analyzing the material. The newspaper photographs showed one fragment about four inches long and two inches wide resembling petrified wood in appearance, and a smaller piece shaped roughly like a flattened cupcake, whose surface showed pits and whorls like those on the trailing end of a meteorite.

Two days later, without waiting for a reply from Washington, Mrs. Lorenzen through the newspaper amplified her challenge. If the Air Force wanted to examine the mysterious fragments, she said, they would first have to agree to certain conditions[XI-22]:

“(1) APRO officers, together with duly appointed Air Force liaison personnel, would establish a board of experts representing both military and civilian UFO researchers.

“(2) This board of experts would decide what meaningful tests need to be performed on the material in question.

“(3) The board then would select a qualified testing agency to perform these tests under its cognizance.”

In all its history, the United States Air Force can surely have received no more extraordinary proposition. Whatever he may have felt, Colonel Tacker merely suggested that Mrs. Lorenzen could submit the material to ATIC for analysis.

The fragments were never forwarded to the Air Force.

Eventually APRO published some information about the “disaster.” Early in September 1957 a group of fishermen on a beach near Ubataba, Brazil, had supposedly sighted a disk-shaped object flashing down toward the sea. The UFO had suddenly veered upward and exploded, showering down fragments and sparks like fireworks. Several pieces had been obtained by a Brazilian representative of APRO, who submitted them to a chemist for complete tests including spectrographic and X-ray diffraction analyses.

The analyses have apparently never been published. Although they evidently showed the presence of at least three elements common on earth--magnesium, hydrogen, and oxygen--APRO somehow deduced that the fragments in their original state had consisted of pure magnesium and that the hydroxide must have formed when they came in contact with the water. The final conclusion stated that the object consisted, at least in part, of 100% magnesium. Similarly, perhaps, a cook might assert that since chocolate fudge consists, at least in part, of 100 per cent sucrose, fudge must originally have been composed entirely of pure sugar, except for a little chocolate and milk it picked up in passing through the kitchen.

From the few facts available a positive identification of the fragments is impossible. The description of the object seen by the fishermen fits that of a meteor that broke into pieces near the end of its flight. In the photographs the fragments look like ordinary meteorites, which often contain a fair amount of magnesium (see _Chapter_ V). There is no evidence to suggest that the fishermen’s “wrecked spaceship” was anything but an exploding meteor.

In the last fifteen years the Air Force has patiently analyzed dozens of odd substances ranging from angel hair to pancakes. The statement made in 1960 by General Thomas D. White, Chief of Staff, United States Air Force, still holds true:

“By an act of Congress the United States Air Force is charged with the Air Defense of the United States. Rapid identification of anything that flies is an important part of air defense. Thus the Air Force initiated and continues the unidentified flying object program. Under this program all unidentified flying object sightings are investigated in meticulous detail by Air Force personnel and qualified scientific consultants. So far, not a single bit of material evidence of the existence of spaceships has been found.”[XI-23]

[XI-1] Ormond, R. “I Found a Little Green Man,” _Flying Saucers_ (August 1957).

[XI-2] Scully, F. _Behind the Flying Saucers._ New York: Popular Library, 1951.

[XI-3] Cahn, J. P. “Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men,” _True_ magazine (September 1952).

[XI-4] Lorenzen, C. E. “The Reality of the Little Men,” _Flying Saucers_ (December 1958), p. 26.

[XI-5] Michel, A. _The Truth about Flying Saucers._ New York: Criterion Books, 1956.

[XI-6] Maney, C. A., and Hall, R. _The Challenge of Unidentified Flying Objects._ Washington, D.C., 1961.

[XI-7] Crompton, J. _The Spider_, London: Collins, 1950.

[XI-8] CRIFO _Orbit_, November 2, 1956.

[XI-9] CRIFO _Orbit_, December 7, 1956.

[XI-10] Air Force Files.

[XI-11] Boston _Globe_, November 24, 1960.

[XI-12] Barker, G. “Chasing the Flying Saucers,” _Flying Saucers_ (September 1961), p. 33.

[XI-13] Palmer, R. “NICAP: National Non-investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena,” _Flying Saucers_ (September 1961), p. 4.

[XI-14] Palmer, R. Editorial, _Flying Saucers_ (March 1962), p. 2.

[XI-15] _UFO Investigator_ (July-August 1961).

[XI-16] Keyhoe, D. E. _The Flying Saucer Conspiracy._ New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1955.

[XI-16a] “There’s Intelligent Life on the Moon!” _Flying Saucers_ (May 1959), p. 73.

[XI-17] _UFO Critical Bulletin_ (January-February 1958).

[XI-18] _UFO Critical Bulletin_ (July-August 1957).

[XI-19] _UFO Critical Bulletin_ (March-April 1958).

[XI-20] News Release No. 98–60, Department of Defense, January 29, 1960.

[XI-21] Alamogordo (N. Mex.) _Daily News_, March 13, 1960.

[XI-22] Alamogordo (N. Mex.) _Daily News_, March 15, 1960.

[XI-23] Tacker, L. J. _Flying Saucers and the U. S. Air Force._ Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960.

_Chapter_ XII

SPECIAL EFFECTS

Some flying-saucer reports, at first glance, do not seem to belong in any of the ordinary categories of sightings such as mistaken identification of air-borne objects or astronomical phenomena. Each of these atypical UFOs forms a class of its own and, when explained, proves to be the “special effect” of a unique situation. Many are misidentified lights or reflections, but since each one derives from a peculiar combination of circumstances that may not have occurred before and is not likely to occur again, accounting for them often requires a certain amount of luck as well as patient detective work.

Let us suppose, for example, that an Iowa farmer telephones the county sheriff one Tuesday afternoon to report that he has just seen a tiger running through his cornfield. When the sheriff arrives an hour later and can find no trace of a tiger, he is baffled; he knows the farmer is neither demented nor a hoaxer, and must have seen something remarkable--but what? The mystery remains unsolved until the sheriff learns from a feature story in Sunday’s paper that on the preceding Tuesday afternoon a trailer truck, carrying a shipment of animals for the Des Moines zoo, had a flat tire while traveling on Highway X near the junction with Route Y. During the stop to repair the tire, a giant eland had escaped from its cage in the trailer; it had been recaptured and the truck had then continued its journey and delivered its cargo intact.

The sheriff can now reconstruct the peculiar combination of events that produced the “tiger” theory. He knows that the section of Highway X where the truck stopped runs parallel to the far side of the farmer’s cornfield. The newspaper account tells him that a giant eland is a large antelope with short, twisted horns and a tawny-colored coat with dark stripes. He concludes that the farmer, having only a few seconds’ glimpse of a strange animal among the corn, had observed the eland’s stripes but had failed to notice its horns, and had therefore mistaken it for a tiger.

_The Role of Unusual Coincidence_

Analogous unlikely coincidences account for many flying-saucer reports. The factors that encourage the misinterpretation may be the particular time or place at which the phenomenon appears, the kind of weather, the experience, physical state, or mood of the observer, his unawareness of a certain fact, or any combination of these and other relevant circumstances.

A fairly simple case of this type was the reported landing of a spacecraft near an Army barracks (often referred to in saucer publications as the “Nike site”) in a rural area of Maryland, shortly before dawn on the morning of September 29, 1958. The sergeant on duty that morning left the orderly room at 4:25 A.M. and started to the barracks to waken the troops. The sky was clear, with bright moonlight. Hearing a whirring sound like a pitched baseball with a loose cover, he looked up toward the west to see a brilliant round white object soaring through the sky from north to south, and breaking up into smaller pieces as it traveled. It disappeared behind the roof of the mess hall, directly to the west, after being in view about two seconds. Hurrying around the south side of the mess hall to search the western horizon, he observed a very bright white, pulsating light at ground level, apparently in a wooded area some four or five miles west of the battery site, as though the glowing object had landed there. He reported the incident to an officer, who measured the azimuth position of the unknown. The glow remained in one place but diminished with increasing daylight until it was no longer visible.

Air Force investigators arrived that afternoon. They had already received many reports that a brilliant fireball had flashed through the sky at 4:25 A.M., the time in question, and had been observed by many witnesses in the area between Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but no fireball could account for the ground light. The next morning at 5:15 A.M. an intensely white, fluctuating light was observed at the same place and was studied through binoculars until daylight made it invisible; it could be seen only from the west side of the mess hall, and one step to the right or left would hide it from the observer. Traveling toward the position of the unknown, investigators found a dairy barn three miles away, and on a direct line of sight from the place the UFO had been observed. On one end of the barn was a 200-watt floodlight with a white reflector, still burning. On questioning the farmer, they learned that until recently the light had been burned out and had not been in use. The early hour of sunrise during the summer had provided all the light he needed to milk his cows. With the shorter days of autumn, however, he had needed the light and had replaced the bulb only a few days before. On the morning of the sighting, he had turned on the light a few minutes before the sergeant had noticed it[XII-1].

Thus several unrelated factors had combined to produce the illusion of a landed space vehicle: 1) only a week earlier, newspapers had publicized the alleged landing of a flying saucer in Sheffield Lake, Ohio (see _Chapter_ XIII); 2) a brilliant fireball had appeared; 3) a farmer had turned on a floodlight, previously out of use for several months; 4) the meteor had disappeared and the floodlight had appeared in roughly the same position as viewed by the observer.

_The Problem of Unknown Lights_

At night, when an observer notices a light appearing out of the darkness, he usually cannot see the object that produces or carries the light. Under familiar conditions on the ground or in the air he usually interprets the light correctly, by a kind of informed guesswork, as that of an automobile, an advertising sign, an airport beacon, a plane, a star, etc. But if it appears under unfamiliar conditions or in unexpected circumstances, he has to make an uninformed guess based on largely unconscious estimates of its size, distance, height, color, and rate of movement. To the driver of a car on a dark country road, a single light suddenly appearing ahead may indicate a plane or a star low in the sky or something on the road itself--a motorcycle, a car with only one headlight working, a workman’s lantern, a pedestrian carrying a flashlight, or something else. A double light may mean another automobile, two motorcycles traveling parallel, an animal whose eyes shine in the approaching headlight, or something else. The driver cannot be sure he interprets the light correctly until he passes it and can see the object itself or until he can identify it in some other way.

_Michigan’s Flying Bird Cage_

A UFO sighting based on mistaken identification of strange lights occurred in the early morning hours of March 22, 1959, near Ann Arbor, Michigan. The night was clear, the moon was nearly full, and visibility was unusually good. At about 1:30 A.M. a man and his wife driving on a country road suddenly noticed a strange object hovering in the sky south of the road. According to their report to the Air Force, the UFO was an elongated oval with a dome on top, something like a bird cage, and brilliantly illuminated by two shafts of intense pale-yellow light that sprang from the bottom and converged over the top. Frightened at this apparition, the witnesses could provide only uncertain estimates of distance and size. The object seemed to be twenty to thirty feet in diameter, was at an altitude of about 200 feet when first seen, and was hovering about two miles away. As they drove on, the object seemed to move and travel parallel with the car for about a mile. Then the yellow lights dimmed and a circle of eight or ten red lights suddenly appeared on the underside, the UFO rose vertically, very rapidly, and vanished in a few seconds. It had been in view for a period of five to ten minutes.

Checking the most probable explanations first, ATIC officials found that the nearby Willow Run Airport had had no aircraft in the vicinity at the time and that no star or planet seemed to be involved. Further investigation showed that the flying bird cage was actually the radio telescope of the University of Michigan. The telescope was installed on the top of Peach Mountain and was clearly visible from the road on which the witnesses were traveling. On the underside of the eighty-five-foot “dish” was a wire-mesh structure that suggested the bird cage. At the time of the sighting the dish was facing in the direction of the witnesses and was illuminated by a floodlight as well as by the bright moonlight. It had seemed to be following the car only because the car itself was moving. The astronomers operating the telescope were rotating the dish from the horizon to the zenith, and the yellow lights dimmed because the witnesses were seeing less and less of the surface. The “circle” of red lights was the red aircraft-warning lights on the WUOM radio tower, which lay in a direct line between the telescope and the witnesses. When the dish reached the zenith and was pointed to the sky overhead, the operating crew turned off the floodlights. The dish was no longer visible to the witnesses, who interpreted the sudden disappearance as a sudden vertical ascent into the sky[XII-1].

_UFOs from Reflections_

Reflections from the bright sun have produced many elusive UFOs. All pilots are familiar with the luminous objects that sometimes appear in the air below a plane on a sunny day, particularly when the plane is flying over wooded terrain that is partly obscured by atmospheric haze. The sun has been reflected momentarily from a broad shiny surface, such as the metal roof of a farm building; because of the contrast between the bright surface and the dark forest surrounding it, the image appears to be a UFO floating high in the air.

Sometimes the sun shines on a bright metallic surface, such as the chrome trim of an automobile, and by chance is reflected directly into the eyes of a passer-by. If he then glances at the sky he may see a whole fleet of UFOs; the bright flash has produced a temporary chemical change in the retina so that for a moment or two the eye sees a series of saucer-shaped images of the sun. A photographer’s flashbulb or a bright flash of lightning can produce similar after-images.

Some startling UFOs have been produced by reflections from an object that the witness was not able to see or did not recognize. One night in the spring of 1961 an amateur astronomer reported that a huge cigar-shaped flying saucer was hovering in the sky several thousand feet above the Harvard College Observatory. Investigation showed that the “UFO” was a reflection from a small oblong insulator on an electric wire strung between two buildings. Faintly illuminated from below by the lights from the unshaded windows, it seemed to be an immense and brilliantly glowing object high in the sky. The witness at first refused to believe that he could so mistake the evidence of his own eyes. Next morning, however, he returned to the scene and was able to see that what had appeared the night before to be a giant spaceship was only a small insulator a few feet above his head.

The bright sun reflected at a particular time from an object invisible to the observer often produces a puzzling phenomenon, such as the flying saucer reported from Danby, California, early in October 1958.

About 4:00 in the afternoon on October 2, three prospectors standing near a tungsten mill at Railroad Danby noticed a sudden bright glow in the northwest sky which remained visible for about 2½ hours and then disappeared. When a glow appeared again the following day at the same time and place, the observers tried to identify it by using a small telescope and saw a bright, oblong object hovering above the horizon; it was the color of aluminum, approximately fifteen feet long, five feet high, and about four miles away. Getting into a car, the men drove in the direction of the object and searched the supposed location on foot for several hours, but could find no trace of the UFO.

Several days later, realizing that the object reappeared every day at about the same time and place, two of the men decided to investigate further. Studying the object through a pair of powerful binoculars, they could see guy wires coming from it and rods radiating from the guy wires. Remembering that two tall radio antennas used by the highway patrol stood in approximately the same location, the witnesses found the explanation, which Air Force investigators confirmed. The antennas, placed some twenty feet apart, extended about twenty feet above the trees. The cigar-shaped hovering object was a special effect depending on a particular combination of circumstances: only during the first part of October, and only late in the afternoon, did the sun’s rays strike the antenna in such a way that the reflection was visible to an observer at Railroad Danby[XII-1].

_Sundogs in Utah and France_

Sundogs are another special effect resulting from a peculiar combination of circumstances, and they continue to supply their quota of good UFO reports. Tiny ice crystals floating in a layer of quiet air and reflecting a bright sun are responsible for producing sundogs. A thin layer of such crystals may be invisible to the observer; a thick layer appears as the familiar cirrus clouds. Sunlight filtering through such an ice fog is reflected in each crystal so that a pattern of bright spots of light forms in the sky, an image of the sun that sometimes rivals the sun itself in brilliance. These images are called mock suns, sundogs, or parhelia when they accompany the sun (and mock moons, moondogs, or paraselenae when they accompany the moon). They appear in the sky at a position a given distance from the sun and usually have a trace of red on the edge nearest the sun.

Occasionally a sundog makes a complete circle of light surrounding the sun with four bright patches, one above, one below, and one on either side. Sometimes two circles will appear, one within the other, surmounted by an inverted arc and traversed by a cross, like the spokes of a wheel whose center is the sun. The complicated structure of a fully developed mock sun--which is extremely rare--can suggest to the imaginative an enormous chariot in the sky and can terrify the superstitious. There is little doubt that this phenomenon inspired the two visions of Ezekiel described in the Bible.

Mock suns have been the cause of many UFO sightings. Even after several publications [see [XII-1a]] explained how the sun reflected from ice crystals could account for some of the reported flying saucers, this idea was largely ignored by early investigators who had a limited training in the physical sciences.

Sundogs are relatively uncommon. Few airmen, even those with long experience, have learned to recognize them. In a poll of both commercial and military pilots, Dr. Menzel found that only one in five knew what a sundog was and how it might look in the sky. Two of three generals in the Air Force, similarly, were unfamiliar with the phenomenon. Like balloons, sundogs have a silvery metallic sheen. When observed from the ground, they seem to hover or move very sluggishly; to a witness in the air they seem to move rapidly, to pace the plane, or to take evasive action as though under intelligent control. When enough data are available, and the time of day and the position of the unknown relative to the sun are appropriate, a mock sun should be considered as a possible explanation of the UFO.

A sundog seen from a plane can suggest a spectacular and fantastic structure, like the one reported over Rheims, France, at 2:30 P.M. local time on March 31, 1960. The pilot and crew of a C-47 plane described the unknown as like a gigantic spool of thread some twelve feet tall. The neck of the spool, about six feet in diameter, seemed to be capped at top and bottom by disks eight or ten feet in diameter. The upper disk was reddish, the lower, blue-green. The plane was flying at 6000 feet and had just passed from a storm area into a region of calm with unlimited visibility. The UFO remained in view for about sixty seconds, then suddenly vanished. From an analysis of the data, the position of the unknown relative to the sun and the observers, and the weather situation, Air Force investigators positively identified the object as a mock sun[XII-1].

One of the most recent sightings of this type occurred on October 2, 1961, a few minutes after noon[XII-1]. A civilian pilot who was just taking off from the Utah Central Airport at Salt Lake City noticed a bright silvery disk in the air ahead of his plane. He supposed it to be another aircraft crossing his course. When he was air-borne, he was surprised to find that the object, now an elongated pencil shape, still appeared in the same position where he had first seen it and hence could not be a plane. Puzzled, he radioed the control tower and reported the UFO. Looking south as directed by the pilot, the tower operator easily found the object, a bright spot in the sky directly below the sun and apparently hovering over the town of Provo, forty miles to the south.

Deciding to investigate, the pilot left the traffic pattern and started directly south after the UFO. It seemed to be standing practically still in the sky, with a little rocking motion, at an altitude of 6500 to 7000 feet. He seemed to have approached within three to five miles when the UFO suddenly shot up “like an elevator” and retreated rapidly south, as though taking evasive action. The acceleration was tremendous, almost as though the UFO had been fired from a rocket, but there was no vapor trail and no sound. It then disappeared, gradually. “It just faded out. I kept my eyes glued right on it because I could see it was moving away at a great speed. I wanted to see how long it would take and it was just a second or two until it had faded completely. And it was getting smaller all the time, you could see it was moving away.” The speed of departure, the pilot estimated, must have been thousands of miles an hour.

Alerted by the pilot’s message to the control tower, several persons on the ground at the Salt Lake City airport, most of them with experience as pilots, had also been watching the UFO. Ground observers at the Provo airport, also alerted, were not able to locate the unknown, even though they had been told it was almost directly overhead.

Investigators from a nearby Air Force Base interviewed the witnesses, who were obviously competent and reliable. All agreed that the unknown had been a bright, silvery, metallic-looking object that seemed to glisten or flicker in the sun; that it was roughly oval or indeterminate in shape; that it was solid and tangible, but not a conventional aircraft or balloon; that it made no sound, showed no exhaust or vapor trail; that it was in view roughly fifteen minutes, and disappeared gradually by “blotting out” or fading. All but one of the witnesses agreed that the skies had been absolutely clear and cloudless; one stated that, although the day was clear, a very slight haze existed over the mountainous region where the UFO appeared.

In spite of this general agreement, certain significant discrepancies became evident. The pursuing pilot stated that the object had moved up and away from him at incredible speed, as though it were controlled. The ground observers, however, did not see any movement by the UFO. Most of them reported that it remained stationary as though it were suspended in the air; a few said that it vanished at intervals, only to reappear a few seconds later in another place. Most of the time, they agreed, it just hung in the sky until it faded from view.

By analysis of these clues, ATIC was able to solve the mystery. According to the local weather bureau, the sky had been clear with visibility unlimited, but there had been very thin cirrus clouds, a layer of minute ice crystals suitable for producing a mock sun. A sundog would also account for the contradictory statements about the UFO’s motion. Since the ground observers remained in one place, their position relative to the sundog did not change and it seemed to remain stationary. The pilot, however, was in a moving plane and changing his position relative to the UFO; hence it seemed to move rapidly away from him. In the same way a rainbow seems stationary to a person who merely stands and watches it. But if he begins to chase it, hoping to catch up and perhaps find the legendary pot of gold, the rainbow seems to move away and elude its pursuer. The pilot’s belief that the UFO had exhibited fantastic speed was, according to his own statement, an inference based on the fact that the UFO quickly dwindled, became very small, and vanished. It disappeared, however, not because it was speeding away at thousands of miles an hour, but because of a change in the relative positions of sun and ice clouds that produced the sundog in the first place. One final point nailed down this explanation. The angular distance between sun and UFO was exactly that to be expected between sun and mock sun, at that time and place.

The details of this sighting obviously show a striking resemblance to some of those in the Mantell case (p. 33), in which the UFO and the sun had the same bearing from the pursuing plane as in the Salt Lake City incident. With the information now available, there can be little doubt that Mantell was actually chasing a Skyhook balloon. But in 1948 when so many of the relevant facts were not known, the sundog theory was a reasonable solution and may still be the correct one.

_Bright Spots on Films_

A bright blur, a ring of light, or a circular image something like the typical disk-shaped flying saucer sometimes appears on a film, much to the surprise of the photographer, who had not noticed any such object when he took the picture. These UFOs are usually caused by reflections from unnoticed drops of moisture in the air or by defects in the camera itself (see Figure 17). If the source of the image is something peculiar, it may pose a real problem (see Plates VIIIa and b).

On July 24, 1957, an American tourist in Norway snapped a picture of a group of houses on a cliff above the seacoast, and was amazed to find some time later that the print showed a large white, doughnut-shaped object hovering in the sky above the coast. Puzzled by this apparent evidence of a saucer that had been visible to the camera but not to her, she submitted the facts to ATIC investigators. Thorough study of the negative, the camera, possible sources of reflection in the landscape at the time the photograph was taken, all failed to account for the mysterious intruder. Obviously not a cloud, the image closely resembled a smoke ring, but the photographer had not been smoking and there were no sources of smoke in the neighborhood. The experts were baffled until one of them thought of a new possibility and again questioned the witness: had she by any chance been wearing a ring when she took the picture? She had--a sparkling diamond. If the angle of the sun, the direction she was facing, and the position of her ring finger in relation to the camera lens and to the sun had been exactly right, the annular image would have been reflected into the lens at the instant she snapped the picture. The resulting bright ring would look exactly like the UFO that appeared on the negative[XII-1] (see Plate VIIb).

An unusually fine large UFO inserted itself into a photograph taken on February 6, 1959, near Boulder, Colorado. The witness had spent the afternoon climbing on Flagstaff Mountain and, about 5:00 P.M., snapped a picture of the town of Boulder, to the southeast. Although he had seen nothing unusual in the sky or in the air, the negative, when developed, showed a small black blob that printed as a white, luminous, roughly spherical object--a typical flying saucer (see Plate VIIa).

Civilian saucer investigators in the area procured a copy of the photograph and sent it to NICAP for evaluation. The witness himself did not immediately assume that he had photographed an interplanetary spaceship hovering over the city of Boulder; instead, he sent a print and a description of the circumstances to Dr. Menzel, who was well acquainted with the geography of Boulder and Flagstaff Mountain. Dr. Menzel suggested that the blob of light could have been produced by some type of reflection: “The sun appears to have been pretty low at the time. Is there, in the approximate position of the blob, some house with a fairly large window that could have been reflecting the sun? Stand at approximately the same spot and look over the region with a field glass. A bright spot like this often spreads enormously on the film. You can see from the picture that the sun must have been shining brilliantly. The shadow, especially of the large barn on the right, gives us some idea of the height of the sun. This was in February, and the angle of the sun will now have changed. Please make this test and let me know.”

Not until the first week of May, however, was the witness able to repeat his excursion and make the necessary tests. Using a copy of his original picture as a guide, he was able to stand in the exact spot from which he had taken the picture. He then realized that the Law Building of the University of Colorado stood in the place occupied by the UFO and that the big double window of the Law Building was at the exact center. In May no reflection appeared, but from calculations he found that the position of the February sun was such that the window, when open at just the right tilt, would reflect the sun’s image to the exact spot on Flagstaff Mountain from which he took the picture. The image of the reflected sun is extremely bright and the film had been overexposed: therefore the image had spread on the film to create the large UFO. To confirm the hypothesis, the witness tried overprinting the negative so that the entire picture came out practically black, and with successively longer exposures the size of the bright UFO diminished. As he got it down to the smallest size on the blackest print, he could see the fuzzy outline of a window[XII-2].

_Unfamiliar Lights on Planes_

In the spring of 1961, a leading saucer publication stated that unidentified objects were still surveying the earth and cited, among other cases, a bright UFO seen maneuvering the night of March 23 near Fort Pierce, Florida[XII-3]. The report failed to mention that unidentified lights were seen on several other nights during that week in the skies over Jacksonville, Miami, and Cocoa-Titusville, as well as over Fort Pierce. Newspaper offices and radio stations in the area received many telephone queries about the mysterious lights, which were observed from the ground and from the air for periods of time ranging from five minutes to an hour. The descriptions showed an impressive consistency: the UFO was a round, twinkling light with a red or orange color changing to white, and exhibited a bobbing up-and-down motion as it swept across the horizon. In all sightings the weather was clear and the visibility excellent.

On the night of March 24 an Eastern Airlines pilot reported the UFO to the Miami Traffic Control. An observer in the control tower at the airport could see the object, but lost sight of it when he took up a plane to chase it. On the following night the Cocoa-Titusville Airport reported a similar object. A pilot in the air sighted the unknown and, about an hour later, encountered a turbulence unlike anything he had experienced in sixteen years of flying. Cruising in the region the next day, he observed a burned-out area on the ground below the place where the UFO had been. On the night of March 27, a ground observer watched the unknown through binoculars as it moved rapidly from west to north and gradually disappeared in the northwest.

Most of these witnesses were veteran airmen, well able to recognize conventional phenomena in the night sky. Studying their reports, officials at Patrick Air Force Base decided that the similarity of the descriptions warranted further investigation. In the preliminary study, an Intelligence officer took up a B-57 aircraft in the vicinity of Fort Pierce, while ground radar at Patrick Air Force Base kept his plane under constant surveillance. At 7:20 P.M., when at 25,000 feet, he saw the UFO, a white light three times brighter than the brightest star. It appeared in the western sky and was moving north to south. When viewed with the naked eye, the light looked like a star that dimmed and brightened in a regular cycle; through binoculars it also displayed the red and green navigation lights of a plane. Soon after the visual sighting, the ground radar informed the investigating pilot that the object was approximately fifty nautical miles from his plane and was a jet airliner bound for Miami; the jet was observed for approximately ten minutes as it descended toward the Miami airport. The investigating plane remained in the air and, about five minutes after the jet had landed, observed a second, similar, high-intensity light that appeared in the western sky, moving from north to south. The radar at the Miami air-traffic control center positively identified this light as a Delta Airline jet, Flight 833, proceeding southeast. From these facts the officers concluded that the UFOs seen in Florida that week had been produced by commercial jet airliners[XII-1].

Two questions remained: How had the experienced pilots and ground observers failed to recognize so familiar a phenomenon as a night-flying jet? What accounted for the unprecedented turbulence experienced by one pilot, and the burned-over ground below the region of the sighting?

The first question was soon answered. ATIC investigators telephoned the Federal Aviation Agency and learned that experiments with a new type of anti-collision beacon were being carried out from various field offices, and that several jet airliners as well as some turboprop aircraft were using the new light. The standard beacon was a rotating sodium light, whose color is yellow. The new beacon was an intense white light which, viewed at a slant, becomes a spectacular phenomenon even more brilliant than Venus or Jupiter seen rising or setting through a hazy atmosphere. Since the witnesses were not familiar with the appearance of the experimental beacons, they had not recognized the newly equipped jets.

The answer to the second question came later, an example of the “luck” required to solve some of these UFO puzzles. Major W. T. Coleman, then Air Force Information Officer for the UFO project, was flying over the Fort Pierce region on the afternoon of April 29 in calm, clear weather when his plane ran into moderate turbulence of the short-wave type, “like riding in a car over a washboard road.” The wind-shear component was not large enough to explain the turbulence, and though a cold front was approaching from the Gulf of Mexico, it was still far out on the edge of the western horizon. Then, being a native of Florida, he suddenly remembered that muck fires were fairly common in the Everglades region, which lay below the plane. Peering down at the glades, he noticed a very large muck fire. He concluded:

“Now, as typical with a cold front situation, the surface wind was blowing from the east pushing the smoke and heat toward the west coast of Florida. This relatively warm air naturally was lifting in the surrounding cool air. When the continuing warm air rose rapidly to the higher altitudes it ran into the reversed upper winds (high altitude westerly). In the process of being lifted the smoke filtered and cleared, yet the air remained relatively heated. It was moved directly across our course, thereby causing turbulence.”[XII-4]

The fires explained both the turbulence reported during the week of the UFO sightings and the burned-out area below the region of turbulence. Thus these Florida UFOs were not spacecraft watching the earth, but were a special effect created by the chance combination of unrelated factors: a new and unfamiliar anti-collision beacon, an advancing cold front, and fires in the Florida swamps.

_Inversions in California_

An unusually complex combination of events produced an epidemic of UFO sightings in northern California during the week of August 12 to 20, 1960. Nearly every night dozens of reliable citizens throughout Tehama County and the Mount Shasta region (long famous for its mysterious lights) reported UFOs at various times and of various descriptions: round, bright, metallic UFOs glowing with a reddish-purple fluorescent type of light, cigar-shaped UFOs trailing a long fiery exhaust, oval UFOs with red lights at each end and white lights in between, yellow-colored UFOs like a flying railroad car with flashing red lights at each end and white lights glowing at the windows. Radios roared with static and radar sets were plagued with phantoms, as the state was apparently invaded by a whole fleet of patrolling saucers.

The most important factor in these sightings was the weather; prolonged and extensive temperature inversions prevailed in the area all that week. From southern Oregon through northern California multiple inversions of 3 to 18 degrees occurred nightly. Under these conditions, practically any light shining into the night was apt to be projected upward as a mirage and to perform weird antics. Determining what was the particular light source of some specific phenomenon is almost impossible.

As complicating factors, certain heavenly bodies made their own contribution to the excitement. Most of the objects observed late at night and watched for periods of one to three hours were refracted images of the stars Capella or Aldebaran or the planet Mars.

Some of the most spectacular sightings were those reported from Red Bluff on the night of August 13–14. Two highway patrolmen were chasing a speeding motorcycle when, at about 11:50 P.M. P.D.S.T., they saw what they at first supposed to be a brilliantly lighted aircraft falling directly toward them. Jumping out of their car, they watched the object as it apparently reversed its course, shot upward, and began to perform fantastic maneuvers in the eastern sky. The performance continued for more than two hours. Before it ended, a second UFO had joined in the celestial dance, which was observed by dozens of excited witnesses in the Red Bluff area.