Chapter XIV: Preface (11)

Air Force bases in the neighborhood were notified, and ATIC investigators gathered and studied the evidence. There was no real mystery[XII-1]. The UFO first noticed by the patrolmen was probably the star Capella, which at Red Bluff is circumpolar; it rose at 10:50 P.M. and at the time of the sighting was about 4.7 degrees above the northeast horizon. About an hour later (12:48 A.M.) Mars rose, also in the northeast; and close behind it (1:15 A.M.) came the bright star Aldebaran, which made a striking pair with Mars. With three brilliant heavenly bodies just above the horizon, on a night of fantastic multiple inversions of temperature and humidity, the only surprising fact is that the number of UFOs reported was not larger.

A person who has never been lucky enough to see a good mirage may feel skeptical about the phenomenon. But those who have encountered a first-rate specimen--for example, the Chicago skyline suspended upside down in mid-air above Lake Michigan--know how startlingly real it can seem. When the source of the mirage is not apparent, the displaced image can seem mysterious and even frightening, as do many UFOs.

One such phenomenon, which might easily have been interpreted as a flying saucer, appeared shortly after dark one evening in mid-July, 1954, and was described by Dr. Menzel in a letter to a friend:

“My wife and I were driving to Alamosa, Colorado, on one of the longest, straightest stretches of highway in the United States, commonly referred to as the ‘gun-barrel highway.’ I had turned over the wheel to her and was settling back for a rest, after a long turn at driving over the mountains, when I became aware of unusual driving behavior on her part. First she would step on the gas, then on the brake, then on the gas again. ‘What is the matter? What are you trying to do?’ I asked. ‘See that truck ahead?’ she replied. ‘Every time I try to pass it, it speeds up, and then it slows down when I try to give it a chance to get ahead of me. It’s making me nervous.’

“I peered ahead through the darkness and there, sure enough, about three hundred feet ahead of us was a truck, its dark body brilliantly outlined with red and white lights. I studied the situation and glanced at the speedometer, which read forty miles per hour. ‘Well,’ I advised her, ‘you certainly ought to be able to pass that, dear, the way you usually drive.’ And this time she really stepped on the gas, pushing the speed up to sixty, seventy, eighty, and finally eighty-five. And would you believe it, that truck took right out ahead, still holding its estimated three hundred feet clearance, and matched us for every mile of that speed. By this time I was beginning to get an idea. ‘Slow down,’ I said. My wife obliged me by coming to a dead stop, brakes squealing.

“‘Now see there,’ she said, ‘I just escaped running into that truck.’ And the truck had stopped, still 300 feet ahead. At this point I ventured my conclusion. ‘That isn’t a truck,’ I explained. ‘It’s a flying saucer.’ ‘You have flying saucers on the brain,’ she said. Well, to shorten the story, she started the car again and the ‘truck’ moved off. And we chased it in that fashion for about fifty miles. On rare occasions, as we dipped slightly in a hollow, the truck would seem to dash ahead at speeds close to 1000 miles an hour. Or sometimes it would jump straight up, momentarily vanish, and then drop back into the road.

“The explanation was quite simple. The hot day had warmed the air close to the pavement, but the cooling of the surface at the onset of darkness had caused a layer of warm air to be sandwiched in between the cold air close to the road surface and the cold air above. This acted like a lens which produced an out-of-focus image of a bright tavern sign more than fifty miles away, a real mirage. There were few cars on the road, but as we met them the effect was most startling because some of them were so enlarged by the lens effect that a car five miles away seemed to be rushing directly at us only a block or two ahead. Sometimes these cars would appear to come to a sharp stop, reverse their course and disappear in the distance. At other times they would appear to be rushing on us upside down, with part of the road itself in the sky. Altogether it was a weird experience, but not in any sense supernatural. Lenses of air, either close to the ground or in the sky, can produce strange illusions.”

In this case, as in many UFO puzzles, the solution depended on a knowledge of the weather conditions and of the facts of local geography. If the pursuing car had turned off the road or stopped for the night before reaching the tavern, the specific cause of the phenomenon might still be a mystery.

_The Chesapeake Bay Case_

Two of the most famous UFO cases, the Nash-Fortenberry and the Tombaugh sightings, have never been completely explained even though the witnesses were unusually competent, the incidents fully described, and the basic facts not in dispute. Although the probable type of mechanism involved is clear in each case, determining specifically what factors combined in exactly what way to produce the phenomenon has so far proved impossible. Neither case, however, supports the theory that the UFO had an extraterrestrial origin.

On the evening of July 14, 1952, a Pan-American DC-4 was flying from New York to Miami, carrying ten passengers and a crew of three including First Officer William B. Nash and Second Officer William H. Fortenberry. As a pilot spending much of his life in the air, Captain Nash had long been interested in the question of UFOs, and during the long night hours of over-water flights he had often cut down the cockpit lights to search the sky. In five years of watching he had observed hundreds of meteors, various types of auroral display, the lights of other aircraft, and the multicolored images of stars and planets distorted by refraction, but he had never seen any unidentifiable aerial phenomenon that appeared to be under intelligent control--until this particular night, when he was not watching for UFOs.

Shortly after 8 P.M. E.S.T. the plane was cruising on automatic pilot at about 8000 feet over Chesapeake Bay, and approaching Norfolk, Virginia. The sun had set and the night was almost entirely dark, although the coast line was still visible. Fortenberry, sitting at the right as copilot, was making his first run on this particular course and Nash, in the pilot’s seat at the left, was pointing out the cities and landmarks of the route. Nash had just called attention to the lights of Newport News and Cumberland, ahead and to the right of the plane, when at 8:12 a brilliant red glow suddenly appeared in the west, apparently between Newport News and the aircraft, and so low that it might almost have been on the ground. One of the men exclaimed, as have so many incredulous witnesses on first seeing a UFO, “What the hell is that?”

Looking through the front windows of the cockpit, they watched the unidentified light traveling northeast at incredible speed on a horizontal course roughly a mile below the plane. Almost immediately they perceived that the unknown was actually a procession of six red-orange lights, glowing like hot coals. Shooting forward like a stream of red tracer bullets, the line of lights moved out over Chesapeake Bay until they were only about half a mile away from the plane. They appeared to be sharply defined, large, circular disks, arranged in a narrow echelon formation--like a set of stairs tilted slightly to the plane’s right, with the leader at the lowest step, each following disk slightly higher and to the rear, and the last disk at the highest point (see Figure 18). Realizing that the line was apparently going to pass under the plane at the right on the copilot’s side, Nash flipped off his seat belt so that he could move to the window on that side. During this brief interval he was not able to see the objects, but Fortenberry kept them in view. As he later described their amazing behavior, all the disks simultaneously turned up on edge, like coins, so that the glowing surfaces were tilted to the right. Still on edge, they suddenly reversed their relative places so that disk 1 now occupied the last place in line and disk 6 became the leader.

This shift had taken only a brief second and was completed by the time Nash reached the window. Both he and Fortenberry then observed the disks flip back from the on-edge to the flat position. In the same fraction of a second, the entire line changed direction as abruptly as a ball bouncing off a wall and shot away to the west on a heading of 270 degrees. An instant later two similar disks darted out, apparently from beneath the plane, and joined the line as numbers 7 and 8 (Figure 18). The lights receded to the west, suddenly disappeared, immediately reappeared, abruptly began a steep climb to an altitude above that of the plane, then vanished not in sequence but in random order. The sighting had lasted for a period of twelve to fifteen seconds[XII-1, XII-5, XII-6, XII-7].

After a quick check showed that no one else in the aircraft had observed the lights, the pilots radioed a message to the CAA station at Norfolk for forwarding to the Norfolk Navy Base, reporting eight unidentified objects traveling at speeds in excess of 1000 miles an hour. In Miami, next morning, Air Force officials questioned both witnesses. According to their estimates, the disks had moved horizontally about 2000 feet above the ground until their final climb and disappearance, were about 100 feet in diameter, and about 15 feet thick. Since they apparently traveled fifty miles during the twelve to fifteen seconds they were in view, their velocity would have been 6000 to 12,000 miles an hour.

Intelligence officials first checked the air traffic. Five jets from Langley Air Force Base, near Newport News, had been in the region at the time of the sighting, but they were ruled out as an explanation for the disks. Both pilots were informed that seven other persons, apparently on the ground, had reported unknown lights in the Norfolk area; the Air Force files contain no record of these reports and it is probable that some, at least, of these persons mistook the sunset-reddened jet trails for UFOs.

Few sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena have been more clearly described. Both witnesses were experienced pilots. Nash had flown more than 10,000 hours at altitudes of 7000 to 8000 feet and had held the rank of captain for eight years. Both men had been trained to observe accurately, to check and double-check every factor that might affect safe flying, and to regard the word “assume” as a potential killer. They shared the attitude of all cautious airmen: “In God we trust--everyone else, we check.”[XII-5] Unlike many UFO descriptions, their report distinguished rigorously between fact and inference, and it included the exact time of the sighting as well as the position, height, speed, and direction of flight of their plane. Using a kind of “instinct-judgment” gradually developed during their many hours in the air, they had made careful estimates of the position, height, speed, and direction of flight of the unknowns. Nevertheless, no reasonable explanation of the disks was found.

At the time of this incident flying saucers had been big news for many weeks. Both _Life_ and _Look_ magazines had recently published serious discussions of the possibility that flying saucers came from other planets, and newspapers were printing dozens of reports of weirdly glowing machines trailing fiery exhausts, streaking through the air at meteoric speeds (see _Chapter_ VII). At ATIC, the small staff of nine men was swamped with saucer reports, far more than they could deal with properly, and some of the investigators were privately convinced that UFOs did come from outer space[XII-6]. For those or other reasons, the Norfolk sighting unquestionably received a less adequate study than would a similar incident today. The case was dropped and filed as an Unknown.

The incredible velocity and instantaneous change of course reported were obviously impossible for any earthly vehicle; no known metal could have escaped being melted by the frictional heat produced during so swift a passage through the dense atmosphere at 2000 feet, and no human flesh and bone could have survived the smashing inertial forces involved in the instantaneous change of direction. Nash and Fortenberry frankly stated their own conviction: “Though we don’t know what they were, what they were doing here or where they came from, we are certain in our own minds that they were intelligently operated craft from somewhere other than this planet.”[XII-7]

_A Possible Explanation of the Nash-Fortenberry Disks_

In the hope of solving the mystery, even though a decade has passed, the authors of this book have made a thorough study of the available evidence and present the results in the pages that follow.[D]

[D] We wish to thank Professor C. A. Maney and Captain W. B. Nash for their generous help with this problem. Although they do not agree with our conclusions, Professor Maney has kindly made available certain useful documents and Captain Nash in a lengthy correspondence has patiently answered a great many questions of detail.

When puzzling observations in a laboratory seem to point to a conclusion that contradicts the main body of scientific knowledge, the researcher first tries to repeat the experiment and duplicate the observations. If this is impossible, as with the Chesapeake Bay phenomena, he next re-examines the assumptions on which the conclusion is based. The belief that the UFOs had an extraterrestrial origin is based chiefly on two assumptions: first, that the estimates of the disks’ size, distance, and speed were reasonably accurate; and second, that the disks were solid objects. If either assumption is unsound, the extraterrestrial theory is unnecessary and the incident becomes much less of a puzzle.

Both witnesses were able and experienced observers. Nevertheless their determinations of distance and size, and hence of speed, are open to question because of the very fact that the disks were unidentified phenomena. Angular estimates are usually reliable when an observer is judging the position and speed of other known aircraft moving in the sky. But when the moving object is a strange one and is seen against an empty sky or flat ground containing no standards of comparison, estimates of actual size mean very little.

The ability to judge distance depends largely on the binocular vision of the observer’s eyes, separated by a span of about 2.5 inches. Focused on an object at 300 feet, they subtend an angle of about one fortieth of a degree, less than one tenth the diameter of the full moon. This is a physiological fact, and means that if the observer is more than 300 feet away from an object of unknown size, he cannot determine its distance accurately unless he knows how large it is or unless he can compare it with a known object. Using angular estimates, the witnesses in the Chesapeake Bay case calculated that at the point of closest approach the disks were a mile lower than the plane and about half a mile to the north--a distance of roughly 7000 feet. Mentally comparing their appearance with that of a DC-3 aircraft at this distance, the observers arrived at an estimate of size--whose accuracy depends on having a known distance. The circularity of this process indicates the weakness of all the estimates given. Even the most skillful observer cannot accurately judge the distance of an unidentified object when he does not know its true size, and he cannot judge the size unless he knows its actual distance.

Over Norwich, Connecticut, on May 15, 1962, a cloudless day with perfect visibility, a Navy aircraft and a commercial-airlines plane reported a near collision at about 7000 feet. The Navy pilot filed a complaint, stating that the two planes had missed each other by a distance of only about 600 feet. According to the commercial pilot, who did not file a complaint, the planes had had a leeway of about 4000 feet--a more than sixfold difference![XII-8]. Thus good pilots can differ widely in estimating the position of objects in the sky, even known aircraft seen in full daylight. With an unrecognized phenomenon seen in darkness or in semidarkness, as in the Chesapeake Bay case, good estimates are impossible.

The extraterrestrial conclusion depends even more strongly on the second assumption, that the UFOs were material objects. Nearly every part of the description is in direct conflict with this idea. The instantaneous reversal of course, for example, if performed by solid objects, should have produced a shock wave that would have broken windows in Norfolk, Newport News, and points west. Only one observation even suggests that the unknowns had a material nature: when the disks flipped on edge they seemed to reveal bottom surfaces, which would indicate a solid body. The witnesses specifically qualified this statement, however, by adding that though they had the impression that the bottom surfaces were unlighted, the “bottoms” were not clearly visible. Thus the three-dimensional structure was not actually observed, but only inferred. The night was dark, the UFOs were glowing like hot coals, and were supposedly more than a mile away. Even if the disks had been solid objects, an observer could actually have seen only a circular-shaped light that suddenly narrowed to a very thin ellipse; if he believed the object to be solid, he might infer the presence of other surfaces, but a side edge 15 feet thick and an unlighted bottom surface, even if they had existed, would not have been detectable.

Of the other observations, all are inconsistent with the theory that the UFOs were material in nature. All, however, are completely consistent with the theory that the disks were immaterial images made of light.

Images made of light can glow with brilliant colors, can show well-defined circular shapes, and can flip on edge. Since they are not subject to the forces of gravity and inertia, they can travel at incredible speed, change direction sharply and instantaneously, and perform all of the maneuvers ascribed to the UFOs. On this new assumption, the observations become credible and the major part of the mystery vanishes.

Only one problem remains. Just exactly what produced the images? Of the many possible explanations, we first considered the simplest, an astronomical source. The UFOs appeared low in the western sky at 8:12 P.M. E.S.T., about forty-five minutes after sunset. The night was dark, for the moon had just entered its last quarter and did not rise until much later. Apparently the only planet that could have been involved was Mercury. Setting a little more than an hour after the sun, it should have been visible above the western horizon at the time of the sighting, but since it was not particularly brilliant, having a magnitude of a little more than +0.6, we put aside the astronomical theory, for the moment, as improbable.

We next explored the possibility of multiple reflections in the glass windows of the cockpit, produced by a light source inside the plane (such as a cigarette), or in the air outside (such as the bright-red exhaust trail of one of the jets in the area). Like the astronomical theory, this idea was set aside as improbable. Learning to distinguish between a reflection and a real light seen through a cockpit window is part of every pilot’s training. When he sees a strange light, he automatically makes the proper checks. Furthermore, Nash and Fortenberry had observed the disks through three separate windows having different orientations.

Accepting the overwhelming probability that the source of the UFOs was outside and below the aircraft, we concluded that it was almost certainly on the ground. The densely populated coastal region near Newport News and Norfolk, with several airfields and military installations, included countless possible sources such as a searchlight, an illuminated advertising sign, an air beacon. Stratified clouds or inversion layers of temperature and/or humidity could have multiplied such a light into a series of glowing disks (see Figure 19).

The soundness of this theory depended on the prevailing weather conditions. According to the reports, on the night of July 14 roughly a third of the sky at 20,000 feet was covered with thin cirrus clouds, practically invisible; at lower altitudes the night was cloudless and sharply clear, there was no apparent haze, visibility was unlimited, and no temperature inversion existed. Under such conditions the suggested mechanism would obviously not operate.

A more detailed survey of the weather conditions, however, quickly showed that this picture was greatly oversimplified. At 8:12, the time of the sighting, the night had already become quite dark. Yet the sun had set only forty-five minutes earlier and, according to the almanac, twilight should not have ended until 9:01 local time. Thus there must have been a dense cloud bank low in the west. Also, according to Captain Nash, there was probably some unstable air, which in itself indicates inequalities of temperature and/or humidity.

A thorough study of the situation showed that inversions of both temperature and humidity must have been present. In the summer of 1952 all the eastern states were suffering from an intense heat wave and drought, and the ground cooled rapidly after sunset, because of the lack of cloud cover during the day. In a period of heat and drought, the nightly cooling produces marked inversions favorable to extreme refraction or reflection. Small in extent, existing only briefly in one place, constantly changing location, such inversions may not be detected by radiosonde observations[XII-9]. During July and August, temperature inversions occurred almost every night in the coastal regions and accounted for the radar angels so frequently observed in the Washington area during those weeks (see _Chapter_ VIII).

The fact that the sighting occurred over Chesapeake Bay is significant. A body of water cools more slowly than the land, and the air over water is warmer than that over land. The cooler air from the land is carried over the water by convection currents, flows in and under the warm air, is heated by the water and rises, to be replaced in turn by the further flow of cold air from the land. The air over a lake, river, or other body of water also has a higher moisture content than over the land and can form an invisible haze.

All these facts lead inescapably to the conclusion that sharp localized discontinuities of both temperature and humidity must have existed over Chesapeake Bay on the night the UFOs appeared. A light on the Virginia coast, shining northeast toward the plane, could easily have been spread out into a series of images like those observed. A change in the orientation of the light or a shift in the location of the inversion would account for the abrupt change of course made by the disks.

Since the plane was flying at a ground speed of about 195 knots (225 to 250 miles an hour), it would have traveled about a mile during the twelve or fifteen seconds the disks were in view. This distance would have changed the relation between moving plane and stationary ground light, so that the images would no longer have been visible from the plane. By flying on, the witnesses left the phenomenon behind them.

Obviously this solution does not identify the particular beacon, searchlight, or other ground light that produced the Chesapeake Bay disks. But it does offer a highly probable explanation that is consistent with all the observations and does not depend on the presence of an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

_Other UFOs in “Stack” Formation_

A correspondent has reported a UFO sighting very similar to the Norfolk case, almost certainly produced by the mechanism just described.

In the late spring of 1955 a physicist, Mr. Z, was driving west on the highway between Dayton and Yakima, Washington, in a region of low-lying hills. The time was shortly after dark; the sun had set but there was still a suggestion of light in the west. Suddenly a line of five glowing UFOs appeared in the western sky, apparently three to five miles away, traveling east at high speed, and accelerating as they approached. Flying in a “stack” with the leading saucer on top, the individual saucers were oriented in horizontal planes, but each follower was lower than and somewhat behind its predecessor so that the entire formation was “like a stack of pancakes” leaning at about a 45-degree angle toward the direction of flight. (Note that this arrangement is the reverse analogue of that of the Chesapeake Bay UFOs.) The top saucer advanced more rapidly than the bottom one, so that as they flashed through the sky at the left of the observer they appeared to be in single file. Startled, he stopped his car and got out to scan the sky, but the saucers had disappeared. Some fifteen to twenty seconds later a similar formation appeared in the west. As they approached he could see that they were thin, flat disks, glowing with a white light, sharply defined and circular in shape, and apparently fifty to a hundred feet in diameter. As they passed, the stack again spread out into single file. When they were apparently about ten miles east, the three lead saucers suddenly disappeared, while the two that had been on the bottom made a sharp turn to the north, as abruptly as balls bouncing off a wall.

Concluding that the saucers might be images produced by an airfield beacon shining upward through very thin horizontal clouds, the observer continued to watch. They reappeared again and again, sometimes at the correct interval for an airfield beacon, but sometimes delaying for two or three minutes. To explain their occasional failure to appear on schedule, he reasoned that some very dense, fast-moving, low-lying clouds must lie in the west between him and the beacon, so that sometimes the light could penetrate to shine on the assumed stratified layers overhead, and sometimes not. After twenty minutes or so, the appearance of the phenomenon changed. The top three saucers merged gradually into an indistinct blur, while the bottom two remained sharp and distinct and continued to dart abruptly to the north just before disappearing.

Although the observer was not able to see the very thin layers of cloud overhead that would be required to account for the sharply defined shape of the saucers, he concluded that his explanation was the most reasonable one[XII-10].

In the Norfolk sighting, unfortunately, the witnesses could not easily have remained in one place to watch for a possible reappearance of the UFOs. If they had circled and flown back, and had been able to find the exact location, they might have seen the disks again.

_The Tombaugh Rectangles_

A remarkable phenomenon observed in New Mexico in the summer of 1949 has remained among the most puzzling of the Unknowns. As in the Chesapeake Bay case, the facts are not in dispute. The witness was an astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh, at that time in charge of the optical instrumentation of the rocket-firing program at the White Sands Missile Range. He had had thousands of hours of experience in observing the night sky and when still a student had gained fame, after months of patient searching of photographic plates, by locating the image of the planet Pluto near the position long predicted for it by Lowell and Pickering.

On the night of August 20 Tombaugh was sitting with his wife and his mother-in-law in the yard of his home in Las Cruces, watching the stars. There was no moon, and the transparency of the sky was extraordinary, so that even the stars of sixth magnitude, usually barely detectable by the naked eye, were clearly visible. About 10:45 P.M. a geometrically spaced group of six to eight rectangles of light appeared almost directly overhead. Of low luminosity, they were “windowlike” in appearance and yellowish-green in color. The individual rectangles were quite small, not wider than four or five minutes of arc, and the entire group covered a span of about 1 degree (about twice that of the full moon). As they moved noiselessly in a vertical circle path toward the south-southeast, the individual rectangles became foreshortened, the span of the group became smaller, the lights turned brownish and faded from view when 35 to 40 degrees above the horizon. They had been in sight for about three seconds. Mrs. Tombaugh, who did not see the lights until they had moved some distance from the zenith, observed them for only about 1½ seconds before they disappeared. To her they seemed a diffuse greenish glow, interconnecting a span of greenish spots of light. Her eyesight had always been less acute than that of her husband, and they attributed the difference in their descriptions to this difference in vision.

Although Tombaugh had been too startled to count the number of rectangles or to note some other features he wondered about later, he immediately recorded the facts of the observation, sketched the pattern of the formation, and noted his impression that the lights had been part of a rigid structure. He added, “I have done thousands of hours of night sky watching, but never saw a sight so strange as this.” A report of this sighting was forwarded to Air Force officials, who could find no explanation. UFO enthusiasts unhesitatingly pronounced the phenomenon a huge flying saucer--an interpretation that the witness himself never made.

The accounts given to the public unfortunately suffer from various distortions of fact. In its Cassandra-like warning of possible visitors from other planets, _Life_ magazine included the Tombaugh sighting as one of the key cases and in a ten-sentence description managed to include at least six misstatements, some of which added to the “uncanny” nature of the incident. According to this summary[XII-11] the year was 1948 (it was 1949); the time was about 11:00 P.M. (it was 10:45 P.M.); the lights were traveling south to north (they were moving northwest to southeast); the object had an oval shape (Tombaugh did not specify a shape); the lights exhibited a glare (they were of low luminosity); their speed was too fast for a plane, too slow for a meteor (no estimate of speed was given). On a nationwide TV show broadcast in 1958 one of the speakers stated specifically that Tombaugh had observed a cigar-shaped object with lighted portholes[XII-12]. An “artist’s conception” of the UFO in one publication[XII-13] depicts a long, tapered ship with a line of lighted windows, wholly unrelated to Tombaugh’s own sketch, which shows no unifying structure, merely six small rectangles arranged as though each one were at the corner of a hexagon (see Figure 20).

While keeping an open mind on the possibility of interplanetary travel, Tombaugh himself has never supported the spaceship interpretation so often attributed to him in print but has considered various possible explanations--insects or birds illuminated by ground lights, or reflections of ground lights against the boundary of an inversion layer in the air. Of these, the inversion theory seems the most probable. The layer in such a case must have been extremely thin or extremely weak, otherwise it would have dimmed the brightness of the faint stars he was observing. As in the Chesapeake Bay case, the mysterious rectangles were undoubtedly the special effect of some unique combination of circumstances, unlikely to be repeated. Conditions were ideal for the formation of small sharply localized inversions: the weather was clear, the day had been hot. A small temperature inversion existing at a relatively low elevation and smoke, haze, or dust collecting in a very thin layer at a relatively low altitude were the prerequisites that almost certainly existed. Some unknown cause--in the vicinity of an airfield there are many possibilities--could have produced a ripple in the thin haze layer. This ripple, tipping the haze layer at a slight angle, could have reflected the lighted windows of a house; as the ripple progressed in a wavelike motion along the layer, the reflection would have moved as did the rectangles of light. Conditions of refraction at the interface would have reflected the wave upward.

Tombaugh has recently summarized his convictions on the entire UFO phenomenon as well as on his own sighting:

“From my own studies of the solar system I cannot entertain any serious possibility for intelligent life on the other planets, not even for Mars (the planet to which I have devoted considerable observation and study over the past thirty-five years). The logistics of visitations from planets revolving around the nearer stars is staggering. In consideration of the hundreds of millions of years in the geologic time scale when such visitations may possibly have occurred, the odds of a single visit in a given century or millennium are overwhelmingly against such an event.

“A much more likely source of explanation is some natural optical phenomenon in our own atmosphere. In my 1949 sighting the faintness of the object, together with the manner of fading in intensity as it traveled away from zenith towards the southeastern horizon, is quite suggestive of a reflection from an optical boundary or surface of slight contrast in refractive index, as in an inversion layer.

“I have never seen anything like it before or since, and I have spent a lot of time where the night sky could be seen well. This suggests that the phenomenon involves a comparatively rare set of conditions or circumstances to produce it, but nothing like the odds of an interstellar visitation.”

[XII-1] Air Force Files.

[XII-1a] Menzel, D. H. “The Truth About Flying Saucers.” _Look_ magazine (June 17, 1952).

[XII-2] Johnson, C. L. Personal communication.

[XII-3] _UFO Investigator_, April-May 1961.

[XII-4] Coleman, W. T. Personal communication.

[XII-5] Nash, W. B. Personal communication.

[XII-6] Ruppelt, E. J. _The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects._ Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1956.

[XII-7] Nash, W. B., and Fortenberry, W. H. “We Flew Above Flying Saucers,” _True_ magazine (October 1952).

[XII-8] Boston _Herald_, June 3, 1962.

[XII-9] “Radar Objects Over Washington,” _Air Weather Service Bulletin_ (September 1954), pp. 52–57.

[XII-10] Gifford, J. F. Personal communication.

[XII-11] “Have We Visitors from Outer Space?” _Life_ magazine, April 4, 1952.

[XII-12] “Flying Saucers, the Enigma of the Skies,” Armstrong Circle Theatre TV Script, Jan. 22, 1958.

[XII-13] Michel, A. _The Truth about Flying Saucers._ New York: Criterion Books, 1956.

[XII-14] Tombaugh, C. W. Personal communication.

_Chapter_ XIII

INVESTIGATORS: AIR FORCE AND CIVILIAN

Few government employees in recent times have been subjected to more criticism than the men in the Aerial Phenomena Group at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. This agency (usually referred to in this book as ATIC) has the responsibility of investigating all official reports of unidentified objects in our skies. Of the thousands of such incidents studied so far, none suggests that the UFO in question came from outer space. In fact, the term UFO has proven to be one of the worst misnomers of history. In the most perplexing cases, the phenomena reported are seldom material Objects, very few of them are Flying and, when fully analyzed, almost none remain Unidentified.

Identifying strange objects in the air over the United States is vital to the country’s security. That military officers should be guilty of carelessness or casual guesswork in this serious business is unthinkable. Yet ATIC investigators, and through them the United States Air Force, of which they are members, for more than a decade have been the target of vicious attacks by civilian enthusiasts devoted to the cult of flying saucers.

Banded together in various “research” organizations and operating on the premise that UFOs are interplanetary in origin, most of these enthusiasts flatly reject the normal explanations--planets, meteors, satellites, balloons, reflections, birds, radar phantoms, hoaxes, or delusions. Flying saucers _obviously_ cruise in our skies, the believers argue, and the Air Force failure to admit the obvious proves that its investigators are incompetent or dishonest or both, and that they are involved in a giant conspiracy to conceal the truth from the American public[XIII-1].

In the view of the saucer groups, the Air Force can do no right. If, after receiving a UFO report, the investigators require some time to collect all the relevant facts and to reach a sound conclusion, they are berated for the delay and accused of cover-up tactics, as in the Killian case (p. 52). On the other hand, when the answer is found quickly and released to the newspapers, UFO addicts deny its truth and assert that the explanation was hurriedly rushed into print in order to deceive the public, as in the Pacific sighting on July 11, 1959 (p. 106)[XIII-1a, p. 8]. Some of these peculiar beliefs may rest on an imperfect understanding of the actual aims, methods, and resources of Air Force investigators.

_Official Study of UFOs_

The report of an unidentified flying object, in about 90 per cent of the cases, comes first from an ordinary private citizen, who often notifies the local newspaper or radio station. Not until he reports the incident to a military official, however, is ATIC empowered to start investigation. The commanding officer at the Air Force base nearest the place of the sighting then makes a preliminary investigation and, if the facts seem to warrant further study, forwards the information to Dayton for evaluation.

With years of experience to draw on, the Aerial Phenomena Group can often identify the unknown after a brief study of the report. If not, they try to determine whether the report contains all the facts necessary for an explanation and whether the unknown may be of interest to Intelligence officers. Does it represent a possible danger to the nation? Does it have possible military significance? Does it have possible scientific or technical significance? If, after this review, the investigators conclude that the unknown might be of some importance, they carry out an intensive study in which they may have the help of an organization directly connected with the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence or of allied Intelligence agencies. When all the relevant facts are collected, a survey usually shows that the unknown fits a particular class of sighting. To complete the identification, ATIC can call on the expert knowledge of a specialist in the type of phenomenon involved.

Expert help is available from a large variety of sources:

1. Official consultant to the Air Force, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Director of the Dearborn Observatory and Professor of Astronomy at Northwestern University, formerly Assistant Director, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

2. Members of the Air Force with special scientific and technical training, whose full duty is the study, investigation, and analysis of UFO reports.

3. A panel of military and civilian experts in all branches of science and technology.

4. The scientific and technical laboratories (photographic, ballistic, chemical, etc.) of all branches of the Air Force and of other government agencies.

5. The meteorological records of the United States Weather Bureau, the United States Coast Guard, and other government agencies.

6. Commercial laboratories under contract to carry out special work.

With the best scientific resources of the nation available, the Air Force can make sure that a puzzling UFO phenomenon will undergo study by an expert. Reports involving radar sightings are analyzed by the research scientists who know most about the behavior of radar. If satellites or astronomical objects might be involved, astronomers study the evidence. If the report includes photographs or physical evidence, experts provide the appropriate laboratory analysis. If a UFO still proves difficult to explain, the complete facts are laid before a panel of experts for discussion. When a sighting has been completely analyzed, the conclusions--known or unknown--are filed with the record of the case. If the newspapers have publicized the incident, a summary of the analysis is given to SAFIS (Office of Information Services, Office of the Secretary of the Air Force) for release to the press.

In the early years of the flying-saucer saga, almost none of the men assigned to investigate UFOs had any special training in the optical and astronomical sciences or in investigative techniques. Since the specific facts of so many cases were classified, civilian scientists who might have helped explain the UFO puzzles were not able to get the necessary information. Unsurprisingly, the percentage of unexplained cases sometimes reached as high as 5 to 10 per cent, and once reached the staggering peak of 20 per cent! In recent years the techniques of collection, investigation, and analysis of the facts have greatly improved. Air Force investigators not only have excellent training, they also have a solid body of experience behind them. In later reviews they have found the answers to many, but not to all, of the backlog of “Unknown” cases which, if reported today, would probably cause no problem. Some of the old cases will probably never be solved because the men in charge at the time did not always know what questions to ask. Essential information was not obtained and can never be obtained now.

The Air Force never closes an unsolved case. Reports that have been listed as Unidentified or Insufficient Evidence are reanalyzed when new evidence becomes available. Occasionally new evidence produces a more complete or even a different explanation for a case that was previously considered probably solved.

Statistical summaries of the UFO sightings for each month and for each period of six months are forwarded to SAFIS for release. In recent years ATIC has been receiving fewer than 600 reports per year and solving about 98 per cent. In 1961, 578 UFOs were reported. Of those in which all the necessary information was available, all but thirteen--about two per cent--were completely explained.

Believers in flying saucers tend to ignore the 98 per cent of cases fully explained by the Air Force, and to focus attention on the 2 per cent that remain puzzling. Yet no distinguishable difference exists between the types of observation described in solved and in unsolved cases. From considering the original reports, the competence of the witnesses, and the appearance and movements of the various UFOs, no analyst could predict in advance which will be fully accounted for and which will not. The witnesses (often technically trained observers or experienced airmen) in the cases that are solved are just as reliable as--and no less so than--the witnesses in the unexplained cases. They report the same classes of phenomena--glowing UFOs, hovering UFOs, UFOs moving at high velocities, making incredible maneuvers, and behaving as though under intelligent control.

The Air Force has accounted for nearly all of these flying saucers. The various causes included aircraft, balloons, satellites, mirages, inversions, hoaxes, delusions, reflections, birds, lenticular clouds, ball lightning, radar anomalies, sundogs, meteors, planets, stars, the Aurora, and other astronomical phenomena. The few remaining cases report similar observations and undoubtedly have one of these causes--which cannot be proved because some essential fact is missing. No data in these unsolved cases suggest that the UFOs had an interplanetary origin or that they constituted a threat to the security of the United States.

When Air Force investigators have determined that a UFO report does not represent anything of interest to Intelligence, their primary duty ends. However, since many UFO puzzles are of interest for scientific or technical reasons, the investigators try to find the specific explanation of each case and, if it has attracted public attention, give the final solution to the press.

_Civilian Saucer Groups_

Since the first flying saucers were reported in 1947, dozens of civilian clubs have been organized throughout the world to collect UFO reports and publish “the truth” allegedly suppressed by government sources. During the last decade the roster in the United States has included such groups as the Borderland Sciences Research Associates (California), Interplanetary Intelligence of Unidentified Flying Objects (Oklahoma), Intercontinental Aerial Research Foundation (Nebraska), UFO Research Committee (Ohio), Civilian Saucer Intelligence (New York), Waukegan Contact Group (Illinois), Saucer Investigative Research Organization (Georgia), World Society of the Flying Saucer (Idaho), Civilian Research on Interplanetary Flying Objects (Ohio), and the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (Washington, D.C.). The oldest of these saucer clubs, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (Arizona) was founded in 1952 and issues a bimonthly news sheet, the _APRO Bulletin_. More or less regular publications (some now defunct) of these groups have included the _Cosmic Researcher_, _Interplanetary News Service_, _CRIFO Orbit_, _Saucerian Bulletin_, and _UFO Critical Bulletin_. In recent years some of the best factual accounts of UFO incidents (as well as some of the weirdest speculation) have appeared in the magazine _Flying Saucers_, which is not connected with any club.

A few clubs, chiefly in California, are semireligious in character, claiming repeated communication with ethereal beings in space. Some clubs accept “contact” stories as valid, others do not. Certain articles of faith are apparently common to all such groups: that UFOs are actually vehicles from outer space; that they sometimes land on earth and occasionally leave physical traces in the form of metallic or organic substances; that scientists who cannot accept these beliefs are hypocrites, archfiends, anti-Galileo reactionaries, stooges for the Army or the Air Force, and members of the conspiracy to delude the public.

_NICAP_

The largest and probably the most influential saucer group is the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), with affiliated subcommittees in various parts of the country. Many members of local organizations such as the UFO Research Committee of Akron, Ohio, also belong to NICAP and help maintain close liaison. The bimonthly news sheet, the _UFO Investigator_, is distributed to members of NICAP and to prominent persons in the government and other fields; it regularly lists recent UFO sightings reported by members, and occasionally prints a detailed report of a specific case. Few of the sightings reported can be independently evaluated because the accounts often omit such essential facts as exact times, dates, places, direction of motion, etc.

With headquarters in Washington, D.C., NICAP strongly reflects the views of its director, Major Donald E. Keyhoe, USMC (Ret.), that UFOs may be interplanetary in origin, sometimes land on earth, but rarely if ever make contact with human beings. Like most saucer believers, many members of NICAP tend to assume without adequate investigation that many unusual sky phenomena reported in the newspapers may be extraterrestrial objects, and they often maintain this attitude in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. When the BOAC Comet exploded near Calcutta on May 2, 1953, Major Keyhoe theorized that a UFO might accidentally or deliberately have collided with the plane. He continued such speculation even after British aviation officials announced, after months of study, that the crash was caused by metal fatigue[XIII-1]. Many of the items printed in the _UFO Investigator_ are based on incomplete evidence. Under the headline “Strange Series of Fireballs Reported,” NICAP listed a UFO observed on March 7, 1960, at about 8:10 P.M., visible from the Canadian border to Florida, and described by some observers as three or four UFOs flying in formation[XIII-3]. This phenomenon was actually the satellite Discoverer VIII making its final descent to earth.

NICAP membership is theoretically open to any non-Communist citizen[XIII-4], but applicants from the “contactee” fringe are not encouraged. The committee once canceled the membership of a space evangelist when he claimed publicly to be a spokesman for NICAP, and in 1958 it canceled the membership of seven famous contactees who had been admitted without the knowledge of the director[XIII-5].

Investigations are carried out as spare-time projects of the members themselves, some of whom constitute an advisory panel of experts. Although many are highly respected in their own professions--television, journalism, military science, religion, government, aviation, engineering, medicine, psychology, and teaching in the physical sciences--few are recognized specialists in the fields required for the analysis of most UFO cases--radar propagation, the physics of optics, meteorology, and astronomy.

Since 1957 a major goal of NICAP has been a Congressional inquiry that supposedly would reveal an Air Force conspiracy to deny the reality of flying saucers[XIII-7]. In 1957 the director lodged a formal complaint with a member of the United States Senate charging that the Air Force continually made false statements on UFOs to the press, the public, and members of Congress. In support of this accusation Major Keyhoe submitted summaries of more than two hundred incidents[XIII-7].

The list cited a number of UFO reports that had never been submitted to the Air Force for analysis. These included reports from foreign countries (one in Sumatra in 1944 and one Holland in 1952) and from NICAP’s private files. Others, such as the Kinross case (p. 154), had not been within ATIC jurisdiction. Many others, such as the Mantell (p. 33) and the Chiles-Whitted (p. 108) cases, had long ago been fully explained. Still other cases, dating from the early days of the saucer era, remain unsolved only because vital facts, not determined at the time of the sighting, are necessary to a full explanation but cannot now be ascertained. The request for a Congressional inquiry was denied but has been repeated at intervals.

_The “Conspiracy” Fantasy_

Most UFO organizations cling to the belief that a conspiracy exists to conceal the existence of extraterrestrial vehicles, but they disagree on its precise composition. To NICAP and its affiliates, the chief culprit is the Air Force, helped occasionally by other government agencies and by well-known civilian scientists. APRO (Aerial Phenomena Research Organization), however, considers that the Air Force is involved only as the tool of still more powerful forces. The director of APRO has published her conviction that nobody in the Air Force, the Navy, or the Marines “has the brains” to contrive so successful a scheme and that the alleged plot “could only be borne [_sic_] of minds schooled in deception and contraception [_sic_]--the elite corps of the Central Intelligence Agency.”[XIII-8] In still another version (which makes the plots of E. Phillips Oppenheim seem amateurish) NICAP itself is a pawn in a superconspiracy so vast that thousands of American citizens have been made its unknowing tools[XIII-9]. The hundreds of strange phenomena observed in the skies, the controversial photographs of UFOs, the “spacemen” who visited Adamski and others, the “contact” and little-green-men stories, the analyses made by the Air Force, the formation of the various saucer clubs, NICAP and its war against the Air Force--all these phenomena, events, and persons are allegedly parts of a colossal drama planned, supported, and staged as a deliberate hoax on the American public. The prime mover is supposed to be the Central Intelligence Agency, whose motive is to conceal--something; just what is not clear[XIII-10].

In comparison with this fantasy, NICAP’s charges of simple Air Force cover-up seem tame.

_UFO at Sheffield Lake, Ohio_

One of the most notorious accusations of Air Force skulduggery, made in attempts to procure a Congressional inquiry, was that embodied in a saucerian study of the Fitzgerald sighting[XIII-11], published by the UFO Research Committee of Akron, Ohio, which maintains a close relationship with NICAP. Although the case was unimportant and was completely explained, we shall discuss it in detail to illustrate the peculiar views and methods of the flying-saucer groups.

In summary, a strange light observed on a dark night for roughly half a minute by a drowsy housewife was converted into a weapon to attack the Air Force. The incident inspired thousands of words of argument, caused the publication and distribution of a lengthy document, used the time of busy investigators, required an otherwise unnecessary expenditure of public funds, and evoked an exchange of letters among angry citizens, harassed Congressmen, and equally harassed Air Force officials. In all UFO history, no larger mountain has ever been made from so small a molehill.

On September 30, 1958, the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base received a letter from Mrs. William Fitzgerald of Sheffield Lake, Ohio, reporting that on September 21 she had sighted a UFO which she would like to have investigated. She enclosed a three-page summary prepared by members of the UFO Research Committee of Akron, and added, “I assure you that I will contact my congressman about this matter if some action is not taken soon to explain it.”[XIII-12]

The alleged UFO had appeared at about 3 A.M. in the yard of the one-story, two-bedroom house occupied by Mrs. Fitzgerald and her husband. She had been sitting up alone watching television and had gone to bed at the end of the late movie. The bedroom window was shut and the window curtains were closed. Outside, the night was dark; the moon had set, there were no street lights, and none of the neighboring houses was lighted. Lying with her arm over her eyes, trying to get to sleep, she suddenly realized that the room was illuminated and stood up on the bed to look out of the window.