Chapter XV: Preface (12)

According to her account, a disk-shaped object with a hump in the middle, a dull aluminum in color, was moving across the yard at a height of about five feet. The object did not glow and did not have lights on it; she could not determine the source of the light that made it visible to her. About twenty to twenty-two feet in diameter and about six feet high, the UFO moved north across the driveway into a neighbor’s yard, losing altitude on the way until it was only one foot above the ground. At a distance of fifty feet, it stopped and floated motionless for several seconds while pink-gray smoke billowed out from two openings in the rim and illuminated the UFO. Each opening contained seven pipes. The smoke did not come from the pipes but from the openings from which the pipes projected. The object then moved back into the witness’s yard, rising to a height of five feet. No longer emitting smoke, it made two quick clockwise turns with a radius of about three feet, and rose straight up. The roof of the house, jutting out over the window, cut it from further view. During the entire time of the sighting, about thirty-six seconds, she had heard a muffled noise like that of a jet engine warming up. She had tried several times to waken her husband, by kicking him, but without success. When the object had gone, she went back to bed and slept.

When she awoke at 11:00 the next morning and mentioned her experience to the family, she learned that ten-year-old John Fitzgerald, sleeping in the second bedroom, had also seen a strange light. He had apparently wakened during the night to go to the bathroom and had returned to bed, when he saw a bright light shining into his room and heard an unusual noise. Climbing up on the radiator to look out of his window, he saw something the color of a tin cup moving across the yard. After watching for a few seconds until the light had gone, he went to bed and to sleep.

Puzzled by the incident, Mrs. Fitzgerald telephoned the local newspaper, the Lorain _Journal_, and the story appeared in several Ohio newspapers. Members of the Akron Committee, one of whom lived in the nearby town of Lorain, soon arrived to question her and prepare the summary of her experience. Other witnesses in Lorain were reported to have seen the same UFO.

Even at first glance, the situation presented several unusual features. The witness had delayed more than a week before notifying Air Force investigators, yet she threatened to notify her congressman unless some action were taken soon. She had not waited for action, however, but by the same mail had written to her congressman requesting him to obtain an explanation from the Air Force. The summary of her experience, prepared with the help of members of the UFO Research Committee of Akron, was equally remarkable. Even though her dark-adapted eyes had just been assaulted by a bright light and the object had been in view for a maximum of only thirty-six seconds, she provided a description so detailed that it almost suggested a photographic memory.

On October 3, three days after her letter reached ATIC, two Air Force men, Technical Sergeant A and Technical Sergeant B, who were specially trained in the investigation of UFO incidents, arrived in Lorain. After a day spent in studying such pertinent matters as the local geography, the records of the Weather Bureau, the Coast Guard station, and the local railway, on October 4 they called on the witnesses.

Again the situation was unusual. Mrs. Fitzgerald’s husband did not appear. With Mrs. Fitzgerald and young John, however, was Mr. C, the member of the local UFO group who had spent several days helping her prepare her account. To the amazement of the sergeants, Mr. C seemed to assume that he was in charge of the interview, answered the questions put to Mrs. Fitzgerald, and continually interrupted with questions and statements of his own. After half an hour of this frustrating procedure, Sergeant A led Mr. C out into the yard. In the house, Sergeant B resumed the inquiry and filled out the official report form.

Few questions were asked of the boy because both the details and the phraseology of his description seemed to echo adult conversations overheard during the two weeks that had elapsed since the sighting. According to the account prepared by the Akron Committee, the boy had been frightened by a light so bright that he had to shield his eyes. (The time was unknown, and the light may or may not have been the one observed by Mrs. Fitzgerald.) Climbing on top of the radiator to look out of the window, he had seen the UFO and watched it take off into the air, and then had gone back to bed and to sleep. Sergeant B had a young son of about the same age. That a normal ten-year-old boy should not call out and try to awaken the household when confronted with a whirling, humming, dome-shaped spaceship some twenty-two feet in diameter and six feet high, moving through his own yard in the middle of the night, seemed too improbable to warrant serious questioning.

After finishing with the Fitzgeralds, the sergeants called on other supposed witnesses in Lorain. Satisfied that they had completed a thorough investigation, they returned to Dayton and presented the information to their superior officers for evaluation. None of the evidence suggested that the phenomenon had been a spacecraft[XIII-12]. The UFO had been the “special effect” of a peculiar combination of circumstances:

1. The time. The sighting had occurred about 3 A.M.; the exact
moment was not known and could not be determined.

2. The geography. The shore of Lake Erie lay about three fifths
of a mile north of the Fitzgerald house. South of the house,
roughly 100 yards away, ran the tracks of the New York Central
Railway. Southwest of the house about one and a half miles
stood a steel foundry.

3. The weather. A drizzling rain was falling at the time of the
sighting. There was some haze and wind; no moonlight.

4. Other factors, (a) Between midnight and 4 A.M. a Coast Guard
cutter equipped with an eight-inch spotlight had been plying
back and forth on Lake Erie, searching for an overdue cabin
cruiser. At about 3 A.M. the cutter had been headed east toward
Lorain, reaching there at 3:15, had then continued east beyond
Sheffield to Avon, before turning back to the Lorain lifeboat
station and berthing at 4 A.M. (b) At 2:52 A.M. a train had
left the Lorain railroad station, roughly three miles from
the Fitzgerald house. Eight minutes later it would have been
passing south of the house at a distance of about 100 yards.
The engine was using a rotating headlight.

From these facts it was possible to reconstruct the probable sequence of events that produced the UFO: In the hour or so before the sighting, the witness had been sitting up alone watching the late movie on TV. The film that night was a horror movie, _Dracula’s Daughter_. About 3 A.M., soon after the witness had gone to bed, the Coast Guard cutter on Lake Erie was traveling east toward Lorain, was very near the harbor and was flashing its spotlight toward shore. The light had briefly illuminated the two bedrooms of the Fitzgerald house and had roused Mrs. Fitzgerald. At that distance, between three and four miles, the beam would have spread and would have been dispersed still more by the drops of rain falling. By the time Mrs. Fitzgerald reached the window and pulled back the curtains, the searchlight was gone. At the same time, however, the train that left Lorain at 2:52 was passing south of the house, using its rotating headlight and producing a roaring noise made more piercing by the moist atmosphere. Looking through the wet glass of the window, the witness saw the beam of the train’s headlight moving through the haze in the yard. Smoke from the nearby foundry was also being blown into the yard. Illuminated by the circular beam of light, the smoke seemed to be a glowing, solid object that moved back and forth and emitted clouds of gray-pink smoke.

In summary, the Air Force concluded that Mrs. Fitzgerald’s UFO was an illusion produced by a combination of factors: an excited frame of mind induced by _Dracula’s Daughter_, the spotlight on the Coast Guard cutter, the rotating headlight of the train and the noise of its engine, drifting smoke from the foundry, and the haze of the drizzly night.

This conclusion provoked an explosion from the witness, who wrote her congressman suggesting mental incompetence on the part of the Air Force official who analyzed the case.

“_The Fitzgerald Report_”

The UFO Research Committee compiled and on December 1, 1958, published a thirteen-page pamphlet (later reissued in amplified form and copyrighted) entitled: “The Fitzgerald Report, A Complete and Detailed Account of the Sighting of an Unidentified Flying Object, Sheffield Lake, Ohio, September 21, 1958.” This document charged “duplicity” in the Air Force treatment of UFO reports in general, and asserted that the Fitzgerald investigation in particular had been “criminally mishandled” and was a “disgrace to the U. S. Air Force and an insult to the American public....” It further suggested that Sergeants A and B be “disciplined” because their investigation was not adequate or thorough, and that they had had “little or no intention of making an honest investigation of this sighting.”

Copies of the pamphlet were mailed to eminent scientists throughout the country, members of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate, officers in the Air Force, the Secretary of the Air Force, and the Secretary of Defense. The publication of such charges against an ordinary private citizen might easily have caused a suit for libel. The Air Force investigators, whatever their private reactions may have been, had no such recourse; their accusers could act with fair assurance of immunity from legal action.

The document made a number of specific accusations. Because of the wide publicity given this attack, we shall discuss each point fully. Our comments, appended in brackets, are based on official records of the Air Force, the New York Central Railway, the United States Weather Bureau, and the United States Coast Guard. Most of these facts were available to the Akron Committee itself.

_Charge 1._ Because of the position of the Fitzgerald house, the headlight of the train could not have shone into the bedroom windows. [Correct. But the point is irrelevant. The Air Force did not suggest that the train’s light shone into the window. The light could have shone into the yard, however, and would have been visible to a witness looking out of the window. The brilliant light that flashed in the window and roused the witness did not come from the train but from the spotlight of the Coast Guard cutter.]

_Charge 2._ Events taking place on the lake could not have had any relation to the sighting because the shore was 3000 feet away and, because of intervening houses and trees, a witness in the Fitzgerald house could not see the lake. [Incorrect conclusion from the facts. The beam of a spotlight on a boat moving one or two miles offshore (as was the Coast Guard cutter at about 3 A.M.) could have been seen from the house. The beam of such a light can be visible for great distances. Reflected from the clouds and spread by the drops of moisture in the air, it could easily have flashed into the window with great brilliance.]

_Charge 3a._ The spotlight used by the Coast Guard cutter was of a type that could not be focused like a searchlight; therefore the beam could not have been reflected from the clouds to the Fitzgerald house. [Incorrect. The spotlight used could operate with either a diffuse or a narrow beam, could be focused like a searchlight, and could have been reflected from the clouds to the house.]

_Charge 3b._ The Coast Guard cutter had used its spotlight and turned the beam in the direction of the house only once that night, while signaling another boat at a time two hours earlier than the sighting and a place roughly five miles from the house. [The December 1, 1958, edition of the document gives the distance as 4½ miles; the 1959 edition gives 5½ miles. Whatever the true distance, the statement is incorrect. A signaling incident did occur at the time and about the place specified, but it had no relation to the Fitzgerald sighting. The light was used frequently in the hours between midnight and 4 A.M., as the cutter carried out its search for the missing cabin cruiser. In a statement obtained by the Akron Committee itself, the chief boatswain’s mate affirmed that “subject spotlight was flashed on and off a number of times during the night, picking up objects in all directions. It is hard to estimate how many times spotlights were snapped on and off during subject search, but they were used quite often during short periods of time.”]

_Charge 4._ The statement that the supposed confirmatory witness, Mrs. S, could not recall anything unusual for the night of the sighting was “a lie,” as evidenced by her signed statement. [Incorrect. When the investigators visited Mrs. S, she asserted that she had nothing to contribute. At about 2:30 A.M. (half an hour earlier than the Fitzgerald sighting) she had indeed noticed a bright-red glow that had startled her at first until she realized that it probably came from the nearby Ohio Edison plant or from the foundry. The signed statement printed by the Akron Committee in the December 1958 edition of the document bears no date. The notarized statement used in the 1959 edition is dated March 25, six months after the sighting had occurred. After the Air Force interview, apparently, Mrs. S had changed her mind for reasons unknown.]

_Charge 5._ The statement that another confirmatory witness, Mr. G, was not available for interview was “pathetic” because it was Mrs. G, not Mr. G, who saw the UFO. [The point of this accusation is not clear. Because of a typographical error in a letter, “Mrs.” was changed to “Mr.” The fact remains that the supposed witness, Mrs. G, was not available. Also, the light she reported had appeared about 2 A.M., an hour before the Fitzgerald sighting.]

_Charge 6a._ It was not true that a misty rain with haze and mist had occurred at the time of the sighting; the witness herself stated that it was not raining. [Incorrect. The Cleveland Weather Bureau recorded continual slight precipitation between midnight and 7 A.M.: .20 inches were recorded between 2 and 4 A.M. When asked whether it was raining when she saw the UFO, the witness replied, “It had rained a few hours before,” a vague response suggesting that she had not noticed the weather at the time of the sighting. Other parts of her account, however, strongly indicate rain. Although the night was warm (about 65 degrees F. at 3 A.M.), her bedroom window was closed.]

_Charge 6b._ It was not true that smoke from the steel plant southwest of the house could have been a factor in the sighting, because the direction of the wind was wrong. [Incorrect. The Weather Bureau recorded “WSW and SW” winds that night averaging ten miles an hour; coming from the southwest, the winds would have blown the smoke northeast, directly toward the house.]

_Charge 7a._ The sergeants did not make a house-to-house check among the neighbors to obtain confirmatory evidence. [Correct. Such a time-consuming procedure would not have been justified. The neighbors had had two weeks in which to report a visiting spaceship. No such report had been made, even by the neighbor in whose yard the noisy object was supposed to have hovered while emitting puffs of smoke.]

_Charge 7b._ They did not ask Mrs. Fitzgerald to make a drawing of the UFO. [Correct. Before their visit she had already made such a drawing, prepared with the help of members of the Akron Committee who had shown her a sketch of an alleged spaceship reproduced several years earlier in an Air Force pamphlet[XIII-13]. With this sketch before her to aid her memory, Mrs. Fitzgerald had described her UFO to a draftsman provided by the committee. Unsurprisingly, the resulting sketch was very similar to the picture used as an example. A drawing obtained in this way could have no value as evidence.]

_Charge 7c._ The sergeants failed to ask enough questions about the motions of the object. [Incorrect. The standard form for reporting unidentified flying objects contains questions specifically designed to describe the motion of an unknown; all these questions were asked and answered.]

_Charge 7d._ They used only the standard report form; it did not include questions that allowed Mrs. Fitzgerald to express all her ideas of what she had seen. [Correct. The questions are designed to elicit observed physical facts; it does not require all the witness’s interpretations.]

_Charge 7e._ They did not take notes during the interview. [Correct. In filling out the report form they obtained all the necessary information. They had been trained not to take additional notes because some witnesses become nervous when they see that their remarks are being written down.]

_Basic charge 7._ These “omissions” in procedure proved that the sergeants had little intention of making an honest investigation. [Incorrect. They omitted no query that might have yielded useful evidence. Their duty was to report and try to account for the phenomenon observed by Mrs. Fitzgerald, not to record her belief in a hypothetical spaceship. The details of structure and motion that Mr. C wanted to insert in the record were mere impressions based on his assumption that the UFO was a solid object under intelligent control.]

The document repeatedly charged that the investigators asked too few questions, and implied that they asked only five of Mrs. Fitzgerald--yet she answered all the many questions in the standard report form. Furthermore, Mr. C had no way of knowing just how many and what questions were asked; during all the latter part of the interview he was outside the house.

Perhaps the best comment on the Fitzgerald Report and on the activities of civilian saucer-investigation groups in general is that of Dr. Thornton Page, the eminent astronomer who in 1952 served on the scientific panel to evaluate UFO reports (see _Chapter_ VII). After receiving a copy of the Fitzgerald Report, he wrote to a member of the Akron Committee:

“As a scientist I am interested in unexplained phenomena, but the one or ones responsible for Mrs. Fitzgerald’s sighting is or are undoubtedly highly complex. It is just as false to say simply that she saw a flying saucer 20 feet in diameter as it is to say that she saw nothing, or that she simply saw the train headlight on a mist. Certainly, I would not expect a pair of Air Force investigators to be able to explain her sighting (and the others) satisfactorily from interviews two weeks after the event. It would be ridiculous to propose that a team of experts in the fields of physics, psychology, meteorology, engineering and railroading be sent to Sheffield Lake, Ohio, to study these sightings from all possible angles.

“I have already written to you and to others that your fundamental error is in oversimplifying your explanations of complex natural phenomena by assuming a common cause without justification. If you say that everything you cannot understand is caused by gremlins, then gremlins are everywhere! And the Air Force would need a much larger budget to investigate every sighting or hearing or feeling of a gremlin!

“... The onus is not on the Air Force or me to prove that no flying saucer was present that night; the onus is on you and your UFO Research Committee to prove that there is _no_ other explanation of what was seen and heard.”

_The Open Mind_

Of the many astronomical observatories in the United States and abroad, none has ever photographed an object that remotely resembled a spaceship. Since 1957, hundreds of members of Moonwatch teams throughout the world have watched the skies to record passages of the many artificial satellites, but no Moonwatch team has yet reported the presence of a spaceship. Radar stations on all continents keep track of every artificial satellite and fragment of satellite orbiting the earth. In February 1963 there were 284 such objects, originating in Canada, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States. If an interloper from beyond our planet should join the parade, Space Track stations would at once detect its presence.

The Air Force has found no evidence of any kind that anyone has ever seen, heard, smelled, photographed, touched, or in any way detected a trace of an interplanetary spacecraft. Extraterrestrial visitors have not yet arrived, and may never arrive. If and when they do, our Air Force wants to be the first to know.

The Air Force will continue to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects and to treat them as “serious business.”[XIII-14] The security of the nation depends on this watchfulness. When a pilot sees a bright object flashing through the sky and cannot immediately recognize it, he knows that he may be looking at a meteor, a balloon, a bird, a sundog, a planetary mirage, or another plane. On the other hand, since he may be catching a significant glimpse of a guided missile or an aircraft from beyond the United States, he promptly reports another UFO. The Air Force cannot afford to guess what is in our skies. They want to _know_.

The creative scientist, eternally curious, keeps an open mind toward strange phenomena and novel ideas, knowing that we have only begun to understand the universe we live in. He remembers, too, that Biot’s discovery that meteorites were “stones from the sky” was at first greeted with disbelief, and he hopes never to be guilty of similar obtuseness. But an open mind does not mean credulity or a suspension of the logical faculties that are man’s most valuable asset.

Human beings now stand on the threshold of space. Visits to and from other worlds may occur in the future, bringing new facts and new interpretations of reality that we cannot now imagine. No evidence yet found indicates that such visits have begun. No fact so far determined suggests that a single unidentified flying object has originated outside our own planet.

[XIII-1] Keyhoe, D. E. _The Flying Saucer Conspiracy._ New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1955.

[XIII-1a] Tacker, L. J. _Flying Saucers and the U. S. Air Force._ Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960.

[XIII-2] Keyhoe, D. E. _Flying Saucers from Outer Space._ New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1953.

[XIII-3] _UFO Investigator_ (March 1960).

[XIII-4] _UFO Investigator_ (August-September 1958).

[XIII-5] _UFO Investigator_ (April-May 1961).

[XIII-6] _UFO Investigator_ (July-August 1960).

[XIII-7] Keyhoe, D. E. _Flying Saucers: Top Secret._ New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1960.

[XIII-8] Lorenzen, C. E. “The Psychology of UFO Secrecy,” _Flying Saucers_ (October 1958), p. 12 ff.

[XIII-9] Davidson, L. [Letter] _Flying Saucers_ (October 1958), p. 79.

[XIII-10] Davidson, L. “An Open Letter to Saucer Researchers,” _Flying Saucers_ (March 1962), p. 36.

[XIII-11] _The Fitzgerald Report_, The UFO Research Committee of Akron, Ohio, 1958.

[XIII-12] Air Force Files.

[XIII-13] Project Blue Book, _Special Report No. 14_, ATIC, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. May 5, 1955.

[XIII-14] New York _Times_, February 28, 1960.