Chapter VI: Preface (3)

Over the loud speaker he remarked to the passengers that American Airlines had a special treat for them which they could see by looking out of the left windows. He continued to watch the lights as he flew west toward Detroit, and radioed two other American Airlines planes in the area. Learning that their pilots were also watching the unusual spectacle, he notified Air Traffic Control (ATC) in Detroit. The lights remained in view for about forty minutes, all the way to Detroit, and the pilot lost sight of them only when he began to let down through the haze for a landing.

Reporters and photographers were waiting to interview him, and next day’s Detroit _Times_ carried a banner headline, “Mystery Discs Trail Plane Here,” over a picture of Captain Killian flanked by the plane’s two pretty hostesses, all three smiling as they held up to the camera three ordinary kitchen saucers[III-9]. After checking with the Detroit ATC, who did not know of any scheduled refueling operation, the pilot reported his experience to officials of American Airlines, and next day returned to New York where again he was besieged by reporters and photographers. Meanwhile, following standard CIRVIS procedure (Communication Instruction for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sighting from Aircraft), the manager of operations of American Airlines reported the incident to ATIC at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

In New York the day after the sighting Captain Killian gave a telephone interview to Radio Station WCHS, Charleston, West Virginia, describing his experience. Following the customary procedure, intelligence officers from Mitchell Air Force Base questioned him and filled out the usual report form[III-2]. In the radio interview and in the talk with intelligence officers Captain Killian made the same statements he had made to American Airlines officials: he didn’t know what the lights were, and he couldn’t tell how far away they had been because he didn’t know their size or their altitude[III-10].

Not for months had such a good flying-saucer story appeared, and the newspapers made the most of it. Among the first to assert that the unknown lights had been flying saucers was the UFO Research Committee of Akron, Ohio (see _Chapter_ XIII). Members of the committee had received the news by telephone, even before Captain Killian’s plane landed at Detroit, from the pilot of a United Airlines plane who had watched the lights on his flight to Akron. During the days following, Captain Killian’s copilot gave an interview on Long John Nebel’s after-midnight radio program in New York. Captain Killian himself described the UFOs to members of a New York UFO organization, Civilian Saucer Intelligence (CSI), and appeared on several radio and TV programs. Both saucer addicts and newsmen besieged Air Force representatives, demanding an immediate explanation of the sighting. Finally, on February 28, only two days after receiving the report from American Airlines, ATIC yielded to public pressure and produced a tentative theory: it was possible that the pilots might have sighted the stars of Orion, as Captain Killian had first suggested. However, the release added, no definite conclusion could be reached until all the facts had been studied.

Promptly rejecting the possibility that he might have been looking at Orion, Captain Killian stated in an interview with the New York _Herald Tribune_, “I am sure there are people on other planets and that they have solved the problem of space travel.... I sincerely believe that their vehicles are coming close to earth.”

While the saucer believers were keeping the story alive, applauding Captain Killian and denouncing the Air Force, the experts at ATIC had been collecting facts and trying to analyze them. The basic piece of evidence was Captain Killian’s own report to American Airlines, made a few hours after the incident took place. After describing the circumstances of the sighting, the appearance and behavior of the lights, the statement continues:

“The only possible explanation other than flying saucers could be a jet-tanker refueling operation. Never having witnessed refueling operations at night, I am not aware of the lighting of the jet tanker.

“My air speed during this complete flight was 250 knots indicated. I also do not know the air speed of tankers during operation if this could be so. I contacted ATC to find out if they had any airplanes on a clearance and no three airplanes were given.

“In summary, it was difficult for me to believe they were jets because of low speed and configuration. If they weren’t jets I still don’t know any more than I did before even though I watched them for forty minutes before. Due to the dark and strong lights I was not able to ascertain any size or shape. The altitude of the objects was 30 degrees above my horizon. Distance away is unknown.”[III-2]

Almost equally important was the evidence of other witnesses. During the forty-minute period of observation, the crews of five other planes, all flying west in the Pennsylvania-Ohio region, had watched the lights for varying lengths of time. Several persons on the ground in and near Akron had seen them between 9:15 and 9:30.

Air Force investigators methodically gathered the facts and made their analysis and on March 16, only twenty days after the sighting, they released a summary to the press. The mysterious lights belonged to normal terrestrial aircraft. Although ATC at Detroit had apparently not had the information when first asked, three B-47 bombers of the Strategic Air Command had been carrying out a night refueling operation from KC-97 tankers at the time and place reported. The tanker has several groups of lights which, from a distance, can seem to be one or more lights, and would have looked very much like the three objects described by Captain Killian. Such a refueling operation takes from about forty minutes to more than an hour.

Captain Killian had been flying at an altitude of 8500 feet, and he had given the location of the unknowns as 30 degrees above his horizon; this agreed with the position of the tankers, which were operating at an altitude of 17,000 feet. Captain Killian had been flying west at an indicated air speed of 250 knots; the refueling tankers had also been flying west at a true air speed of 230 knots (ca. 270 mph). Since the courses of plane and tankers were roughly parallel, the tankers had remained in view and would have arrived over Akron at about 9:15, the time that ground observers reported the lights.

Everything checked. Every detail of the incident was accounted for[III-11]. Nevertheless the solution caused an explosion in the camps of the saucer enthusiasts, who called it, among other things, imaginative. Forgetting that the “Orion” theory suggested immediately after the sighting had been only tentative, UFO addicts ridiculed it and asked why the experts had later offered a different explanation--which they greeted with equal ridicule[III-12].

Captain Killian, too, had apparently forgotten his first report. On March 24, a month after the sighting, in an interview by the Long Island _Daily Press_ he stated that the things he saw could not have been tankers; that he knew what B-47 bombers and KC-97 tankers looked like, and how they looked in operation at night (Original statement to American Airlines: “Never having witnessed refueling operations at night, I am not aware of the lighting of jet tankers.”) Also, he told the _Daily Press_, the objects he saw were at least triple the size of any known tanker or bomber. (Original statement to American Airlines: “Due to the dark and strong lights I was not able to ascertain any size or shape.”) Furthermore, he asserted, the unknowns had been far too fast for a tanker, and had moved at a speed of about 2000 miles an hour. (Original statement to American Airlines: “... it was difficult for me to believe they were jets because of low speed.”)

In rejecting the Air Force explanation of this incident, flying-saucer addicts ignored several embarrassing questions: If Captain Killian actually saw interplanetary craft, how did he fail to see the earthly aircraft operating at the same time and place? If the unknowns moved at a speed of 2000 miles an hour, how did Captain Killian and the crews of several other planes, flying at less than 300 miles an hour, keep the unknowns in sight for forty minutes? In that length of time the UFOs should have covered most of the distance to the Pacific.

Few persons, given the facts by responsible officials, would persist in denying the reality of the tankers and conjuring up a fleet of flying saucers to occupy the relevant cubic area of space. To the true enthusiast, however, these refueling planes remain incontrovertible proof that spacecraft are among us.

_... And Kites and Soap Bubbles_

Objects need not be as large as Skyhook balloons or jets to start a flying-saucer scare. Brightly illuminated advertising blimps have caused many UFO reports. Unfamiliar circumstances or a faulty perspective can manufacture spaceships out of things as small as seeds, spider webs, scraps of paper, or toy balloons.

In the autumn of 1947, during the first months of the saucer scare, many such UFOs were reported. One experienced observer, formerly a combat pilot, reported a flying saucer overhead at a height he estimated as 5000 feet. More careful study showed that the object was at a height of only about 250 feet and was suspended from small balloons. Later he learned that, as a joke, some boys had launched a paper saucer carried by helium-filled toy balloons. During this same period when everyone was talking about flying saucers, spaceships reported over an Iowa town one night turned out to be glowing bits of paper drifting from a fireplace chimney[III-13].

On March 16, 1961, according to the British radio, a resident of East Suffolk reported to the police that he had seen a spaceship land in a nearby field. Investigators soon found the craft: a fuel tank that had fallen from a passing plane.

A fleet of UFOs appeared late one afternoon in July 1961 to an observer driving west along Highway 54 from El Paso, Texas, to Alamogordo, New Mexico. It had been raining in the mountains, and wind and dust storms had forced the driver to stop several times during his trip, but now the sun was shining between patches of dark cloud in the western sky. Driving toward the outskirts of Alamogordo, he was startled to see a V-shaped formation of huge saucers flying directly toward him. Stopping his car, he saw that they were glowing a deep red, were moving at high speed, and seemed to be as high as the clouds. When they had reached a point nearly overhead, they suddenly seemed to drop down toward the observer. Rapidly revising all his first estimates of size, height, and speed, he recognized their true identity. They were merely a group of tumbleweeds that had been carried aloft in the strong winds and were soaring past at a height of only 100 feet. Illumination from the setting sun had produced their weird reddish glow.

A spectacular flying saucer hovered near the Smithsonian satellite-observing station in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles, on the night of October 17, 1961. The station crew observed it with binoculars, by apogee telescope, and photographed it with the Baker-Nunn satellite camera. A brilliantly glowing object, it shone in the eastern sky, moving erratically and fluctuating in brightness. After watching it for nearly an hour and finding that the nearby airport could not observe the object, the observers concluded that it must be less distant than it seemed, and set out by car to try to get a closer look. About a mile and a half from the station they stopped, and solved the mystery. A plantation manager and his servant stood in a field, hanging on to one end of a 1200-foot kite string. At the other end, high in the sky, soared a kite; hanging from it was a lighted pressure lantern[III-14] (see Plate IIa).

In 1954 malfunction of a sewage-disposal plant in western Pennsylvania produced one of the most spectacular saucer reports on record. An oversupply of detergent, whipped by a stiff breeze, foamed into a mountainous tower of bubbles. A sudden gust of wind broke the tower and launched a colossal mass of bubbles as large as a ten-story building. This brilliant, scintillating, super-giant bubble bath rose to great heights and drifted for miles. Widely reported as a UFO, this apparition was merely an unusual by-product of modern technology. The UFOs photographed over Kentucky on July 7, 1947, were probably vapor trails, a less familiar sight then than now; or they might possibly have been the smoke trails from an exploding meteor (see Plate IIb).

A saucer incident that might have become a classic Unknown occurred in Denver at 10 A.M. on a summer’s day in 1950. A man was sitting on the shady porch of his house, reading. Beyond the porch roof the sun shone brightly. Glancing up from his book, he was startled to see a formation of perhaps a dozen spherical objects, shining iridescently, traveling toward the distant mountains. As he watched, those in the front of the procession seemed to vanish instantly while others appeared out of nowhere to join the parade at the rear. Measuring their size against the mountain background, he decided they were “immense” and they moved at fantastic speed, covering the thirty or so miles to the mountains in a matter of five or six seconds.

Too stunned to take action, he was still numb from shock when he heard a faint “Hello,” and looked up--to realize that the little girl across the street was blowing soap bubbles. If the man had jumped up when he first saw the objects and had rushed into the house to telephone the nearest saucer club, he might never have found out that the “spaceships” were only bubbles[III-15].

[III-1] Ruppelt, E. J. _The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects._ Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1956.

[III-2] Air Force Files.

[III-3] Menzel, D. H. _Flying Saucers._ Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953.

[III-4] Tacker, L. J. _Flying Saucers and the U. S. Air Force._ Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960.

[III-5] Keyhoe, D. E. _Flying Saucers from Outer Space._ New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1953.

[III-6] Scully, F. _Behind the Flying Saucers._ New York: Popular Library, Inc., 1951, p. 144.

[III-7] Sarson, P. B. “Aircraft Condensation Aura,” _Meteorological Magazine_, London, Vol. LXXXV (1956), p. 217.

[III-7a] Johannesburg _Star_, April 14, 1958.

[III-8] Case 142, CRIFO _Orbit_, Vol. II (March 2, 1956).

[III-9] Detroit _Times_, Feb. 25, 1959.

[III-10] Barker, G. “Chasing the Flying Saucers,” _Flying Saucers_ (July 1959), p. 24 ff.

[III-11] Kirsch, F. A. “Air Force Right on Killian ‘Saucer’?” _Flying Saucers_ (August 1960), p. 17 ff.

[III-12] “Report on Unidentified Flying Objects Observed Feb. 24, 1959, by American-United Airline Pilots.” Compiled by Unidentified Flying Objects Research Committee, Akron, Ohio, Feb. 24, 1960.

[III-13] Wylie, C. C. [Speech] _Popular Astronomy_, Vol. LVI (1948), p. 217.

[III-14] Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, _The SAO News_, Vol. I, No. 6 (November 1961).

[III-15] Dean, C. W. Personal communication.

_Chapter_ IV

THE SPANGLED HEAV’NS: STARS AND PLANETS

Shortly before dawn on March 3, 1955, a spectacular flying saucer appeared over Alaska. The witness, a civilian scientist with the rank of Commander in the United States Navy, was returning from the North Pole on the daily Air Force Ptarmigan weather flight; his mission had been to study the effect of the aurora on radio propagation, for the Department of Defense. He described his experience as follows:

_A Mirage of Sirius_

“We were flying southwest of Point Barrow, Alaska, not far from Bering Strait, en route to Eielson Air Force Base in Fairbanks, and our course was roughly southeast. The night was clear and the stars shone brilliantly. I was looking out of the western bomb blister when suddenly I saw a bright object shoot in at tremendous speed from the horizon, directly toward the plane. At first I thought it was a meteor or a fireball and I instinctively ducked, but the object came to a sudden skidding stop about 300 feet away, thereafter riding along with our plane and keeping pace with our speed. I could scarcely believe my eyes. The thing possessed green and red signal lights that flashed back and forth, and something that looked like a lighted propeller on the top. Beyond question, it was a flying saucer.

“I wondered if the thing might be a hallucination, brought on by fatigue. After all, we had been in the air almost seventeen hours. I cleaned my spectacles and rubbed my eyes, but the Saucer was still there, pacing the plane and bobbing up and down as the plane itself occasionally wove or dipped. My next thought was to eliminate all possible chance that the thing was an internal reflection. I pulled my fur parka up over my head and put my face smack against the bulging surface of the blister that formed the window. Thus shielded from all internal illumination, I could still see the glowing object. I next drew a pencil from my pocket and held it out at arm’s length, and was surprised to find that the glowing disk was somewhat smaller than the eraser. I made a rapid calculation and concluded that if the sphere was actually 300 feet away, as it seemed, then it was only a foot or two in diameter, not much larger than a basketball. My next thought was whether one of the radio parachutes had somehow or other got attached to the plane by the string. These objects, brilliantly lit by an electric light, can be quite startling. But it had been nearly half an hour since the last parachute release and the meteorologists were just getting ready to lower another through the trap. I decided to call the meteorologist to look at the thing. But before I could call out, as if it had read my mind the object suddenly took off at top speed and disappeared. Now I was really concerned. In less than two seconds the UFO had vanished over the coast of Siberia, some 200 miles away. It must have been traveling at the fantastic speed of more than 100 miles a second. The Korean War was over but our relations with the Soviet Union were still tense, and I wondered if the object might be a secret Russian missile on reconnaissance. I kept my eyes glued to the point where the saucer had disappeared and suddenly, a couple of minutes later, it shot back toward the plane, more brilliant and spectacular than the first time.

“You can perhaps imagine my relief when I suddenly realized what the object was, and at the same time realized that I had hit on the answer to a great many flying-saucer reports of a similar nature. Only someone familiar with the constellations could have identified the object. It was a mirage of Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens. Actually Sirius was slightly below the horizon at this time, but the bending of the light had raised the image above the horizon and had diffused the beam into the saucerlike form. The flashing red and green lights were common phenomena associated with star twinkling, and the apparent structure, including the whirling propeller, resulted from distortion by the earth’s atmosphere.

“But why had the image taken off the way it did, and then rushed back? The moving plane of course was continually changing position relative to the ground features. A mountain peak on the distant horizon had briefly come between the plane and the star, obscuring the light. The light was not cut off all at once, however. Thus as the image dimmed it seemed to shrink, as though it were racing away. This temporary barrier also explained the sudden stops and starts and the tremendous instantaneous acceleration the object seemed to make at the instant it appeared. The large atmospheric lens was simply focusing the light of the star in the general direction of the plane and thus it was centered with my eye. That is why the object seemed to duplicate the motion of the plane.

“I watched the object for several minutes after its return. I was able to get full confirmation of this identification when the star rose over the western horizon; it rose in the west because the southward motion of the plane more than compensated for the westward rotation of the star. And as Sirius came up from the horizon, the ‘flying saucer’ sank back into the brilliant hemisphere of stars, where it belonged.” (The witness in this case was the senior author of this book.)

Sirius has inspired many UFO reports. On December 10, 1952, at 7:15 P.M. P.S.T., the pilot and radar observer of an F-94 on routine patrol duty were over the town of Odessa, Washington, at about 26,000 feet when they saw a large white light in the east[IV-1]. Dim reddish-white lights seemed to be coming from “windows,” and no trail or exhaust was visible. The pilot attempted to intercept but the object performed amazing feats--did a _chandelle_ in front of the plane, rushed away, stopped, and then made straight for the aircraft on a collision course at incredible speed. The pilot banked away to avoid collision, and afterward was not able to locate the object. The radar man then got a brief return but soon lost contact. Although the visual and radar contacts had not coincided, both men assumed that they referred to the same object[IV-2, p. 65].

Investigators suggested at first that the object might have been one of the Telemuk balloons, but this idea had to be discarded and the sighting was listed as Unknown. A review of the evidence by the present authors suggests a highly probable explanation. Above the low cloud cover at 3000 feet the night was clear and moonless. In the east, Sirius was just rising over the horizon at the exact bearing of the unknown object. Atmospheric refraction would have produced exactly the phenomenon described. The same atmospheric conditions that caused the mirage of the star would have caused anomalous radar returns (see _Chapter_ VIII).

_Earth’s Distorting Atmosphere_

In everyday life we often look at familiar objects through a distorting medium. Houses and persons seen through a pane of poor window glass look peculiar and wrongly shaped, and images of trees and clouds reflected in a pool or a stream of rippling water may continually shift and break, but these distortions do not deceive us because we are used to them. The child who stands before the crazy mirrors in an amusement park may laugh at himself for looking so fat or so thin, so tall or so short. Knowing that the image is only a ludicrous approximation to his real appearance, he is able to recognize himself without difficulty. But a stranger, placed so that he could see only the distorted image and not the person who made it could not make the necessary corrections and probably would not recognize the child if they met in the street.

Like window glass, water, or mirrors, a mere layer of air can distort an image. For the astronomer, the earth’s atmosphere is a lifelong frustration. Acting as an imperfect lens, it continually falsifies the true position, color, size, and shape of the heavenly bodies he tries to study. Under certain conditions it can change the image of a star or a planet into an unrecognizable stranger. When light enters the atmosphere, the rays are bent or “refracted” so that the image is moved upward, somewhere above the true position of the star (see Figure 6). When we are admiring a sunset and think we are watching the very top rim of the sinking sun as it drops below the horizon, we are actually seeing only its projected image. The sun itself has already set, but its light is bent upward by the air that clings to the earth’s surface. The greater the density of the air, the greater the displacement of the image. If there were no air at the earth’s surface, the sun would vanish and darkness would come instantaneously, with no intervening period of twilight.

A star’s light does not bend uniformly, however. Light rays of different wave lengths bend at different angles, so that when white light is scattered or “dispersed” into its component colors, the blues and greens are bent more than the reds. The density and the temperature of the air also affect the beam, so that as a star’s light travels from the thin upper atmosphere to the denser air near the earth, the colors shift constantly and the star seems to twinkle, flicker, and change in color and brightness.

Such changes are most noticeable when a star is low on the horizon at dawn or at dusk, so that its light reaches us only after traveling through miles of dense atmosphere. The sun displays these effects dramatically. At sunrise and sunset its scattered light may illuminate the entire horizon. Clouds turn red and gold, hills and the tops of buildings take on a ruddy glow, and the entire sky may flame. The red wave lengths remain, while most of the blues and greens have been scattered out of the beam or may appear briefly at the top of the sun’s disk, as a “green flash,” at the instant it sinks below the horizon.

Similarly, a star or planet observed low on the horizon at sunrise or sunset may appear extraordinarily large and brilliant. It may seem to have structure, showing an intense red glow at the bottom and bright blue at the top. Watching it, the startled observer may see the object apparently in motion, hovering, pulsating, and flashing red and green lights. If he is so inclined, he can easily interpret the image as a strange machine, the red as the glow from an exhaust, and the blue as the illumination system of an interplanetary craft.

Normally the air is warmest at the surface of the earth and steadily gets colder at greater and greater heights. Sometimes this condition is reversed, particularly in the broad deserts and prairies of the Southwest, where the changes between the day’s heat and the night’s cold may be sudden and extreme. The ground cools off rapidly during the night and imparts this coldness to the layer of air immediately above. Thus the air may be warmer some distance above the ground. When such a “temperature inversion” occurs, light going through the air bends in a peculiar way (see Figure 7), so that the image is displaced far more than normally. The inversion may produce fuzzy or greatly distorted images, and when there are several layers of alternating hot and cold air, the effects may be spectacular. At the boundaries between the layers the distortion and displacement increase greatly. A star or a planet seen through such an atmosphere may display apparently violent motions, peculiar shapes, and fantastic color changes; light clouds drifting over the bright stars may increase this illusion of motion[IV-3]. The rising or setting sun, although actually below the horizon, may project upward several images of itself, one on the top of another, to form a kind of Chinese pagoda, or a “bell pepper.” And the twinkling top rung of the pagoda may simulate a whirling propeller.

_The “Whipping Girl” of Saucerdom_

The planets are wanderers. Each day they move to a new position among the constellations. Astronomers and navigators have learned the paths of the planets and the positions of the brightest fixed stars, but most of us, when we look up at the night sky and see a brilliant stranger among the familiar star groups, must cudgel our brains to account for it. According to our dispositions, we may consult a newspaper or telephone an observatory to find out the name of the intruder, or we may conclude that the unknown is an alien spacecraft.

The planet Venus has been chased at least once by patrolmen in a squad car, has several times caused the scrambling of jet interceptors, and has been named the culprit in so many UFO mysteries that saucer enthusiasts somewhat cynically refer to it as “the whipping girl” of saucerdom.

The brightest of the planets and the closest to earth, Venus never moves more than 45 degrees from the sun and thus is most often visible in our skies near sunrise or sunset, preceding or following the sun. The apparent size of the planet varies according to its distance from the earth and its phase. When it is farthest from the earth, the disk has a diameter of ten seconds; at its closest, the diameter has grown sixfold, to sixty-four seconds. The human eye and the ordinary camera see it as a brilliant white star. Being nearer the sun, Venus receives almost twice as much light from the sun as does the earth, and when at greatest brilliance, can be seen in the daytime sky. Viewed momentarily through rapidly moving cirrus clouds, it may seem to be racing across the sky like a flying saucer, but a longer look will reveal that the object is actually making very slow progress, like a planet[IV-4].

To the airman in the cockpit of a plane, the planet in the dawn sky can be a breathtaking sight. As one veteran pilot has described the experience, “Venus rose to signal me from the eastern horizon, so brilliant and inconsistent in color, changing at once from yellow to green to purple and then reversing the show, that I thought for a time it was another aircraft equipped with special lighting devices. But Venus steadied in time, proving its identity.”[IV-5]

During the spring of 1956 Venus stimulated an unusual amount of flying-saucer excitement. About 9:00 E.S.T. on the nights of March 20, 21, and 22, dozens of persons in Cincinnati, Ohio, telephoned the newspapers and the local headquarters of Civilian Research Interplanetary Flying Objects (CRIFO), to report an unidentified flying object that was burning “like a beacon” in the western sky. A reporter for the Cincinnati _Enquirer_ stated: “To the naked eye, the object appeared to be an extraordinarily intense bluish white light ... through binoculars, the object appeared to be a compact galaxy of lights, changing form as they revolved slowly. At one point, with binoculars set slightly out of focus, it assumed the appearance of a diamond brooch ringed with emeralds turning lazily on an eccentric axis.” The object was visible for nearly an hour, moved slowly to the northwest, and disappeared.

Astronomers quickly identified the unknown as Venus. To the saucer enthusiasts, however, it appeared as a low-flying luminous object with swept-back wings, hovering in the west, making no sound, and displaying colors that changed from red to white. While admitting that some of the reported sightings might have been Venus, the editor of _Orbit_ (the official publication of CRIFO) argued that an object that changed shape and sparkled like diamonds and emeralds could not possibly be Venus. He stated “that the public should know that out of seventeen UFO reports received for a three day period, ten were explainable as Venus but _six were not_! These stubborn six defied all conventional explanation.”[IV-6]

While the fate of the seventeenth UFO may require further explanation, the flying saucer reports did not offer a real puzzle. The time, the position, the colors, and the apparent motions of the object were entirely consistent with those expected for the planet under the prevailing atmospheric conditions. Dr. Paul Herget of the Cincinnati Observatory had easily identified the “mysterious” object. He added that Venus would continue to get brighter and brighter until the middle of May, and that the number of UFOs sighted would probably increase correspondingly.

He was right. Less than three weeks after the excitement in Cincinnati, Venus inspired one of the most notorious “Unknowns” in the history of saucerdom, one that evoked charges of fraud, falsehood, and conspiracy on a grand scale.

_The Ryan Case_

An American Airlines plane had just taken off on a flight from Albany to Syracuse, New York, on the night of April 8, 1956. The sky was clear with a very thin overcast. At 10:15 E.S.T., while at about 6000 feet over Schenectady, Captain Ryan and his first officer sighted an unidentified flying object and reported it to Griffis Air Force Base. Bright orange in color, it glowed ahead of the plane in the northwestern sky. At first it seemed to be traveling at great speed, 800 to 1000 miles an hour. Then it appeared to slow down to the plane’s speed, about 250 miles an hour, and thereafter kept a steady distance ahead. The tower operators at the Albany and Watertown airports also saw the object, as did the crews of four other plane flights, who decided it was probably a star or a planet.

The shift supervisor on duty in the tower at Griffis Air Force Base, alerted by Captain Ryan, was able to observe the unknown through binoculars. He described it as apparently round, larger than any star, at an estimated altitude of 3000 or 4000 feet; when first sighted it looked white with an orange tint but after about ten minutes changed to orange with a red tint. During the twenty-three minutes he watched it, the unknown slowly descended over the horizon. Interceptors from Griffis Air Force Base were scrambled (Air Force jargon meaning to take off and pursue as quickly as possible) at 10:48 and 10:52, but returned to base without finding anything. Captain Ryan, having watched the object during most of the flight, landed his plane at Syracuse and made the customary report.

The newspaper accounts that followed caused a short-lived flying-saucer scare, but when officials from ATIC investigated they had no difficulty in solving the mystery. The evidence was plain and unmistakable. The object was the planet Venus. According to the reports of Captain Ryan and the other observers in the air and on the ground, the object was low in the northwest; estimates of its azimuth varied from 290 to 330 degrees. A plot of the planet’s actual position at 10:20 P.M., when the UFO was first picked up by the tower operator at Griffis Air Force Base, showed that Venus was slightly above the horizon at an azimuth of 301 degrees, and that it set at 304 degrees at about 10:42 (when allowance is made for the effects of atmospheric refraction)--the time the UFO disappeared from the view of the Griffis observers. Of the four other commercial and military pilots who reported the object, all described it as essentially stationary, and all positively identified it as Venus. In confirmation, the glowing light reappeared the following night at the same time and position. The intercepting jets had not been able to find the alleged UFO because by the time they left the ground, around 10:50, the planet had already set[IV-1].

There the matter should have ended. The puzzle was solved, and forgotten by all but a few saucer addicts. Some twelve months later, however, Major Donald Keyhoe reopened the case. As the new Director of the National Investigations Committee for Aerial Phenomena, commonly known as NICAP (see _Chapter_ XIII), he charged the Air Force with concealing the true facts of the incident, and himself tried to get in touch with Captain Ryan to obtain information to support the charge. Receiving no answer to letters or telephone calls, Major Keyhoe then gave his story to certain government agencies. Using as evidence a newspaper account[IV-7] and interpretations of Captain Ryan’s remarks in a TV interview, NICAP alleged that the object sighted on April 8, 1956, had been a UFO; that the captain, on orders from Griffis Air Force Base, had abandoned his scheduled route to chase the unknown craft, had lost it somewhere over Lake Ontario, had then turned back and landed at Syracuse and, finally, that his flight log must have been falsified to conceal the facts of this pursuit[IV-8].

The original question, the identity of an unknown object, was all but forgotten. In letters, telegrams, and telephone calls to various officials of American Airlines, Congress, the Air Force, the Civil Aeronautics Board, and the Civil Aviation Authority, NICAP requested an official investigation of the incident. The first requests evoked no response but continued efforts were successful. After hints of publicity and of possible senatorial interest, the beleaguered agencies at last yielded to NICAP pressure and reopened the case. Captain Ryan, a reliable officer with twenty-three years’ experience as a pilot, was subjected to official interrogation. Busy government bureaus were forced to invest further time, money, and energy to confirm facts that had never been in doubt.

To the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), Captain Ryan replied that he had observed an unidentified object, but that he had not altered the course of his flight. He repeated this explicit statement to officials of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) and of American Airlines. Airline records provided independent confirmation. Since the scheduled time of the flight between Albany and Syracuse had been 49 minutes, and the actual time elapsed on the night in question had been 48 minutes, he could not possibly have spent time in making a detour over Lake Ontario as alleged.

These declarations, according to NICAP, were worthless. They merely proved that Captain Ryan had given false answers to his questioners; that the government agencies involved knew the answers were false; and that a gigantic conspiracy existed to suppress the truth. Among those suggested as possible members[IV-8] were the American Airlines Company, the Civil Aeronautics Board, the Civil Aviation Agency, the United States Air Force, and possibly even the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council!

Saucer publications still list this sighting of Venus as an Unknown.

_Venus as a Morning Star_

One of the “best” UFOs of the year 1950 appeared when Venus performed in plain sight of the ATIC offices at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio[IV-2, p. 103].

About midmorning on March 8 a TWA plane, coming in to land at Dayton municipal airport, was circling to get into the traffic pattern when both pilot and copilot noticed an extremely bright light hovering in the southeast. Much brighter and larger than a star, it appeared and disappeared in the high, thick, scattered clouds. The tower operators, who also saw it, immediately telephoned the Ohio Air National Guard and officials at ATIC. Within minutes the UFO had attracted an audience of exceptionally well-qualified observers. Air Force experts on unidentified flying objects watched it from the ground, technicians studied returns on the radar screens at the laboratory at Wright Field, and the pilots of two hastily scrambled F-51s tried to intercept it.

The radar operators, who reported returns from both UFO and pursuit planes, called the pilots and vectored them in toward the target. Both pilots could see the light at first, but when they had climbed to about 15,000 feet they found themselves in clouds so thick that neither could see the other plane, and the unknown was no longer visible. Since ground radar reported that the planes were getting closer to the target, the pilots decided to continue, on instruments, but they separated to avoid the danger of colliding with each other. In a few seconds they were deep in dense cloud. Flying conditions were far worse than they had expected and the planes were icing up fast. Nevertheless the pilots kept climbing until ground radar advised them that they were almost on target. Realizing that if a solid object actually were ahead of them they would hit it before they could see it, the pilots immediately descended to below the clouds and circled, hoping for a break in the overcast, until ground radar reported that the target was fading fast. The planes then landed. When the clouds broke momentarily, after about an hour, the UFO was not visible.

A conference took place at ATIC that afternoon to discuss the identity of the mysterious light and the cause of the radar echoes. A check showed that the position of the UFO had been identical with that of Venus. The light, the conference concluded, had been Venus. One pilot later disagreed, arguing that the light had not looked to him like a planet and that if the object had been Venus it should have appeared, but did not, at the same time on the following day. But the weather conditions the first day would have distorted the image and made it unlike the pale light of Venus occasionally visible in the daytime. It was not visible at all the following day because of different weather conditions.

The radar returns, the investigators found, had come from the ice-laden clouds and were unrelated to the light. Both planes had encountered unexpectedly severe icing conditions which increased as they approached the center of the cloud. Radar, tracking their course during these moments, had shown the planes approaching close to the unknown target. All the evidence, the radar experts agreed, indicated that the unknown target was ice[IV-1].

_Venus as an Evening Star_

In the spring of 1959 Venus again, this time in the evening, caused reports of flying saucers. At 6:20 P.M. on March 13, a clear evening with visibility of about fifteen miles, an unidentified flying object was sighted in the western sky near Duluth, Minnesota[IV-1]. Witnesses described its shape as tubular or round and its color as red, orange, green, or white. Two interceptors of the Air Defense Command were scrambled to investigate and headed for the object at top speeds, but they could get no closer and eventually gave up the chase and landed. Military personnel at ground stations and in the air observed the object visually and picked up radar returns; it disappeared, after about thirty minutes, by fading from sight. Although this spectacular unknown had seemed to keep pace with the aircraft, at times rushing toward the planes on a collision course and at other times reversing direction and racing away, all witnesses agreed that the object had remained at a magnetic bearing of approximately 300 degrees.

The radar screen at the ground station had been photographed and the film was forwarded to ATIC at Dayton. Analysis showed that the echoes had not come from a real target but were “angels” caused by interference (see _Chapter_ VIII). Some operators had reported sharp contacts, others fuzzy; on some sets the target had faded suddenly, on others it rushed off the scope at incredible speeds. Contact was intermittent, for short periods of from ten seconds to a minute, and each new contact gave a different position for the target.

At the time of the sighting Venus was just on the western horizon, at the same position occupied by the unknown, and probably would have been invisible except for the refraction by the earth’s atmosphere. Layers of air with different temperatures had produced the apparent motion and changes in color. The object had maintained the same size and relative position during the entire period of observation; it disappeared by fading from sight, sinking farther below the horizon. The following night, under similar atmospheric conditions, the object reappeared in the same position. The unknown was positively identified as Venus.

Venus was again reported as a UFO on the night of October 19, 1959, in Korea. An observer reported a crescent-shaped silver object moving very slowly toward the west. Observing it for three hours and twenty minutes through the telescope of a transit, he obtained very exact data on the bearing and altitude, which provided the facts required for identification. The object moved westward at a rate of approximately 12 degrees an hour, a rate close to the rotational velocity of the earth and the apparent rotational velocity of the stars. Venus at the time occupied exactly the same position as the object, and went below the horizon shortly after the reported sighting[IV-1].

_The Rotating Lights of Japan_

One of the most famous exploits of Venus took place over Japan and Korea in December 1952 and January 1953. The resulting UFOs, publicized as “The Rotating Lights of Japan,” were automatically identified as spaceships by saucerians. Noting the similarity to the “foo balls” often seen by airmen during World War II, however, Dr. Menzel concluded that the lights were probably a type of foo ball, “an exceptional mirage.”[IV-9, p. 96] The rotating cycle of colors suggested that the atmosphere was acting to break up and disperse the component colors of a luminous image, displaced from its true position. Without precise information on the time, position, and direction of motion of the unknown, this theory could not then be substantiated. During the preparation of this book, however, the authors were able to examine the original data on file at ATIC and to obtain the facts necessary for a complete solution.

The drama began on December 29, when UFOs were reported at many points over northern Honshu, the main island of Japan, and continued with similar sightings, particularly on January 9 and January 21. On the evening of December 29 the pilot of an F-84-G plane, engaged in local-area night flying, overheard a radio-telephone conversation between another plane and a radar station on the ground reporting an unusual light in the western sky. Although the sky was thinly overcast at 8000 to 10,000 feet, he was far above the clouds, flying in brilliant moonlight with a visibility of at least forty miles. At 7:48 P.M. local time, while at 27,000 feet, he observed an unidentified object above and almost due west of his plane. Turning off all his lights to make sure that the object was not merely a reflection of his own canopy, he climbed after the unknown and kept it in view for three minutes, then lost it briefly. He soon located it again at 35,000 feet, when he seemed to be level with the object and tried to close in on it. During this second sighting he observed it for about five minutes before the light disappeared in the west.

The pilot was a man of unusual experience, in command of a fighter escort wing, and well aware of the illusions a flyer can experience at night. He was also a remarkably accurate and resourceful observer, so that his report to Intelligence investigators is a model of exact statement. If all such reports were similarly precise and complete, few UFOs would remain unidentified and the civilian saucer groups would have to disband (see _Chapter_ XIII). Carefully separating what he observed from what he concluded, the pilot stated that the object looked larger than the stars or any planet; he assumed that it was circular, but could not determine the actual shape. He could not determine whether the object was silent or noisy because the noise of his own motors would have prevented his hearing any sound from the unknown. The object seemed to show a cluster of lights, red, white, and green, which slowly rotated in a counterclockwise direction from east to west; one complete cycle of revolution required a time estimated at four to eight seconds. The shifting of the three colors during the cycle resembled the rotating colors in some jukeboxes, and the effect was phenomenal. “As these colors rotated in the body of the object, at times the entire body was one solid color, either white, green, or red, but in the process of completing a revolution the body was frequently fractionally red, white, or white-green, plus the other possible combinations of the three colors.” Also there seemed to be three beams of white light radiating out from the main body in straight shafts which, unlike the colors, did not change their relative positions but remained constant at positions of roughly 11:00, 5:00, and 7:00. No phenomenon that might be an exhaust was observed. As to motion and behavior, the object seemed to travel exactly parallel to the plane and maintained a constant distance in spite of the pilot’s attempts to intercept it at speeds of around 500 miles an hour. At no time did it execute any maneuvers except for a gradual change of direction during the two observations. The sighting ended when the lights vanished in the west[IV-1]. These rotating lights were also seen by the crew of an F-94 interceptor who watched them for about forty minutes, by the crew of a B-26 bomber who watched them for about seven minutes, and by various ground observers.

To make a positive identification, the investigator must know the weather conditions, the bearing of the observing aircraft, and the position of the object. Atmospheric conditions were found to be conducive to the formation of mirages. At the time of the first sighting on December 29, the observing plane was headed slightly to the east of north; the UFO was in the west, apparently traveling north on a course parallel with that of the plane. After the pilot lost sight of the object, he circled and hunted and was flying slightly east of south when he again picked up the object, which was still in the west.

A check of the astronomical situation showed that the sun had set about three hours before the sighting. Venus was following roughly three hours behind the sun and was extremely brilliant, with a magnitude of nearly -4.0. At 7:48 P.M., when the pilot sighted the unknown, the planet was about 3 degrees above the western horizon. When Venus finally sank beneath the horizon and disappeared, the “unknown” also vanished.

The similar UFOs reported from Japan during the same period, on January 9 and January 21, 1953, were also mirages of the planet Venus. The cases of “The Rotating Lights of Japan” in the Air Force file on UFOs have now been shifted from the category “Unknown” to the category “Solved.” In many other UFO cases of the “rotating lights” variety, the Air Force has positively identified the unknown as the planet Jupiter.

_UFOs and the Opposition of Mars_

Venus is not the only heavenly body to simulate a flying saucer. Jupiter and even Mercury, the smallest of the planets, have inspired their share of UFOs. Mars, which can also be very bright, has frequently been reported as a spaceship.

On June 21, 1952, an F-47 aircraft was on routine patrol over the Atomic Energy Commission installation at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, when at 10:58 P.M. a spotter from the Ground Observer Corps informed the pilot that a slow-moving craft was moving in the area at very high altitude. At about the same time the pilot observed a blinking white light, of no definite shape and with no exhaust or trail, apparently making passes at him. For the next eighteen minutes the pilot tried vainly to intercept the unknown. The plane was at 15,000 feet, moving at about 250 knots. As the pilot turned to meet the pass, the UFO would pull up some 4000 to 5000 feet above the plane and then move in again. When the plane reached 22,000 feet, the UFO appeared to make a final dive from 28,000 feet, pulled back up to its previous altitude, and then disappeared. The pilot’s reaction is indicated by his answer to one of the routine questions on the Air Force report form: “Did you stop at any time during the sighting?” His reply read: “Ha Ha!”

Investigating the incident, officials from ATIC at first suspected that the object might have been a balloon, released as a hoax; only a few weeks earlier a crank had launched a flight of balloons near Oak Ridge and had been caught. But after interviewing the witnesses, the investigators concluded that the UFO was far more probably the planet Mars. As so often happens, however, they could not convert the “probable” into a “positive” identification because they lacked one essential fact: the bearing of the aircraft[IV-1].

Some flying-saucer enthusiasts consider Mars as the probable home port of many spaceships, which allegedly visit the earth in particularly large numbers when Mars is in opposition--the point in its path that is nearest the earth; these ships supposedly seize the chance to hop over to earth when the distance between the two planets is at a minimum.

It is to be hoped that the Martians, if any, are more competent navigators than the terrestrial saucerians who propose this theory. No sensible Martian would plan a journey scheduled to land him on earth during the few weeks when the two planets are closest. Traveling between Mars and earth is not like jumping across a mountain stream where the banks remain stationary: the jumper, of course, chooses the narrowest part of the stream and leaps across in a straight path. But in space travel both planets are moving; they travel in elliptical orbits of different sizes and at different speeds. To reach earth, the Martian, too, must get into an elliptical orbit of a size and shape that will eventually intersect the earth’s orbit. According to calculations by terrestrial rocket experts, the path that requires the least fuel is about 735 million miles long--some twenty times the distance between the two planets when they are closest. To follow this course, which takes 260 days of travel, the Martian must leave 260 days before the day that his ship and the earth will converge and meet at a particular position in space. Therefore he plans to blast off at a time when earth in its orbit is 76 degrees of arc behind Mars in its orbit (see Figure 8). By the time he lands on earth, the planet Mars is lagging 44 degrees of arc behind the earth[IV-10].

Any increase in UFO reports that may occur when Mars is in opposition should be attributed not to spaceships but to the heightened brilliance of the planet itself glowing in the night sky.