The World of Flying Saucers: A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space Age

Chapter VII: Preface (4)

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_The Gorman “Dogfight”_

One of the most puzzling of the classic saucer mysteries began on the evening of October 1, 1948, when George F. Gorman, manager of a construction company and a lieutenant in the North Dakota Air National Guard, was returning to Fargo, N.D., from a cross-country practice flight in an F-51 fighter. About 9:00, Lieutenant Gorman called the control tower at the local airport for landing instructions, and asked the identity of a moving light that was blinking on and off in the air below him. Informed that a Piper Cub was coming in from the south, he continued to circle, and at 9:05 again called in to report that he could see the Cub below him at about 1000 feet. He could also see an unidentified light moving rapidly at about the same altitude.

The assistant traffic controller then walked to the south window of the tower and looked out. He could see the Cub in the air and, a little above it, a clear white light. The light was moving swiftly to the north, then shifted and continued in a straight line toward the northwest. After watching it for several seconds, he returned to his post. A few minutes later Gorman called the tower for the third time to say that he was going to try to close in on the unknown. The traffic controller then stepped to the south window of the tower. Through his binoculars he could see a light moving rapidly over the field in a straight line toward the northwest. It had no particular shape and was merely a clear white light about the size of a plane’s tail lamp. After a few seconds he returned and resumed communication with Gorman.

The pilot of the Cub glimpsed the light briefly as he was landing his plane. He supposed it to be the tail light of another ship going very fast in a straight line in a westerly direction, and was puzzled by the fact that an army plane seemed to be pursuing it. After landing he delivered some bottles of Coca-Cola to the tower operators and, overhearing the conversation between them and Gorman, stepped to the balcony at the southeast corner of the tower to see what was happening. From there he could see the light going west, with the army plane after it. The light shifted briefly to the southeast but almost immediately resumed its northwest course and disappeared after a few seconds.

Lieutenant Gorman, meanwhile, had begun a weird “dogfight.” The UFO seemed to be at an altitude of about 1000 feet, was traveling about 250 miles an hour, and was blinking off and on. As he approached, the light banked to the left. Gorman dived after it but could not catch up. The light then began to climb in a rapid turn. Attempting to turn with it, Gorman blacked out temporarily from the excessive speed.

Continuing the chase, this time at 5000 to 7000 feet Gorman noticed that the light was now traveling fast, apparently faster than the F-51 could go, so he began trying to cut it off in turns with his fighter at full power. As the object circled to the left, Gorman cut back to the right for a head-on pass. When collision seemed inevitable he dived and the light seemed to pass over his canopy at a distance of about 500 feet. According to the description he later gave the Air Force, the unknown at this closest approach seemed to be a round white light, somewhat flattened, from six to eight inches in diameter--about a quarter the apparent size of the full moon. Gorman then made a climbing turn. When he could see the light again it suddenly reversed direction and headed straight for the plane, attempting to ram. It was no longer blinking off and on but was a steady white. Just before collision it pulled up and Gorman, too, pulled up. The light went straight up, with Gorman following until, at 14,000 feet, his plane went into a power stall while the object circled some 2000 feet above him. As he resumed the battle, the light seemed to retreat, then attack. Gorman dodged and circled to the left to get in position for another intercept. Finally, when these maneuvers had taken him some twenty-five miles southeast of Fargo, he was at 14,000 feet with the object below him at 11,000 feet. He dived after it. The UFO turned and started a head-on pass, then broke it off, climbed straight up, and disappeared. The time was 9:27. Gorman returned to the Fargo airport and landed, convinced that some intelligence had been controlling the actions of the unknown[IV-1].

With the memory of the Mantell tragedy (p. 33) and the Chiles-Whitted sighting (see _Chapter_ V, p. 109) still fresh in mind, officials from ATIC arrived at Fargo in less than twenty-four hours to investigate this new incident [IV-2, p. 63 ff.]. They carefully questioned Lieutenant Gorman and the three other witnesses, but could find no obvious explanation. No other aircraft had been in the neighborhood at the time of the sighting. The weather had been clear, visibility unlimited, with some auroral activity in the northeast. When tested with a control group of five other F-51s that had flown during the same period, Gorman’s plane showed no more radioactivity than did the control group--the slightly higher amount shown by all planes after flight. Gorman’s report was confusing, in parts, and reconstructing the exact sequence of maneuvers by UFO and plane proved impossible. There were almost as many theories offered in explanation as there were investigators, but eventually a reasonable solution did appear.

A lighted weather balloon had been released from the weather station at Fargo at 8:50, ten minutes before Lieutenant Gorman’s first call. As observed from the station, the balloon had traveled west and then northwest. At 9:00 it would have been near the airport about where the unknown light was first reported. A balloon could well have accounted for the events described in the first phases of the incident, but less well for those in the last. Officially, however, the cause was listed as a lighted weather balloon[IV-2, p. 67]--an answer that was not entirely satisfactory.

_a._ "Grindstone" clouds over Mount Rainier. (CHAP. II)]

_b._ A "stack of plates" near the Maritime Alps northeast of Marseilles. (CHAP. II)]

_a._ Kite with lantern photographed at Curaçao, B.W.I. (CHAP. III)]

_b._ UFOs over Kentucky, 10:35 P.M., CST, July 7, 1947. Jet trails? Bolides? (CHAP. III)]

_a._ Meteor trail. (CHAP. V)]

_b._ Fireball over Puerto Rico, January 12, 1947. (CHAP. V)]

_a._ Coast Guard photograph of UFOs over Salem, Massachusetts, July 16, 1952. (CHAP. VI)]

_b._ UFO near the village of Arbleterre, in northern France, October 2, 1954. (CHAP. VI)]

_c._ Radar "ghosts" at Salina, Kansas, September 10, 1956. (CHAP. VIII)]

_Only a Balloon?_

A review of the evidence, made by the authors during the preparation of this book, emphasized some puzzling inconsistencies. Lieutenant Gorman had had the UFO in view for about twenty-seven minutes. During the first five or ten minutes it had traveled horizontally at low altitude in a fairly steady course. Then it had suddenly changed tactics, had climbed to high altitude, turned, darted in and out, and performed both evasive and aggressive actions. The three witnesses on the ground, however, did not see the UFO perform _any_ of these combat maneuvers. It had been traveling steadily north and northwest and had disappeared from view ten or fifteen minutes before the aerial dogfight ended.

These differences strongly suggested that two unknowns were involved in the sighting. According to this theory, the light seen by the ground observers was the weather balloon; the light first seen over the airfield by Gorman was also the weather balloon. His adversary during the major part of the dogfight was a second unknown, not a physical object but some kind of optical phenomenon, very probably a mirage of the planet Jupiter. The reconstruction based on this theory would account for all the puzzling aspects of the case.

As first described by Lieutenant Gorman and by the three witnesses on the ground, the light was small, bright, and clear; no structure was visible; it made no noise and left no trail or exhaust. It was south of the control tower, was traveling horizontally west and northwest, seemingly at high speed, on a straight course, at low altitude. On these points all the witnesses agreed.

They did not agree in their estimates of its actual distance and height--a fact that is not surprising when we consider the circumstances. The night was clear and cloudless. It was also dark. The sun had set more than two hours earlier and there was no moonlight (new moon on October 2). On a dark night, the height and distance (and hence the speed) of a moving light of unknown size are notoriously difficult to estimate. According to Lieutenant Gorman, the light when he first saw it was about 1000 feet above the ground and 1000 yards--a little more than ½ mile--from his plane. The three men on the ground saw the UFO, for a few seconds, at different times during a period of less than ten minutes. Like Gorman, they were experienced airmen but they differed from him and from each other in their estimates. According to the assistant traffic controller, the altitude and distance from the control tower were 2000–2500 feet and 1–2 miles. According to the traffic controller, they were 4000–5000 feet and ½ mile; according to the Cub’s pilot, they were 5000–6000 feet and 1 mile.

In spite of the discrepancies, these estimates are in general agreement and, together with the details of the UFOs appearance, are consistent with the description of the weather balloon that had been released at 8:50, about ten or fifteen minutes before the UFO was sighted from the ground. The balloon carried a small white light, moved west and then northwest, was at low altitude and slowly climbing, and would soon have disappeared from the view of ground observers.

The object that Lieutenant Gorman first saw and pursued was also the balloon, climbing and turning. As it bobbed and swayed in the air currents it would have seemed to blink off and on, just as he reported. Underestimating its height and distance and overestimating its velocity as did the pilot in the Cuban dogfight (p. 42), he tried to follow its apparent climbing turn and, as he stated, blacked out briefly because of his excessive speed. During this interval, short as it may have been, he of course lost track of the object. Shortly afterward, when the UFO passed over his canopy and he dived, he again lost sight of the object.

When he resumed the chase he supposed that he had located the same object he had been following earlier--but the evidence suggests that he had picked up a different target. The unknown was going much faster than before, was at a much higher altitude, and shone with a steady brilliance instead of blinking off and on. In such a tense situation he could understandably have mistaken one strange light for another. Pursuing an apparently hostile unknown, less than a year after the still mysterious death of Mantell in a similar encounter, he might justifiably have been frightened.

The most probable source of the second light is the planet Jupiter. The sun had set at 6:24 P.M. Following some three hours behind the sun, the planet had a magnitude of -1.7 and was thus brighter than Sirius, the brightest star. Shortly after 9:10 when the UFO began its violent maneuvers (the exact time is not known), Jupiter was very low in the southwest sky, between two and three degrees above the horizon, at a bearing of about 231 degrees. The UFO was also attacking from the southwest, as is shown by Gorman’s tactics: in trying to cut it off in circles to the left, he gradually moved to the southeast.

The weather bureau records for that evening, obtained from radiosonde observations, show that temperature inversions existed both near the ground and at higher altitude. Thus conditions were ideal to produce a furiously twinkling planetary mirage. When a planet is close to the horizon this twinkling, together with the defocusing action of the earth’s atmosphere, can spread out the image so that it looks huge, with an apparent diameter as great as ten minutes of arc. Under such conditions, both the size and the intensity of the light fluctuate. When they diminish, the object seems to be racing away from the observer; when they increase, it seems to be rushing directly towards him on a collision course. The peculiar lens-like action of the atmosphere makes the image seem to be, not at infinity, but only a few hundred feet away from the observer.

Seen through the distorting atmospheric lens, the image of Jupiter could have performed exactly as Gorman described: it would have darted back and forth, seemed to attack, retreat, and carry out the “controlled” maneuvers that actually depended partly on the movement of the plane itself. Gorman apparently assumed that he was dealing with a material object (as indeed he was in the beginning), and therefore did not consider the possibility that he was seeing merely an optical image.

The geographical situation would have helped produce the illusion. Fargo lies at an elevation of about 900 feet and the land rises gradually to the west. Due west is Bismarck at 1670 feet. To the south lies a series of buttes, some of them as high as 3500 feet. Thus in the southwest where Jupiter was setting and where the UFO attacked from, the buttes would repeatedly have cut off the planet from view as Gorman maneuvered, so that the image would have seemed to race in and out and perform evasive actions, just as did the mirage of Sirius in Alaska (p. 60). Since Jupiter was very low, however, the buttes served to conceal it from the observers on the ground.

The times involved provide the last piece of the puzzle. The dogfight ended at about 9:27. The time of the geometrical setting of Jupiter was 9:25. The usual lag due to refraction is between two and three minutes (see Figure 9). The planet therefore remained visible for about two minutes longer. The image actually sank below the horizon and disappeared from view between 9:27 and 9:28, the same time that the UFO climbed straight up into the sky and disappeared. When Jupiter vanished, the unknown also vanished and did not return.

Absolute proof of this solution is of course impossible. Nevertheless, the description of the UFO, its behavior, its direction, its time of disappearance--all are consistent with its identification as Jupiter. The Gorman case might reasonably be removed from the “Balloon?” category and listed as “Balloon plus planetary mirage.”

_Jupiter through a Jet Trail_

Venus, Mars, and Jupiter seen under unusual conditions can mystify even the most hardheaded witness. Unrecognized air turbulence and increased scattering of the light can easily create the illusion of a flying saucer.

An ex-army man, a trained observer with a good knowledge of physics and optics, reports the following unnerving experience[IV-11].

“On January 30, 1954, my buddy and I had been fox hunting in southwestern Indiana. We hunted until well after sundown and headed for the car. As we neared it, a jet plane thundered through the darkening sky, from north to south. Placing game and guns in the car, I walked around it to see if the tires were OK. Happening to glance skyward, I let out a yell. There it was, and no mistaking it. A flying saucer blazing in the sky. A real illuminated spaceship. Only it wasn’t moving, just hanging in the sky. Football-shaped, about as long as the apparent diameter of the full moon, it showed red, yellow, and bluish green. [Here he sketched a football shape, glowing red knobs placed at the two ends, yellow lights girdling the middle, and yellow and green arcs curving between the two ends (see Figure 10).] I carry an eight-power field glass when hunting and I immediately trained this on the celestial wonder. The result was weird. It seemed to be pulsating with a quivering, twinkling light. We watched it for some five minutes, trying to figure out what we were seeing. Then the spaceship began to get smaller, simply reducing in size without moving. Smaller and smaller it became and in another five minutes it suddenly contracted into a planet--Jupiter, I believe it was. [Jupiter was in the eastern sky 50 to 60 degrees above the horizon.]

“When we realized what we were watching we began to try to figure out the ‘why.’ Suddenly we realized we were looking directly through the path of the plane at the planet and our best guess was that the atmospheric turbulence and temperature change caused by the passage of the jet was to blame for the strange aberration we had witnessed. And we wondered if refraction of the golden light could cause the reds, greens, and blues. Since neither of us uses snake-bite medicine in any form, we figured our observations were about as substantial as our feeble scientific understanding would permit.

“But anyway, I found out how people may see flying saucers and be perfectly honest in their incomplete observations. Had a person inclined to the supernatural taken a good look, jumped in his car, and headed for home at high speed, he would steadfastly have believed he had seen a flying saucer which was evidently observing the earth preparatory to an attack from outer space.”

[IV-1] Air Force Files.

[IV-2] Ruppelt, E. J. _The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects._ Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1956.

[IV-3] Tacker, L. J. _Flying Saucers and the U. S. Air Force._ Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960, p. 59.

[IV-4] Payne-Gaposchkin, C. _Introduction to Astronomy._ Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1954.

[IV-5] Gann, E. K. _Fate Is The Hunter._ Crest Reprint, New York: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1962, p. 172.

[IV-6] Case 151, CRIFO _Orbit_, Vol. III (April 6, 1956).

[IV-7] Buffalo _Evening News_, April 10, 1956.

[IV-8] Keyhoe, D. E. _Flying Saucers: Top Secret._ New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1960.

[IV-9] Menzel, D. H. _Flying Saucers._ Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953.

[IV-10] Ley, W., and von Braun, W. _The Exploration of Mars._ New York: The Viking Press, 1956.

[IV-11] Main, O. Personal correspondence.

_Chapter_ V

OUT OF THE SKY: METEORS AND FIREBALLS

About one o’clock in the afternoon on November 30, 1954, a spectacular meteor flared across the southeastern part of the United States and exploded. Many persons in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi saw the bright flash high in the sky, followed by a trail of smoke, and heard three violent detonations. Over the town of Sylacauga, Alabama, a nine-pound fragment of the falling meteoric body crashed through the roof of a house, bruised the left arm and hip of the unlucky resident, and came to rest on the floor. Members of the American Meteor Society collected detailed descriptions of the event from many witnesses and added this daylight fireball to the official list of observed meteorite falls from which meteorites are recovered[V-1, p. 128].

UFO addicts, however, apparently regarded both the meteor and its fragments as unnatural phenomena, implied some doubt that the fragment was really a meteorite, and characterized the incident as peculiar[V-2].

To the astronomer who specializes in the study of meteors the only peculiar aspect of the episode is that saucer publications list so few mysterious UFOs for that particular week when similar spectacular fireballs were almost a commonplace in the southeast states. On November 29 a meteor flew over Alabama at 5:30 P.M., and about two hours later another with a long trail soared over Florida. On November 30 at 5:00 P.M., a few hours after the fall at Sylacauga, another bright fireball flashed over Alabama. Shortly before midnight the same night a meteor flamed over North Carolina, so brilliant that its copper-green light illuminated the interior of cars on the highway; blue-green fire shot out above the treetops, changed to magnesium white, and then slowly faded. Detailed observations of all these appeared in the scientific journal _Meteoritics_[V-1, p. 128].

_Stones from Heaven_

Until roughly a hundred and fifty years ago meteors and meteorites had the status of cosmic orphans, unacknowledged members of the astronomical family. Few persons doubted the existence of the fixed stars, the solar planets, comets, or even of “new stars” or novae, but they rejected a natural explanation for meteors and interpreted them as falling stars, flying dragons, or fountains of fire in the sky. Most astronomers as well as laymen laughed at the recurrent idea that “stones from heaven” could fall on the earth. Then in 1803 the French scientist J. B. Biot described an extraordinary rain of meteorites that fell at L’Aigle on April 26[V-3]; he convinced the French Academy of Sciences that the stones had indeed pelted from the sky during the great meteor display. Meteoritics is thus a relatively young science. Much remains to be learned about these cosmic visitors, but certain basic facts have been established[V-4].

Meteors enter the earth’s atmosphere continually, by day as well as by night, and they show great variety. Some are so brilliant that they are visible even in broad daylight. Some are so faint that even in darkness they can be seen only through a telescope. Others, still fainter, can be detected only by radar specially designed for this purpose. Because of the friction created when they penetrate the earth’s atmosphere, most meteors vaporize and vanish many miles above the ground. We see them as only bright streaks of light, quickly extinguished. If the meteoric body is large enough, has the right chemical constitution, and enters the atmosphere at a favorable angle and velocity, some of it may survive the journey and fall to the earth as a meteorite. A distinct odor sometimes accompanies the fall--the smell of sulphur, onions, or cyanide. About 40,000 tons of meteoritic material fall on the earth each day, most of it in the form of fine dust. The object may be a chunk of metal or stone the size of a pebble or a boulder, or it may be a mass weighing several tons, so enormous that it gouges out a crater at the place where it hits and comes to rest far beneath the earth’s surface. Some meteors, fortunately extremely rare, apparently can strike the earth and devastate a large area but, like the wind, leave behind no physical trace. According to present theory, members of a regular shower are probably remnants of comets, which have an icy structure, and the minute bits of frozen debris vaporize in a flash of light high in the atmosphere. Meteors that survive to reach the earth as meteorites are thought to be fragments of asteroids, or tiny planets. Meteorites vary so widely in their physical and chemical structure that they require a complex system of classification. Nevertheless the specialist can distinguish between a meteorite and earthly rocks and stones by laboratory tests[V-5].

_Meteor Streams and Showers_

Any clear night displays its quota of meteors. But at certain times, when the earth happens to collide with a stream of cosmic debris moving in an elliptical orbit, a shower of meteors takes place. (For a list of the major night meteor streams, see TABLE I.) Most meteor streams probably result from the breakup of comets; if the debris is distributed uniformly in the comet’s orbit, a meteor shower occurs each time the earth crosses the orbit. For example, the Perseids, fragments of Comet 1862 III, have reappeared every August for more than 1200 years, and the Leonids, debris of Comet Temple (1866 I), regularly return around the third week in November. Like the Taurids, another dependable stream, the Leonids are notable for their brilliant fireballs, which have deposited some of the largest meteorites ever found on the earth.

Some regular showers produce great numbers of meteors at intervals of several years. For nearly a millennium, A.D. 902 to 1866, a marked increase in the number of Leonids occurred every thirty-three years. The display in 1833 was one of the most spectacular in history, and witnesses said that the “stars were falling” as thick as snowflakes. Before the scheduled major shower of 1899, however, the main stream was deflected by passing close to the planet Jupiter and the periodic spectacle did not take place. Since then, the Leonids have been considered a “lost” stream, but some members of the shower have continued to appear each November. On November 16 and 17, 1961, they produced an unexpectedly awesome display with many brilliant fireballs.

TABLE I

MAJOR METEOR STREAMS

The close approach of a comet sometimes causes a fantastic shower of “shooting stars,” and hundreds or even thousands may be counted in a single night. At the approach of the debris of Comet Biela on November 27, 1885, some 75,000 meteors were visible from a single place during a period of an hour. Irregularly occurring or sporadic meteors not associated with a known comet also occur and pelt the earth unexpectedly.

_The Green Fireballs_

On the evening of September 18, 1954, a group of astronomers and their wives from the observatory at Sacramento Peak, New Mexico, were having a picnic at the White Sands National Monument, near Alamogordo. In this great desert of pure white gypsum the air is extremely hot during the daytime but cools to a pleasant warmth after sunset. Supper finished, the picnickers had taken off shoes and stockings to wade in the soft warm sand. By 8:30 it was dark and some of the astronomers had already left but others (including Dr. Menzel) had lingered to watch the stars, which stand out sharply in the clear skies over the desert.

Suddenly, far to the north, appeared an enormous green fireball. Of blinding brilliance, it was moving slowly and majestically from east to west in a substantially horizontal path about seven degrees above the horizon, leaving behind a luminous trail that persisted for at least fifteen minutes. At about the same time thousands of other persons on the ground in New Mexico and Colorado, as well as the crews of several planes in flight, were observing the fireball. It passed over a crowded football stadium in Santa Fe, interfered with radio and TV transmission as it appeared over Albuquerque, and over Denver turned night into day. A United Airlines pilot at about 15,000 feet near Laramie, Wyoming, saw the blue-green ball crossing his course and for some ten minutes observed the luminous cloud it left behind[V-6]. At almost the same instant, the fireball was sighted in the Bay of San Francisco, 1000 miles away. One publication cited this meteor as two separate UFOs, one flying over San Francisco, the other over New Mexico and the Southwest[V-2].

When telephone calls swamped the newspaper offices, reporters interviewed Dr. Lincoln La Paz of the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico. Although he had not observed this particular specimen, he had seen similar green fireballs a few years earlier and he commented that this was no ordinary meteor but something unusual. A new wave of UFO excitement began to sweep the country. Were mysterious machines from outer space again patrolling New Mexico?

The astronomers who had admired the fireball at White Sands were amazed at the public reaction. As professionals who had spent their lives in observing and analyzing astronomical phenomena, they agreed that the object had been unusual in its slow movement, its color, and its brilliance. But an unusual meteor is still only a meteor, not a spaceship, and they easily recognized it as a green fireball of the type that had appeared over the Southwest a few years earlier.

The first epidemic of green fireballs had begun in early December 1948, and for nearly two months the brilliantly burning objects had appeared almost every night in the skies over New Mexico[V-7, p. 71]. Their apparent collision course startled plane crews in the air, and their steady, seemingly purposeful motion frightened observers on the ground. The fireballs showed a family resemblance in their bright-green color, their great size and brilliance, their level flight path, their noiseless disappearance, and their failure to leave material fragments on the ground.

New Mexico was a particularly sensitive area, studded with military bases and research installations carrying out vital work in ballistics, guided missiles, atomic energy, and space science in general. Since the unusual meteors seemed to be concentrating on New Mexico, Air Force Intelligence had to face the question: Were the fireballs natural astronomical phenomena or were they experimental guided missiles from another country, perhaps Russia?

After consulting Dr. La Paz and hearing his evaluation of the evidence, the Air Force felt growing concern. Perhaps unconsciously influenced by the general hysteria of the past year, Dr. La Paz concluded that the objects were not meteors but must be “something unusual” because they differed from “normal” meteors in their color, trajectory, velocity, size, brilliance, and apparent lack of fragments.

With very little knowledge of meteors and great faith in machines from outer space, saucer enthusiasts reasoned that since the fireballs were not normal meteors they must be artificial objects. Since they were artificial, they must be under intelligent control. Since they were intelligently controlled, they must be unmanned missiles or manned vehicles launched from an alien spaceship hovering hundreds of miles above the earth whose purpose might or might not be destructive, or they might be merely ranging devices sent as a warning to earthmen.

The Air Force was not particularly worried about interplanetary visitors, but it was concerned with the possibility that the fireballs were man-made vehicles, a potential danger to the country. One scientist had suggested that the Russians might have constructed a guided missile whose nose cone, the final stage in a multistage rocket, was made of ice and various other chemicals. In re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, such a cone would burn up; the vaporizing ices would account for the green color observed, for the silent disappearance of the object, and for the lack of material traces on the ground. Whatever the true explanation, members of the Air Defense Command could not afford to guess; they had to know.

In mid-February 1949 they assembled at Los Alamos a conference of military and intelligence officers, physicists, and astronomers, to discuss the problem of the green fireballs. After two days of studying the evidence, most of the members agreed that the fireballs were meteors of an unusual type and, as natural phenomena, not a threat to national security. To take care of the extremely remote chance that this conclusion might be wrong, the conference turned over the problem to the scientists at Air Force Cambridge Research Center which, in the late summer, organized Project Twinkle to equip and establish three cinetheodolite stations in New Mexico. Fitted with a diffraction grating to split the spectrum into its component colors (and thus identify the chemical elements present), the cameras were to photograph and record the altitude, size, speed, and spectrum of the luminous objects.

Since the green fireballs, meanwhile, had all but vanished from the skies, enthusiasm for the research project diminished. Only one camera (designed by Dr. Menzel) was ever put into operation and it never found anything to photograph. After two months of futile searching, the Air Force finally abandoned Project Twinkle as a waste of time.

In the years following, green fireballs occasionally appeared. An astronomer observed one over Lafayette, Colorado, at 7:45 P.M. on June 4, 1950. One soared over the New England states and eastern Canada on November 2, 1950, and a year later, on November 2, 1951, a plane crew over Texas sighted another which was dramatically publicized in _Life_ magazine, and described in another publication as a missile that ejected flaming balls. Few other fireballs made the headlines until the one of September 18, 1954, but even that caused only brief excitement and the Air Force expressed no alarm.

_Meteors in the Records_

The American Meteor Society, whose members specialize in the study of meteors and meteorites, for years have collected reports of such phenomena. From a large enough number of good descriptions of a given meteor, astronomers can analyze the data mathematically and determine the meteor’s radiant--the point in the heavens from which it seems to come. The meteor is then identified by its radiant and given an AMS number. For several years the data were published in _Meteoritics_, a journal issued jointly by the Meteoritical Society and the Institute of Meteoritics of the University of New Mexico. Dr. Charles P. Olivier, president of the American Meteor Society, was a contributing editor.

The records in _Meteoritics_ for the years 1950 to 1955 list dozens of fireballs, many of them green, that were somehow overlooked by saucer enthusiasts. On August 11, 1950, during the maximum of the Perseid shower, a blue-green fireball (AMS 2336) apparently oval- or cigar-shaped appeared over Washington, Oregon, and Idaho at 7:30 P.M. and was reported by more than 100 witnesses. So brilliant that it showed a noticeable disk, it flew in a horizontal path, silently broke into three pieces, and disappeared[V-8, p. 379].

September 20, the same year, was a big day for meteors. At 1:35 A.M. a giant fireball (AMS 2326) roared over southeastern Illinois from north to south, leaving a luminous train visible in five states and illuminating the sky and countryside from St. Louis to Louisville and from Memphis to Knoxville. The final detonation, over western Kentucky, was heard over an area 1000 miles square and shook buildings from Paducah to Memphis. Fragments showered farms over a twenty-five-mile area, struck five buildings, and penetrated one roof. About fifty pounds of meteorites dropped in Murray, Calloway County, Kentucky, and are now in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. That same night about 10:45 P.M., fireballs were reported by plane crews flying over a six-state area--Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico[V-9, p. 115]. Similar fireballs that vanished without trace were reported on September 28, 1953 (AMS 2331); October 4, 1953 (AMS 2330); May 15, 1954; and October 27, 1954 (AMS 2337).

The green fireballs still appear now and then, as they always have. None of them has yet changed into a spaceship.

_Fallacies about Meteors_

Most flying-saucer enthusiasts still refuse to believe that the green fireballs were natural phenomena. Misinterpreting or distorting the statements made by professional astronomers, they cite the unusual nature of these meteors as proof that they were not meteors at all but machines from another world. Advocates of this belief need more than a refresher course in logic; they also need to learn some facts about meteors.

The space-vehicle interpretation rests on a series of mistaken beliefs and illogical conclusions about the nature and behavior of meteors. These false premises may be summarized as follows:

1. _Color._ Meteors do not contain copper; since the peculiar shade of green shown by the green fireballs could come only from copper, the fireballs were not meteors but spacecraft.

2. _Speed and trajectory._ Meteors do not travel at a slow rate of speed and do not follow a horizontal path; since the green fireballs did both, they were not meteors but spacecraft.

3. _Size and brilliance._ Meteors do not show such great size or brilliance as did the green fireballs, which were therefore not meteors but spacecraft.

4. _Sound._ Meteors produce a loud noise; since the green fireballs moved silently, they were not meteors but spacecraft.

5. _Fragments._ Meteors deposit material fragments on the earth which can be located if the investigator maps the flight path and makes a search; since the green fireballs left no fragments, they were not meteors but spacecraft.

In the pages that follow we shall attempt to correct each of these mistaken ideas in turn, to present the actual facts known to astronomers, and to show clearly that the green fireballs were not spacecraft, but meteors.

_Facts about Meteors_

1. _Color._ Copper-green meteors are not a new phenomenon. This unusual shade of green is only one of the many possible colors that meteors may display--white, green, blue, yellow, orange, red, and all shades in between. Descriptions received by the Meteoritical Society include adjectives such as bright-green, copper-green, blue-green, fiery white, green-white, orange, blue, yellowish, silver, red-orange. Perceptions of color vary greatly among different observers, so that several witnesses may choose different words for the color of the same object. The most common adjective used is “brilliant”; an observer who has only a few seconds to look at the object often has real difficulty in deciding just what color accompanied the brilliance. Very common phrases are blue-green, greenish-white, orange-yellow, orange-red, greenish-yellow, yellow-green.

Both the chemical structure and the velocity of the meteoric body help determine its apparent color. As the burning object plunges through the atmosphere and vaporizes, the chemical elements produce their typical colors. At higher velocities, atmospheric friction heats the body to higher temperatures and whitens the color; as the body slows down and becomes less hot, it is apt to appear redder.

In a few instances astronomers have been able to photograph the color spectrum of a meteor in flight, to analyze the spectral lines and determine exactly what elements were present[V-10]. As a rule, however, the chemical content must be found from a laboratory analysis of recovered meteorites. Some meteors do contain traces of copper, and free nodules of pure copper have been found in several meteorites [V-5, p. 81]. Magnesium occurs in fairly high percentages in most meteorites and the amount is unusually high in green meteors[V-11]. It produces a color almost identical with that from copper. Seeing the green of a vaporizing meteor, no observer could tell whether the color came from copper or from magnesium unless he could photograph the spectrum or make a chemical analysis of the meteorite.

The color displayed by the New Mexico fireballs may have come from copper, but more probably from magnesium. Another possible source is frozen nitrogen. Laboratory experiments relating to problems of satellite re-entry[V-12] have shown that when frozen nitrogen vaporizes, it emits a brilliant green glow whose wave length is almost identical with that of the New Mexico fireballs, as judged from the paintings made by witnesses. One of the prevailing theories suggests that meteors of this type may be icy “cometoids”--cometary debris, chunks of ice, and frozen gases (including nitrogen) at very low temperatures. When they enter the earth’s atmosphere and are slowed down to speeds of several hundred miles an hour, they become heated and vaporize, and the surface alternately melts and refreezes; the vaporizing nitrogen would produce the green color seen in the fireballs. Such a process would account for the color, the short lifetime, and the lack of fragments of the New Mexico meteors.

To summarize: Meteors _can_ exhibit the particular green color shown by the New Mexico fireballs. It can result from copper, magnesium, or frozen nitrogen, which can normally occur in meteors.

2. _Speed and trajectory._ Meteors vary widely in their velocities and flight paths. They plunge from space into the earth’s atmosphere at speeds estimated to range from seven to forty-five miles a second relative to the earth--from 25,000 to more than 150,000 miles per hour. Members of a particular meteor stream usually show a characteristic velocity. The Perseids, for example, travel at high speed, some thirty-six miles a second, while the Geminids saunter in at a mere twenty-one miles a second. Most of these “falling stars” become visible to us when they have descended to around sixty or seventy miles above the earth. Flashing down in a steep path, they usually burn up and vanish by the time they have fallen to around fifty or forty miles. The larger the meteor’s body, the longer its life and the lower its point of disappearance. Most meteors maintain a straight course as they descend toward earth. A typical path is that photographed by Smithsonian astronomers in New Mexico on the night of November 23, 1960 (see Plate IIIa). Some fireballs have been reported to change course after exploding. More probably, the witness is actually observing the shifting pattern of the smoke cloud left by the meteor. The Puerto Rico fireball of January 12, 1947, left an erratic trail of this type, which was photographed ten to twenty minutes after the meteor had disappeared (see Plate IIIb).

The original entrance velocity, angle of entry, size, and chemical structure all influence the shape of a meteor’s path and its time of survival. The apparent angle of descent as seen by the observer depends on the distance and the direction the object is moving relative to the observer. When the meteor travels parallel to the observer’s line of sight, it seems much slower than when it passes the line of sight at right angles. The greater the distance between the observer and the meteor, the slower its apparent motion[V-13].

Some meteors move very slowly; traveling at an almost leisurely rate, they soar through the sky on a long, level path almost parallel with the earth. The slow fireballs in the great meteor procession of 1913 maintained a horizontal course over a distance of several thousand miles, from western Canada to Brazil[V-14].

Astronomical records show that green meteors are usually slow. Some 230 persons reported to the American Meteor Society that on November 28, 1953, at 6:30 P.M., a fireball moved slowly through the sky from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania. Described as blue-white-green, changing to orange-yellow-red, it was huge, disk-shaped, and vanished silently without depositing fragments [V-1, p. 273]. On May 15, 1954, at 11:22 P.M., more than 100 persons observed (and reported) a slow-moving fireball, blue-green changing to red, of luminosity so great that it woke sleeping people. Toward the end of its course it seemed to stop, spiraled a couple of times, and then simply vanished without leaving fragments [V-8, p. 336].

To summarize: Meteors _can_ travel at low velocities and in apparently horizontal paths.

3. _Size and brilliance._ Giant meteors of great luminosity have been recorded throughout history. Some fireballs have been visible to observers throughout an area of thousands of square miles. Typical descriptions are: dazzling, like an airplane falling in flames, bigger than the full moon, of blinding brilliance, so bright it turned night into day, like the headlight of a locomotive, as big as the setting sun but three times as brilliant.

The luminosity does not depend on the actual size of the meteoric body. A fragment no larger than a pinhead can create a brilliant flash as it vanishes. A spectacular fireball that lights up the country over hundreds of miles may have a small body that burns up completely miles above the earth. A larger body can survive longer, so that it continues to flare for several seconds or more. The larger, long-lasting fireballs may explode into smaller fragments and cascades of sparks. In exploding, they can produce a luminous cloud of particles that remains visible for fifteen or twenty minutes and then peppers the ground with meteorites that fall like hail or buckshot. A giant fireball can deposit chunks of metal weighing a ton or more like those found in Mexico, or can leave a truly enormous body that penetrates the ground and carves out a great crater like those in Arizona and Texas.

To summarize: Huge fireballs of great brilliance are not new.

4. _Sound._ Some meteors produce noise; others do not. Most meteors silently vaporize high above the earth. When one does reach the ground, it may strike with no noise but the faint thud of its impact. Shooting through the air, it sometimes makes weak noises that have been described as rumbling, crackling, rustling, whistling, or hissing.

Meteors sometimes explode with one or more crashing detonations that rattle or even break windows. The noise has been described as like a heavy clap of thunder, the explosion of a volcano, or a whir as if a million bumblebees had been disturbed. The noise from the explosion of the Siberian meteor in 1908 was heard over a distance of 600 miles, and the shock registered as an earthquake in England.

Many meteors, like the Pennsylvania fireball of January 29, 1952, (AMS 2328) are completely silent. This blue-green object, so large that it showed a definite disk, was reported to the American Meteor Society by more than 400 witnesses from Maine to Virginia and from New York to Ohio; none of the observers heard any noise [V-1, p. 264].

To summarize: Some meteors end with a bang, but most of them don’t even whimper.

5. _Fragments._ Most meteors burn up high in the atmosphere. A few, if they are large enough in size (at least ten to twenty pounds) and tough enough in structure, survive to reach the earth as stony or metallic fragments. Marked differences characterize the various meteor streams. The Taurids (maximum November 12) are relatively rigid structures, unusually tough, and show little tendency to break up in their flight. The many Taurid fireballs show that fairly large bodies have survived. The Geminids (maximum December 14) are of average strength but appear to be very dense, while the Draconids (October 10) are featherlike and fragile, with low density. Some of the most brilliant fireballs may be structures of ice and frozen gases which quickly vaporize on reaching the earth and hence leave no detectable fragments. The fiery object that struck Siberia in 1908 may have been such an “icy cometoid”; although it devastated an area of hundreds of square miles and uprooted or knocked down some eighty million trees, it apparently left no physical trace[V-15].

If some of the physical body does survive to reach the earth’s surface, finding it is still a problem. Recovery is rare even when the fall occurs in daylight over well-populated country and the flight path can be charted from the accounts of reliable witnesses. When the fall occurs at night, recovery is even rarer[V-5]. After dark, even experienced observers find it difficult to judge true directions and distances, and they may plot a place of fall that is many miles from the actual point of impact. Meteoriticists know that there is small chance of finding meteorites that fall at night except in regions where most of the land is under cultivation. In the fifty years between 1898 and 1948, of forty-eight recoveries from observed meteorite falls in the United States, only seven were made from falls occurring after 8 P.M.[V-5].

Recovery depends on many factors: the number of persons who saw the event, the accuracy of their estimates of distance and direction, the size of the meteorites, the patience of the searchers, the time and money available for the search, and, most important of all, just plain luck.

The Norton County fall of February 18, 1948, illustrates both the detective work and the luck required. At about 4:56 P.M. C.S.T. a brilliant detonating fireball soared over an area including Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas, and left a large white cloud that was visible for about an hour afterward. Newspapers publicized the phenomenon as a flying saucer and a few excited witnesses agreed. One man affirmed that shortly before the explosion the strange craft hovered over his yard at eye level, belching fire and showering sparks, then suddenly took off, climbing fast, and exploded.

Meteoriticists at once recognized the characteristic pattern of an exploding meteor and determined to find the remains. From newspaper reports and personal interviews with the witnesses, H. H. Nininger of the American Meteorite Museum in Arizona plotted the path and determined that the probable point of explosion was thirteen miles west and three miles north of Norton, Kansas[V-16]. From similar investigations, Lincoln La Paz of the Institute of Meteoritics in New Mexico determined the probable place of impact as an area eight miles long and four miles wide, about thirty-two square miles, on the Kansas-Nebraska line.

During the Easter vacation a field-survey party from New Mexico drove north into Kansas to hunt for the meteorite, but blizzards and snow-blocked roads stopped the work. A second search, begun on April 27, suggested that the main mass of the meteorite must have fallen somewhere in Furnas County, Nebraska. When persistent hunting failed to reveal it, the searchers moved south into Kansas, where a farmer had found a strange stone that smelled of sulphur and contained metallic specks. Although many stony meteorites of various weights turned up in this area, the main mass remained hidden until July 3 when a farmer located it, by accident, in a field that the official party had already examined and abandoned some three months earlier. This meteorite, although it weighed more than a ton and had dug out a six-foot crater in the ground, had eluded the hunters because “at the time of the fall the only dwelling close to the point of impact was unoccupied and ... the impact occurred in a field so overgrown with weeds and stubble that even the large crater made by the record-breaking main mass of the fall was finally located only when by chance a caterpillar tractor started to fall into it.”[V-17]

To find these meteorites, several highly trained searchers had spent days of effort, made a number of field surveys, driven more than 10,000 miles, and interviewed hundreds of persons who observed the flight of the fireball. Even so, they counted themselves lucky because many “meteorites of such composition and structure, although large enough to produce spectacular light and sound effects in the intermediate layers of the atmosphere, might disintegrate so completely during transit through the denser lower atmosphere that only dust would survive to reach the earth.”

The green fireballs of New Mexico were silent; they were probably icy structures and hence produced no meteorites. Even if they had, locating the place of fall would have been nearly impossible because the meteors appeared at night in a sparsely populated area.

To summarize: Many meteors do not leave fragments. Even when they do, finding the meteorite requires luck as well as hard work.

_Unusual Fireballs_

The officers and crewmen of a plane in flight have a front-row seat at the drama of the heavens, where astronomical events seem doubly vivid against the dark night sky. The pilot has been trained to recognize the major constellations, the brightest stars, and ordinary phenomena such as meteors and the Aurora Borealis. As a rule, however, he limits his study to the needs of the job. The few who have an astronomer’s intimate acquaintance with the heavens have often made valuable contributions to our knowledge. Comet 1957d was first observed by an airman and Comet 1948l was discovered by a pilot flying from the Fiji Islands to Australia. Comet Wilson, discovered on July 23, 1961 (and reported to the Air Force by some persons as a UFO), was first recognized by A. Stewart Wilson, navigator on a Pan American flight over the Pacific. All members of the crew were skilled and experienced fliers, but he alone was equipped to see the significance of the intruder in the constellation Gemini[V-18].

One of the most fantastic apparitions to confront a pilot is a group of luminous objects flaming through the air in more or less geometrical formation. The objects often seem to be heading directly toward the plane on a collision course but, as though under intelligent control, seem to veer off at the last possible instant and then disappear at incredible speed. The pilot usually recognizes this frightening phenomenon as an exploding meteor or a cluster of fireballs. Occasionally the sight is so extraordinary that he insists it could not have been a mere meteor but must have been some weird spacecraft. Airmen of unquestioned competence have made this mistake, sometimes because they more than half believed in extraterrestrial visitors, but more often because they knew less than they supposed about meteors.

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The World of Flying Saucers: A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space AgeChapter VII: Preface (4)

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