Chapter IX: Preface (6)

The most crucial discrepancy between negatives and story, however, was revealed by the pattern of the spots, which formed a flat V. The orientation of the V was the same on all the negatives. If the formation had actually passed directly overhead and the photographer had panned with it, as he claimed, then he must have taken all his pictures either as the lights approached him or as they receded. If he had taken two successive pictures, one as the formation approached and the next as it receded, the V would have reversed position in the second picture--V would have changed to ∧--unless he had managed to stand on his head while taking the second picture. And if he had actually taken all his pictures either as the lights approached or as they receded, he had performed the incredible feat of obtaining two clear, sharp photographs, while panning, in a mere two seconds.

Although these facts suggested that the explanation given for the pictures was at least highly improbable, Air Force experts refrained from labeling them frauds. Professional photographers can undoubtedly make various guesses as to how the pictures were made and the possible identity of the V of bright spots, but proof is impossible. In the Air Force files they remain in the category of Unknowns.

_Other Winged UFOs_

During the era of the saucers, winged creatures were responsible for many UFO stories. But winged creatures do not stay put, and in flying away they usually take with them the evidence that the alleged spaceships were actually only birds or insects.

One such incident occurred at Downey, California, on May 29, 1951. Late in the afternoon three technical writers for North American Aviation were standing outdoors chatting and looking at the sky when suddenly they noticed about thirty glowing, meteorlike objects moving in the east, about 45 degrees above the horizon. They made no sound and left no trail. Emitting an intense electric-blue light, the objects made fantastic right-angled turns and swept across the sky in an undulating vertical formation, apparently covering about 90 degrees of sky in about 25 seconds. The diameters of the objects were estimated at 30 feet and the speed at 1700 miles an hour[VI-11].

Many persons concluded that the unknowns must be interplanetary in origin because, as _Life_ magazine commented, no natural object hurtling at such a speed could execute a right-angled turn, and no known machine could fly so fast without making a sound or leaving a trail. No one could quarrel with this statement, but it has no obvious relation to the incident in question. Technical writers are not necessarily trained observers, and these witnesses had no way to make a reliable estimate of the height of the objects. Without an accurate estimate of at least one quantity--true altitude, true size, or true speed--the others are meaningless. The unknowns were probably birds, but they could equally well have been butterflies, bits of paper, or merely ashes blowing over the two-story building.

Winged creatures sometimes avoid the interplanetary label only by staying in sight long enough to be examined. About sundown on May 19, 1955, switchboards at police stations in the Los Angeles area were swamped by telephone calls reporting a fleet of silvery flying saucers, changing formation with incredible speeds “as if playing tag in the sky.” One witness, however, had the presence of mind to get out his binoculars and look at the objects; they were birds with dark wing tips. Thinking they might be geese, he called the State Division of Fish and Game, which identified the “saucers” as a flock of _Pelicanus erythrorhynchos_, an inland species of pelican that float on the prevailing wind currents[VI-12].

Sometimes an observer identifies such objects correctly, but later begins to doubt his own judgment. About 7:30 in the evening of August 26, 1956, a man driving along a highway in California noticed a flock of about nine small birds flying northward, dark against the blue sky. In a random group, they moved freely among themselves as birds do but continued in a northern direction. The witness watched the birds as carefully as possible, but the intermittent glimpses possible when a man is driving a car did not allow him to make good estimates of their size or height. Nevertheless, he guessed at their distance and calculated that they covered an arc of 60 degrees in five seconds, which would mean a speed of about 1000 miles an hour.

Instead of questioning the accuracy of his estimate, for some reason he doubted his first identification. If the objects could fly 1000 miles an hour, he reasoned, then they were not birds after all, and must be flying saucers![VI-13]

_The Tremonton Movies_

One of the most famous controversies resulting from a flight of birds centered on the Tremonton, Utah, films of UFOs.

On the morning of July 2, 1952, a Navy photographer and his family were on their way to California, driving near the town of Tremonton, Utah, not far from the Great Salt Lake. At about 11:10 A.M. the man’s wife noticed something unusual in the sky. Stopping the car, the man observed about a dozen shiny, disklike objects “milling around the sky in a rough formation.” Getting out his movie camera, a Bell and Howell 16-mm. equipped with a 3-inch telephoto lens, he started photographing the group. Just before it disappeared toward the west, one object left the main group and headed east. The photographer obtained about forty feet of film before the objects vanished. After developing the film, he sent it to the Air Force for evaluation, together with his opinion that the objects had been huge and had traveled at very high altitude at supersonic speeds. This was only an impression, however, for as he told investigators from ATIC: “There was no reference point in the sky and it was impossible for me to make any estimate of speed, size, altitude, or distance.”[VI-8] The pictures are of such poor quality and show so little that even the most enthusiastic home-movie fan today would hesitate to show them to his friends. Only a stimulated imagination could suggest that the moving objects are anything but very badly photographed birds.

The movies show nothing that can be recognized--merely bright blurs of light moving at random. Their luminosity is not constant, and the spots fade out and then become bright again. The frames include no clouds, no trees, no house, no hill--no known reference point by which to calculate the altitude, size, or distance of the moving lights. After exhaustive study the photographic experts concluded that the negatives had not been tampered with and that, unlike the Lubbock stills, the pictures had been made exactly as described. But pictures of what? The objects were not balloons and not planes. At the time, the experts also rejected the theory that they might be birds because, in their [mistaken] opinion, birds could not produce such bright reflections.

If the Tremonton movies contained no proof that the objects were birds, still less did they contain proof that they were round machines from outer space, and ATIC finally classified the sighting as “Unknown.” Later, however, Captain Ruppelt noted the strong resemblance to sea gulls he observed “riding a thermal” in the sky above San Francisco. They were “so high that you couldn’t see them until they banked just a certain way; then they appeared to be a bright white flash, much larger than one would expect from sea gulls.” [VI-10, p. 290]

Air Force investigators later concluded that the famous Tremonton movies show merely the large white gulls that soar near Utah’s Great Salt Lake. The objects were photographed shortly before noon on a hot summer’s day, against a deep-blue sky without any clouds to obscure the high sun. The fading and brightening of the lights, their individual motion within the group, and the one object that suddenly left the group, all are consistent with the behavior of a flock of birds, probably gulls, whose plumage is reflecting the sun. The glossy feathers of these birds can flash as brilliantly as a satiny metal surface as they circle and change position with respect to the sun. The birds can be dazzling against the clear, dark-blue sky of the western states. So brilliant is the flash that it wholly obscures the object that is reflecting the light.

Like many other puzzling UFO reports, the objects in the Tremonton movies were living lights--a case for the ornithologist rather than the Air Force.

A bright light moving erratically as it crossed and recrossed the field of view caused an experienced pilot and copilot to execute violent and evasive maneuvers in a flight over the dark Pacific.[VI-14] The errant UFO proved to be only a firefly inadvertently trapped between the panes of the double windshield.

[VI-1] Rolfe, F. _Eastern Daily Press_, January 16, 1908.

[VI-2] Purdy, R. J. “The occasional luminosity of the White Owl (_Strix flammea_),” _Transactions of the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists Society_, Vol. VIII (1904–1909), p. 547.

[VI-3] Gurney, J. H. _The Zoologist_, No. 802 (April 1908), p. 121.

[VI-4] Boston _Traveller_, Oct. 30, 1961.

[VI-5] London _Daily Telegraph_, November 8, 1958.

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

[VI-7] Ruppelt, E. J. _The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects._ Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1956.

[VI-8] Air Force Files.

[VI-9] Menzel, D. H. Personal files.

[VI-10] Ruppelt, E. J. _The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects._ Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., reprint, 1960.

[VI-11] _Life_ magazine, April 7, 1952.

[VI-12] Los Angeles _Times_, May 21, 1955.

[VI-13] Case 201, CRIFO _Orbit_, Vol. III (Oct. 5, 1956).

[VI-14] Major William T. Coleman. Personal communication.

_Chapter_ VII

PANIC

The summer of 1952, the period that Captain Ruppelt called “the big flap,” offers a history of the UFO mania in capsule form. If the newspapers were to be believed, the heavens were crowded with armadas of spaceships both visible and invisible. There was even a monster story to add spice to the tales.

Yet the panic was largely an artificial creation. All spring the nation’s movie-goers had been flocking to see a well-made thriller, _The Day the Earth Stood Still_, in which a mysterious glowing object appears in the sky over Washington, D.C., and lands in the middle of the city. The object proves to be a flying saucer from another planet, whose inhabitants want only to help the human race. Looking something like a huge poached egg, a hump in the center sloping down to a circular rim, the pictured vehicle offered a dramatic example to anyone in the mood to see a spaceship but not quite sure how it should look. In fact, many of the saucers described in the months and years following were obviously based on this model.

The summer’s hysteria was also nurtured by the fears of some Air Force investigators who were convinced that UFOs were intelligently controlled craft originating outside the earth[VII-1, p. 286]. Although these officials realized that whenever an unusually good saucer story appeared in the papers the number of sightings increased sharply in the days following, they apparently did not consider the possibility that the increase resulted from the power of suggestion. This apprehensive attitude, plus three publications in the spring of 1952, made the summer’s panic almost inevitable.

_Growth of a Panic_

On April 4 _Life_ magazine published an article whose title might well have alarmed the most stolid: “Have We Visitors from Outer Space?” Presenting ten “insoluble” cases, the article managed to suggest without exactly saying so that interplanetary visitors were among us. The very next day, April 5, the Air Force announced a new directive, ordering the commanding officers of all Air Force installations to make immediate, high-priority reports of all UFO sightings in their areas[VII-1, p. 178]. Reasonably inferring from the _Life_ article and from the new directive that Defense officials were concerned by the threat of UFOs, newspapers gave space to all tales of flying saucers. _Look_ magazine then jumped on the bandwagon and on June 24 published an article, “Hunt for the Flying Saucers!” The public responded enthusiastically. Hypnotized by the prestige of these magazines, whose saucer articles seemed to have the support of the Air Force, thousands of well-intentioned but poorly equipped observers joined in the hunt, watched the skies, and began to cry “Tally-ho!” at every streak of light.

Nature cooperated. As in every summer, she offered a rich display of regular meteor showers. By mid-July Aquarids in large numbers are streaking through the sky, to continue into mid-August, and by the beginning of August the Perseids have arrived to join the summer’s parade. The records of the American Meteor Society reflect this rise in the number of meteors. In the nights from July 10 to 31, 1952, five observers stationed in California, Oregon, Missouri, Iowa, and Long Island, New York, counted a total of more than 2000 meteors in some eighty-five hours of watching. The smallest number reported by a single observer in any one hour was nine; the highest was fifty[VII-2].

Nature not only offered dramatic fireworks in the sky; she also produced exactly the right conditions for viewing them. During June and July an unprecedented heat wave lay over the entire East, driving sweltering citizens out of doors to savor the relative coolness of the night air. Furthermore, the nights were dark. The moon began to wane on July 7, and until nearly the end of the month there was little moonlight to dim the brilliance of the meteors flashing through the heavens. No wonder that frightened people hunting for saucers should have had so little trouble finding them, when the sky seemed to be teeming with UFOs.

By the middle of July the nine-man investigating force at ATIC was all but buried in saucer reports--more than forty a day, far too many to handle either promptly or adequately. Only a very lengthy history of the saucer era could describe and account for each one of the hundreds of UFOs reported during those weeks. A few of the most publicized incidents are listed here:

July 2. A group of UFOs photographed with a movie camera near
Tremonton, Utah (p. 130).

July 5. A UFO reported over an atomic plant at Hanford,
Washington. (A Skyhook balloon.)[VII-1, p. 203]

July 7. Flying saucer reported by hundreds of persons in
the Pacific Northwest. (This spectacular daytime meteor was
visible for a distance of 500 miles on either side of its path
and was reported from Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon,
California, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. It made no sound and
was so brilliant that observers called it the “Sunshine
Fireball.”)[VII-3]

July 12. A flying saucer, glowing blue-white, was reported over
Indiana. (Another fine meteor.)[VII-1, p. 203]

July 13–18. Flying saucers reported from all states in the
Union. (Observers for the American Meteor Society counted an
average of fifteen meteors per hour on those nights.)

July 14. A group of saucers over Chesapeake Bay and Norfolk,
Virginia (p. 256).

July 16. Saucers photographed by Coast Guardsman, Salem,
Massachusetts (p. 122).

The sighting hysteria was approaching the critical mass, and no special wisdom was required to see that an explosion was inevitable. The only question was: Where would it occur? The panic finally reached its climax in the nation’s capital:

July 19. Flying saucers (invisible) invade Washington, D.C.
(See _Chapter_ VIII.)

July 26. Saucers again invade Washington (p. 155).

July 27. Saucers over Manhattan Beach, California (p. 49).

July 29. Saucers over Port Huron, Michigan (p. 160).

August 1. Saucer over Bellefontaine, Ohio (p. 162).

Most of these and hundreds of other UFOs were eventually identified as meteors, stars, balloons, jet planes, birds, searchlights, and radar angels. About the only aerial phenomenon that was not mistaken for a flying saucer during these weeks of panic was the planet Venus. Until the end of August it was too near the sun to be visible.

_The Scoutmaster’s UFO_

True to the pattern set during 1947, the first summer of the saucers, the panic of 1952 did not end without an elaborate hoax and a good monster story.

The famous “Scoutmaster” incident occurred at West Palm Beach, Florida, on the night of August 19[VII-1, p. 229]. According to the report given the Intelligence officer at the local air base, the scoutmaster (an ex-Marine) had offered to drive four of the boys to their homes at the close of the evening’s meeting. While traveling over a country road bordered by scrub pine and palmetto thickets, he had noticed some mysterious lights among the pines and decided he must investigate. Leaving the frightened boys in the car with instructions to go for help if he had not returned in fifteen minutes, he took his machete and two flashlights and bravely set off into the dangerous woods. He was found some time later by the boys, the constable, and the deputy sheriff, and was apparently terrified. When he entered the woods, he said, he noticed a peculiar odor and felt an oppressive sensation of heat. On looking up, he saw hovering above him a dark circular object with a turretlike dome in the middle, so large that it blotted out most of the sky. When he went closer, a door opened, a ball of fire emerged and drifted toward him, enveloped him, and rendered him unconscious. He called on the boys to confirm the presence of the strange lights and the huge machine, and as further proof he exhibited burns in his cap and on his face and arms.

Since scoutmasters are traditionally upright citizens, the story seemed to merit attention. Investigators from ATIC visited the scene, interviewed all persons concerned, and sent the cap and the machete to Dayton for analysis. Very soon, however, the drama began to fall apart. The scoutmaster, after being interviewed by Air Force investigators, assumed an aura of mystery and stated publicly that he had been warned not to talk. At the same time he hired a press agent and offered to sell his story to the newspapers. A study of the landscape showed that the boys could not have seen any “machine” from the road. The townspeople did not consider the woods dangerous. Aircraft preparing to land at the airport regularly flew over the area in question with their landing lights on; to a person on the road, the lights might seem to be flitting through the woods. Furthermore the study showed that the scene had been set in advance for a frightening incident. As they drove along the lonely road, the scoutmaster had been talking about flying saucers and, after he stopped the car, had warned the boys that they might need to go for help. The man’s reputation for veracity, too, began to melt away, and one townsman remarked that if the scoutmaster claimed that the sun was shining, he’d look up to see for himself before accepting the statement. The knife and cap showed no radioactivity. The laboratory report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation showed that the burn on the cap was made by a cigarette, and the “burns” on the hand and arm proved to be only superficial scorching of the hair and could easily have been produced by the flame of a kitchen match.

This investigation cost the usual amount of time and money, but it was unquestionably a hoax[VII-4].

_Monster in West Virginia_

The final incident in the summer’s panic occurred on the evening of September 12 when a family group near the town of Sutton, West Virginia, saw a flaming object flash across the sky and apparently land on a nearby hill. Taking their flashlights, they set out to investigate and, on reaching the hill, smelled an unpleasant odor. When they turned on their flashlights, they stated, they saw two red eyes glaring at them; a huge monster, ten feet tall, breathing fire, with a bright-green body and a blood-red face, waddled toward them, and they turned and ran[VII-5].

Air Force investigators concluded immediately that the flaming object first seen was the meteor observed that night by thousands of persons in Virginia and West Virginia and reported officially to various observatories. What the frightened family saw when they reached the hilltop and flashed the light was probably the glowing eyes or body of some mundane creature of the woods. A local group of civilian saucer investigators rejected this explanation, as usual, and after making its own study concluded that the monster story could very well have been true!

The monster is now enshrined in West Virginia history[VII-5], and forms the subject of a new ballad written by Cindy Coy and set to the tune of “Sweet Betsy from Pike.” One verse and the chorus will suffice:

The size of the phantom was a sight to behold,
Green eyes and red face, so the story was told.
It floated in air with fingers of flame.
It was gone with a hiss just as quick as it came.

Chorus:

Oh, Phantom of Flatwoods, from Moon or from Mars,
Maybe from God and not from the stars,
Please tell us why you fly o’er our trees
The end of the world or an omen of peace?

_The Panel of Civilian Scientists_

When after three months of constant threat no flying saucers had yet tried to invade the country, the acute phase of the panic subsided. Nevertheless, responsible officials in the Department of Defense were uneasy, and Air Defense was particularly worried by the problem of the radar phantoms, whose cause was not fully understood (see _Chapter_ VIII). Even if UFOs proved to be normal phenomena, other very real dangers existed in the situation. If the public believed in the possibility of extraterrestrial antagonists, a clever enemy on earth simply by fabricating a few incidents could easily induce a mass hysteria that might paralyze the country. Also, if the number of saucer reports should be greatly multiplied by some artificial stimulus, their sheer numbers would clog communication channels, interfere with the Early Warning System, and at a time of imminent attack from another part of the globe might cause a disastrous three- or four-hour delay in the activation of the Air Force network.

Government officials, uncertain of the facts, were reluctant to decide or to state whether there was or was not convincing evidence of extraterrestrial surveillance.

To clear up the potentially explosive atmosphere, the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI), under the Central Intelligence Agency, decided to consult outstanding civilian experts and invited certain eminent scientists to study and evaluate the evidence. For this purpose Air Force investigators assembled the complete data on the cases they considered most significant. They also prepared, on their own initiative, an unofficial report setting forth the evidence which, in the opinion of several investigators, proved conclusively that UFOs were interplanetary objects operating under intelligent control.

After a preliminary meeting late in November 1952, the panel met on January 12, 1953, to begin their study. The chairman was the late Dr. H. P. Robertson, mathematician and physicist, of the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena. The other members were Dr. Luis W. Alvarez, physicist, of the University of California at Berkeley; Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner, an expert on radio propagation; Dr. Samuel A. Goudsmit, physicist, of Brookhaven National Laboratory; and Dr. Thornton W. Page, astronomer, of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Also present were several officers of the OSI. To avoid possible bias, Air Force officers who had actively worked on UFO cases and civilians who were closely identified with such studies were not asked to attend. The cases studied included all the “classics,” such as the Tremonton and other movies, the Mantell and Gorman affairs, the radar sightings at Washington, D.C., as well as other less well-known reports.

One incident that particularly engaged the attention of the panel, and would probably have become a famous classic except that Air Force investigators had kept it a strict secret, was the sighting at Presque Isle Air Force Base in northern Maine. On October 10, 1952, at about 10 P.M. E.S.T., a group of weather observers had noticed a bright-orange object hovering low on the eastern horizon and had set up a theodolite to measure its altitude and bearing. As the glowing unknown slowly rose higher above the horizon and seemed to come closer, it appeared through the telescope of the theodolite as a circular disk accompanied by four flickering green lights, two on each side. Alarmed by this spectacular phenomenon, the observers called the Air Force Base at Limestone, some twenty miles north and east, to ask whether the object was visible there. It was. Setting up a theodolite, the Limestone observers measured the height and bearing, and both groups of observers sent the recorded data to ATIC.

Here was the kind of situation the investigators had been hoping for: simultaneous observations of a single object, made from two different stations a known distance apart. Calculations based on the altitudes and bearings reported by the two stations yielded fantastic results. In a plot of the data (shown schematically in Figure 12a) the prolonged lines intersected, indicating a group of unknowns hovering 100 miles above the earth and more than 50 miles off the Maine coast, of tremendous size and moving at high speed. Concluding that the objects must have come from outer space, or were possibly a new type of orbiting vehicle of Russian origin, the Air Force had promptly clamped down the security lid. When ATIC’s science consultant, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, looked at the data, he just as promptly disagreed with these ideas and clearly identified the unknown as the planet Jupiter, which had risen at 6:03 P.M. E.S.T. and at 10:00 was the brightest object in the eastern sky. The believers in the extraterrestrial theory were then in the majority at ATIC, however. They had refused to accept the identification, and submitted the Presque Isle sighting to the panel as a prize example of UFO surveillance.

The panel members quickly disposed of the case. The measurements reported from Presque Isle obviously pointed directly to the planet Jupiter, not a mere 100 but millions of miles beyond the earth. If a constant correction was applied to the bearings from Limestone, they also agreed with Jupiter’s position. Careless use of the theodolite had produced an error in the data. To measure the angle of an object above the horizon, the observer has only to make sure that the theodolite is level, but to measure the bearing he must align it with true north, a direction that cannot be determined by guesswork. The Limestone observers had made a mistake in determining true north and had thus obtained a wrong bearing for the unknown. When the corrected data were plotted (shown schematically in Figure 12b) the prolonged lines were parallel, and both pointed squarely to the planet Jupiter at infinity.

The orange light was unquestionably Jupiter, and the accompanying green lights were its four bright satellites twinkling through the layers of the earth’s atmosphere. Amazed that this uncomplicated case, already explained by Dr. Hynek, should have been offered as evidence for the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs, the panel extended its investigation to the original observers at Presque Isle. The witnesses there were bewildered by the inquiry; they had checked the object when it appeared again on the night of October 11, they said, and had then identified it as the planet Jupiter, but they had not thought it necessary to notify the Air Force![VII-4]

For five long days the panel worked, analyzing every available bit of evidence as it related to four alternative theories: 1) that UFOs were a supersecret device of some sort being developed by the United States; 2) that UFOs were a supersecret device being developed by some foreign power; 3) that UFOs were normal phenomena wrongly interpreted; and 4) that UFOs came from other planets. As the panel succeeded in explaining one after another of the fifty or so submitted cases, or was able to suggest a highly probable solution in terms of normal physical phenomena, the members reached their conclusion. Theory number one they rejected with complete certainty; they were 98 per cent certain that theory number two was wrong, and 99 per cent sure that number four was also incorrect (scientists are reluctant to accept any negative belief with absolute certainty). The document submitted unofficially by ATIC investigators they also rejected for lack of evidence. All the facts, they decided, supported theory number three, that the reported UFOs were merely natural phenomena, wrongly interpreted[VII-6].

The panel delivered this evaluation to the Office of Scientific Intelligence, together with a recommendation that government agencies should immediately abandon the policy of secrecy regarding UFO reports and should make public all the facts in every case. Unfortunately this recommendation was not followed. The report included some rather caustic comments on the general inadequacy of the investigative techniques that had been used. As one of the members remarked unofficially, trying to get to the bottom of some of the sightings was like cutting treacle. The panel report with its blunt criticisms was of course not intended for public release and, understandably, was kept classified.

Although the OSI had asked for an expert opinion, some Air Force and government officials were unwilling to accept the verdict when they got it, and flatly refused to believe that UFOs were normal phenomena[VII-7]. When echoes of their disagreement escaped the security screen, civilian saucer enthusiasts concluded with some justification that Air Force officials were “covering up.” They were. They were not hiding any proof that flying saucers came from outer space, however, as the saucer addicts charged, but were merely trying to conceal their own confusion and the panel’s criticisms.

As one member of the panel later stated to a correspondent, the explanation of UFO beliefs “lies in a logical defect. It is this: UFOs form a class of all celestial observations that cannot be immediately explained. There is no other truly common feature; some manifestations are optical, others are detected by radar; some are points, others circular, others patterned; some are seen by night, others by day, etc. The implication that they are somehow related is a false one, as we know from the large proportion positively identified after the fact (what relation is there between Venus and a meteorological balloon?). Calling all unidentified objects in the sky ‘flying saucers’ or even UFOs (Venus doesn’t ‘fly’ in any proper sense of the word) is like calling any word I cannot understand ‘Greek.’ The class of all words I cannot understand would scarcely form a single language. Therefore, the explanation of UFOs as a class is simply that they are not a uniform class but a hodge-podge of widely disparate, partly described phenomena that were seen in the sky.”[VII-8]

Not until April 9, 1958, did the Air Force make public the internal recommendation made by the panel some five years earlier. If the entire study had been released earlier, with a full statement of the facts and the analyses made by the panel, it might have ended the saucer scare at once. Instead the UFO hysteria continued, with periods of remission, and is still dying a slow and lingering death.

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

[VII-2] Olivier, C. P. “Tables of Hourly Rates Based upon American Meteor Society Data.” Interim Report No. 28, Harvard University Radio Meteor Research Program (May 1958).

[VII-3] _Sky and Telescope_, Vol. XI (1952), p. 312.

[VII-4] Air Force Files.

[VII-5] Barker, G. _They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers._ New York: University Books, Inc., 1956.

[VII-6] Robertson, H. P. Personal files.

[VII-7] Chop, A. M. Personal communication.

[VII-8] Page, T. W. Personal files.

_Chapter_ VIII

PHANTOMS ON RADAR

The evidence of radar, according to the saucer enthusiasts, provides final proof that alien spaceships indeed patrol our skies. Because radar is an electronic device, it allegedly cannot be fooled by mirages, reflections, or peculiar weather conditions. If radar records an echo from an unidentified object and, at about the same time, a human witness reports a puzzling light in the sky, the believers proclaim that the unprejudiced testimony of science has confirmed the presence of a solid flying saucer. Sometimes a radarscope reports unidentified objects at a time when observers on the ground and in search planes cannot see anything unusual in the sky. The believers then conclude not that radar evidence can be misinterpreted, but that the operators of the flying saucers may somehow be able to make both themselves and their ships invisible![VIII-1]

_Radar as a Reporter_

Any UFO investigator who presumes to evaluate electronic evidence should have much more than an amateur’s knowledge of the nature and behavior of radar. Correct interpretation of the signals requires training, experience, skill, and an expert’s acquaintance with the peculiarities of the set under varying conditions. But even the expert does not yet understand the causes of all the phenomena that can appear. He is limited by our still incomplete knowledge of dynamic meteorology--precise information about the composition of the atmosphere and how it interacts with microwaves. With proper instrumentation and first-rate operators, radar can correctly report the approximate direction, distance, altitude, and rate of motion of objects within its range. If the returns are misinterpreted, however, radar can seem to give false reports.

Radar is not a TV camera or a photographic lens. It does not, at least at present, produce a picture of the physical appearance, shape, size, or color of the thing it detects. The scope shows only tiny spots of light on the flat surface of a screen. A pointer something like a clock hand continually sweeps around the dial at a given speed. A complete rotation may take from two to fifteen seconds, depending on the type of the set. This sweep hand keeps pace with the rotation of the radar antenna as it scans the sky by sending out radio pulses. When they encounter a solid object, they bounce off and return to the set as echoes which show as “blips,” or spots of light, on the radarscope. The operator must interpret these spots and try to identify them as planes, helicopters, balloons, ships, mountains, clouds, birds, storms, hurricanes, or phantom echoes of various kinds. Safe commercial flying depends on the accuracy of these identifications, as does the security of the country in periods of international tension.

Radar only reports. It does not interpret. If the sweep hand on successive rotations shows a spot of light apparently moving from position _A_ to position _B_, to _C_, to _D_, the operator generally concludes that the blips represent a single object that is moving at a certain speed in a certain direction (see Figure 13). If successive sweeps show a spot of light that remains at position _A_, he usually concludes that it represents a stationary object. If the blip moves a very great distance in the interval between two sweeps or seems to jump erratically from one position to another, an amateur might interpret it as a spacecraft flying at incredible velocity--a flying saucer. But an expert would probably conclude, especially under certain weather conditions, that the scope was picking up echoes from two or more separate objects, one reflecting briefly at position _A_, another at position _B_, and so on.

_The Principle of Radar_

Radar is an electronic assembly far too complex for detailed description here, but its basic principle is simple. It is merely an echo machine that reflects radio waves instead of sound waves. To illustrate by a rough analogy, let us imagine that a man is standing in the middle of an open field on a very dark night. He wants to find out something of the contours of the surrounding country but his only tools are a compass, a watch with luminous dial and hands, and a large megaphone. He raises the megaphone to his lips, points it directly north, and gives a sharp and piercing call: “Hi!” He now cups his hand to his ear and listens for an echo. Hearing no reply, he deduces that in the north there are no hills, tall buildings, or other obstructions that might have produced an echo.

Changing his position, he turns to the east and tries the experiment again. After an interval his call returns as a faint echo: “Hi!” The time elapsed between call and echo, according to his watch, is ten seconds. His call has taken five seconds to reach the object and five seconds more to return. Since he knows that sound travels at the rate of about 1000 feet a second, he deduces that an obstruction lies in the east, about 5000 feet away. Slowly changing position, he repeats his call at various points around the compass. Some echoes take longer to return than others, indicating more distant objects. Other echoes come back in a fraction of a second, showing an object very close. Thus he gradually constructs a mental map of the surrounding terrain.

Radar detects and locates objects in a similar way, by reflecting sharp pulses of radio waves. But spurious echoes, which sometimes deceive the operator, can also appear on the scope. These “anomalous” or abnormal returns may have one of several causes, including the nature of the radar mechanism itself. To help explain this, let us go back to our analogy of the man in the open field. Let us suppose that the man has mechanized his device. To ease the strain on his vocal cords, he has built a megaphone with a record-playing device. The megaphone rotates automatically and sends out a recorded “Hi!” once every twenty seconds, as regular as clockwork. To increase the sensitivity of his hearing, he wears ear trumpets that point in the same direction as the megaphone. This procedure is more effective than cupping his ears and eliminates some of the extraneous noise that might come in from the rear and the sides.

With this improved equipment the man now repeats his experiment. As before, he gets no signal from the north. When he turns to the east he gets an echo after ten seconds, just as he did during his first experiment. As he continues to turn slowly, like a minute hand on a clock dial, he mentally maps the positions of the echoes as distances along the hand from the center of the dial, and compares this new map with the crude one he constructed earlier. Basically the two agree.

But wait! From the southwest he hears a new echo that did not occur in his earlier experiment. It returns after two seconds and thus apparently comes from an obstruction 1000 feet away. Puzzled, the man decides to walk toward the object and check his observation. After he has covered half the distance he stops, sends out a call, and listens for the echo. The indicated distance to the echo-producing object is now 500 feet, just as he calculated. And so he goes on, checking at intervals. When he has covered 990 feet he knows that he should reach the obstruction at any moment and to avoid colliding with it in the darkness he proceeds with extreme caution--995, 996, 997, 998, 999 feet. He puts out his hand, expecting to touch a building or a stone wall, and warily takes the last step. But he finds no structure of any kind, merely level ground. And at the same moment he finds to his astonishment that he can no longer detect the echoes he had been following. What has happened? Has his equipment been malfunctioning? Or was the unknown structure perhaps a vehicle from outer space that waited until he was practically touching it and then rose silently in an enormous burst of speed and vanished?

The man checks and finds that his equipment is functioning perfectly, since he can still pick up echoes from the terrain he had mapped earlier. He then walks back ten feet and listens once more for an echo from the phantom structure. Again he gets a signal, apparently from an obstruction just ten feet ahead. Has the mysterious object suddenly returned? But how could it have done so without disturbing the atmosphere or making a noise? By this time our man is frightened as well as puzzled, but he boldly decides to make one more experiment. He walks again to the point where the obstruction should be. Signaling again to the southwest, he now gets a faint echo apparently from a distance of 10,000 feet. Tired as he is, he starts walking toward this new obstruction and eventually reaches his goal. He now finds the true source of the returns--a high hill that rises abruptly from the plain. The hill is 10,000 feet away from the position indicated by the original series of echoes, and 11,000 feet away from the place he stood when he first sent out the signals.

Finally the man figures out the explanation. When he made his first experiment, with primitive equipment, he had given one sharp shout and then waited for a long time for the signal to return; thus there was never any uncertainty about the source of the echo. The time that elapsed between shout and return had clearly indicated the distance of the echo-producing object. But the improved automatic equipment of the second experiment produced a train of signals going out continuously at regular intervals, twenty seconds apart. Therefore when the sound waves encountered a definite object, a train of echoes began coming back, twenty seconds apart. An object at a distance of 10,000 feet would return an echo in twenty seconds; another object at a distance of 11,000 feet would return an echo in twenty-two seconds. But an echo from this second object would reach the listener at exactly the same time as an echo from an object only 1000 feet away. He now understands why he seemed to detect a structure at a distance of 1000 feet which disappeared as he approached and then reappeared 10,000 feet farther away. In fact, the object that returned the misinterpreted echo could have been 20,000 or 30,000 or 40,000 feet farther away--any multiple of 10,000 feet. Large numbers of signals were returning every twenty seconds. The man had no way of deciding for certain whether a particular echo came from the most recent signal and therefore indicated a relatively close object, or whether it came from an earlier signal and therefore from a more distant object.

Broadening his experiment our man eventually learned other characteristics of these echoes. He found that on the average day he was rarely plagued by this uncertainty in identifying the returns. The second-round echoes were very weak, almost undetectable, and therefore caused no major problem. But on other days, under different weather conditions, sound tended to travel long distances without losing much in intensity. On such days the echoes were often confusing.

_Weather and Radar Echoes_

Radar is an echo machine that reflects radio waves instead of sound waves. Instead of traveling at the speed of sound, about 1000 feet a second, radio waves travel at the velocity of light, 186,000 miles a second. Successive pulses go out at very short intervals, perhaps one one-thousandth of a second apart, so that each pulse is followed by another just 186 miles behind it. If the operator gets a return from an object that is apparently at a distance of 25 miles, he must sometimes allow for the possibility that he is getting a secondary echo and that the actual distance may be different. The object that produces the echo may be at a distance of 25 plus 186 miles, or 25 plus twice 186 miles, or 25 plus any other whole-number multiple of 186 miles.

Under ordinary circumstances, the reflections from very distant targets rarely confuse the operator. The curvature of the earth tends to shield the radiation, and the distance factor alone reduces the intensity to a negligible value. But weather can cause peculiar returns. A layer of warm air above cooler air at the earth’s surface has much the same effect on radio waves that it has on light waves. A temperature inversion can produce radar “mirages”--commonly called “phantoms,” “ghosts,” or “angels.” Relatively small amounts of warm air, even mere warm bubbles in a layer of colder air, will suffice. When the scope records a series of blips, the operator ordinarily assumes that all are returns from a single object. If inversions of temperature or humidity exist in the atmosphere, however, the series of returns may represent several different ground objects rather than a single object in the sky. Since these inversion layers do not remain fixed but move, change, and shimmer, on one sweep the radar may reflect one ground object and on the next sweep some fifteen seconds later may reflect a totally different ground object five or six miles away from the first. An inexperienced operator might conclude, wrongly, that both echoes came from a single object that had traveled five miles in a fraction of a minute (see Figure 14). Similar mistakes in identity have caused many reports of radar flying saucers.

Such a radar incident occurred at one of our defense installations in Alaska early in the morning of January 22, 1952[VIII-2]. Shortly after midnight a bright target appeared on the radarscope, moving down from the northeast, fairly high, and apparently traveling at about 1500 miles an hour. Unidentified targets require particularly prompt investigation in this sensitive area so close to Siberia. Within minutes an F-94 jet was moving in from a fighter base 100 miles to the south; two other jets were scrambled at intervals and vectored in toward the unknown target by ground radar. When radar switched to short range, however, it always lost both the target and the pursuit plane, even though both were close to the radar site. The first jet could find nothing in the air, and no echoes appeared on its radar. The second jet saw nothing in the air, but its radar recorded a brief, weak echo to the right at about 28,000 feet. The echo faded immediately, returned briefly, and then disappeared as the jet closed in. The third jet, after cruising the area for ten minutes without detecting anything visually or on radar, suddenly got a strong radar return from an apparently stationary target just as it passed over the ground radar site. The pilot made three direct runs on the unknown. Each time he broke off the intercept when he got within 200 yards of the target position as shown on his radar, for fear of collision. At no time did he see anything at the supposed location of the target. (This experience is somewhat analogous to that of our man who used echoing sound waves to locate a solid structure only to find, on reaching the indicated spot, that the structure was not there.)

Captain Roy James, chief of the radar section of ATIC, examined all the data and the scanty weather reports then available for this Alaskan area, and concluded that the targets were ghost returns probably from the ground, caused by peculiar atmospheric conditions--the same conditions that had interfered with normal operation of the ground radar. Although ground structures are scarce in that part of Alaska, they do exist, and so do mountains. The analysis was undoubtedly correct, even though knowledge of the location and movement of the temperature inversion was too imprecise for the analyst to plot and locate the true target that produced the reflections[VIII-3, p. 167].

Some of the nation’s most brilliant physicists have carried out fundamental research into the behavior of microwaves under varying conditions. The technical nature of these investigations makes them difficult to describe in ordinary language, but they provide vital information for the expert.

One such study has specifically attacked the problem of radar images that perform rapid and erratic maneuvers at close range and seem to overtake, fly parallel with, or almost collide with the pursuing aircraft. Such returns may be caused by the “non-isotropic secondary scattering of energy” (that is, the radio waves are not reflected in a uniform manner) from an airplane to a ground object, or from ground object to plane. Under appropriate weather conditions the plane itself causes the puzzling echoes, so that the velocity and movement of the radar “saucer” depend directly on those of the plane. When the aircraft is the first of the two scatterers, the radar saucer always appears at the same bearing as the plane, and is always farther away from the detecting radar than is the plane. Thus the path of the phantom always lies outside the path of the aircraft, and when the jet performs a 360-degree turn, the phantom also turns, on an outside path. However, if the jet happens to fly directly over the ground object that is reflecting the energy, then the observing radar will see the images of the jet and the phantom flying on what seems to be a collision course.

Conversely, when the ground object is the first of the two scatterers, the saucer phantom always occurs at the same bearing as the ground object, and the distance to the phantom is always greater than to the ground object. If the aircraft crosses the radial line from radar to ground object, at a range exceeding the range to the object, then the echoes from plane and saucer almost merge at the point of crossing, in a “near collision.” But if the plane flies “this side” of the object, then the plane and saucer will never be closer together than the distance between plane and ground object at the point of crossing. A height-finding radar, trained on the pursuing plane, would show the phantom saucer apparently diving toward or climbing away from the plane, attacking and retreating at very high velocities[VIII-4].

_The Kinross Case_

Some such mechanism probably explains the radar returns reported in the Kinross case, which some saucer publications cite as a proved instance in which a flying saucer attacked a plane. On the night of November 23, 1953, an Air Force jet was scrambled from Kinross Air Force Base, Michigan, to intercept an unidentified plane observed on radar. The jet successfully accomplished its mission and identified the unknown as a Dakota, a Canadian C-47. On its return to the base, however, the Air Force jet crashed into Lake Michigan and, as often happens when a plane crashes into deep water and the exact place of the crash is not known, no wreckage was ever found. As the ground radar at Kinross had tracked the returning jet, the scope had picked up a phantom echo in the neighborhood of the jet; the two blips had seemed to merge just as both went off the scope.

Since the crash was not reported as a UFO incident and did not involve any question of unidentified flying objects, ATIC was not asked to investigate the problem. The office of the Deputy Inspector General for Safety carried out a thorough inquiry and concluded that the crash had been an aircraft accident, probably caused by the pilot’s suffering an attack of vertigo. As for the two blips shown by radar, the night had been a stormy one and atmospheric conditions had been conducive to abnormal returns. The phantom echo had almost certainly been a secondary reflection produced by the jet itself, and it thus merged with the return from the jet and vanished with it when the plane hit the water.

Solely on the basis of this radar phantom, some civilian saucer groups have tried to transform the Kinross crash into a UFO mystery with Air Force investigators as the villains, and have suggested that the ghost blip represented an alien spacecraft that happened to be cruising over Lake Michigan that night and attacked the jet for one of two reasons: 1) The saucer might have tried to avoid close contact with the jet by employing a “reversed G-field beam” (see _Chapter_ IX); colliding with this beam as with a stone wall, the jet crashed. 2) The saucer might have used the G-field to scoop the plane out of the air and take it aboard the spacecraft; the captured pilot might have been needed to teach the English language to his alien captors.

_The “Invasion” of Washington, D.C._

The most famous of the radar phantoms are those that “invaded” Washington, D.C., on the nights of July 19 and July 26, 1952, and terrified a large number of radar operators, pilots, and Air Force officials who in a more normal emotional climate would have recognized the “invisible” flying saucers for what they were--radar angels produced by weather conditions[VIII-2]. All during July the eastern seaboard had suffered an unprecedented drought and heat wave. Lack of cloud cover produced intensely hot days and rapid radiative cooling of the earth’s surface at night. This situation, combined with the prevailing light winds, was ideal for the formation of low-level temperature inversions during the hours of darkness[VIII-5].