for[III-11]. Nevertheless the solution caused an explosion in
the camps of the saucer enthusiasts, who called it, among other
things, imaginative. Forgetting that the “Orion” theory suggested
immediately after the sighting had been only tentative, UFO addicts
ridiculed it and asked why the experts had later offered a different
explanation--which they greeted with equal ridicule[III-12].
Captain Killian, too, had apparently forgotten his first report. On
March 24, a month after the sighting, in an interview by the Long
Island _Daily Press_ he stated that the things he saw could not have
been tankers; that he knew what B-47 bombers and KC-97 tankers looked
like, and how they looked in operation at night (Original statement
to American Airlines: “Never having witnessed refueling operations at
night, I am not aware of the lighting of jet tankers.”) Also, he told
the _Daily Press_, the objects he saw were at least triple the size of
any known tanker or bomber. (Original statement to American Airlines:
“Due to the dark and strong lights I was not able to ascertain any
size or shape.”) Furthermore, he asserted, the unknowns had been far
too fast for a tanker, and had moved at a speed of about 2000 miles an
hour. (Original statement to American Airlines: “... it was difficult
for me to believe they were jets because of low speed.”)
In rejecting the Air Force explanation of this incident, flying-saucer
addicts ignored several embarrassing questions: If Captain Killian
actually saw interplanetary craft, how did he fail to see the earthly
aircraft operating at the same time and place? If the unknowns moved at
a speed of 2000 miles an hour, how did Captain Killian and the crews of
several other planes, flying at less than 300 miles an hour, keep the
unknowns in sight for forty minutes? In that length of time the UFOs
should have covered most of the distance to the Pacific.
Few persons, given the facts by responsible officials, would persist
in denying the reality of the tankers and conjuring up a fleet of
flying saucers to occupy the relevant cubic area of space. To the true
enthusiast, however, these refueling planes remain incontrovertible
proof that spacecraft are among us.
_... And Kites and Soap Bubbles_
Objects need not be as large as Skyhook balloons or jets to start
a flying-saucer scare. Brightly illuminated advertising blimps
have caused many UFO reports. Unfamiliar circumstances or a faulty
perspective can manufacture spaceships out of things as small as seeds,
spider webs, scraps of paper, or toy balloons.
In the autumn of 1947, during the first months of the saucer scare,
many such UFOs were reported. One experienced observer, formerly
a combat pilot, reported a flying saucer overhead at a height he
estimated as 5000 feet. More careful study showed that the object
was at a height of only about 250 feet and was suspended from small
balloons. Later he learned that, as a joke, some boys had launched a
paper saucer carried by helium-filled toy balloons. During this same
period when everyone was talking about flying saucers, spaceships
reported over an Iowa town one night turned out to be glowing bits of
paper drifting from a fireplace chimney[III-13].
On March 16, 1961, according to the British radio, a resident of East
Suffolk reported to the police that he had seen a spaceship land in a
nearby field. Investigators soon found the craft: a fuel tank that had
fallen from a passing plane.
A fleet of UFOs appeared late one afternoon in July 1961 to an observer
driving west along Highway 54 from El Paso, Texas, to Alamogordo, New
Mexico. It had been raining in the mountains, and wind and dust storms
had forced the driver to stop several times during his trip, but now
the sun was shining between patches of dark cloud in the western sky.
Driving toward the outskirts of Alamogordo, he was startled to see a
V-shaped formation of huge saucers flying directly toward him. Stopping
his car, he saw that they were glowing a deep red, were moving at high
speed, and seemed to be as high as the clouds. When they had reached
a point nearly overhead, they suddenly seemed to drop down toward the
observer. Rapidly revising all his first estimates of size, height,
and speed, he recognized their true identity. They were merely a group
of tumbleweeds that had been carried aloft in the strong winds and
were soaring past at a height of only 100 feet. Illumination from the
setting sun had produced their weird reddish glow.
A spectacular flying saucer hovered near the Smithsonian
satellite-observing station in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles, on
the night of October 17, 1961. The station crew observed it with
binoculars, by apogee telescope, and photographed it with the
Baker-Nunn satellite camera. A brilliantly glowing object, it shone
in the eastern sky, moving erratically and fluctuating in brightness.
After watching it for nearly an hour and finding that the nearby
airport could not observe the object, the observers concluded that it
must be less distant than it seemed, and set out by car to try to get
a closer look. About a mile and a half from the station they stopped,
and solved the mystery. A plantation manager and his servant stood in a
field, hanging on to one end of a 1200-foot kite string. At the other
end, high in the sky, soared a kite; hanging from it was a lighted
pressure lantern[III-14] (see Plate IIa).
In 1954 malfunction of a sewage-disposal plant in western Pennsylvania
produced one of the most spectacular saucer reports on record. An
oversupply of detergent, whipped by a stiff breeze, foamed into a
mountainous tower of bubbles. A sudden gust of wind broke the tower
and launched a colossal mass of bubbles as large as a ten-story
building. This brilliant, scintillating, super-giant bubble bath rose
to great heights and drifted for miles. Widely reported as a UFO, this
apparition was merely an unusual by-product of modern technology. The
UFOs photographed over Kentucky on July 7, 1947, were probably vapor
trails, a less familiar sight then than now; or they might possibly
have been the smoke trails from an exploding meteor (see Plate IIb).
A saucer incident that might have become a classic Unknown occurred in
Denver at 10 A.M. on a summer’s day in 1950. A man was sitting on the
shady porch of his house, reading. Beyond the porch roof the sun shone
brightly. Glancing up from his book, he was startled to see a formation
of perhaps a dozen spherical objects, shining iridescently, traveling
toward the distant mountains. As he watched, those in the front of the
procession seemed to vanish instantly while others appeared out of
nowhere to join the parade at the rear. Measuring their size against
the mountain background, he decided they were “immense” and they moved
at fantastic speed, covering the thirty or so miles to the mountains in
a matter of five or six seconds.
Too stunned to take action, he was still numb from shock when he heard
a faint “Hello,” and looked up--to realize that the little girl across
the street was blowing soap bubbles. If the man had jumped up when
he first saw the objects and had rushed into the house to telephone
the nearest saucer club, he might never have found out that the
“spaceships” were only bubbles[III-15].
[III-1] Ruppelt, E. J. _The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects._
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1956.
[III-2] Air Force Files.
[III-3] Menzel, D. H. _Flying Saucers._ Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1953.
[III-4] Tacker, L. J. _Flying Saucers and the U. S. Air Force._
Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960.
[III-5] Keyhoe, D. E. _Flying Saucers from Outer Space._ New York:
Henry Holt & Co., 1953.
[III-6] Scully, F. _Behind the Flying Saucers._ New York: Popular
Library, Inc., 1951, p. 144.
[III-7] Sarson, P. B. “Aircraft Condensation Aura,” _Meteorological
Magazine_, London, Vol. LXXXV (1956), p. 217.
[III-7a] Johannesburg _Star_, April 14, 1958.
[III-8] Case 142, CRIFO _Orbit_, Vol. II (March 2, 1956).
[III-9] Detroit _Times_, Feb. 25, 1959.
[III-10] Barker, G. “Chasing the Flying Saucers,” _Flying Saucers_
(July 1959), p. 24 ff.
[III-11] Kirsch, F. A. “Air Force Right on Killian ‘Saucer’?” _Flying
Saucers_ (August 1960), p. 17 ff.
[III-12] “Report on Unidentified Flying Objects Observed Feb. 24, 1959,
by American-United Airline Pilots.” Compiled by Unidentified Flying
Objects Research Committee, Akron, Ohio, Feb. 24, 1960.
[III-13] Wylie, C. C. [Speech] _Popular Astronomy_, Vol. LVI (1948), p.
217.
[III-14] Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, _The SAO News_, Vol. I,
No. 6 (November 1961).
[III-15] Dean, C. W. Personal communication.
_Chapter_ IV
THE SPANGLED HEAV’NS: STARS AND PLANETS
Shortly before dawn on March 3, 1955, a spectacular flying saucer
appeared over Alaska. The witness, a civilian scientist with the rank
of Commander in the United States Navy, was returning from the North
Pole on the daily Air Force Ptarmigan weather flight; his mission had
been to study the effect of the aurora on radio propagation, for the
Department of Defense. He described his experience as follows:
_A Mirage of Sirius_
“We were flying southwest of Point Barrow, Alaska, not far from
Bering Strait, en route to Eielson Air Force Base in Fairbanks, and
our course was roughly southeast. The night was clear and the stars
shone brilliantly. I was looking out of the western bomb blister when
suddenly I saw a bright object shoot in at tremendous speed from the
horizon, directly toward the plane. At first I thought it was a meteor
or a fireball and I instinctively ducked, but the object came to a
sudden skidding stop about 300 feet away, thereafter riding along with
our plane and keeping pace with our speed. I could scarcely believe my
eyes. The thing possessed green and red signal lights that flashed back
and forth, and something that looked like a lighted propeller on the
top. Beyond question, it was a flying saucer.
“I wondered if the thing might be a hallucination, brought on by
fatigue. After all, we had been in the air almost seventeen hours. I
cleaned my spectacles and rubbed my eyes, but the Saucer was still
there, pacing the plane and bobbing up and down as the plane itself
occasionally wove or dipped. My next thought was to eliminate all
possible chance that the thing was an internal reflection. I pulled my
fur parka up over my head and put my face smack against the bulging
surface of the blister that formed the window. Thus shielded from all
internal illumination, I could still see the glowing object. I next
drew a pencil from my pocket and held it out at arm’s length, and was
surprised to find that the glowing disk was somewhat smaller than the
eraser. I made a rapid calculation and concluded that if the sphere was
actually 300 feet away, as it seemed, then it was only a foot or two
in diameter, not much larger than a basketball. My next thought was
whether one of the radio parachutes had somehow or other got attached
to the plane by the string. These objects, brilliantly lit by an
electric light, can be quite startling. But it had been nearly half an
hour since the last parachute release and the meteorologists were just
getting ready to lower another through the trap. I decided to call the
meteorologist to look at the thing. But before I could call out, as
if it had read my mind the object suddenly took off at top speed and
disappeared. Now I was really concerned. In less than two seconds the
UFO had vanished over the coast of Siberia, some 200 miles away. It
must have been traveling at the fantastic speed of more than 100 miles
a second. The Korean War was over but our relations with the Soviet
Union were still tense, and I wondered if the object might be a secret
Russian missile on reconnaissance. I kept my eyes glued to the point
where the saucer had disappeared and suddenly, a couple of minutes
later, it shot back toward the plane, more brilliant and spectacular
than the first time.
“You can perhaps imagine my relief when I suddenly realized what the
object was, and at the same time realized that I had hit on the answer
to a great many flying-saucer reports of a similar nature. Only someone
familiar with the constellations could have identified the object. It
was a mirage of Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens. Actually
Sirius was slightly below the horizon at this time, but the bending
of the light had raised the image above the horizon and had diffused
the beam into the saucerlike form. The flashing red and green lights
were common phenomena associated with star twinkling, and the apparent
structure, including the whirling propeller, resulted from distortion
by the earth’s atmosphere.
“But why had the image taken off the way it did, and then rushed back?
The moving plane of course was continually changing position relative
to the ground features. A mountain peak on the distant horizon had
briefly come between the plane and the star, obscuring the light. The
light was not cut off all at once, however. Thus as the image dimmed
it seemed to shrink, as though it were racing away. This temporary
barrier also explained the sudden stops and starts and the tremendous
instantaneous acceleration the object seemed to make at the instant it
appeared. The large atmospheric lens was simply focusing the light of
the star in the general direction of the plane and thus it was centered
with my eye. That is why the object seemed to duplicate the motion of
the plane.
“I watched the object for several minutes after its return. I was able
to get full confirmation of this identification when the star rose over
the western horizon; it rose in the west because the southward motion
of the plane more than compensated for the westward rotation of the
star. And as Sirius came up from the horizon, the ‘flying saucer’ sank
back into the brilliant hemisphere of stars, where it belonged.” (The
witness in this case was the senior author of this book.)
Sirius has inspired many UFO reports. On December 10, 1952, at 7:15
P.M. P.S.T., the pilot and radar observer of an F-94 on routine patrol
duty were over the town of Odessa, Washington, at about 26,000 feet
when they saw a large white light in the east[IV-1]. Dim reddish-white
lights seemed to be coming from “windows,” and no trail or exhaust was
visible. The pilot attempted to intercept but the object performed
amazing feats--did a _chandelle_ in front of the plane, rushed away,
stopped, and then made straight for the aircraft on a collision course
at incredible speed. The pilot banked away to avoid collision, and
afterward was not able to locate the object. The radar man then got
a brief return but soon lost contact. Although the visual and radar
contacts had not coincided, both men assumed that they referred to the
same object[IV-2, p. 65].
Investigators suggested at first that the object might have been one
of the Telemuk balloons, but this idea had to be discarded and the
sighting was listed as Unknown. A review of the evidence by the present
authors suggests a highly probable explanation. Above the low cloud
cover at 3000 feet the night was clear and moonless. In the east,
Sirius was just rising over the horizon at the exact bearing of the
unknown object. Atmospheric refraction would have produced exactly
the phenomenon described. The same atmospheric conditions that caused
the mirage of the star would have caused anomalous radar returns (see
_Chapter_ VIII).
_Earth’s Distorting Atmosphere_
In everyday life we often look at familiar objects through a distorting
medium. Houses and persons seen through a pane of poor window glass
look peculiar and wrongly shaped, and images of trees and clouds
reflected in a pool or a stream of rippling water may continually shift
and break, but these distortions do not deceive us because we are used
to them. The child who stands before the crazy mirrors in an amusement
park may laugh at himself for looking so fat or so thin, so tall or so
short. Knowing that the image is only a ludicrous approximation to his
real appearance, he is able to recognize himself without difficulty.
But a stranger, placed so that he could see only the distorted image
and not the person who made it could not make the necessary corrections
and probably would not recognize the child if they met in the street.
Like window glass, water, or mirrors, a mere layer of air can distort
an image. For the astronomer, the earth’s atmosphere is a lifelong
frustration. Acting as an imperfect lens, it continually falsifies the
true position, color, size, and shape of the heavenly bodies he tries
to study. Under certain conditions it can change the image of a star
or a planet into an unrecognizable stranger. When light enters the
atmosphere, the rays are bent or “refracted” so that the image is moved
upward, somewhere above the true position of the star (see Figure 6).
When we are admiring a sunset and think we are watching the very top
rim of the sinking sun as it drops below the horizon, we are actually
seeing only its projected image. The sun itself has already set, but
its light is bent upward by the air that clings to the earth’s surface.
The greater the density of the air, the greater the displacement of
the image. If there were no air at the earth’s surface, the sun would
vanish and darkness would come instantaneously, with no intervening
period of twilight.
[Illustration: _Figure 6._ Bending of light by the atmosphere. A star
below the horizon is visible because refraction raises the image.]
A star’s light does not bend uniformly, however. Light rays of
different wave lengths bend at different angles, so that when white
light is scattered or “dispersed” into its component colors, the blues
and greens are bent more than the reds. The density and the temperature
of the air also affect the beam, so that as a star’s light travels from
the thin upper atmosphere to the denser air near the earth, the colors
shift constantly and the star seems to twinkle, flicker, and change in
color and brightness.
Such changes are most noticeable when a star is low on the horizon at
dawn or at dusk, so that its light reaches us only after traveling
through miles of dense atmosphere. The sun displays these effects
dramatically. At sunrise and sunset its scattered light may illuminate
the entire horizon. Clouds turn red and gold, hills and the tops of
buildings take on a ruddy glow, and the entire sky may flame. The red
wave lengths remain, while most of the blues and greens have been
scattered out of the beam or may appear briefly at the top of the sun’s
disk, as a “green flash,” at the instant it sinks below the horizon.
Similarly, a star or planet observed low on the horizon at sunrise or
sunset may appear extraordinarily large and brilliant. It may seem to
have structure, showing an intense red glow at the bottom and bright
blue at the top. Watching it, the startled observer may see the object
apparently in motion, hovering, pulsating, and flashing red and green
lights. If he is so inclined, he can easily interpret the image as a
strange machine, the red as the glow from an exhaust, and the blue as
the illumination system of an interplanetary craft.
[Illustration: _Figure 7._ Displacement of light image by temperature
inversion.]
Normally the air is warmest at the surface of the earth and steadily
gets colder at greater and greater heights. Sometimes this condition
is reversed, particularly in the broad deserts and prairies of the
Southwest, where the changes between the day’s heat and the night’s
cold may be sudden and extreme. The ground cools off rapidly during
the night and imparts this coldness to the layer of air immediately
above. Thus the air may be warmer some distance above the ground. When
such a “temperature inversion” occurs, light going through the air
bends in a peculiar way (see Figure 7), so that the image is displaced
far more than normally. The inversion may produce fuzzy or greatly
distorted images, and when there are several layers of alternating hot
and cold air, the effects may be spectacular. At the boundaries between
the layers the distortion and displacement increase greatly. A star
or a planet seen through such an atmosphere may display apparently
violent motions, peculiar shapes, and fantastic color changes; light
clouds drifting over the bright stars may increase this illusion of
motion[IV-3]. The rising or setting sun, although actually below the
horizon, may project upward several images of itself, one on the top of
another, to form a kind of Chinese pagoda, or a “bell pepper.” And the
twinkling top rung of the pagoda may simulate a whirling propeller.
_The “Whipping Girl” of Saucerdom_
The planets are wanderers. Each day they move to a new position among
the constellations. Astronomers and navigators have learned the paths
of the planets and the positions of the brightest fixed stars, but most
of us, when we look up at the night sky and see a brilliant stranger
among the familiar star groups, must cudgel our brains to account
for it. According to our dispositions, we may consult a newspaper or
telephone an observatory to find out the name of the intruder, or we
may conclude that the unknown is an alien spacecraft.
The planet Venus has been chased at least once by patrolmen in a squad
car, has several times caused the scrambling of jet interceptors,
and has been named the culprit in so many UFO mysteries that saucer
enthusiasts somewhat cynically refer to it as “the whipping girl” of
saucerdom.
The brightest of the planets and the closest to earth, Venus never
moves more than 45 degrees from the sun and thus is most often visible
in our skies near sunrise or sunset, preceding or following the sun.
The apparent size of the planet varies according to its distance from
the earth and its phase. When it is farthest from the earth, the disk
has a diameter of ten seconds; at its closest, the diameter has grown
sixfold, to sixty-four seconds. The human eye and the ordinary camera
see it as a brilliant white star. Being nearer the sun, Venus receives
almost twice as much light from the sun as does the earth, and when at
greatest brilliance, can be seen in the daytime sky. Viewed momentarily
through rapidly moving cirrus clouds, it may seem to be racing across
the sky like a flying saucer, but a longer look will reveal that the
object is actually making very slow progress, like a planet[IV-4].
To the airman in the cockpit of a plane, the planet in the dawn sky
can be a breathtaking sight. As one veteran pilot has described the
experience, “Venus rose to signal me from the eastern horizon, so
brilliant and inconsistent in color, changing at once from yellow to
green to purple and then reversing the show, that I thought for a time
it was another aircraft equipped with special lighting devices. But
Venus steadied in time, proving its identity.”[IV-5]
During the spring of 1956 Venus stimulated an unusual amount of
flying-saucer excitement. About 9:00 E.S.T. on the nights of March
20, 21, and 22, dozens of persons in Cincinnati, Ohio, telephoned
the newspapers and the local headquarters of Civilian Research
Interplanetary Flying Objects (CRIFO), to report an unidentified
flying object that was burning “like a beacon” in the western sky. A
reporter for the Cincinnati _Enquirer_ stated: “To the naked eye, the
object appeared to be an extraordinarily intense bluish white light
... through binoculars, the object appeared to be a compact galaxy
of lights, changing form as they revolved slowly. At one point, with
binoculars set slightly out of focus, it assumed the appearance of a
diamond brooch ringed with emeralds turning lazily on an eccentric
axis.” The object was visible for nearly an hour, moved slowly to the
northwest, and disappeared.