enthusiasts, however, it appeared as a low-flying luminous object with
swept-back wings, hovering in the west, making no sound, and displaying
colors that changed from red to white. While admitting that some of
the reported sightings might have been Venus, the editor of _Orbit_
(the official publication of CRIFO) argued that an object that changed
shape and sparkled like diamonds and emeralds could not possibly be
Venus. He stated “that the public should know that out of seventeen
UFO reports received for a three day period, ten were explainable as
Venus but _six were not_! These stubborn six defied all conventional
explanation.”[IV-6]
While the fate of the seventeenth UFO may require further explanation,
the flying saucer reports did not offer a real puzzle. The time, the
position, the colors, and the apparent motions of the object were
entirely consistent with those expected for the planet under the
prevailing atmospheric conditions. Dr. Paul Herget of the Cincinnati
Observatory had easily identified the “mysterious” object. He added
that Venus would continue to get brighter and brighter until the
middle of May, and that the number of UFOs sighted would probably
increase correspondingly.
He was right. Less than three weeks after the excitement in Cincinnati,
Venus inspired one of the most notorious “Unknowns” in the history of
saucerdom, one that evoked charges of fraud, falsehood, and conspiracy
on a grand scale.
_The Ryan Case_
An American Airlines plane had just taken off on a flight from Albany
to Syracuse, New York, on the night of April 8, 1956. The sky was
clear with a very thin overcast. At 10:15 E.S.T., while at about 6000
feet over Schenectady, Captain Ryan and his first officer sighted
an unidentified flying object and reported it to Griffis Air Force
Base. Bright orange in color, it glowed ahead of the plane in the
northwestern sky. At first it seemed to be traveling at great speed,
800 to 1000 miles an hour. Then it appeared to slow down to the plane’s
speed, about 250 miles an hour, and thereafter kept a steady distance
ahead. The tower operators at the Albany and Watertown airports also
saw the object, as did the crews of four other plane flights, who
decided it was probably a star or a planet.
The shift supervisor on duty in the tower at Griffis Air Force Base,
alerted by Captain Ryan, was able to observe the unknown through
binoculars. He described it as apparently round, larger than any star,
at an estimated altitude of 3000 or 4000 feet; when first sighted it
looked white with an orange tint but after about ten minutes changed
to orange with a red tint. During the twenty-three minutes he watched
it, the unknown slowly descended over the horizon. Interceptors from
Griffis Air Force Base were scrambled (Air Force jargon meaning to take
off and pursue as quickly as possible) at 10:48 and 10:52, but returned
to base without finding anything. Captain Ryan, having watched the
object during most of the flight, landed his plane at Syracuse and made
the customary report.
The newspaper accounts that followed caused a short-lived flying-saucer
scare, but when officials from ATIC investigated they had no difficulty
in solving the mystery. The evidence was plain and unmistakable. The
object was the planet Venus. According to the reports of Captain Ryan
and the other observers in the air and on the ground, the object was
low in the northwest; estimates of its azimuth varied from 290 to 330
degrees. A plot of the planet’s actual position at 10:20 P.M., when
the UFO was first picked up by the tower operator at Griffis Air Force
Base, showed that Venus was slightly above the horizon at an azimuth
of 301 degrees, and that it set at 304 degrees at about 10:42 (when
allowance is made for the effects of atmospheric refraction)--the time
the UFO disappeared from the view of the Griffis observers. Of the
four other commercial and military pilots who reported the object, all
described it as essentially stationary, and all positively identified
it as Venus. In confirmation, the glowing light reappeared the
following night at the same time and position. The intercepting jets
had not been able to find the alleged UFO because by the time they left
the ground, around 10:50, the planet had already set[IV-1].
There the matter should have ended. The puzzle was solved, and
forgotten by all but a few saucer addicts. Some twelve months later,
however, Major Donald Keyhoe reopened the case. As the new Director of
the National Investigations Committee for Aerial Phenomena, commonly
known as NICAP (see _Chapter_ XIII), he charged the Air Force with
concealing the true facts of the incident, and himself tried to get in
touch with Captain Ryan to obtain information to support the charge.
Receiving no answer to letters or telephone calls, Major Keyhoe then
gave his story to certain government agencies. Using as evidence a
newspaper account[IV-7] and interpretations of Captain Ryan’s remarks
in a TV interview, NICAP alleged that the object sighted on April 8,
1956, had been a UFO; that the captain, on orders from Griffis Air
Force Base, had abandoned his scheduled route to chase the unknown
craft, had lost it somewhere over Lake Ontario, had then turned back
and landed at Syracuse and, finally, that his flight log must have been
falsified to conceal the facts of this pursuit[IV-8].
The original question, the identity of an unknown object, was all
but forgotten. In letters, telegrams, and telephone calls to various
officials of American Airlines, Congress, the Air Force, the Civil
Aeronautics Board, and the Civil Aviation Authority, NICAP requested
an official investigation of the incident. The first requests evoked
no response but continued efforts were successful. After hints of
publicity and of possible senatorial interest, the beleaguered agencies
at last yielded to NICAP pressure and reopened the case. Captain Ryan,
a reliable officer with twenty-three years’ experience as a pilot,
was subjected to official interrogation. Busy government bureaus were
forced to invest further time, money, and energy to confirm facts that
had never been in doubt.
To the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), Captain Ryan replied that he had
observed an unidentified object, but that he had not altered the course
of his flight. He repeated this explicit statement to officials of the
Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) and of American Airlines. Airline records
provided independent confirmation. Since the scheduled time of the
flight between Albany and Syracuse had been 49 minutes, and the actual
time elapsed on the night in question had been 48 minutes, he could
not possibly have spent time in making a detour over Lake Ontario as
alleged.
These declarations, according to NICAP, were worthless. They merely
proved that Captain Ryan had given false answers to his questioners;
that the government agencies involved knew the answers were false; and
that a gigantic conspiracy existed to suppress the truth. Among those
suggested as possible members[IV-8] were the American Airlines Company,
the Civil Aeronautics Board, the Civil Aviation Agency, the United
States Air Force, and possibly even the Central Intelligence Agency and
the National Security Council!
Saucer publications still list this sighting of Venus as an Unknown.
_Venus as a Morning Star_
One of the “best” UFOs of the year 1950 appeared when Venus performed
in plain sight of the ATIC offices at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,
Dayton, Ohio[IV-2, p. 103].
About midmorning on March 8 a TWA plane, coming in to land at Dayton
municipal airport, was circling to get into the traffic pattern when
both pilot and copilot noticed an extremely bright light hovering in
the southeast. Much brighter and larger than a star, it appeared and
disappeared in the high, thick, scattered clouds. The tower operators,
who also saw it, immediately telephoned the Ohio Air National Guard
and officials at ATIC. Within minutes the UFO had attracted an audience
of exceptionally well-qualified observers. Air Force experts on
unidentified flying objects watched it from the ground, technicians
studied returns on the radar screens at the laboratory at Wright Field,
and the pilots of two hastily scrambled F-51s tried to intercept it.
The radar operators, who reported returns from both UFO and pursuit
planes, called the pilots and vectored them in toward the target. Both
pilots could see the light at first, but when they had climbed to about
15,000 feet they found themselves in clouds so thick that neither
could see the other plane, and the unknown was no longer visible.
Since ground radar reported that the planes were getting closer to
the target, the pilots decided to continue, on instruments, but they
separated to avoid the danger of colliding with each other. In a few
seconds they were deep in dense cloud. Flying conditions were far worse
than they had expected and the planes were icing up fast. Nevertheless
the pilots kept climbing until ground radar advised them that they
were almost on target. Realizing that if a solid object actually were
ahead of them they would hit it before they could see it, the pilots
immediately descended to below the clouds and circled, hoping for a
break in the overcast, until ground radar reported that the target was
fading fast. The planes then landed. When the clouds broke momentarily,
after about an hour, the UFO was not visible.
A conference took place at ATIC that afternoon to discuss the identity
of the mysterious light and the cause of the radar echoes. A check
showed that the position of the UFO had been identical with that of
Venus. The light, the conference concluded, had been Venus. One pilot
later disagreed, arguing that the light had not looked to him like a
planet and that if the object had been Venus it should have appeared,
but did not, at the same time on the following day. But the weather
conditions the first day would have distorted the image and made it
unlike the pale light of Venus occasionally visible in the daytime. It
was not visible at all the following day because of different weather
conditions.
The radar returns, the investigators found, had come from the ice-laden
clouds and were unrelated to the light. Both planes had encountered
unexpectedly severe icing conditions which increased as they
approached the center of the cloud. Radar, tracking their course during
these moments, had shown the planes approaching close to the unknown
target. All the evidence, the radar experts agreed, indicated that the
unknown target was ice[IV-1].
_Venus as an Evening Star_
In the spring of 1959 Venus again, this time in the evening, caused
reports of flying saucers. At 6:20 P.M. on March 13, a clear evening
with visibility of about fifteen miles, an unidentified flying object
was sighted in the western sky near Duluth, Minnesota[IV-1]. Witnesses
described its shape as tubular or round and its color as red, orange,
green, or white. Two interceptors of the Air Defense Command were
scrambled to investigate and headed for the object at top speeds, but
they could get no closer and eventually gave up the chase and landed.
Military personnel at ground stations and in the air observed the
object visually and picked up radar returns; it disappeared, after
about thirty minutes, by fading from sight. Although this spectacular
unknown had seemed to keep pace with the aircraft, at times rushing
toward the planes on a collision course and at other times reversing
direction and racing away, all witnesses agreed that the object had
remained at a magnetic bearing of approximately 300 degrees.
The radar screen at the ground station had been photographed and
the film was forwarded to ATIC at Dayton. Analysis showed that the
echoes had not come from a real target but were “angels” caused by
interference (see _Chapter_ VIII). Some operators had reported sharp
contacts, others fuzzy; on some sets the target had faded suddenly,
on others it rushed off the scope at incredible speeds. Contact was
intermittent, for short periods of from ten seconds to a minute, and
each new contact gave a different position for the target.
At the time of the sighting Venus was just on the western horizon, at
the same position occupied by the unknown, and probably would have
been invisible except for the refraction by the earth’s atmosphere.
Layers of air with different temperatures had produced the apparent
motion and changes in color. The object had maintained the same size
and relative position during the entire period of observation; it
disappeared by fading from sight, sinking farther below the horizon.
The following night, under similar atmospheric conditions, the object
reappeared in the same position. The unknown was positively identified
as Venus.
Venus was again reported as a UFO on the night of October 19, 1959,
in Korea. An observer reported a crescent-shaped silver object moving
very slowly toward the west. Observing it for three hours and twenty
minutes through the telescope of a transit, he obtained very exact data
on the bearing and altitude, which provided the facts required for
identification. The object moved westward at a rate of approximately 12
degrees an hour, a rate close to the rotational velocity of the earth
and the apparent rotational velocity of the stars. Venus at the time
occupied exactly the same position as the object, and went below the
horizon shortly after the reported sighting[IV-1].
_The Rotating Lights of Japan_
One of the most famous exploits of Venus took place over Japan and
Korea in December 1952 and January 1953. The resulting UFOs, publicized
as “The Rotating Lights of Japan,” were automatically identified as
spaceships by saucerians. Noting the similarity to the “foo balls”
often seen by airmen during World War II, however, Dr. Menzel concluded
that the lights were probably a type of foo ball, “an exceptional
mirage.”[IV-9, p. 96] The rotating cycle of colors suggested that
the atmosphere was acting to break up and disperse the component
colors of a luminous image, displaced from its true position. Without
precise information on the time, position, and direction of motion of
the unknown, this theory could not then be substantiated. During the
preparation of this book, however, the authors were able to examine the
original data on file at ATIC and to obtain the facts necessary for a
complete solution.
The drama began on December 29, when UFOs were reported at many
points over northern Honshu, the main island of Japan, and continued
with similar sightings, particularly on January 9 and January 21.
On the evening of December 29 the pilot of an F-84-G plane, engaged
in local-area night flying, overheard a radio-telephone conversation
between another plane and a radar station on the ground reporting
an unusual light in the western sky. Although the sky was thinly
overcast at 8000 to 10,000 feet, he was far above the clouds, flying
in brilliant moonlight with a visibility of at least forty miles. At
7:48 P.M. local time, while at 27,000 feet, he observed an unidentified
object above and almost due west of his plane. Turning off all his
lights to make sure that the object was not merely a reflection of his
own canopy, he climbed after the unknown and kept it in view for three
minutes, then lost it briefly. He soon located it again at 35,000 feet,
when he seemed to be level with the object and tried to close in on
it. During this second sighting he observed it for about five minutes
before the light disappeared in the west.
The pilot was a man of unusual experience, in command of a fighter
escort wing, and well aware of the illusions a flyer can experience
at night. He was also a remarkably accurate and resourceful observer,
so that his report to Intelligence investigators is a model of exact
statement. If all such reports were similarly precise and complete,
few UFOs would remain unidentified and the civilian saucer groups
would have to disband (see _Chapter_ XIII). Carefully separating what
he observed from what he concluded, the pilot stated that the object
looked larger than the stars or any planet; he assumed that it was
circular, but could not determine the actual shape. He could not
determine whether the object was silent or noisy because the noise of
his own motors would have prevented his hearing any sound from the
unknown. The object seemed to show a cluster of lights, red, white, and
green, which slowly rotated in a counterclockwise direction from east
to west; one complete cycle of revolution required a time estimated
at four to eight seconds. The shifting of the three colors during the
cycle resembled the rotating colors in some jukeboxes, and the effect
was phenomenal. “As these colors rotated in the body of the object, at
times the entire body was one solid color, either white, green, or red,
but in the process of completing a revolution the body was frequently
fractionally red, white, or white-green, plus the other possible
combinations of the three colors.” Also there seemed to be three beams
of white light radiating out from the main body in straight shafts
which, unlike the colors, did not change their relative positions but
remained constant at positions of roughly 11:00, 5:00, and 7:00. No
phenomenon that might be an exhaust was observed. As to motion and
behavior, the object seemed to travel exactly parallel to the plane
and maintained a constant distance in spite of the pilot’s attempts to
intercept it at speeds of around 500 miles an hour. At no time did it
execute any maneuvers except for a gradual change of direction during
the two observations. The sighting ended when the lights vanished in
the west[IV-1]. These rotating lights were also seen by the crew of
an F-94 interceptor who watched them for about forty minutes, by the
crew of a B-26 bomber who watched them for about seven minutes, and by
various ground observers.
To make a positive identification, the investigator must know the
weather conditions, the bearing of the observing aircraft, and the
position of the object. Atmospheric conditions were found to be
conducive to the formation of mirages. At the time of the first
sighting on December 29, the observing plane was headed slightly to the
east of north; the UFO was in the west, apparently traveling north on a
course parallel with that of the plane. After the pilot lost sight of
the object, he circled and hunted and was flying slightly east of south
when he again picked up the object, which was still in the west.
A check of the astronomical situation showed that the sun had set about
three hours before the sighting. Venus was following roughly three
hours behind the sun and was extremely brilliant, with a magnitude
of nearly -4.0. At 7:48 P.M., when the pilot sighted the unknown,
the planet was about 3 degrees above the western horizon. When Venus
finally sank beneath the horizon and disappeared, the “unknown” also
vanished.
The similar UFOs reported from Japan during the same period, on January
9 and January 21, 1953, were also mirages of the planet Venus. The
cases of “The Rotating Lights of Japan” in the Air Force file on UFOs
have now been shifted from the category “Unknown” to the category
“Solved.” In many other UFO cases of the “rotating lights” variety, the
Air Force has positively identified the unknown as the planet Jupiter.
_UFOs and the Opposition of Mars_
Venus is not the only heavenly body to simulate a flying saucer.
Jupiter and even Mercury, the smallest of the planets, have inspired
their share of UFOs. Mars, which can also be very bright, has
frequently been reported as a spaceship.
On June 21, 1952, an F-47 aircraft was on routine patrol over the
Atomic Energy Commission installation at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, when at
10:58 P.M. a spotter from the Ground Observer Corps informed the pilot
that a slow-moving craft was moving in the area at very high altitude.
At about the same time the pilot observed a blinking white light, of
no definite shape and with no exhaust or trail, apparently making
passes at him. For the next eighteen minutes the pilot tried vainly to
intercept the unknown. The plane was at 15,000 feet, moving at about
250 knots. As the pilot turned to meet the pass, the UFO would pull up
some 4000 to 5000 feet above the plane and then move in again. When
the plane reached 22,000 feet, the UFO appeared to make a final dive
from 28,000 feet, pulled back up to its previous altitude, and then
disappeared. The pilot’s reaction is indicated by his answer to one of
the routine questions on the Air Force report form: “Did you stop at
any time during the sighting?” His reply read: “Ha Ha!”
Investigating the incident, officials from ATIC at first suspected
that the object might have been a balloon, released as a hoax; only
a few weeks earlier a crank had launched a flight of balloons near
Oak Ridge and had been caught. But after interviewing the witnesses,
the investigators concluded that the UFO was far more probably the
planet Mars. As so often happens, however, they could not convert the
“probable” into a “positive” identification because they lacked one
essential fact: the bearing of the aircraft[IV-1].
Some flying-saucer enthusiasts consider Mars as the probable home port
of many spaceships, which allegedly visit the earth in particularly
large numbers when Mars is in opposition--the point in its path that is
nearest the earth; these ships supposedly seize the chance to hop over
to earth when the distance between the two planets is at a minimum.
It is to be hoped that the Martians, if any, are more competent
navigators than the terrestrial saucerians who propose this theory.
No sensible Martian would plan a journey scheduled to land him on
earth during the few weeks when the two planets are closest. Traveling
between Mars and earth is not like jumping across a mountain stream
where the banks remain stationary: the jumper, of course, chooses the
narrowest part of the stream and leaps across in a straight path. But
in space travel both planets are moving; they travel in elliptical
orbits of different sizes and at different speeds. To reach earth,
the Martian, too, must get into an elliptical orbit of a size and
shape that will eventually intersect the earth’s orbit. According to
calculations by terrestrial rocket experts, the path that requires
the least fuel is about 735 million miles long--some twenty times the
distance between the two planets when they are closest. To follow this
course, which takes 260 days of travel, the Martian must leave 260 days
before the day that his ship and the earth will converge and meet at
a particular position in space. Therefore he plans to blast off at a
time when earth in its orbit is 76 degrees of arc behind Mars in its
orbit (see Figure 8). By the time he lands on earth, the planet Mars is
lagging 44 degrees of arc behind the earth[IV-10].
Any increase in UFO reports that may occur when Mars is in opposition
should be attributed not to spaceships but to the heightened brilliance
of the planet itself glowing in the night sky.
_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.
[Illustration: _Figure 8._ Orbit of spaceship. Mars_{1} and earth_{1},
positions of planets when ship leaves Mars; Mars_{2} and earth_{2},
positions when ship lands on earth.]