like the witnesses, apparently assumed that a single unidentified
flying object accounted for all the phenomena observed that evening.
Although the available evidence is somewhat confusing, a careful study
shows that, on the contrary, the visual and the radar targets could not
have been the same.
When the ground spotter first reported the UFO, she described it as a
stationary light low on the horizon. The radarscope, however, showed
a target that was moving slowly, at an altitude of about 16,000 feet.
Some minutes later, when the visual target did begin to move, the radar
target speeded up. This was the only instance in which the movements
of the two seemed to be roughly parallel. But in the excitement
that followed, all the witnesses assumed that the two targets were
identical. The published account[VIII-3, p. 303 ff.] does not
distinguish clearly between the actions of the light and the movements
of the blips on the radarscope.
Let us begin by reviewing the facts about the visual target. According
to the witnesses on the ground, it was a brilliant bluish-white light
that appeared on the northeast horizon and remained stationary during
most of the period it was observed. At one time it seemed to advance
rapidly toward the witnesses, make a wide sweep around Rapid City,
which was a few miles away from the observers, and then return to
its original position. According to the witnesses in the air, the
light did not remain stationary but retreated from the pursuing plane
and followed the returning plane, duplicating the plane’s speed and
keeping the distance between them constant. The pilots based this
interpretation, evidently, on the fact that the light did not vary in
size or brilliance and thus seemed to pace the plane.
These descriptions all point to the same answer: that the light was a
star or a planet. Since it was infinitely distant, the jets could not
get any closer to it and at ground levels the image was distorted by
peculiar atmospheric conditions. Mars had been absent from the night
sky for months, and Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter were then morning
stars; therefore the unknown could not have been a planet. However,
the bright star Capella was on the northeast horizon at a declination
of plus 46 degrees and would have been visible from both Fargo and
Rapid City. A check of the Weather Bureau records shows that the night
was clear and dark. The sun had set about an hour before the sighting
began, and at that time in the evening there was no moonlight because
the moon was in its last quarter. Visibility was about thirty-five
miles and the wind was from the northeast, about four meters per
second. There was a marked temperature inversion--9 degrees--at ground
levels. Such an inversion could easily account for the erratic motions
reported for the light.
There can be little doubt that the visual target was the star Capella.
The radar targets also were clearly the result of weather, just as the
air-traffic controller had suspected when he first looked at the scope.
Conditions were ideal--a calm, clear, warm summer night--for phantom
echoes. The first radar target, moving southwest, was probably a return
from some ground object. When the jet took to the air, the scope showed
a different kind of UFO target, one that echoed the movements of the
plane itself--retreating from the pursuer, advancing when the pursuer
turned back--and was always farther away from the ground station than
the plane itself.
Although saucer enthusiasts interpret these maneuvers as proof that
the phantom was under intelligent control, radar experts recognize the
familiar pattern in which a ghost echo is actually a return from the
plane itself. Because of the temperature inversions the radar pulses
do not return directly from the plane to the ground receiver but are
deflected from the plane to the ground, then back to the plane, and
thence on to the ground scope. The phantom echo always occurs from the
same direction as the aircraft and is always “on the other side” of the
plane (see p. 153).
This explanation also accounts for the evidence of the jet’s gun
camera. The photographs taken showed nothing, although the radar
warning light indicated a solid object ahead. After the pilot had
switched on the set, however, there had been a brief delay before the
red signal blinked on. During this interval the plane had not come any
closer to the unknown light, but the radio waves had scattered from
plane to ground and back to plane so that the gun radar did indeed
detect a solid object--the plane itself!
In short, the evidence supports our conclusion that an image of the
star Capella, distorted by the atmospheric conditions produced by a
strong temperature inversion, accounted for the visual sightings;
and that radar echoes from the pursuing jets, deflected by the same
temperature inversion, accounted for the phantom targets on the ground
radarscope and the gun radar.
[VIII-1] Keyhoe, D. E. _The Flying Saucer Conspiracy_. New York: Henry
Holt & Co., 1955.
[VIII-2] Air Force Files.
[VIII-3] Ruppelt, E. J. _The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects._
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1956.
[VIII-4] Plank, V. G. “Spurious Echoes on Radar, A Survey.” Astia
Document No. AD-215470, AFCRC-TR-59-210 (May 1959).
[VIII-5] Borden, R. C., and Vickers, T. K. “A Preliminary Study of
Unidentified Targets Observed on Air Traffic Control Radars.” Technical
Development Report No. 180, Civil Aeronautics Administration, Technical
Development and Evaluation Center, Indianapolis, Indiana (May 1953).
[VIII-6] “Radar Objects Over Washington,” _Air Weather Service
Bulletin_ (September 1954), pp. 52–57.
[VIII-7] Menzel, D. H. _Elementary Manual of Radio Propagation_.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1948.
[VIII-7a] ---- “Why Flying Saucers Show Up on Radar.” _Look_ magazine
(September 9, 1952).
[VIII-8] Keyhoe, D. E. “What Radar Tells about Flying Saucers.” _True_
magazine (December 1952), p. 25 ff.
[VIII-9] Plank, V. G. Personal communication.
[VIII-10] Withrow, S. R. “Angels on Radar Scopes,” _Air Weather Service
Bulletin_ (September 1954), pp. 48–51.
[VIII-11] Atlas, D. “Radar Studies of Meteorological ‘Angel’ Echoes,”
_Journal of Atmospheric and Terrestrial Physics_, Vol. XV (1959), pp.
262–87.
[VIII-12] ---- “Possible Key to the Dilemma of Meteorological ‘Angel’
Echoes,” _Journal of Meteorology_, Vol. XVII (1960), pp. 95–103.
[VIII-13] ---- “Sub-horizon Radar Echoes by Scatter Propagation,”
_Journal of Geophysical Research_, Vol. LXIV (1959), pp. 1205–18.
[VIII-14] Richardson, R. E.; Stacey, J. M.; Kohler, H. M.; and Naka, F.
R., “Radar Observations of Birds,” _Proceedings of the Seventh Weather
Radar Conference_ (November 1958).
[VIII-15] Harper, W. G. “Angels on Centimetric Radars Caused by Birds,”
_Nature_, Vol. CLXXX (1957), p. 847.
[VIII-16] Ligda, M. G. H. “Radar Observations of Blackbird Flights,”
_Texas Journal of Science_ (December 1958).
[VIII-17] Holzer, R., and Smith, W. (Eds.), Proceedings on the
Conference on Atmospheric Electricity, Geophysics Research Directorate,
Air Force Cambridge Research Center, AFCRC-TR-55-222 (December 1955).
[VIII-18] Eastwood, E; Bell, J. D.; and Phelp, N. R. “‘Ring Angels’
over Southeast England,” _Nature_, Vol. CLXXXIII (1959), pp. 1759–60.
_Chapter_ IX
E-M AND G-FIELDS IN UFO-LAND
The phenomenon of magnetism has always fascinated both scientists
and laymen. Paracelsus believed that he could use a magnet to draw
disease out from a person, transfer it to the ground, and thus cure
the patient. Later practitioners believed that a sick person could
regain his health by sleeping with head and feet oriented north to
south so as to be in line with the earth’s magnetic poles. Laputa,
the saucer-shaped floating island visited by Gulliver in his travels,
was propelled by the attracting or repelling forces of a large magnet
imbedded in the center of the island. In recent years magnetism has
similarly been called on to account for some of the peculiar maneuvers
allegedly performed by UFOs.
In the world of flying saucers an all-purpose electromagnetic (E-M)
force, unknown to earth scientists, is supposed to be able to produce
light and heat, disturb a compass, render an object radioactive, stop a
wrist watch without damaging the man who wears it, interfere with the
functioning of radio and TV sets, turn out the lights of automobiles,
stop the action of gasoline engines, and aid in the creating of
artificial gravitational fields (G-fields) around extraterrestrial
spaceships.
UFOs equipped with E-M powers have occasionally been reported in
France since 1954[IX-1], but they had rarely appeared in the United
States until late in 1957 when freak weather in Texas, plus the birth
of the space age, started a new wave of flying-saucer incidents. Few
spectacular UFOs had appeared since the 1952 panic (_Chapter_ VII) and
the average citizen had almost forgotten about flying saucers. Then on
October 4, 1957, when Sputnik I went into orbit and opened the door
to outer space, people once more began to watch the heavens uneasily.
Uneasiness became alarm a month later when, with American satellites
still sitting on the launching pad, Sputnik II roared into space. A
ball of fire floating over a field in western Texas provided the small
stimulus needed to turn alarm into hysteria, and for several weeks
people tended to see spaceships in every cloud and every unfamiliar
light in the sky. The reasoning seemed to be that if man with his
limited powers could launch satellites to orbit the planet, why
shouldn’t interplanetary ships already be visiting the earth?
In the months of November and December the Air Force received more UFO
reports than during the entire ten months preceding, and the reports
had their highest frequency in the single week following November
2[IX-2]. For a period of about eight days, if all the stories were
true, our skies were crowded with flying saucers.
Spaceships with electromagnetic powers roved from the Dominican
Republic to Alaska; they stopped automobiles, turned off headlights,
jammed radios and stopped clocks in cars, blurred TV sets in the home,
dimmed the cabin lights in airplanes, and altered a speedometer to
register a dangerously high speed instead of the legal sixty miles per
hour. (Whether the driver in question offered this novel defense to a
judge in traffic court is unknown.) Police in squad cars pursued UFOs
in Elmwood Park, Illinois; Danville, Illinois; and Hammond, Indiana. In
Brazil, an orange-colored, whistling UFO hovered near Fort Itaipu and
first caused a temporary failure of the lights, then knocked out the
generating plant for several moments. A driver in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
saw a UFO that not only stalled his car but also stopped the dashboard
clock and the driver’s own wrist watch. A driver in western Texas saw
a UFO that, not content with stopping the engine and radio of his car,
also magnetized the right half of the bumper and a part of the fender.
One driver reported that his car and those of several other motorists
had stalled near Cortez, Colorado; he had not thought of looking at the
sky, but any saucer enthusiast could have told him that a UFO must have
been hovering there.
In addition to these special models equipped with Medusa-like powers,
other spaceships allegedly landed briefly at the military installation
at White Sands, New Mexico; harassed a United States Coast Guard ship
in the Gulf of Mexico; landed in Ohio and raised the radioactivity
level of the ground; and stopped in Nebraska for repairs.
_Stormy Weather in Texas_
The new type of UFO with electromagnetic (E-M) powers first attracted
notice in this country by allegedly appearing near Levelland, Texas, on
the night of November 2, 1957, a few hours before Sputnik II went into
orbit. A small town with a population of about 8000, Levelland lies on
the plains of western Texas about sixty miles from Plainview, site of
a famous meteor shower, and only twenty-five miles from Lubbock, which
a few years earlier had gained national fame with its “Lubbock lights”
(p. 123). The region is normally an arid one, but at the beginning
of November it was experiencing unusual weather--electrical storms
and rain (the month proved to be the wettest ever recorded in western
Texas).
About 11:15 that Saturday night, a farmworker named Pedro Saucedo (or
Saucido) with his friend Joe Palaz (also given in various printed
accounts as Palav, Salav, Salaz, Salvaz) was driving home from
Levelland. A few miles northwest of the town he had turned off Route
116 into a side road, when both men noticed a flash of light in a field
at the right. Evidently unalarmed, he continued driving and talking
until suddenly the engine died and the lights went out. While trying
to restart the motor, Saucedo (the similarity between “Saucedo” and
“saucer” presents a diverting coincidence) glimpsed over his left
shoulder something that looked like a flaming ball or a fiery tornado
drifting rapidly toward the truck. A veteran of combat in Korea,
Saucedo reacted instantaneously to the blazing unknown. As he described
the experience later that night, “I jumped out of the truck and hit the
dirt because I was afraid. I called to Joe but he didn’t get out. The
thing passed directly over my truck with a great sound and a rush of
wind. It sounded like thunder and my truck rocked from the flash.... I
felt a lot of heat.” Crawling out and seeing the object disappear in
the direction of Levelland, he restarted the engine and drove back to
Levelland to report the incident to the sheriff[IX-2].
The sheriff was soon receiving reports from other persons who had been
driving in the same area at about the same time. They said that they,
too, had seen a blazing object which they described as a “flying egg”
or “egg-shaped fireball.” Their cars, like Saucedo’s, had stalled and
then restarted when the object disappeared. A number of townspeople
telephoned the authorities to report bright flashes in the sky, and the
police comment that “everyone who called was very excited”[IX-3] was
probably an understatement.
Under headlines such as “Mystery Object Stalls Autos in West Texas,”
these stories hit newspapers all over the nation. The news spread fast.
All day Sunday dozens of persons in Texas and New Mexico were relating
that they, too, had seen fiery objects and flashes of light in the sky
the night before. An amazingly large number of citizens seem to have
been out late that stormy Saturday night, but apparently none of them
noticed any ordinary lightning--only phantom “somethings” variously
described as a burning mass, a big light, an egg-shaped object 200 feet
long lighted up as though it were on fire, something like neon lights,
objects that were red, glowing, brilliant, fiery, bluish-green, or
pulsating green.
Not surprisingly, with all this publicity, the original incident
quickly began to take on new dimensions. Saucedo amplified his first
statements and recalled that the object had been “torpedo-shaped,”
“like a rocket, but much larger,” and that lights on the object had
seemed to be winking on and off[IX-4].
For days the Russian satellites had to share the spotlight with the
American flying eggs, while both amateur and professional investigators
tried to solve the mystery. The proponents of UFOs deduced the presence
of a flying saucer with E-M powers. Various astronomers, when urged
by newsmen, reluctantly advanced off-the-cuff theories based on the
meager printed accounts. Dr. La Paz, of the Institute of Meteoritics
in New Mexico, suggested that the things seen at Levelland might
have been fireballs. A reporter assigned to the Harvard-Smithsonian
Observatories to cover Moonwatch observations of the new Sputnik gave
a sketchy summary of the incident to Dr. Menzel, who also concluded
that Saucedo might have seen an unusually bright meteor and, startled
by its brilliance, might accidentally have killed the engine. Lacking
news of Sputnik II, the reporter sent in a facetious story asserting
that, according to the director of the Harvard College Observatory,
the flying eggs were mirages that so frightened the drivers that they
reacted by pressing a “nervous foot” on the accelerator and killing
the engine. When the weather conditions at Levelland became known, of
course, the meteor theory was immediately discarded. Dr. Nininger,
of the American Meteorite Museum in Arizona, made the best guess of
all: Saucedo had observed an example of that rare phenomenon, ball
lightning[IX-5].
Within a few days an Air Force investigator visited Levelland to study
the incident. Members of civilian saucer groups complained later that,
since he spent only seven hours in the area, he had obviously not taken
the problem seriously and could not have found the correct solution.
Even seventy hours of labor, however, could not have produced a clearer
picture. Saucedo had unquestionably had a frightening experience, very
much as he originally described it. But as in many UFO sightings,
most of the other reports had been stimulated chiefly by the general
excitement. Three persons, not “dozens,” had seen the phenomenon near
the ground. From ten to fifteen others (including the sheriff) had not
observed it at close quarters but had merely seen brilliant flashes of
light in the sky.
After studying the weather reports and the descriptions given by the
various witnesses, the Air Force issued an explanation, unfortunately
ambiguous because it omitted the necessary word “either,” stating that
the phenomenon observed at Levelland had been “ball lightning or St.
Elmo’s fire.” Supporters of the saucer theory seized on this ambiguity
to protest, correctly, that ball lightning and St. Elmo’s fire are
two different phenomena. They went on to conclude by some process of
peculiar logic that neither ball lightning nor St. Elmo’s fire was
involved and that the phenomenon had actually been a flying saucer.
Saucer publications have printed thousands of words to support this
argument. The evidence, however, leads to an overwhelming probability:
the fiery unknown at Levelland was ball lightning.
_The Phenomenon of Ball Lightning_
Most of us know very little about lightning. On the average, it causes
some 180 deaths each year. Many persons when caught outdoors by a
thunderstorm run to shelter under a tree, not realizing that the tree
itself offers the most attractive target to the electrically charged
clouds overhead. Even the scientists who make a special study of the
phenomenon still have much to learn about the conditions that produce
lightning and its various manifestations[IX-6].
The most familiar type is the lightning we see in stormy weather;
it flashes in brilliant zigzags from zenith to horizon, darts from
cloud to cloud, or strikes like a javelin toward earth. At night,
particularly in the country where no city lights mask its brilliance,
lightning can be a frightening elemental force. A form popularly
called “heat” or “sheet” lightning is a familiar, almost playful
phenomenon in the midwest and southwest, although comparatively rare
on the east coast. In hot, humid weather it flares intermittently
near the horizon, noiseless because the luminous “sheets” are merely
reflections of an ordinary zigzag flash that is too far away to be
heard. “Bead lightning” has also been reported, appearing as a chain
of spheroids that gradually fade away as they discharge. A spectacular
display of “pinched lightning,” an even rarer phenomenon (see Plate
Va), was photographed in late August 1961 at Los Alamos, New Mexico,
during a severe thunderstorm[IX-7]. Ball lightning, which seems to
be commoner in Europe than in North America (just as tornadoes are
commoner in North America than in Europe) is so little understood that
some scientists have doubted its reality. In recent years, laboratory
research has added much to our knowledge of ball lightning and Soviet
scientists in particular have studied it as a possible weapon against
enemy planes[IX-8].
Ball lightning is usually described as a luminous ball whose diameter
ranges from a few inches to several feet; the color may be red to
orange or blue to white. These lightning balls appear most frequently
toward the end of an electrical storm when the air is highly ionized,
often just after a nearby lightning flash. They look and act like solid
objects. They can hang motionless or drift in the air, glide along
telephone wires or fences, roll down chimneys and across the floor to
radio or TV sets, float a few inches above the ground or high in the
sky. The ball persists as an entity for a time ranging from several
seconds to many minutes; it may then evaporate noiselessly, or may
disappear with an explosive noise and a force that can damage nearby
objects[IX-8a]. One of the few existing photographs of ball lightning
was taken at Lincoln, Nebraska, on August 30, 1930 (see Plate Vb).
American, European, and Soviet scientists have suggested various
theories, none of them entirely satisfactory, to explain the formation
of ball lightning[IX-9, IX-10, IX-11]. These evanescent fiery globes
probably represent some sort of continuous electric current perhaps
held together by its own magnetic field, like the fabled hoop snake
that could roll along the ground by holding its tail in its mouth.
In 1938 the pilot of a BOAC plane en route to Iraq, flying in dense
cloud and rain at 8500 feet, reported that a ball of fire had entered
the rear cabin and burst with a loud explosion. One or two minutes
later it (or another lightning ball) entered the cockpit through the
window which was open for visibility, singed the hair and eyebrows of
the pilot, then bounced on through the forward passenger cabin and into
the rear cabin, where it again exploded[IX-12].
Similar incidents have been reported by Soviet pilots. In the summer
of 1956, a Soviet transport plane flying at about 10,000 feet was
struck by ball lightning during a very rough flight through a stormy
cold front. A fiery red-orange ball ten to fifteen inches in diameter
appeared in front of the aircraft, swerved to the left, struck the left
propeller and exploded with a loud detonation and a blinding white
flash. The intense electrical discharge destroyed radio communication
between the plane and the ground and disabled the radio compass. In
attempting to disconnect the antenna, the radio operator received an
electric shock. When the plane landed and was examined, one of the
blades of the left propeller was found to be slightly damaged and a
small fused area and a deposit of soot were found on the edge of the
airfoil a few inches from its end[IX-13].
A similar case occurred in December 1956, when a Soviet jet had entered
a storm cloud and was climbing through it. As the plane reached the top
of the cloud, at an altitude of 12,000 to 15,000 feet, ball lightning
suddenly appeared a short distance ahead and to the right of the plane,
and exploded with a dull but piercing noise and a blinding flash; the
ball then broke into a series of beads. Although one of the engines
close to the ball died at the instant of the explosion, the crew were
able to start it again and the flight continued normally. After landing
and finding no mechanical damage, they concluded that the engine had
failed temporarily because the explosion had formed a region of
intense rarefied air that deprived the engine of oxygen[IX-13].