the Levelland case. In the summer of 1934 Mr. Durward, a British
meteorologist, while driving along the bank of a lake observed the
phenomenon: “It began to rain heavily, with slight or moderate thunder
and lightning. His son, a boy of twelve, was opening the iron gates,
spaced at intervals on this road, and found one difficult to open.
Mr. Durward, while walking the short distance from the motor-car to
the gate to assist his son, saw among the pine trees on his left what
looked like a ball of fire about 12 in. in diameter moving towards
them. It struck the iron gatepost farthest from the latch. There was no
noise, but the boy, who had his hand on the latch, gave a yell; for the
next few hours he was unable to lower his arm.”[IX-12]
In Levelland the night of November 2 conditions were ideal for the
formation of ball lightning. For several days the area had been
experiencing freak weather, and on the night in question had been
visited by rain, thunderstorms, and lightning. Shortly before the
glowing sphere approached the truck, the two men had noticed a
lightning flash in a nearby field. The original description of the
phenomenon--a “flaming ball” or a “fiery tornado” that floated toward
and over the truck and detonated with light and heat--fits the classic
picture of ball lightning. The truck’s engine may have died for one of
several reasons. The rain during the evening could have seeped under
the hood and soaked the ignition or dampened the spark plugs. The
feed line may have been clogged. Or the region of highly rarefied air
created by the ball lightning may temporarily have deprived the engine
of oxygen.
Of the other drivers near Levelland that night who reported having
trouble with balky motors and seeing a blazing object like an
egg-shaped fireball, three probably saw ball lightning. Others, after
hearing Saucedo’s frightening story, perhaps unconsciously dramatized
their own experiences and magnified ordinary lightning flashes into
attacking fiery objects. It is significant that although the night
was stormy, only Saucedo reported seeing the ordinary lightning that
normally accompanies a thunderstorm.
Since ball lightning is short-lived and cannot be preserved as
tangible evidence, its appearance in Levelland on the night of November
2 can never be absolutely proved, even though this explanation fits
all the facts--facts that in themselves do not warrant so lengthy a
study. Only the saucer proponents could have converted so trivial a
series of events--a few stalled automobiles, balls of flame in the sky
at the end of a thunderstorm--into a national mystery. Ball lightning
doubtless accounts for other UFO reports, such as the phenomenon
observed at Lock Raven Dam on October 26, 1958, when two men returning
late at night from a fishing trip saw a flaming ball hovering above the
superstructure of a bridge; the ball exploded with a loud noise and a
brilliant white flash and disappeared.
_E-M and Non-E-M Saucers_
The next UFOs reported in this series belonged to the old-fashioned,
non-E-M variety. From White Sands Proving Grounds near Alamogordo,
New Mexico, came a report that military police, while patrolling the
up-range in a jeep about 2:30 Sunday morning (a few hours after the
Saucedo incident), had seen a brilliant reddish-orange light, shaped
like an egg, hovering in the sky. From its apparent distance (two to
three miles away) and apparent size (as large as a grapefruit held at
arm’s length), the men deduced that it was a huge object, 75 to 100
yards in diameter[IX-2]. After remaining motionless for about three
minutes, it descended toward the ground and disappeared. (According
to some versions, it later rose into the sky and then disappeared.)
Members of another jeep patrol soon matched this tale with the report
that on Sunday night about eight o’clock they had seen a bright,
glowing object hovering in the sky but, instead of landing, it suddenly
climbed until it got so far up it looked like a star. Both jeeps, it
should be noted, continued to function normally.
Officials at White Sands soon dampened the excitement. The description
of the light that appeared at 2:30 A.M. included certain doubtful
factors. The night had been overcast and so dark that the stars were
not visible, although the cloud cover was broken at intervals. Since
the sighting had not included any object of known distance or known
size for comparison, the estimates of the UFO’s distance and size
were of no value. The light might have been small and close; it might
equally well have been huge and far away. Under the circumstances,
the most probable explanation was that the men had glimpsed the moon
(then roughly half full) through broken clouds, and that the apparent
movement was an illusion produced by the moving clouds. The Sunday
evening UFO was unquestionably the planet Venus. Then nearly at maximum
brilliance, it was a conspicuous object in the western sky after sunset
and inspired many saucer reports during this week of anxiety.
The White Sands incidents had reached the papers, however, and
contributed to the general hysteria. By Monday afternoon, flying eggs
were allegedly stopping automobiles as far north as Canada, but the
Southwest continued to hold the center of the UFO stage against all
competition.
On Monday night, November 4, the Alamogordo, New Mexico, radio station
broadcast a dramatic interview with an engineer from Holloman Air
Force Base, New Mexico, describing his sighting of an E-M-radiating
UFO at least 500 feet long. About one o’clock on Monday afternoon, Mr.
X stated, he was returning to base after a weekend in El Paso[IX-4].
While driving along a desert stretch of U. S. Highway 54 near the town
of Orogrande, he noticed a group of cars stopped ahead of him, their
passengers standing in the road, pointing at the sky. Looking up, he
saw an iridescent egg-shaped object at least 500 feet long--more than
twice the size of the UFOs reported in the preceding two days. As it
approached, the flying egg exerted a force that killed the engine
of his car, generated a wave of heat that gave him a bad burn, and
demonstrated a startling new characteristic: it silenced the radio
in his car. (During the next few days, reports of similar encounters
usually included a jammed radio.) When the UFO took off toward the
mountains and disappeared, Mr. X started his car again and drove on
into Alamogordo to the home of a friend, Mrs. Coral Lorenzen.
One of the most zealous amateur investigators of UFO reports, Mrs.
Lorenzen had founded the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO)
(see _Chapter_ XIII) in January 1952, and from 1954 to 1956 had been
employed at Holloman Air Force Base. After listening to Mr. X’s
story and examining the notes he had scribbled during the sighting
(unfortunately they proved to be illegible, but for some reason no one
has ever suggested that the pen or pencil was also hexed by the UFO),
she hurried him down to the local radio station where he made the taped
interview that was broadcast later that evening.
A daylight visit by an E-M flying egg 500 feet in length would
supposedly have attracted the attention of many witnesses. Air Force
investigators could find only one: Mr. X. According to his testimony,
the passengers of several automobiles (his estimate of the number of
cars varied from time to time but he eventually settled on ten) had
stood in the road watching the unknown object. A persistent search
by Air Force officials failed to locate any one of these persons.
The witness showed no sign of the burns he allegedly suffered. In
short, the only evidence to support his story was Mr. X’s own and the
authorities sensibly concluded that the incident was either a hoax or a
hallucination, inspired by newspaper publicity about Levelland’s flying
eggs.
Tuesday morning’s chief contribution to the UFO epidemic was not to be
laughed off so easily, for it was made by trained military personnel.
At 5:10 A.M. on November 5, the Coast Guard cutter _Sebago_, traveling
north in the Gulf of Mexico, detected an erratically maneuvering UFO on
the radarscope. The swiftly moving object would race across and off the
scope, only to reappear almost immediately from another direction and
position and again move off the scope at incredible speed. After ten
minutes the radar target vanished, but watchers on the deck glimpsed a
glowing object, brilliant as a planet; it streaked across the sky just
above the northwest horizon and vanished. The unknown radar targets
then returned and continued to fill the scope with their incredible
movements until 5:37, when they finally disappeared and did not return.
This mystery, too, yielded to orderly investigation. Air Force radar
experts made a detailed analysis of the data and positively identified
the mysterious returns. They had not come from the complex air traffic
overhead, as had first been suggested, nor from a fantastically
maneuverable spaceship. They were merely false targets produced by
the weather conditions (see _Chapter_ VIII). The brilliant light that
flashed across the sky was not reported by the radarscope and had no
relation to the radar returns. In view for a few seconds at most,
brilliant in the morning twilight (the sun rose some fifty minutes
later), the flash of light was probably a distant meteor--November is
rich in meteor displays.
_The Saturnian Visitors_
Tuesday evening while the nation was still wondering about the flying
eggs in New Mexico and the invisible UFOs that buzzed the _Sebago_,
welcome comic relief appeared. A man named Schmidt, a grain buyer,
announced that during the afternoon he had visited with the crew of
a flying saucer that had landed to make repairs. While driving in
the country near Kearney, Nebraska, he said, he had noticed a bright
flash about a quarter of a mile away. Going closer to investigate, he
perceived a huge silvery ship a hundred feet long, thirty feet wide,
and fourteen feet high, which had landed in a dry river bed. The motor
of his car then died. He got out and was walking toward the ship when a
light shot out and paralyzed him. The ship opened and two men emerged.
After searching him for concealed weapons, they released him from
paralysis and invited him into the ship, where he spent half an hour
chatting with these strangers and their female companions, mostly in
High German and English. (He knew that they came from outer space but
not until some weeks later, when they paid him a second visit, did he
discover that they were natives of the planet Saturn.)[IX-14] After he
left the ship it rose straight up into the sky and disappeared, while
he hurried back to town to report to the sheriff, to broadcast an
account of his experience over the local radio, and to give his story
to the newspapers.
It is perhaps a measure of the panic level that week that local
officials actually examined the ground at the “landing” site, looking
for evidence. They found none. The four “hydraulic rams” that allegedly
supported the huge machine had left no imprint on the sand of the dry
river bed. Traces of oil found on the ground were tested chemically and
proved to be the same brand that the witness carried in the trunk of
his car.
Gaining national notoriety from this incident, Schmidt soon became
a popular lecturer at flying-saucer clubs, thrilling the audience
with tales of later visits from the Saturnians and his journeys
in their spaceship to the Arctic Circle, through the waters under
the North Pole, and even into outer space. A year or so later his
extraterrestrial friends allegedly tipped him off to the location of
certain valuable minerals on earth, including veins of quartz that had
the desirable property of curing cancer. To mine this quartz and thus
make it available to humanity, he enlisted the sympathy and financial
aid of a number of lonely, wealthy widows. Some of these ladies
eventually came to believe that they had been the victims of fraud and,
in 1961, a California jury agreed with them. The Saturnians apparently
have not yet reappeared to help their friend out of his difficulties.
_Surveillance by Flying Eggs_
Wednesday November 6 was relatively calm on the UFO front, although
automobile engines died, radios malfunctioned, and TV screens
blurred at about the time that lights were reported in the sky in
Texas, New Mexico, Illinois, and Canada. Accounts received later by
saucer organizations stated that on Tuesday (or Wednesday) night an
orange-colored, whistling, E-M type of UFO had hovered near Fort Itaipu
in Brazil, caused a temporary failure of the electric lights, and then
knocked out the generating plant for several moments. Since the alleged
visitation occurred in a foreign country it was not, of course, open to
study by the United States Air Force. In any case investigation would
have been difficult, since the report failed to include such facts as
the exact time of appearance, position, and direction of movement of
the UFO. The witnesses, whose names were not given, apparently related
the incident under pledge of secrecy to other persons who insisted
on remaining anonymous, who passed the story on to still others who
refused to be named, who in turn gave the news to reporters, who signed
only their initials[IX-15]. So insubstantial a tale obviously does
not merit serious investigation. The dimming of electric lights and
the capricious behavior of a generating system are not extraordinary
phenomena and no UFO is required to account for them.
The next incident to gain publicity in this amazing week occurred on
Thursday (or Wednesday) evening when a UFO allegedly landed in Ohio
and then vanished. Driving home in the early evening along a country
road, a Mr. Olden Moore saw a glowing UFO in the sky. At first it
looked small, like a star, but it rapidly increased in size and split
apart in the air as it descended and apparently landed in a nearby
field. Moore stopped his car, intending to investigate, but for some
reason he changed his mind and instead drove on home to get his
wife. When they returned and searched the field they found nothing.
Nevertheless, they reported the incident to the authorities and next
day a Civilian Defense official, arriving to check the ground where the
UFO supposedly had landed, reported the level of radioactivity “far
above normal.”
A woman living half a mile away from the field in question reported
that, although she herself had not seen a UFO, her TV set had blurred
at about the time of the sighting, and on the following day she found
that her car, parked near the house, was pockmarked. Applying his
Geiger counter to the car, the Civilian Defense official pronounced it
radioactive[IX-16]. This UFO apparently possessed highly selective E-M
powers: it did not stop the engine of Mr. Moore’s car but did interfere
with the operation of a TV set half a mile away!
Air Force investigators patiently collected and sifted the facts.
The supposed landing site showed nothing abnormal--the grass was not
burned, the earth was not disturbed, no foreign material could be
found. The normal radioactivity of the ground in the area measured .18
milliroentgens; at the supposed landing site the measure had been .20
milliroentgens. This difference of .02 is not “far above normal” but
well within the probable error in the calibration of the instruments.
Interviews with other Ohioans who had also seen the glowing unknown
provided the answer: the UFO was a large meteor, conspicuous in the
dusk of early evening. Traveling directly toward the witness, it
had looked like a glowing sphere suspended in the air and rapidly
increasing in brightness. Near the end of its flight it split into two
or more pieces and fell silently to the earth, not “in the next field”
but perhaps many miles away. The blurring of the TV set may have been
mere coincidence or, if the meteor had actually passed close by, may
have resulted from the ionized trail of the meteor (see _Chapter_ V).
_Saucerdom’s Miraculous Electromagnetic Force_
Most of us remember the nursery tale of Chicken-Little, who started a
panic in the barnyard kingdom with her eyewitness report that the sky
was falling: “I saw it with my eyes, I heard it with my ears, and a
piece of it fell on my tail.” Calm was restored in the kingdom, after
a time, when the prosaic truth came to light: a falling acorn, not a
piece of the sky, had grazed the credulous chick.
In somewhat similar fashion, the hysteria caused by the car-stalling
flying eggs subsided. As the Russian satellites gliding across the
night sky proved more interesting to the public than hypothetical
spaceships, flying-saucer stories occupied less and less space in
the daily papers and the number of UFO reports dwindled. Air Force
investigators worked hard at the job of separating facts from fantasy
and by Saturday November 9, 1957, the end of a wild week, the panic was
over. During the two years following, 1958 and 1959, fewer than a dozen
E-M-equipped UFOs were reported over the entire American continent.
The civilian flying-saucer groups, however, rejected the
normal explanations of the November reports except that of the
Schmidt-Saturnian meeting, which all but the cultists indignantly
denounced as a hoax publicized to embarrass sincere students of UFOs.
Dissatisfied with the solutions found by the Air Force, the National
Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) carried out an
independent study (see _Chapter_ XIII) of the November sightings,
and in June 1960 issued a booklet entitled “Electro-Magnetic Effects
Associated With Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO’s).” After examining
many reports of E-M phenomena and rejecting an unspecified number as
unreliable, members of the investigating committee studied the evidence
in a series of eighty-one incidents occurring over a period of fifteen
years, roughly a third of which were reported during the week of the
Levelland panic[IX-17].
The cases include instances in which, allegedly, electrical
appliances failed to function, at the same time and the same place
in which a witness observed a UFO. In some cases a witness observed
electromagnetic effects but did not see a UFO, at the same time that
a neighboring witness saw a UFO but did not observe electromagnetic
effects. The effects in question include the stopping, missing,
sputtering, and near-quitting of automobile motors; the dimming or
flickering of automobile headlights; static, roar, or fading of car
radios; the dimming and brightening of house lights; the dimming and
brightening of cabin lights in airplanes; the blurring of TV screens;
the temporary loss of picture and/or sound in a TV set; the stopping of
watches and clocks; and odd noises over a telephone wire.
This list may astonish the average citizen who has often endured
similar annoyances and never thought of blaming UFOs for his troubles.
Most householders know that watches run down, that houselights dim
and brighten with the changing demands made on the city electrical
system, and that a plane flying over a house can blur the image on a
TV screen. There can be few readers of this book who have not at some
time experienced such brief frustrations with automobiles, radios, TV
sets, and timepieces--the ordinary troubles that keep our repairmen in
business without assistance from UFOs.
To the heterogeneous data provided by these eighty-one cases, the
committee attempted to apply the precise tools of logic and mathematics
in order to establish a correlation between UFOs and electromagnetic
effects, and concluded that a cause-and-effect relationship probably
did exist.
With suitable material, statistical methods can suggest a correlation
between any two sets of facts and can estimate the probability that
the correlation is significant and not due to chance. No competent
statistician, however, would try to apply the methods to such amorphous
and uncertain data as those used by the committee. More than a third of
the incidents cited come from newspaper accounts or the private files
of saucer organizations in foreign countries. All leave many unanswered
questions. At least two involve fully identified objects: the great
fireball of September 18, 1954 (p. 92), and the three fireballs of
April 6, 1955, may well have caused some radio interference but they
were not UFOs. Even with the well-reported cases, a conscientious
historian would find it nearly impossible to determine precisely what
the witnesses saw, what they heard, what they did, and what they said.
The various printed accounts of the Levelland incidents, for example,
vary in many details. The events took place in an atmosphere of
excitement and the stories inevitably changed slightly with each
retelling. The reports of Air Force investigators, records in the files
of civilian saucer organizations, statements in newspapers, magazines,
and books--no two give exactly the same version of any given incident.
Although the points of disagreement are often trivial, they are
sometimes vital to finding the correct explanation.
Even if, for the sake of argument, a statistician were willing to
accept the evidence of the eighty-one cases at face value, he would
still not attempt to establish a correlation between UFOs and E-M
effects. The probability that a (postulated) UFO will appear at a given
time or place is unknown; the probability that an electrical appliance
will fail to work at a given time or place is equally unknown. Hence
the probability that the two phenomena will occur together at a given
time and place is a concept that has no meaning.
_Effects and Causes_
Asked to explain what caused the failures of engines, radios, watches,
etc. reported during the week of the Levelland sightings, any high
school physics student who answered, “Some new kind of electromagnetic
force” would properly receive a grade of zero. Admittedly there are
physical phenomena that the scientist does not yet understand, but
he does know that electrical and magnetic forces do not and can not
perform all the feats attributed to them by saucer enthusiasts.
The electrical failures ascribed to E-M forces undoubtedly had a
variety of causes. Automobile engines can stall for many reasons. Rain
seeping under the hood of a car can soak the ignition and temporarily
interfere with smooth operation. Sand or dust or a vapor lock in the
fuel line can do the same. The body of an automobile is metal and
completely encloses the ignition system and the motor. The engine
stops if it is deprived of gasoline or oxygen, but it does not stop
if lightning strikes the car. The metal body acts as a shield that
electrical forces cannot penetrate.
Every driver knows that the reception on a car radio normally varies
from poor to fair; it rarely remains constant. While moving beneath a
power line, a car may receive no radio signals at all. A high-tension
line can be surrounded by an electrical field that makes a radio set
hum or buzz raucously and completely jams the reception. Static or
a powerful interfering signal can easily jam a car’s radio, but no
electrical field, static or oscillating, can kill a car’s motor or
shut off its lights or stop the dashboard clock; it could not stop
the driver’s wrist watch, and it could not stop a man’s watch without
seriously injuring the wearer, even if he were standing in an open
field.
Radio and TV sets may function badly for one of many reasons. They
may simply need a good repairman! A passing plane, a more powerful
transmitting station on the air, auroral activity, stormy weather,
ultraviolet radiation, or clouds of ejected atoms from the sun--any of
these can disrupt radio or TV communication, but they do not interfere
with the operation of gasoline engines.
All meteors bright enough to be seen can cause some radio and TV
interference--and in the first week of November the Taurid shower
is approaching its maximum. Although meteors do not, by themselves,
emit any appreciable amount of radio energy, the friction between the
swiftly moving meteoric body and the atmosphere produces a train of hot
gases that can momentarily reflect radio waves. The brightest meteors
leave behind them a persistent cloud of luminous, electrified gas that
can absorb radio waves and thus blanket incoming signals for several
minutes after the meteor has passed. A spectacular fireball observed
about 8:30 P.M. M.S.T. on April 18, 1962, momentarily turned off the
street lights in the town of Eureka, Utah; it was so bright that it
triggered the photoelectric control, just as daybreak does[IX-17a].