Kentucky, on September 11, 1962, when state police and the local Civil
Defense director were called in to investigate a strange substance that
looked like spun glass, which had been floating down near the residence
of Mr. Y in great quantities for more than an hour. The Air Force, when
called for advice, suggested three possibilities: the material might
be chemicals used in cloud seeding, might be refuse from a defective
filter in a chemical or industrial plant, or might be gossamer formed
by migrating spiders. The first two possibilities were quickly ruled
out. The witnesses, when requestioned, remembered that they had indeed
noticed spiders clinging to several bits of the material they had
picked up. The troopers’ report concluded, “It is the belief of this
unit the substance observed was gossamer formed by huge quantities of
migrating spiders moving, which is normal for this season.”
The yearly migration of spiders and sloughing of gossamer is an
established fact. As an explanation of angel hair it is far less
fantastic than a still-hypothetical cruising spaceship.
_Other Varieties of Angel Hair_
Several types of angel hair not of arachnid origin have been reported
in industrial areas, particularly in and near cities that have textile
factories. When the filtering system of such a factory fails to work
properly, lint and waste residues may be thrown into the air to be
carried away by the wind and eventually deposited on the ground.
Drifting fibers of nylon, rayon, and other fabrics can mystify an
observer, especially if the residues break and disappear when touched.
Some cities, such as Cincinnati, maintain an Air Pollution Center to
deal with the problems resulting from air contamination by industrial
wastes. Scientists at this and other centers often collaborate with
ATIC in identifying unknown substances reported in connection with UFOs.
Late in the afternoon of September 25, 1956, a housewife in Cincinnati
noticed a strange substance floating down into her yard, a white,
fibrous material that curled when she touched it. Wondering if she
had found some angel hair, she described the incident to the editors
of _Orbit_, a saucer publication; in addition, she collected some of
the material in a jar and sent it to the Air Force for analysis[XI-8].
Working in collaboration with the Air Pollution Center at Cincinnati,
ATIC investigators subjected the material to chemical and microscopic
tests and identified it as waste products from fibers of cuprammonium
(Bemberg) rayon, from a local industrial plant[XI-9].
The possible varieties of angel hair increase with the development of
new technologies. During March and April 1959, the Air Force received
many reports that flying saucers were cruising over the mountains near
Coburn, Virginia, regularly used a landing strip on an inaccessible
peak of Sheep Rock Mountain, and frequently dropped angel hair on
the nearby countryside. The investigating officer collected some of
the material and identified it as a type of “window,” the rolls or
long strips of aluminum foil used by the military in World War II to
produce spurious radar echoes and confuse enemy anti-aircraft fire. The
Coburn angel hair was identical with the foil used by Air Force planes
carrying out experiments in the area. “Window” falls very slowly;
dropped from a height of 40,000 feet, it may easily be visible for
some time to ground observers, as well as interfere with local radar
reception[XI-10].
A similar angel-hair incident was reported on November 23, 1960,
when many residents in southern Michigan and the Midwest reported a
mysterious, glowing white object in the eastern sky that was dropping
strange material to the earth. Witnesses described the object variously
as a comet, a satellite with a tail, or a saucer-shaped UFO. The
angel hair was quickly identified as foil dropped by planes that were
conducting a test of radar reception[XI-11].
Reports of angel hair still come in occasionally to ATIC and, if
the explanation is not immediately obvious, are investigated. On
the afternoon of October 12, 1959, officials at Robins Air Force
Base, Georgia, received a telephone call stating that unidentified
substances were falling from unknown objects in the sky near the town
of Washington. Two Air Force investigators arrived in the town before
evening to interview the witnesses and examine the material.
The first sighting had occurred shortly before noon, when a farm woman
noticed an object in the sky, traveling not particularly fast from
southeast to west. A stream of peculiar-looking substance, broad as the
vapor trail of a jet plane, was trailing behind and floating toward the
earth. The object itself was “as large as a football,” brown or black
in color, and maintained a perfectly straight, even course. A few hours
later in a town a few miles northeast, a man mowing his lawn noticed on
the grass two whitish-gray streaks about ten feet long and eight inches
wide, extending from east to west. Deciding that the peculiar streaks
were a fungus or a mold, he mowed across them; at once a gray dust rose
about twenty inches into the air and then settled back to earth.
The Air Force investigators took samples of the dusty earth and grass
for analysis. Chemical tests showed the presence of silver iodide.
Finding silver in such an unlikely place posed a problem, but it
also pointed the way to a solution. Silver iodide and other silver
halides are used in cloud seeding to produce rain; long “plumes” of
this material, ejected from planes, have been successfully tracked in
mountainous country for distances of thirty-five miles downwind. A
few questions in the right places produced the answer: research teams
from the University of Georgia at Athens and from the Lockheed plant
at Marietta had been in the air that day, carrying out experiments
in cloud seeding. The angel hair was the silver iodide used in the
experiment[XI-10].
Angel hair of less mysterious origin has now found its way into the
culinary world. The restaurant of the Hotel Bristol in Córdoba,
Argentina, offers “Angel-hair soup,” very fine threadlike spaghetti in
chicken broth.
_The Wisconsin Pancakes_
Of the many substances offered the public as proof of extraterrestrial
visitors, probably few have evoked more publicity than the Wisconsin
pancakes. According to a plumber named Joe Simonton, of Eagle River,
Wisconsin, a flying saucer with three peculiarly dressed occupants
appeared in his yard on April 18, 1961, and hovered a few feet above
the ground. When one of the saucermen indicated by sign language that
he was thirsty and held out a two-handled jug, Simonton obligingly
filled it with well water and handed it back. Looking through the open
hatchway, he saw another spaceman cooking something on a kind of grill.
When the spaceman noticed the terrestrial’s interest, he presented him
with three “pancakes” from the grill--thin, oblong, greasy, rubbery
pastries perforated by small round holes and smelling strongly of
goose grease. The saucer then departed. Although Simonton’s curiosity
apparently stopped short of tasting these gifts, he took them to a
friend of his in Eagle River, a county judge and a member in good
standing of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena
(NICAP)[XI-12].
Eager to learn whether the flapjacks came from this world or another,
the judge promptly mailed one of them to NICAP headquarters in
Washington, D.C., explained its history and requested an analysis. At
the same time he gave the story, as far as it went, to the newspapers.
After two weeks of anxious waiting, on May 7 he again wrote to NICAP,
protesting their failure to acknowledge his parcel and demanding either
an analysis or the pancake. This time he received a prompt reply:
NICAP deplored the publicity involving the organization with such a
fantastic-sounding claim, but agreed to send the stuff to a chemist.
Meanwhile time was passing and pancakes, at least terrestrial ones,
don’t last forever. Without waiting for the report from the chemist
the judge submitted one of the remaining pancakes to Air Force
investigators of UFOs. On May 25--the cakes were now more than a
month old--he wrote a third letter, excoriating NICAP for its lack of
enthusiasm over the evidence, and sent a carbon copy to Ray Palmer,
editor of _Flying Saucers_, who in the early days of UFOs had been
their staunch proponent (see _Chapter_ II). The magazine promptly
published the letter, with comments, as well as an editorial that
solemnly reproached NICAP for its attitude toward contactee stories in
general[XI-13].
If the magazine and the judge had planned the entire episode
deliberately to embarrass NICAP, they could not have timed it better.
Busy trying to promote a Congressional hearing on flying saucers, NICAP
apparently had no time, facilities, or inclination to investigate
flapjacks of such dubious origin. Interrupted by phone calls, besieged
by reporters, and generally harassed, NICAP mailed the cake to an Ohio
physics professor, a member of the organization, in the hope that he
could induce his colleague in the chemistry department to analyze the
cake. Since the chemistry professor was ill, the physics professor
returned the specimen to headquarters in Washington. Old and tired as
it must have been by this time, the cake then was dispatched to New
York to another NICAP member, a chemist, who began some preliminary
tests.
Sometime during these weeks the Air Force announced the results of
its analysis. The pancakes consisted of starch, fat, buckwheat hulls,
soybean hulls, wheat bran, and other common substances; bacteriological
and radiation readings were normal[XI-14]. Obviously the specimen
had been an ordinary pancake fried on earth--or else the spacemen’s
home planet produced grains that are indistinguishable from those
flourishing on earth.
NICAP, however, had the last word. Preliminary tests by their chemist
had shown that the cakes contained a common type of hydrogenated
oil shortening that melted at body temperature. Further tests were
temporarily delayed because of the expense. However, NICAP assured the
judge, the tests would be completed sometime, and any fragments left
over would be saved and returned![XI-15]
_The Moon Bridge_
On the evening of July 29, 1953, Mr. J. J. O’Neill, a science reporter
for the New York _Herald Tribune_, was looking at the moon through his
small telescope when he saw what he believed to be a shaft of light
shining from the mountainous ridge above the Mare Crisium crater and
fanning out into the shadowed area of the crater wall. According to his
interpretation, the light was coming from underneath a new structure, a
gigantic natural bridge twelve to twenty miles long that arched over a
gap in the mountainous rim. This region of the moon had been thoroughly
studied and mapped during the previous century and no such feature had
ever been noticed. The sudden appearance of so spectacular an object,
if true, would indeed require explanation. Alerted by news reports of
the moon bridge, a British amateur astronomer, H. P. Wilkins, reported
a few weeks later that he, too, could see the mysterious arch through
his telescope (see Figure 16).
To saucer enthusiasts these reports constituted proof that the moon was
inhabited. Since Nature alone could not have formed such an arch in so
short a time, they argued, the bridge must be artificial. The structure
might have been built by creatures living on the moon, perhaps in
enormous underground cities. These beings might be native Selenites,
or they might be colonists from Mars or from planets belonging to
another solar system who were using the moon as a base for their
spaceships[XI-16].
[Illustration: _Figure 16._ The “Moon Bridge.” A, Just before sunset
light fans out from beneath “arch”; B, the fan narrows as sun sinks
lower; C, fan begins to disappear as sun sets below horizon. (Based on
sketches by the late H. P. Wilkins.)]
Professional astronomers, queried about the mysterious bridge, pointed
out that sunlight could not have produced the phenomenon in the way
described. When a bright lamp shines through an open doorway into a
darkened room, the light spreads out like a fan into the shadowed area
because the light source is very near. But the supposed light source
in this case was the far-distant sun. If a shaft of sunlight were
shining under a huge lunar arch, as claimed, the opposite boundaries
of the illuminated area would be essentially parallel, not divergent
like the fan-shaped region described. Examining the Mare Crisium
wall through the fifteen-inch Harvard telescope, Dr. Menzel (who was
therefore labeled “one of the Army stooges”[XI-16a]) concluded that
the bright area observed by the amateurs must have been a high plateau
that was still illuminated by the setting sun while the rest of the
crater wall was already in darkness. The roughly curved boundary of
the illuminated plateau, seen against the shadowed mountains, had
been mistakenly interpreted as a bridge. Dr. G. P. Kuiper, one of the
world’s leading authorities on the moon, also studied the area with the
eighty-two-inch reflecting telescope at the McDonald Observatory, and
reached the same conclusion.
One writer offered further proof (derived from an unnamed source)
for the reality of the new bridge. Astronomers at Mount Palomar
Observatory, he asserted, had made a secret study that confirmed the
presence of the structure; furthermore a spectrographic analysis was
supposed to have proved that the bridge was made of metal[XI-16].
Sensible comment on these statements is not easy. A “secret” study
would be impossible since the moon’s face is obviously open to all
viewers, and the purported chemical analysis is sheer nonsense. The
spectroscope can tell the physicist what luminous gases are present
in the atmosphere around a heavenly body, but it cannot reveal the
composition of a solid object on the surface of the body, unless the
object is first heated until it vaporizes and is transformed into gas.
Before a physicist could make a spectrographic analysis of the alleged
lunar structure, he would have to land on the moon and chip off a piece
of the “bridge” itself.
“_Pieces of Saucers_”
In UFO publications, any oddly shaped chunk of rock or metal is
likely to be described as a fragment of an interplanetary craft. A
six-inch meteorite that fell at Sylacauga, Alabama, (_Chapter_ V)
has been classified in one saucer book as an “unidentified crashed
object.”[XI-16] By peculiar reverse logic, sometimes the absence of a
solid fragment is adduced as equally valid evidence of flying saucers.
The green fireballs of New Mexico (_Chapter_ V) were identified as
spacecraft partly because they did not leave material traces on the
ground. Similarly, when a small object apparently struck and went
through a metal signboard in New Haven, Connecticut, on August 19,
1953, the object itself could not be found. Nevertheless, from a study
of the size and shape of the hole and the material around the hole,
saucer investigators, with more than Sherlockian skill, concluded that
the object must have been a missile from outer space.
To identify “pieces of saucers,” a new pseudoscience has now developed
which we may call “xenochemistry,” the interpretation of substances
allegedly from other planets. In xenochemistry, a full qualitative and
quantitative analysis is usually not performed and exact results are
not made public. From an identification and sometimes a quantitative
estimate of one or two of the elements present in the specimen, the
investigator infers the nature of the rest and treats the inference
as proved fact. On the basis of this “analysis” he concludes that the
object, before it entered our atmosphere, must have had a certain
chemical composition that is unknown or impossible on earth and that
the object therefore came from another planet.
_Silver Rain in Brazil_
One of the most publicized substances to be analyzed in this way was
the “silver rain” that allegedly fell from an unidentified flying
object in Brazil. The incident occurred on December 13, 1954, in the
city of Campinas and the witness was a housewife but, as in many UFO
sightings, exactly what happened is not easy to find out[XI-17]. UFO
publications in England, New Zealand, and the United States reported
that the sighting had occurred at night but, in spite of the darkness,
the witness had observed the objects in detail. She described three
gray-colored, circular flying saucers; each was made up of two sections
or plates, one placed on top of the other; the top plate rotated
continuously and sent out a strong light. Moving soundlessly and in
close formation, the three saucers had performed fantastic acrobatics
over the city, apparently unnoticed by the other residents. Suddenly
one of them had peeled off and dived low over the roof of the woman’s
house, lighting up the whole neighborhood with the brilliant glare of
its rotating section; then, going into a high-speed climb, it dropped
at her feet a liquid substance that fell “like silver rain.”
According to the more generally accepted and more probable version, the
incident occurred in the morning in full daylight. The housewife was
feeding her poultry when she heard a noise on the ground near her feet.
Stooping down, she observed a pool of shiny liquid, like silver rain,
which solidified within a few seconds. Looking up, she saw three large
objects moving rapidly high in the sky and they looked to her like
flying saucers.
A reporter on the Campinas _Correio Popular_, hearing rumors that a
flying saucer had dropped strange material “something like lead,”
interviewed the woman, collected some fragments that a neighbor had
picked up, and took them to a local chemist for analysis. The newspaper
then reported that the stuff was absolutely pure tin--that is, it was
about 90 per cent pure tin and the rest was either oxidation or metal
alloys that were unknown on earth[XI-17, XI-18, XI-19].
Understandably interested in this report, members of the Brazilian Air
Force also interviewed the witness and collected some of the fragments
she showed them, as well as other fragments that had fallen about the
same time in other parts of the city. Laboratory analysis showed the
material to be merely solder. Several large airports not far from
Campinas might well have had large planes in the air; they could have
dropped the solder. The Air Force obviously saw no need to invoke the
presence of extraterrestrial vehicles to account for the incident and
considered the problem solved, but Brazilian saucer enthusiasts refused
to accept this explanation. In their opinion the Air Force had either
gotten hold of the wrong material or was covering up the true facts.
Two years later, in the autumn of 1956, the reporter who had ordered
the original analysis received another collection of fragments and
turned them over to a group of civilian investigators of UFO phenomena.
Although he did not know the full history of the new fragments
(unfortunately he had forgotten the names of the persons who gave them
to him), he himself was convinced that they were part of the original
shower of silver rain. Accepting this theory, the civilians sent the
fragments to the United States for analysis: one part to a sympathetic
scientist at an Ohio college, who asked a chemist colleague to test the
material, and another to a commercial chemist in New York. When the
New York chemist, like the Brazilian Air Force in 1954, reported that
the material was an ordinary tin solder, the UFO group concluded that
the fragment sent him must have been spurious, and refused to accept
his findings. The Ohio chemist reported that his specimen contained
tin, did not contain antimony, and had a density of 10.3. Since the
density of tin is 7.3, the sample obviously contained other elements in
addition to tin.
With the reports in hand, the editor of the Brazilian _UFO Critical
Bulletin_ published the xenochemical conclusion under the headline,
“Stuff Analyzed by American and Brazilian Scientists Proves the UFOs
Are Non-Terrestrial Flying Machines.”[XI-18]
The full facts on which this conclusion rests should presumably be
available for study, but they have never been published. The origin of
the 1956 fragments is unknown; they may or may not have been part of
the 1954 fall. But the 1954 incident at least offered an apparently
ideal chance to establish beyond doubt the exact composition of a
substance that fell from some object in the sky, and to determine
whether it came from earth or from beyond. The material did not
deliquesce or disappear, as gossamer and industrial waste may do,
but remained available for analysis. Incredibly, this ideal chance
was lost. Of the several chemists involved, none made a complete
qualitative, quantitative, and spectroscopic analysis, and none
published his complete data. The Ohio chemist, busy with ordinary
duties, had time to make only a preliminary analysis of the 1956
fragment. He did not determine the amount of tin present and did not
determine what elements other than tin were in the sample. The density
of the 1954 sample is not known and the results of the complete
qualitative, quantitative, and spectrographic tests, if performed, are
not available.
When a businessman sends a specimen to a commercial chemist for
analysis, he expects to receive a specific list of exactly what
elements it contains and in what percentages. If he received, instead,
results such as those of the silver-rain analysis, plus the chemist’s
opinion that the specimen used to consist of something else in
different proportions, the businessman would very properly refuse to
pay.
No competent chemist would use the meager data available to assert
that the 1954 and 1956 fragments had an identical origin, or that they
were originally composed only of pure tin. A quantitative analysis
theoretically could show that a given sample is composed entirely of
a certain element such as tin, but if the sample contains only 90 per
cent tin, 10 per cent obviously consists of other elements, and the
specimen is not 100 per cent pure tin.
With so few facts available, the actual identity of the silver rain can
only be guessed at, but overwhelming evidence indicates that it was
made right here on earth.
The _Handbook of Chemistry and Physics_ lists a large number of
possibilities. At least 5 alloys of tin and lead, without antimony,
have densities between 9.43 and 10.33, like the 1956 fragments.
Ordinary “plumber’s solder” is 67 per cent lead, 33 per cent tin, and
has a density of 9.4. “Tinman’s solder” is 67 per cent tin and 33 per
cent lead. Many aluminum solders have neither antimony nor lead, but
contain tin in percentages ranging from 50 to 97 per cent, combined
with varying proportions of zinc, aluminum, copper, cadmium, or
phosphorus.
One judicial-minded investigator of flying saucers gently pointed
out to the editor of the _UFO Critical Bulletin_ that the use of the
word “proved” for the extraterrestrial origin of the silver rain was
premature, and suggested the need for obtaining and publishing a
complete analysis before drawing any conclusions. The editor responded
with the peculiar logic of the xenochemist:
“What more is necessary to convince so severe and thickheaded person
as Dr. ----? Would be necessary a statement in conjunction with some
highly worldly considered scientist? ... Would be necessary a statement
in conjunction from Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the Pope?--This he’ll
never get of course. Would be necessary a UFO landing on his private
garden?”[XI-17]