directly south after the UFO. It seemed to be standing practically
still in the sky, with a little rocking motion, at an altitude of
6500 to 7000 feet. He seemed to have approached within three to five
miles when the UFO suddenly shot up “like an elevator” and retreated
rapidly south, as though taking evasive action. The acceleration was
tremendous, almost as though the UFO had been fired from a rocket, but
there was no vapor trail and no sound. It then disappeared, gradually.
“It just faded out. I kept my eyes glued right on it because I could
see it was moving away at a great speed. I wanted to see how long
it would take and it was just a second or two until it had faded
completely. And it was getting smaller all the time, you could see it
was moving away.” The speed of departure, the pilot estimated, must
have been thousands of miles an hour.
Alerted by the pilot’s message to the control tower, several persons on
the ground at the Salt Lake City airport, most of them with experience
as pilots, had also been watching the UFO. Ground observers at the
Provo airport, also alerted, were not able to locate the unknown, even
though they had been told it was almost directly overhead.
Investigators from a nearby Air Force Base interviewed the witnesses,
who were obviously competent and reliable. All agreed that the
unknown had been a bright, silvery, metallic-looking object that
seemed to glisten or flicker in the sun; that it was roughly oval or
indeterminate in shape; that it was solid and tangible, but not a
conventional aircraft or balloon; that it made no sound, showed no
exhaust or vapor trail; that it was in view roughly fifteen minutes,
and disappeared gradually by “blotting out” or fading. All but one
of the witnesses agreed that the skies had been absolutely clear and
cloudless; one stated that, although the day was clear, a very slight
haze existed over the mountainous region where the UFO appeared.
In spite of this general agreement, certain significant discrepancies
became evident. The pursuing pilot stated that the object had moved up
and away from him at incredible speed, as though it were controlled.
The ground observers, however, did not see any movement by the UFO.
Most of them reported that it remained stationary as though it were
suspended in the air; a few said that it vanished at intervals, only to
reappear a few seconds later in another place. Most of the time, they
agreed, it just hung in the sky until it faded from view.
By analysis of these clues, ATIC was able to solve the mystery.
According to the local weather bureau, the sky had been clear with
visibility unlimited, but there had been very thin cirrus clouds, a
layer of minute ice crystals suitable for producing a mock sun. A
sundog would also account for the contradictory statements about the
UFO’s motion. Since the ground observers remained in one place, their
position relative to the sundog did not change and it seemed to remain
stationary. The pilot, however, was in a moving plane and changing his
position relative to the UFO; hence it seemed to move rapidly away
from him. In the same way a rainbow seems stationary to a person who
merely stands and watches it. But if he begins to chase it, hoping to
catch up and perhaps find the legendary pot of gold, the rainbow seems
to move away and elude its pursuer. The pilot’s belief that the UFO
had exhibited fantastic speed was, according to his own statement,
an inference based on the fact that the UFO quickly dwindled, became
very small, and vanished. It disappeared, however, not because it was
speeding away at thousands of miles an hour, but because of a change in
the relative positions of sun and ice clouds that produced the sundog
in the first place. One final point nailed down this explanation. The
angular distance between sun and UFO was exactly that to be expected
between sun and mock sun, at that time and place.
The details of this sighting obviously show a striking resemblance to
some of those in the Mantell case (p. 33), in which the UFO and the sun
had the same bearing from the pursuing plane as in the Salt Lake City
incident. With the information now available, there can be little doubt
that Mantell was actually chasing a Skyhook balloon. But in 1948 when
so many of the relevant facts were not known, the sundog theory was a
reasonable solution and may still be the correct one.
_Bright Spots on Films_
A bright blur, a ring of light, or a circular image something like the
typical disk-shaped flying saucer sometimes appears on a film, much to
the surprise of the photographer, who had not noticed any such object
when he took the picture. These UFOs are usually caused by reflections
from unnoticed drops of moisture in the air or by defects in the
camera itself (see Figure 17). If the source of the image is something
peculiar, it may pose a real problem (see Plates VIIIa and b).
[Illustration: _Figure 17._ Distorted images produced on film by lens
defects. A, True image; B, image produced by poor lens, not well
figured; C, by astigmatism; D, coma; E, off-axis beam; F, off-axis beam
and coma.]
On July 24, 1957, an American tourist in Norway snapped a picture of a
group of houses on a cliff above the seacoast, and was amazed to find
some time later that the print showed a large white, doughnut-shaped
object hovering in the sky above the coast. Puzzled by this apparent
evidence of a saucer that had been visible to the camera but not to
her, she submitted the facts to ATIC investigators. Thorough study
of the negative, the camera, possible sources of reflection in the
landscape at the time the photograph was taken, all failed to account
for the mysterious intruder. Obviously not a cloud, the image closely
resembled a smoke ring, but the photographer had not been smoking
and there were no sources of smoke in the neighborhood. The experts
were baffled until one of them thought of a new possibility and again
questioned the witness: had she by any chance been wearing a ring when
she took the picture? She had--a sparkling diamond. If the angle of
the sun, the direction she was facing, and the position of her ring
finger in relation to the camera lens and to the sun had been exactly
right, the annular image would have been reflected into the lens at the
instant she snapped the picture. The resulting bright ring would look
exactly like the UFO that appeared on the negative[XII-1] (see Plate
VIIb).
An unusually fine large UFO inserted itself into a photograph taken on
February 6, 1959, near Boulder, Colorado. The witness had spent the
afternoon climbing on Flagstaff Mountain and, about 5:00 P.M., snapped
a picture of the town of Boulder, to the southeast. Although he had
seen nothing unusual in the sky or in the air, the negative, when
developed, showed a small black blob that printed as a white, luminous,
roughly spherical object--a typical flying saucer (see Plate VIIa).
Civilian saucer investigators in the area procured a copy of the
photograph and sent it to NICAP for evaluation. The witness himself
did not immediately assume that he had photographed an interplanetary
spaceship hovering over the city of Boulder; instead, he sent a print
and a description of the circumstances to Dr. Menzel, who was well
acquainted with the geography of Boulder and Flagstaff Mountain. Dr.
Menzel suggested that the blob of light could have been produced by
some type of reflection: “The sun appears to have been pretty low at
the time. Is there, in the approximate position of the blob, some house
with a fairly large window that could have been reflecting the sun?
Stand at approximately the same spot and look over the region with a
field glass. A bright spot like this often spreads enormously on the
film. You can see from the picture that the sun must have been shining
brilliantly. The shadow, especially of the large barn on the right,
gives us some idea of the height of the sun. This was in February, and
the angle of the sun will now have changed. Please make this test and
let me know.”
Not until the first week of May, however, was the witness able to
repeat his excursion and make the necessary tests. Using a copy of his
original picture as a guide, he was able to stand in the exact spot
from which he had taken the picture. He then realized that the Law
Building of the University of Colorado stood in the place occupied by
the UFO and that the big double window of the Law Building was at the
exact center. In May no reflection appeared, but from calculations he
found that the position of the February sun was such that the window,
when open at just the right tilt, would reflect the sun’s image to the
exact spot on Flagstaff Mountain from which he took the picture. The
image of the reflected sun is extremely bright and the film had been
overexposed: therefore the image had spread on the film to create the
large UFO. To confirm the hypothesis, the witness tried overprinting
the negative so that the entire picture came out practically black,
and with successively longer exposures the size of the bright UFO
diminished. As he got it down to the smallest size on the blackest
print, he could see the fuzzy outline of a window[XII-2].
_Unfamiliar Lights on Planes_
In the spring of 1961, a leading saucer publication stated that
unidentified objects were still surveying the earth and cited, among
other cases, a bright UFO seen maneuvering the night of March 23
near Fort Pierce, Florida[XII-3]. The report failed to mention that
unidentified lights were seen on several other nights during that week
in the skies over Jacksonville, Miami, and Cocoa-Titusville, as well
as over Fort Pierce. Newspaper offices and radio stations in the area
received many telephone queries about the mysterious lights, which were
observed from the ground and from the air for periods of time ranging
from five minutes to an hour. The descriptions showed an impressive
consistency: the UFO was a round, twinkling light with a red or orange
color changing to white, and exhibited a bobbing up-and-down motion as
it swept across the horizon. In all sightings the weather was clear and
the visibility excellent.
On the night of March 24 an Eastern Airlines pilot reported the UFO
to the Miami Traffic Control. An observer in the control tower at the
airport could see the object, but lost sight of it when he took up a
plane to chase it. On the following night the Cocoa-Titusville Airport
reported a similar object. A pilot in the air sighted the unknown and,
about an hour later, encountered a turbulence unlike anything he had
experienced in sixteen years of flying. Cruising in the region the next
day, he observed a burned-out area on the ground below the place where
the UFO had been. On the night of March 27, a ground observer watched
the unknown through binoculars as it moved rapidly from west to north
and gradually disappeared in the northwest.
Most of these witnesses were veteran airmen, well able to recognize
conventional phenomena in the night sky. Studying their reports,
officials at Patrick Air Force Base decided that the similarity of the
descriptions warranted further investigation. In the preliminary study,
an Intelligence officer took up a B-57 aircraft in the vicinity of Fort
Pierce, while ground radar at Patrick Air Force Base kept his plane
under constant surveillance. At 7:20 P.M., when at 25,000 feet, he saw
the UFO, a white light three times brighter than the brightest star.
It appeared in the western sky and was moving north to south. When
viewed with the naked eye, the light looked like a star that dimmed and
brightened in a regular cycle; through binoculars it also displayed
the red and green navigation lights of a plane. Soon after the visual
sighting, the ground radar informed the investigating pilot that the
object was approximately fifty nautical miles from his plane and was a
jet airliner bound for Miami; the jet was observed for approximately
ten minutes as it descended toward the Miami airport. The investigating
plane remained in the air and, about five minutes after the jet had
landed, observed a second, similar, high-intensity light that appeared
in the western sky, moving from north to south. The radar at the Miami
air-traffic control center positively identified this light as a Delta
Airline jet, Flight 833, proceeding southeast. From these facts the
officers concluded that the UFOs seen in Florida that week had been
produced by commercial jet airliners[XII-1].
Two questions remained: How had the experienced pilots and ground
observers failed to recognize so familiar a phenomenon as a
night-flying jet? What accounted for the unprecedented turbulence
experienced by one pilot, and the burned-over ground below the region
of the sighting?
The first question was soon answered. ATIC investigators telephoned
the Federal Aviation Agency and learned that experiments with a new
type of anti-collision beacon were being carried out from various field
offices, and that several jet airliners as well as some turboprop
aircraft were using the new light. The standard beacon was a rotating
sodium light, whose color is yellow. The new beacon was an intense
white light which, viewed at a slant, becomes a spectacular phenomenon
even more brilliant than Venus or Jupiter seen rising or setting
through a hazy atmosphere. Since the witnesses were not familiar with
the appearance of the experimental beacons, they had not recognized the
newly equipped jets.
The answer to the second question came later, an example of the “luck”
required to solve some of these UFO puzzles. Major W. T. Coleman, then
Air Force Information Officer for the UFO project, was flying over
the Fort Pierce region on the afternoon of April 29 in calm, clear
weather when his plane ran into moderate turbulence of the short-wave
type, “like riding in a car over a washboard road.” The wind-shear
component was not large enough to explain the turbulence, and though
a cold front was approaching from the Gulf of Mexico, it was still
far out on the edge of the western horizon. Then, being a native of
Florida, he suddenly remembered that muck fires were fairly common in
the Everglades region, which lay below the plane. Peering down at the
glades, he noticed a very large muck fire. He concluded:
“Now, as typical with a cold front situation, the surface wind was
blowing from the east pushing the smoke and heat toward the west coast
of Florida. This relatively warm air naturally was lifting in the
surrounding cool air. When the continuing warm air rose rapidly to the
higher altitudes it ran into the reversed upper winds (high altitude
westerly). In the process of being lifted the smoke filtered and
cleared, yet the air remained relatively heated. It was moved directly
across our course, thereby causing turbulence.”[XII-4]
The fires explained both the turbulence reported during the week of the
UFO sightings and the burned-out area below the region of turbulence.
Thus these Florida UFOs were not spacecraft watching the earth, but
were a special effect created by the chance combination of unrelated
factors: a new and unfamiliar anti-collision beacon, an advancing cold
front, and fires in the Florida swamps.
_Inversions in California_
An unusually complex combination of events produced an epidemic of UFO
sightings in northern California during the week of August 12 to 20,
1960. Nearly every night dozens of reliable citizens throughout Tehama
County and the Mount Shasta region (long famous for its mysterious
lights) reported UFOs at various times and of various descriptions:
round, bright, metallic UFOs glowing with a reddish-purple fluorescent
type of light, cigar-shaped UFOs trailing a long fiery exhaust,
oval UFOs with red lights at each end and white lights in between,
yellow-colored UFOs like a flying railroad car with flashing red lights
at each end and white lights glowing at the windows. Radios roared with
static and radar sets were plagued with phantoms, as the state was
apparently invaded by a whole fleet of patrolling saucers.
The most important factor in these sightings was the weather; prolonged
and extensive temperature inversions prevailed in the area all that
week. From southern Oregon through northern California multiple
inversions of 3 to 18 degrees occurred nightly. Under these conditions,
practically any light shining into the night was apt to be projected
upward as a mirage and to perform weird antics. Determining what was
the particular light source of some specific phenomenon is almost
impossible.
As complicating factors, certain heavenly bodies made their own
contribution to the excitement. Most of the objects observed late at
night and watched for periods of one to three hours were refracted
images of the stars Capella or Aldebaran or the planet Mars.
Some of the most spectacular sightings were those reported from Red
Bluff on the night of August 13–14. Two highway patrolmen were chasing
a speeding motorcycle when, at about 11:50 P.M. P.D.S.T., they saw what
they at first supposed to be a brilliantly lighted aircraft falling
directly toward them. Jumping out of their car, they watched the object
as it apparently reversed its course, shot upward, and began to perform
fantastic maneuvers in the eastern sky. The performance continued for
more than two hours. Before it ended, a second UFO had joined in the
celestial dance, which was observed by dozens of excited witnesses in
the Red Bluff area.
Air Force bases in the neighborhood were notified, and ATIC
investigators gathered and studied the evidence. There was no real
mystery[XII-1]. The UFO first noticed by the patrolmen was probably
the star Capella, which at Red Bluff is circumpolar; it rose at 10:50
P.M. and at the time of the sighting was about 4.7 degrees above the
northeast horizon. About an hour later (12:48 A.M.) Mars rose, also in
the northeast; and close behind it (1:15 A.M.) came the bright star
Aldebaran, which made a striking pair with Mars. With three brilliant
heavenly bodies just above the horizon, on a night of fantastic
multiple inversions of temperature and humidity, the only surprising
fact is that the number of UFOs reported was not larger.
A person who has never been lucky enough to see a good mirage may
feel skeptical about the phenomenon. But those who have encountered a
first-rate specimen--for example, the Chicago skyline suspended upside
down in mid-air above Lake Michigan--know how startlingly real it can
seem. When the source of the mirage is not apparent, the displaced
image can seem mysterious and even frightening, as do many UFOs.
One such phenomenon, which might easily have been interpreted as a
flying saucer, appeared shortly after dark one evening in mid-July,
1954, and was described by Dr. Menzel in a letter to a friend:
“My wife and I were driving to Alamosa, Colorado, on one of the
longest, straightest stretches of highway in the United States,
commonly referred to as the ‘gun-barrel highway.’ I had turned over
the wheel to her and was settling back for a rest, after a long turn
at driving over the mountains, when I became aware of unusual driving
behavior on her part. First she would step on the gas, then on the
brake, then on the gas again. ‘What is the matter? What are you trying
to do?’ I asked. ‘See that truck ahead?’ she replied. ‘Every time I try
to pass it, it speeds up, and then it slows down when I try to give it
a chance to get ahead of me. It’s making me nervous.’
“I peered ahead through the darkness and there, sure enough, about
three hundred feet ahead of us was a truck, its dark body brilliantly
outlined with red and white lights. I studied the situation and glanced
at the speedometer, which read forty miles per hour. ‘Well,’ I advised
her, ‘you certainly ought to be able to pass that, dear, the way you
usually drive.’ And this time she really stepped on the gas, pushing
the speed up to sixty, seventy, eighty, and finally eighty-five. And
would you believe it, that truck took right out ahead, still holding
its estimated three hundred feet clearance, and matched us for every
mile of that speed. By this time I was beginning to get an idea. ‘Slow
down,’ I said. My wife obliged me by coming to a dead stop, brakes
squealing.
“‘Now see there,’ she said, ‘I just escaped running into that truck.’
And the truck had stopped, still 300 feet ahead. At this point I
ventured my conclusion. ‘That isn’t a truck,’ I explained. ‘It’s a
flying saucer.’ ‘You have flying saucers on the brain,’ she said. Well,
to shorten the story, she started the car again and the ‘truck’ moved
off. And we chased it in that fashion for about fifty miles. On rare
occasions, as we dipped slightly in a hollow, the truck would seem to
dash ahead at speeds close to 1000 miles an hour. Or sometimes it would
jump straight up, momentarily vanish, and then drop back into the road.
“The explanation was quite simple. The hot day had warmed the air
close to the pavement, but the cooling of the surface at the onset of
darkness had caused a layer of warm air to be sandwiched in between the
cold air close to the road surface and the cold air above. This acted
like a lens which produced an out-of-focus image of a bright tavern
sign more than fifty miles away, a real mirage. There were few cars
on the road, but as we met them the effect was most startling because
some of them were so enlarged by the lens effect that a car five miles
away seemed to be rushing directly at us only a block or two ahead.
Sometimes these cars would appear to come to a sharp stop, reverse
their course and disappear in the distance. At other times they would
appear to be rushing on us upside down, with part of the road itself
in the sky. Altogether it was a weird experience, but not in any sense
supernatural. Lenses of air, either close to the ground or in the sky,
can produce strange illusions.”
In this case, as in many UFO puzzles, the solution depended on
a knowledge of the weather conditions and of the facts of local
geography. If the pursuing car had turned off the road or stopped
for the night before reaching the tavern, the specific cause of the
phenomenon might still be a mystery.
_The Chesapeake Bay Case_
Two of the most famous UFO cases, the Nash-Fortenberry and the Tombaugh
sightings, have never been completely explained even though the
witnesses were unusually competent, the incidents fully described, and
the basic facts not in dispute. Although the probable type of mechanism
involved is clear in each case, determining specifically what factors
combined in exactly what way to produce the phenomenon has so far
proved impossible. Neither case, however, supports the theory that the
UFO had an extraterrestrial origin.
On the evening of July 14, 1952, a Pan-American DC-4 was flying
from New York to Miami, carrying ten passengers and a crew of three
including First Officer William B. Nash and Second Officer William H.
Fortenberry. As a pilot spending much of his life in the air, Captain
Nash had long been interested in the question of UFOs, and during
the long night hours of over-water flights he had often cut down
the cockpit lights to search the sky. In five years of watching he
had observed hundreds of meteors, various types of auroral display,
the lights of other aircraft, and the multicolored images of stars
and planets distorted by refraction, but he had never seen any
unidentifiable aerial phenomenon that appeared to be under intelligent
control--until this particular night, when he was not watching for UFOs.