at about 8000 feet over Chesapeake Bay, and approaching Norfolk,
Virginia. The sun had set and the night was almost entirely dark,
although the coast line was still visible. Fortenberry, sitting at the
right as copilot, was making his first run on this particular course
and Nash, in the pilot’s seat at the left, was pointing out the cities
and landmarks of the route. Nash had just called attention to the
lights of Newport News and Cumberland, ahead and to the right of the
plane, when at 8:12 a brilliant red glow suddenly appeared in the west,
apparently between Newport News and the aircraft, and so low that it
might almost have been on the ground. One of the men exclaimed, as
have so many incredulous witnesses on first seeing a UFO, “What the
hell is that?”
[Illustration: _Figure 18._ Reported movements of the Chesapeake Bay
disks. A, Disks at first approach; B, they flip over and reverse order;
C, they change direction and recede.]
Looking through the front windows of the cockpit, they watched the
unidentified light traveling northeast at incredible speed on a
horizontal course roughly a mile below the plane. Almost immediately
they perceived that the unknown was actually a procession of six
red-orange lights, glowing like hot coals. Shooting forward like
a stream of red tracer bullets, the line of lights moved out over
Chesapeake Bay until they were only about half a mile away from the
plane. They appeared to be sharply defined, large, circular disks,
arranged in a narrow echelon formation--like a set of stairs tilted
slightly to the plane’s right, with the leader at the lowest step,
each following disk slightly higher and to the rear, and the last disk
at the highest point (see Figure 18). Realizing that the line was
apparently going to pass under the plane at the right on the copilot’s
side, Nash flipped off his seat belt so that he could move to the
window on that side. During this brief interval he was not able to see
the objects, but Fortenberry kept them in view. As he later described
their amazing behavior, all the disks simultaneously turned up on edge,
like coins, so that the glowing surfaces were tilted to the right.
Still on edge, they suddenly reversed their relative places so that
disk 1 now occupied the last place in line and disk 6 became the leader.
This shift had taken only a brief second and was completed by the time
Nash reached the window. Both he and Fortenberry then observed the
disks flip back from the on-edge to the flat position. In the same
fraction of a second, the entire line changed direction as abruptly
as a ball bouncing off a wall and shot away to the west on a heading
of 270 degrees. An instant later two similar disks darted out,
apparently from beneath the plane, and joined the line as numbers 7 and
8 (Figure 18). The lights receded to the west, suddenly disappeared,
immediately reappeared, abruptly began a steep climb to an altitude
above that of the plane, then vanished not in sequence but in random
order. The sighting had lasted for a period of twelve to fifteen
seconds[XII-1, XII-5, XII-6, XII-7].
After a quick check showed that no one else in the aircraft had
observed the lights, the pilots radioed a message to the CAA station
at Norfolk for forwarding to the Norfolk Navy Base, reporting eight
unidentified objects traveling at speeds in excess of 1000 miles
an hour. In Miami, next morning, Air Force officials questioned
both witnesses. According to their estimates, the disks had moved
horizontally about 2000 feet above the ground until their final climb
and disappearance, were about 100 feet in diameter, and about 15 feet
thick. Since they apparently traveled fifty miles during the twelve to
fifteen seconds they were in view, their velocity would have been 6000
to 12,000 miles an hour.
Intelligence officials first checked the air traffic. Five jets from
Langley Air Force Base, near Newport News, had been in the region at
the time of the sighting, but they were ruled out as an explanation
for the disks. Both pilots were informed that seven other persons,
apparently on the ground, had reported unknown lights in the Norfolk
area; the Air Force files contain no record of these reports and
it is probable that some, at least, of these persons mistook the
sunset-reddened jet trails for UFOs.
Few sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena have been more clearly
described. Both witnesses were experienced pilots. Nash had flown
more than 10,000 hours at altitudes of 7000 to 8000 feet and had held
the rank of captain for eight years. Both men had been trained to
observe accurately, to check and double-check every factor that might
affect safe flying, and to regard the word “assume” as a potential
killer. They shared the attitude of all cautious airmen: “In God we
trust--everyone else, we check.”[XII-5] Unlike many UFO descriptions,
their report distinguished rigorously between fact and inference, and
it included the exact time of the sighting as well as the position,
height, speed, and direction of flight of their plane. Using a kind of
“instinct-judgment” gradually developed during their many hours in the
air, they had made careful estimates of the position, height, speed,
and direction of flight of the unknowns. Nevertheless, no reasonable
explanation of the disks was found.
At the time of this incident flying saucers had been big news for many
weeks. Both _Life_ and _Look_ magazines had recently published serious
discussions of the possibility that flying saucers came from other
planets, and newspapers were printing dozens of reports of weirdly
glowing machines trailing fiery exhausts, streaking through the air at
meteoric speeds (see _Chapter_ VII). At ATIC, the small staff of nine
men was swamped with saucer reports, far more than they could deal with
properly, and some of the investigators were privately convinced that
UFOs did come from outer space[XII-6]. For those or other reasons, the
Norfolk sighting unquestionably received a less adequate study than
would a similar incident today. The case was dropped and filed as an
Unknown.
The incredible velocity and instantaneous change of course reported
were obviously impossible for any earthly vehicle; no known metal
could have escaped being melted by the frictional heat produced during
so swift a passage through the dense atmosphere at 2000 feet, and no
human flesh and bone could have survived the smashing inertial forces
involved in the instantaneous change of direction. Nash and Fortenberry
frankly stated their own conviction: “Though we don’t know what they
were, what they were doing here or where they came from, we are certain
in our own minds that they were intelligently operated craft from
somewhere other than this planet.”[XII-7]
_A Possible Explanation of the Nash-Fortenberry Disks_
In the hope of solving the mystery, even though a decade has passed,
the authors of this book have made a thorough study of the available
evidence and present the results in the pages that follow.[D]
[D] We wish to thank Professor C. A. Maney and Captain W. B. Nash for
their generous help with this problem. Although they do not agree with
our conclusions, Professor Maney has kindly made available certain
useful documents and Captain Nash in a lengthy correspondence has
patiently answered a great many questions of detail.
When puzzling observations in a laboratory seem to point to a
conclusion that contradicts the main body of scientific knowledge,
the researcher first tries to repeat the experiment and duplicate
the observations. If this is impossible, as with the Chesapeake Bay
phenomena, he next re-examines the assumptions on which the conclusion
is based. The belief that the UFOs had an extraterrestrial origin is
based chiefly on two assumptions: first, that the estimates of the
disks’ size, distance, and speed were reasonably accurate; and second,
that the disks were solid objects. If either assumption is unsound, the
extraterrestrial theory is unnecessary and the incident becomes much
less of a puzzle.
Both witnesses were able and experienced observers. Nevertheless their
determinations of distance and size, and hence of speed, are open to
question because of the very fact that the disks were unidentified
phenomena. Angular estimates are usually reliable when an observer is
judging the position and speed of other known aircraft moving in the
sky. But when the moving object is a strange one and is seen against
an empty sky or flat ground containing no standards of comparison,
estimates of actual size mean very little.
The ability to judge distance depends largely on the binocular vision
of the observer’s eyes, separated by a span of about 2.5 inches.
Focused on an object at 300 feet, they subtend an angle of about one
fortieth of a degree, less than one tenth the diameter of the full
moon. This is a physiological fact, and means that if the observer
is more than 300 feet away from an object of unknown size, he cannot
determine its distance accurately unless he knows how large it is or
unless he can compare it with a known object. Using angular estimates,
the witnesses in the Chesapeake Bay case calculated that at the point
of closest approach the disks were a mile lower than the plane and
about half a mile to the north--a distance of roughly 7000 feet.
Mentally comparing their appearance with that of a DC-3 aircraft at
this distance, the observers arrived at an estimate of size--whose
accuracy depends on having a known distance. The circularity of this
process indicates the weakness of all the estimates given. Even the
most skillful observer cannot accurately judge the distance of an
unidentified object when he does not know its true size, and he cannot
judge the size unless he knows its actual distance.
Over Norwich, Connecticut, on May 15, 1962, a cloudless day with
perfect visibility, a Navy aircraft and a commercial-airlines plane
reported a near collision at about 7000 feet. The Navy pilot filed
a complaint, stating that the two planes had missed each other by a
distance of only about 600 feet. According to the commercial pilot, who
did not file a complaint, the planes had had a leeway of about 4000
feet--a more than sixfold difference![XII-8]. Thus good pilots can
differ widely in estimating the position of objects in the sky, even
known aircraft seen in full daylight. With an unrecognized phenomenon
seen in darkness or in semidarkness, as in the Chesapeake Bay case,
good estimates are impossible.
The extraterrestrial conclusion depends even more strongly on the
second assumption, that the UFOs were material objects. Nearly every
part of the description is in direct conflict with this idea. The
instantaneous reversal of course, for example, if performed by solid
objects, should have produced a shock wave that would have broken
windows in Norfolk, Newport News, and points west. Only one observation
even suggests that the unknowns had a material nature: when the disks
flipped on edge they seemed to reveal bottom surfaces, which would
indicate a solid body. The witnesses specifically qualified this
statement, however, by adding that though they had the impression
that the bottom surfaces were unlighted, the “bottoms” were not
clearly visible. Thus the three-dimensional structure was not actually
observed, but only inferred. The night was dark, the UFOs were glowing
like hot coals, and were supposedly more than a mile away. Even if the
disks had been solid objects, an observer could actually have seen only
a circular-shaped light that suddenly narrowed to a very thin ellipse;
if he believed the object to be solid, he might infer the presence of
other surfaces, but a side edge 15 feet thick and an unlighted bottom
surface, even if they had existed, would not have been detectable.
Of the other observations, all are inconsistent with the theory
that the UFOs were material in nature. All, however, are completely
consistent with the theory that the disks were immaterial images made
of light.
Images made of light can glow with brilliant colors, can show
well-defined circular shapes, and can flip on edge. Since they are
not subject to the forces of gravity and inertia, they can travel
at incredible speed, change direction sharply and instantaneously,
and perform all of the maneuvers ascribed to the UFOs. On this new
assumption, the observations become credible and the major part of the
mystery vanishes.
Only one problem remains. Just exactly what produced the images? Of
the many possible explanations, we first considered the simplest,
an astronomical source. The UFOs appeared low in the western sky at
8:12 P.M. E.S.T., about forty-five minutes after sunset. The night
was dark, for the moon had just entered its last quarter and did not
rise until much later. Apparently the only planet that could have been
involved was Mercury. Setting a little more than an hour after the
sun, it should have been visible above the western horizon at the time
of the sighting, but since it was not particularly brilliant, having
a magnitude of a little more than +0.6, we put aside the astronomical
theory, for the moment, as improbable.
We next explored the possibility of multiple reflections in the glass
windows of the cockpit, produced by a light source inside the plane
(such as a cigarette), or in the air outside (such as the bright-red
exhaust trail of one of the jets in the area). Like the astronomical
theory, this idea was set aside as improbable. Learning to distinguish
between a reflection and a real light seen through a cockpit window
is part of every pilot’s training. When he sees a strange light,
he automatically makes the proper checks. Furthermore, Nash and
Fortenberry had observed the disks through three separate windows
having different orientations.
Accepting the overwhelming probability that the source of the
UFOs was outside and below the aircraft, we concluded that it was
almost certainly on the ground. The densely populated coastal
region near Newport News and Norfolk, with several airfields and
military installations, included countless possible sources such as a
searchlight, an illuminated advertising sign, an air beacon. Stratified
clouds or inversion layers of temperature and/or humidity could have
multiplied such a light into a series of glowing disks (see Figure 19).
[Illustration: _Figure 19._ Searchlight shining on clouds. A, Through
slightly foggy or dusty atmosphere, light cone plainly visible; B,
through multiple thin cloud layers and foggy or dusty atmosphere; C,
on cloud layer through clear atmosphere, no light cone visible; D, on
multiple thin cloud layers, no light cone visible.]
The soundness of this theory depended on the prevailing weather
conditions. According to the reports, on the night of July 14 roughly
a third of the sky at 20,000 feet was covered with thin cirrus clouds,
practically invisible; at lower altitudes the night was cloudless and
sharply clear, there was no apparent haze, visibility was unlimited,
and no temperature inversion existed. Under such conditions the
suggested mechanism would obviously not operate.
A more detailed survey of the weather conditions, however, quickly
showed that this picture was greatly oversimplified. At 8:12, the time
of the sighting, the night had already become quite dark. Yet the sun
had set only forty-five minutes earlier and, according to the almanac,
twilight should not have ended until 9:01 local time. Thus there must
have been a dense cloud bank low in the west. Also, according to
Captain Nash, there was probably some unstable air, which in itself
indicates inequalities of temperature and/or humidity.
A thorough study of the situation showed that inversions of both
temperature and humidity must have been present. In the summer of 1952
all the eastern states were suffering from an intense heat wave and
drought, and the ground cooled rapidly after sunset, because of the
lack of cloud cover during the day. In a period of heat and drought,
the nightly cooling produces marked inversions favorable to extreme
refraction or reflection. Small in extent, existing only briefly in
one place, constantly changing location, such inversions may not be
detected by radiosonde observations[XII-9]. During July and August,
temperature inversions occurred almost every night in the coastal
regions and accounted for the radar angels so frequently observed in
the Washington area during those weeks (see _Chapter_ VIII).
The fact that the sighting occurred over Chesapeake Bay is significant.
A body of water cools more slowly than the land, and the air over water
is warmer than that over land. The cooler air from the land is carried
over the water by convection currents, flows in and under the warm air,
is heated by the water and rises, to be replaced in turn by the further
flow of cold air from the land. The air over a lake, river, or other
body of water also has a higher moisture content than over the land and
can form an invisible haze.
All these facts lead inescapably to the conclusion that sharp localized
discontinuities of both temperature and humidity must have existed over
Chesapeake Bay on the night the UFOs appeared. A light on the Virginia
coast, shining northeast toward the plane, could easily have been
spread out into a series of images like those observed. A change in the
orientation of the light or a shift in the location of the inversion
would account for the abrupt change of course made by the disks.
Since the plane was flying at a ground speed of about 195 knots (225
to 250 miles an hour), it would have traveled about a mile during the
twelve or fifteen seconds the disks were in view. This distance would
have changed the relation between moving plane and stationary ground
light, so that the images would no longer have been visible from the
plane. By flying on, the witnesses left the phenomenon behind them.
Obviously this solution does not identify the particular beacon,
searchlight, or other ground light that produced the Chesapeake
Bay disks. But it does offer a highly probable explanation that is
consistent with all the observations and does not depend on the
presence of an extraterrestrial spacecraft.
_Other UFOs in “Stack” Formation_
A correspondent has reported a UFO sighting very similar to the Norfolk
case, almost certainly produced by the mechanism just described.
In the late spring of 1955 a physicist, Mr. Z, was driving west on
the highway between Dayton and Yakima, Washington, in a region of
low-lying hills. The time was shortly after dark; the sun had set but
there was still a suggestion of light in the west. Suddenly a line
of five glowing UFOs appeared in the western sky, apparently three
to five miles away, traveling east at high speed, and accelerating
as they approached. Flying in a “stack” with the leading saucer on
top, the individual saucers were oriented in horizontal planes, but
each follower was lower than and somewhat behind its predecessor so
that the entire formation was “like a stack of pancakes” leaning at
about a 45-degree angle toward the direction of flight. (Note that
this arrangement is the reverse analogue of that of the Chesapeake Bay
UFOs.) The top saucer advanced more rapidly than the bottom one, so
that as they flashed through the sky at the left of the observer they
appeared to be in single file. Startled, he stopped his car and got
out to scan the sky, but the saucers had disappeared. Some fifteen to
twenty seconds later a similar formation appeared in the west. As they
approached he could see that they were thin, flat disks, glowing with
a white light, sharply defined and circular in shape, and apparently
fifty to a hundred feet in diameter. As they passed, the stack again
spread out into single file. When they were apparently about ten miles
east, the three lead saucers suddenly disappeared, while the two that
had been on the bottom made a sharp turn to the north, as abruptly as
balls bouncing off a wall.
Concluding that the saucers might be images produced by an airfield
beacon shining upward through very thin horizontal clouds, the observer
continued to watch. They reappeared again and again, sometimes at the
correct interval for an airfield beacon, but sometimes delaying for
two or three minutes. To explain their occasional failure to appear
on schedule, he reasoned that some very dense, fast-moving, low-lying
clouds must lie in the west between him and the beacon, so that
sometimes the light could penetrate to shine on the assumed stratified
layers overhead, and sometimes not. After twenty minutes or so, the
appearance of the phenomenon changed. The top three saucers merged
gradually into an indistinct blur, while the bottom two remained sharp
and distinct and continued to dart abruptly to the north just before
disappearing.
Although the observer was not able to see the very thin layers of cloud
overhead that would be required to account for the sharply defined
shape of the saucers, he concluded that his explanation was the most
reasonable one[XII-10].
In the Norfolk sighting, unfortunately, the witnesses could not easily
have remained in one place to watch for a possible reappearance of the
UFOs. If they had circled and flown back, and had been able to find the
exact location, they might have seen the disks again.
_The Tombaugh Rectangles_
A remarkable phenomenon observed in New Mexico in the summer of 1949
has remained among the most puzzling of the Unknowns. As in the
Chesapeake Bay case, the facts are not in dispute. The witness was
an astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh, at that time in charge of the optical
instrumentation of the rocket-firing program at the White Sands Missile
Range. He had had thousands of hours of experience in observing the
night sky and when still a student had gained fame, after months of
patient searching of photographic plates, by locating the image of the
planet Pluto near the position long predicted for it by Lowell and
Pickering.
On the night of August 20 Tombaugh was sitting with his wife and
his mother-in-law in the yard of his home in Las Cruces, watching
the stars. There was no moon, and the transparency of the sky was
extraordinary, so that even the stars of sixth magnitude, usually
barely detectable by the naked eye, were clearly visible. About 10:45
P.M. a geometrically spaced group of six to eight rectangles of light
appeared almost directly overhead. Of low luminosity, they were
“windowlike” in appearance and yellowish-green in color. The individual
rectangles were quite small, not wider than four or five minutes of
arc, and the entire group covered a span of about 1 degree (about twice
that of the full moon). As they moved noiselessly in a vertical circle
path toward the south-southeast, the individual rectangles became
foreshortened, the span of the group became smaller, the lights turned
brownish and faded from view when 35 to 40 degrees above the horizon.
They had been in sight for about three seconds. Mrs. Tombaugh, who did
not see the lights until they had moved some distance from the zenith,
observed them for only about 1½ seconds before they disappeared. To her
they seemed a diffuse greenish glow, interconnecting a span of greenish
spots of light. Her eyesight had always been less acute than that of
her husband, and they attributed the difference in their descriptions
to this difference in vision.
Although Tombaugh had been too startled to count the number of
rectangles or to note some other features he wondered about later, he
immediately recorded the facts of the observation, sketched the pattern
of the formation, and noted his impression that the lights had been
part of a rigid structure. He added, “I have done thousands of hours
of night sky watching, but never saw a sight so strange as this.” A
report of this sighting was forwarded to Air Force officials, who could
find no explanation. UFO enthusiasts unhesitatingly pronounced the
phenomenon a huge flying saucer--an interpretation that the witness
himself never made.