one-story, two-bedroom house occupied by Mrs. Fitzgerald and her
husband. She had been sitting up alone watching television and had
gone to bed at the end of the late movie. The bedroom window was shut
and the window curtains were closed. Outside, the night was dark; the
moon had set, there were no street lights, and none of the neighboring
houses was lighted. Lying with her arm over her eyes, trying to get to
sleep, she suddenly realized that the room was illuminated and stood
up on the bed to look out of the window.
According to her account, a disk-shaped object with a hump in the
middle, a dull aluminum in color, was moving across the yard at a
height of about five feet. The object did not glow and did not have
lights on it; she could not determine the source of the light that
made it visible to her. About twenty to twenty-two feet in diameter
and about six feet high, the UFO moved north across the driveway into
a neighbor’s yard, losing altitude on the way until it was only one
foot above the ground. At a distance of fifty feet, it stopped and
floated motionless for several seconds while pink-gray smoke billowed
out from two openings in the rim and illuminated the UFO. Each opening
contained seven pipes. The smoke did not come from the pipes but from
the openings from which the pipes projected. The object then moved back
into the witness’s yard, rising to a height of five feet. No longer
emitting smoke, it made two quick clockwise turns with a radius of
about three feet, and rose straight up. The roof of the house, jutting
out over the window, cut it from further view. During the entire time
of the sighting, about thirty-six seconds, she had heard a muffled
noise like that of a jet engine warming up. She had tried several times
to waken her husband, by kicking him, but without success. When the
object had gone, she went back to bed and slept.
When she awoke at 11:00 the next morning and mentioned her experience
to the family, she learned that ten-year-old John Fitzgerald, sleeping
in the second bedroom, had also seen a strange light. He had apparently
wakened during the night to go to the bathroom and had returned to bed,
when he saw a bright light shining into his room and heard an unusual
noise. Climbing up on the radiator to look out of his window, he saw
something the color of a tin cup moving across the yard. After watching
for a few seconds until the light had gone, he went to bed and to sleep.
Puzzled by the incident, Mrs. Fitzgerald telephoned the local
newspaper, the Lorain _Journal_, and the story appeared in several Ohio
newspapers. Members of the Akron Committee, one of whom lived in the
nearby town of Lorain, soon arrived to question her and prepare the
summary of her experience. Other witnesses in Lorain were reported to
have seen the same UFO.
Even at first glance, the situation presented several unusual features.
The witness had delayed more than a week before notifying Air Force
investigators, yet she threatened to notify her congressman unless some
action were taken soon. She had not waited for action, however, but by
the same mail had written to her congressman requesting him to obtain
an explanation from the Air Force. The summary of her experience,
prepared with the help of members of the UFO Research Committee of
Akron, was equally remarkable. Even though her dark-adapted eyes had
just been assaulted by a bright light and the object had been in view
for a maximum of only thirty-six seconds, she provided a description so
detailed that it almost suggested a photographic memory.
On October 3, three days after her letter reached ATIC, two Air Force
men, Technical Sergeant A and Technical Sergeant B, who were specially
trained in the investigation of UFO incidents, arrived in Lorain. After
a day spent in studying such pertinent matters as the local geography,
the records of the Weather Bureau, the Coast Guard station, and the
local railway, on October 4 they called on the witnesses.
Again the situation was unusual. Mrs. Fitzgerald’s husband did not
appear. With Mrs. Fitzgerald and young John, however, was Mr. C, the
member of the local UFO group who had spent several days helping her
prepare her account. To the amazement of the sergeants, Mr. C seemed to
assume that he was in charge of the interview, answered the questions
put to Mrs. Fitzgerald, and continually interrupted with questions
and statements of his own. After half an hour of this frustrating
procedure, Sergeant A led Mr. C out into the yard. In the house,
Sergeant B resumed the inquiry and filled out the official report form.
Few questions were asked of the boy because both the details and the
phraseology of his description seemed to echo adult conversations
overheard during the two weeks that had elapsed since the sighting.
According to the account prepared by the Akron Committee, the boy had
been frightened by a light so bright that he had to shield his eyes.
(The time was unknown, and the light may or may not have been the one
observed by Mrs. Fitzgerald.) Climbing on top of the radiator to look
out of the window, he had seen the UFO and watched it take off into
the air, and then had gone back to bed and to sleep. Sergeant B had
a young son of about the same age. That a normal ten-year-old boy
should not call out and try to awaken the household when confronted
with a whirling, humming, dome-shaped spaceship some twenty-two feet in
diameter and six feet high, moving through his own yard in the middle
of the night, seemed too improbable to warrant serious questioning.
After finishing with the Fitzgeralds, the sergeants called on other
supposed witnesses in Lorain. Satisfied that they had completed a
thorough investigation, they returned to Dayton and presented the
information to their superior officers for evaluation. None of the
evidence suggested that the phenomenon had been a spacecraft[XIII-12].
The UFO had been the “special effect” of a peculiar combination of
circumstances:
1. The time. The sighting had occurred about 3 A.M.; the exact
moment was not known and could not be determined.
2. The geography. The shore of Lake Erie lay about three fifths
of a mile north of the Fitzgerald house. South of the house,
roughly 100 yards away, ran the tracks of the New York Central
Railway. Southwest of the house about one and a half miles
stood a steel foundry.
3. The weather. A drizzling rain was falling at the time of the
sighting. There was some haze and wind; no moonlight.
4. Other factors, (a) Between midnight and 4 A.M. a Coast Guard
cutter equipped with an eight-inch spotlight had been plying
back and forth on Lake Erie, searching for an overdue cabin
cruiser. At about 3 A.M. the cutter had been headed east toward
Lorain, reaching there at 3:15, had then continued east beyond
Sheffield to Avon, before turning back to the Lorain lifeboat
station and berthing at 4 A.M. (b) At 2:52 A.M. a train had
left the Lorain railroad station, roughly three miles from
the Fitzgerald house. Eight minutes later it would have been
passing south of the house at a distance of about 100 yards.
The engine was using a rotating headlight.
From these facts it was possible to reconstruct the probable sequence
of events that produced the UFO: In the hour or so before the sighting,
the witness had been sitting up alone watching the late movie on TV.
The film that night was a horror movie, _Dracula’s Daughter_. About 3
A.M., soon after the witness had gone to bed, the Coast Guard cutter
on Lake Erie was traveling east toward Lorain, was very near the harbor
and was flashing its spotlight toward shore. The light had briefly
illuminated the two bedrooms of the Fitzgerald house and had roused
Mrs. Fitzgerald. At that distance, between three and four miles, the
beam would have spread and would have been dispersed still more by the
drops of rain falling. By the time Mrs. Fitzgerald reached the window
and pulled back the curtains, the searchlight was gone. At the same
time, however, the train that left Lorain at 2:52 was passing south of
the house, using its rotating headlight and producing a roaring noise
made more piercing by the moist atmosphere. Looking through the wet
glass of the window, the witness saw the beam of the train’s headlight
moving through the haze in the yard. Smoke from the nearby foundry was
also being blown into the yard. Illuminated by the circular beam of
light, the smoke seemed to be a glowing, solid object that moved back
and forth and emitted clouds of gray-pink smoke.
In summary, the Air Force concluded that Mrs. Fitzgerald’s UFO was
an illusion produced by a combination of factors: an excited frame
of mind induced by _Dracula’s Daughter_, the spotlight on the Coast
Guard cutter, the rotating headlight of the train and the noise of its
engine, drifting smoke from the foundry, and the haze of the drizzly
night.
This conclusion provoked an explosion from the witness, who wrote her
congressman suggesting mental incompetence on the part of the Air Force
official who analyzed the case.
“_The Fitzgerald Report_”
The UFO Research Committee compiled and on December 1, 1958, published
a thirteen-page pamphlet (later reissued in amplified form and
copyrighted) entitled: “The Fitzgerald Report, A Complete and Detailed
Account of the Sighting of an Unidentified Flying Object, Sheffield
Lake, Ohio, September 21, 1958.” This document charged “duplicity”
in the Air Force treatment of UFO reports in general, and asserted
that the Fitzgerald investigation in particular had been “criminally
mishandled” and was a “disgrace to the U. S. Air Force and an insult
to the American public....” It further suggested that Sergeants A and
B be “disciplined” because their investigation was not adequate or
thorough, and that they had had “little or no intention of making an
honest investigation of this sighting.”
Copies of the pamphlet were mailed to eminent scientists throughout
the country, members of the United States House of Representatives and
the United States Senate, officers in the Air Force, the Secretary of
the Air Force, and the Secretary of Defense. The publication of such
charges against an ordinary private citizen might easily have caused
a suit for libel. The Air Force investigators, whatever their private
reactions may have been, had no such recourse; their accusers could act
with fair assurance of immunity from legal action.
The document made a number of specific accusations. Because of the
wide publicity given this attack, we shall discuss each point fully.
Our comments, appended in brackets, are based on official records of
the Air Force, the New York Central Railway, the United States Weather
Bureau, and the United States Coast Guard. Most of these facts were
available to the Akron Committee itself.
_Charge 1._ Because of the position of the Fitzgerald house, the
headlight of the train could not have shone into the bedroom windows.
[Correct. But the point is irrelevant. The Air Force did not suggest
that the train’s light shone into the window. The light could have
shone into the yard, however, and would have been visible to a witness
looking out of the window. The brilliant light that flashed in the
window and roused the witness did not come from the train but from the
spotlight of the Coast Guard cutter.]
_Charge 2._ Events taking place on the lake could not have had any
relation to the sighting because the shore was 3000 feet away and,
because of intervening houses and trees, a witness in the Fitzgerald
house could not see the lake. [Incorrect conclusion from the facts. The
beam of a spotlight on a boat moving one or two miles offshore (as was
the Coast Guard cutter at about 3 A.M.) could have been seen from the
house. The beam of such a light can be visible for great distances.
Reflected from the clouds and spread by the drops of moisture in
the air, it could easily have flashed into the window with great
brilliance.]
_Charge 3a._ The spotlight used by the Coast Guard cutter was of a
type that could not be focused like a searchlight; therefore the beam
could not have been reflected from the clouds to the Fitzgerald house.
[Incorrect. The spotlight used could operate with either a diffuse or a
narrow beam, could be focused like a searchlight, and could have been
reflected from the clouds to the house.]
_Charge 3b._ The Coast Guard cutter had used its spotlight and turned
the beam in the direction of the house only once that night, while
signaling another boat at a time two hours earlier than the sighting
and a place roughly five miles from the house. [The December 1, 1958,
edition of the document gives the distance as 4½ miles; the 1959
edition gives 5½ miles. Whatever the true distance, the statement is
incorrect. A signaling incident did occur at the time and about the
place specified, but it had no relation to the Fitzgerald sighting. The
light was used frequently in the hours between midnight and 4 A.M., as
the cutter carried out its search for the missing cabin cruiser. In a
statement obtained by the Akron Committee itself, the chief boatswain’s
mate affirmed that “subject spotlight was flashed on and off a number
of times during the night, picking up objects in all directions. It
is hard to estimate how many times spotlights were snapped on and off
during subject search, but they were used quite often during short
periods of time.”]
_Charge 4._ The statement that the supposed confirmatory witness, Mrs.
S, could not recall anything unusual for the night of the sighting
was “a lie,” as evidenced by her signed statement. [Incorrect. When
the investigators visited Mrs. S, she asserted that she had nothing
to contribute. At about 2:30 A.M. (half an hour earlier than the
Fitzgerald sighting) she had indeed noticed a bright-red glow that
had startled her at first until she realized that it probably came
from the nearby Ohio Edison plant or from the foundry. The signed
statement printed by the Akron Committee in the December 1958 edition
of the document bears no date. The notarized statement used in the 1959
edition is dated March 25, six months after the sighting had occurred.
After the Air Force interview, apparently, Mrs. S had changed her mind
for reasons unknown.]
_Charge 5._ The statement that another confirmatory witness, Mr. G,
was not available for interview was “pathetic” because it was Mrs.
G, not Mr. G, who saw the UFO. [The point of this accusation is not
clear. Because of a typographical error in a letter, “Mrs.” was changed
to “Mr.” The fact remains that the supposed witness, Mrs. G, was not
available. Also, the light she reported had appeared about 2 A.M., an
hour before the Fitzgerald sighting.]
_Charge 6a._ It was not true that a misty rain with haze and mist had
occurred at the time of the sighting; the witness herself stated that
it was not raining. [Incorrect. The Cleveland Weather Bureau recorded
continual slight precipitation between midnight and 7 A.M.: .20 inches
were recorded between 2 and 4 A.M. When asked whether it was raining
when she saw the UFO, the witness replied, “It had rained a few hours
before,” a vague response suggesting that she had not noticed the
weather at the time of the sighting. Other parts of her account,
however, strongly indicate rain. Although the night was warm (about 65
degrees F. at 3 A.M.), her bedroom window was closed.]
_Charge 6b._ It was not true that smoke from the steel plant southwest
of the house could have been a factor in the sighting, because the
direction of the wind was wrong. [Incorrect. The Weather Bureau
recorded “WSW and SW” winds that night averaging ten miles an hour;
coming from the southwest, the winds would have blown the smoke
northeast, directly toward the house.]
_Charge 7a._ The sergeants did not make a house-to-house check among
the neighbors to obtain confirmatory evidence. [Correct. Such a
time-consuming procedure would not have been justified. The neighbors
had had two weeks in which to report a visiting spaceship. No such
report had been made, even by the neighbor in whose yard the noisy
object was supposed to have hovered while emitting puffs of smoke.]
_Charge 7b._ They did not ask Mrs. Fitzgerald to make a drawing of the
UFO. [Correct. Before their visit she had already made such a drawing,
prepared with the help of members of the Akron Committee who had shown
her a sketch of an alleged spaceship reproduced several years earlier
in an Air Force pamphlet[XIII-13]. With this sketch before her to
aid her memory, Mrs. Fitzgerald had described her UFO to a draftsman
provided by the committee. Unsurprisingly, the resulting sketch was
very similar to the picture used as an example. A drawing obtained in
this way could have no value as evidence.]
_Charge 7c._ The sergeants failed to ask enough questions about the
motions of the object. [Incorrect. The standard form for reporting
unidentified flying objects contains questions specifically designed to
describe the motion of an unknown; all these questions were asked and
answered.]
_Charge 7d._ They used only the standard report form; it did not
include questions that allowed Mrs. Fitzgerald to express all her
ideas of what she had seen. [Correct. The questions are designed to
elicit observed physical facts; it does not require all the witness’s
interpretations.]
_Charge 7e._ They did not take notes during the interview. [Correct.
In filling out the report form they obtained all the necessary
information. They had been trained not to take additional notes because
some witnesses become nervous when they see that their remarks are
being written down.]
_Basic charge 7._ These “omissions” in procedure proved that the
sergeants had little intention of making an honest investigation.
[Incorrect. They omitted no query that might have yielded useful
evidence. Their duty was to report and try to account for the
phenomenon observed by Mrs. Fitzgerald, not to record her belief in a
hypothetical spaceship. The details of structure and motion that Mr.
C wanted to insert in the record were mere impressions based on his
assumption that the UFO was a solid object under intelligent control.]
The document repeatedly charged that the investigators asked too
few questions, and implied that they asked only five of Mrs.
Fitzgerald--yet she answered all the many questions in the standard
report form. Furthermore, Mr. C had no way of knowing just how many and
what questions were asked; during all the latter part of the interview
he was outside the house.
Perhaps the best comment on the Fitzgerald Report and on the activities
of civilian saucer-investigation groups in general is that of Dr.
Thornton Page, the eminent astronomer who in 1952 served on the
scientific panel to evaluate UFO reports (see _Chapter_ VII). After
receiving a copy of the Fitzgerald Report, he wrote to a member of the
Akron Committee:
“As a scientist I am interested in unexplained phenomena, but the
one or ones responsible for Mrs. Fitzgerald’s sighting is or are
undoubtedly highly complex. It is just as false to say simply that
she saw a flying saucer 20 feet in diameter as it is to say that she
saw nothing, or that she simply saw the train headlight on a mist.
Certainly, I would not expect a pair of Air Force investigators to
be able to explain her sighting (and the others) satisfactorily from
interviews two weeks after the event. It would be ridiculous to
propose that a team of experts in the fields of physics, psychology,
meteorology, engineering and railroading be sent to Sheffield Lake,
Ohio, to study these sightings from all possible angles.
“I have already written to you and to others that your fundamental
error is in oversimplifying your explanations of complex natural
phenomena by assuming a common cause without justification. If you
say that everything you cannot understand is caused by gremlins, then
gremlins are everywhere! And the Air Force would need a much larger
budget to investigate every sighting or hearing or feeling of a gremlin!
“... The onus is not on the Air Force or me to prove that no flying
saucer was present that night; the onus is on you and your UFO Research
Committee to prove that there is _no_ other explanation of what was
seen and heard.”
_The Open Mind_
Of the many astronomical observatories in the United States and
abroad, none has ever photographed an object that remotely resembled
a spaceship. Since 1957, hundreds of members of Moonwatch teams
throughout the world have watched the skies to record passages of the
many artificial satellites, but no Moonwatch team has yet reported the
presence of a spaceship. Radar stations on all continents keep track
of every artificial satellite and fragment of satellite orbiting the
earth. In February 1963 there were 284 such objects, originating in
Canada, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States. If an interloper
from beyond our planet should join the parade, Space Track stations
would at once detect its presence.
The Air Force has found no evidence of any kind that anyone has ever
seen, heard, smelled, photographed, touched, or in any way detected a
trace of an interplanetary spacecraft. Extraterrestrial visitors have
not yet arrived, and may never arrive. If and when they do, our Air
Force wants to be the first to know.
The Air Force will continue to investigate reports of unidentified
flying objects and to treat them as “serious business.”[XIII-14] The
security of the nation depends on this watchfulness. When a pilot
sees a bright object flashing through the sky and cannot immediately
recognize it, he knows that he may be looking at a meteor, a balloon,
a bird, a sundog, a planetary mirage, or another plane. On the other
hand, since he may be catching a significant glimpse of a guided
missile or an aircraft from beyond the United States, he promptly
reports another UFO. The Air Force cannot afford to guess what is in
our skies. They want to _know_.
The creative scientist, eternally curious, keeps an open mind toward
strange phenomena and novel ideas, knowing that we have only begun to
understand the universe we live in. He remembers, too, that Biot’s
discovery that meteorites were “stones from the sky” was at first
greeted with disbelief, and he hopes never to be guilty of similar
obtuseness. But an open mind does not mean credulity or a suspension of
the logical faculties that are man’s most valuable asset.
Human beings now stand on the threshold of space. Visits to and from
other worlds may occur in the future, bringing new facts and new
interpretations of reality that we cannot now imagine. No evidence yet
found indicates that such visits have begun. No fact so far determined
suggests that a single unidentified flying object has originated
outside our own planet.
[XIII-1] Keyhoe, D. E. _The Flying Saucer Conspiracy._ New York: Henry
Holt & Co., 1955.
[XIII-1a] Tacker, L. J. _Flying Saucers and the U. S. Air Force._
Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960.
[XIII-2] Keyhoe, D. E. _Flying Saucers from Outer Space._ New York:
Henry Holt & Co., 1953.
[XIII-3] _UFO Investigator_ (March 1960).
[XIII-4] _UFO Investigator_ (August-September 1958).
[XIII-5] _UFO Investigator_ (April-May 1961).
[XIII-6] _UFO Investigator_ (July-August 1960).
[XIII-7] Keyhoe, D. E. _Flying Saucers: Top Secret._ New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1960.
[XIII-8] Lorenzen, C. E. “The Psychology of UFO Secrecy,” _Flying
Saucers_ (October 1958), p. 12 ff.
[XIII-9] Davidson, L. [Letter] _Flying Saucers_ (October 1958), p. 79.
[XIII-10] Davidson, L. “An Open Letter to Saucer Researchers,” _Flying
Saucers_ (March 1962), p. 36.
[XIII-11] _The Fitzgerald Report_, The UFO Research Committee of Akron,
Ohio, 1958.
[XIII-12] Air Force Files.
[XIII-13] Project Blue Book, _Special Report No. 14_, ATIC,
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. May 5, 1955.
[XIII-14] New York _Times_, February 28, 1960.
APPENDIX
UFO AND OTHER INCIDENTS REFERRED TO
_Date_ _Place_ _Associated _Page_
name_