Part 16

Since the ground spotter had a visual target and the traffic controller had a radar target, he telephoned to compare notes on positions; as they were talking, the spotter interrupted the conversation to say that the light was beginning to move southwest toward Rapid City. Checking the radarscope and finding a fast-moving target the controller sent two of his men running outside to look at the sky. After a few seconds they reported that they could see a large bluish-white light moving toward them from the northeast. It made “a wide sweep” around Rapid City and then returned to a stationary position in the northeast where it had first appeared. (Unfortunately the account does not state clearly whether the “wide sweep” was observed visually or on radar.)

By this time all the witnesses were greatly excited by the UFO. The master sergeant couldn’t decide what to do next because he kept thinking, “They’re bigger than all of us!” but the traffic controller notified the F-84 patrolling in the west and asked for an intercept. The pilot soon found the light, which was still stationary. He began the chase, but when he had approached to within an estimated three miles, the light rapidly began to retreat. He continued the chase directly north for 120 miles (during which both the jet and the UFO went off the ground scope) but he could not gain on the object. Running short of fuel, he turned back toward the base. The ground scope soon picked him up again and, a few seconds later, picked up an unknown target apparently trailing the jet by ten or fifteen miles.

A second jet then took to the air, located the light, and began the pursuit. Like the first pilot, he could not close the distance between him and the receding UFO. After performing various tests to convince himself that he wasn’t chasing a reflection, he finally turned on his radar gun camera. After a few seconds the red light blinked on, indicating a solid object ahead. The pilot thereupon asked permission to break off the intercept and, having taken a photograph, returned to base. As before, the ground scope picked up the returning jet but this time the UFO did not reappear on the scope. The controller then called officials at the filter center at Fargo, North Dakota. They had not received any UFO reports; a few minutes later, however, they called back to say that spotter posts between the two cities, on a southwest-northeast line, had indeed seen a bluish-white light.

Investigators from ATIC arrived promptly but they were not able to explain the sighting. Even the photographs showed nothing useful. Conclusion: unknown.

The incident remained unexplained chiefly because the investigators, like the witnesses, apparently assumed that a single unidentified flying object accounted for all the phenomena observed that evening. Although the available evidence is somewhat confusing, a careful study shows that, on the contrary, the visual and the radar targets could not have been the same.

When the ground spotter first reported the UFO, she described it as a stationary light low on the horizon. The radarscope, however, showed a target that was moving slowly, at an altitude of about 16,000 feet. Some minutes later, when the visual target did begin to move, the radar target speeded up. This was the only instance in which the movements of the two seemed to be roughly parallel. But in the excitement that followed, all the witnesses assumed that the two targets were identical. The published account[VIII-3, p. 303 ff.] does not distinguish clearly between the actions of the light and the movements of the blips on the radarscope.

Let us begin by reviewing the facts about the visual target. According to the witnesses on the ground, it was a brilliant bluish-white light that appeared on the northeast horizon and remained stationary during most of the period it was observed. At one time it seemed to advance rapidly toward the witnesses, make a wide sweep around Rapid City, which was a few miles away from the observers, and then return to its original position. According to the witnesses in the air, the light did not remain stationary but retreated from the pursuing plane and followed the returning plane, duplicating the plane’s speed and keeping the distance between them constant. The pilots based this interpretation, evidently, on the fact that the light did not vary in size or brilliance and thus seemed to pace the plane.

These descriptions all point to the same answer: that the light was a star or a planet. Since it was infinitely distant, the jets could not get any closer to it and at ground levels the image was distorted by peculiar atmospheric conditions. Mars had been absent from the night sky for months, and Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter were then morning stars; therefore the unknown could not have been a planet. However, the bright star Capella was on the northeast horizon at a declination of plus 46 degrees and would have been visible from both Fargo and Rapid City. A check of the Weather Bureau records shows that the night was clear and dark. The sun had set about an hour before the sighting began, and at that time in the evening there was no moonlight because the moon was in its last quarter. Visibility was about thirty-five miles and the wind was from the northeast, about four meters per second. There was a marked temperature inversion--9 degrees--at ground levels. Such an inversion could easily account for the erratic motions reported for the light.

There can be little doubt that the visual target was the star Capella.

The radar targets also were clearly the result of weather, just as the air-traffic controller had suspected when he first looked at the scope. Conditions were ideal--a calm, clear, warm summer night--for phantom echoes. The first radar target, moving southwest, was probably a return from some ground object. When the jet took to the air, the scope showed a different kind of UFO target, one that echoed the movements of the plane itself--retreating from the pursuer, advancing when the pursuer turned back--and was always farther away from the ground station than the plane itself.

Although saucer enthusiasts interpret these maneuvers as proof that the phantom was under intelligent control, radar experts recognize the familiar pattern in which a ghost echo is actually a return from the plane itself. Because of the temperature inversions the radar pulses do not return directly from the plane to the ground receiver but are deflected from the plane to the ground, then back to the plane, and thence on to the ground scope. The phantom echo always occurs from the same direction as the aircraft and is always “on the other side” of the plane (see p. 153).

This explanation also accounts for the evidence of the jet’s gun camera. The photographs taken showed nothing, although the radar warning light indicated a solid object ahead. After the pilot had switched on the set, however, there had been a brief delay before the red signal blinked on. During this interval the plane had not come any closer to the unknown light, but the radio waves had scattered from plane to ground and back to plane so that the gun radar did indeed detect a solid object--the plane itself!

In short, the evidence supports our conclusion that an image of the star Capella, distorted by the atmospheric conditions produced by a strong temperature inversion, accounted for the visual sightings; and that radar echoes from the pursuing jets, deflected by the same temperature inversion, accounted for the phantom targets on the ground radarscope and the gun radar.

[VIII-1] Keyhoe, D. E. _The Flying Saucer Conspiracy_. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1955.

[VIII-2] Air Force Files.

[VIII-3] Ruppelt, E. J. _The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects._ Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1956.

[VIII-4] Plank, V. G. “Spurious Echoes on Radar, A Survey.” Astia Document No. AD-215470, AFCRC-TR-59-210 (May 1959).

[VIII-5] Borden, R. C., and Vickers, T. K. “A Preliminary Study of Unidentified Targets Observed on Air Traffic Control Radars.” Technical Development Report No. 180, Civil Aeronautics Administration, Technical Development and Evaluation Center, Indianapolis, Indiana (May 1953).

[VIII-6] “Radar Objects Over Washington,” _Air Weather Service Bulletin_ (September 1954), pp. 52–57.

[VIII-7] Menzel, D. H. _Elementary Manual of Radio Propagation_. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1948.

[VIII-7a] ---- “Why Flying Saucers Show Up on Radar.” _Look_ magazine (September 9, 1952).

[VIII-8] Keyhoe, D. E. “What Radar Tells about Flying Saucers.” _True_ magazine (December 1952), p. 25 ff.

[VIII-9] Plank, V. G. Personal communication.

[VIII-10] Withrow, S. R. “Angels on Radar Scopes,” _Air Weather Service Bulletin_ (September 1954), pp. 48–51.

[VIII-11] Atlas, D. “Radar Studies of Meteorological ‘Angel’ Echoes,” _Journal of Atmospheric and Terrestrial Physics_, Vol. XV (1959), pp. 262–87.

[VIII-12] ---- “Possible Key to the Dilemma of Meteorological ‘Angel’ Echoes,” _Journal of Meteorology_, Vol. XVII (1960), pp. 95–103.

[VIII-13] ---- “Sub-horizon Radar Echoes by Scatter Propagation,” _Journal of Geophysical Research_, Vol. LXIV (1959), pp. 1205–18.

[VIII-14] Richardson, R. E.; Stacey, J. M.; Kohler, H. M.; and Naka, F. R., “Radar Observations of Birds,” _Proceedings of the Seventh Weather Radar Conference_ (November 1958).

[VIII-15] Harper, W. G. “Angels on Centimetric Radars Caused by Birds,” _Nature_, Vol. CLXXX (1957), p. 847.

[VIII-16] Ligda, M. G. H. “Radar Observations of Blackbird Flights,” _Texas Journal of Science_ (December 1958).

[VIII-17] Holzer, R., and Smith, W. (Eds.), Proceedings on the Conference on Atmospheric Electricity, Geophysics Research Directorate, Air Force Cambridge Research Center, AFCRC-TR-55-222 (December 1955).

[VIII-18] Eastwood, E; Bell, J. D.; and Phelp, N. R. “‘Ring Angels’ over Southeast England,” _Nature_, Vol. CLXXXIII (1959), pp. 1759–60.

_Chapter_ IX

E-M AND G-FIELDS IN UFO-LAND

The phenomenon of magnetism has always fascinated both scientists and laymen. Paracelsus believed that he could use a magnet to draw disease out from a person, transfer it to the ground, and thus cure the patient. Later practitioners believed that a sick person could regain his health by sleeping with head and feet oriented north to south so as to be in line with the earth’s magnetic poles. Laputa, the saucer-shaped floating island visited by Gulliver in his travels, was propelled by the attracting or repelling forces of a large magnet imbedded in the center of the island. In recent years magnetism has similarly been called on to account for some of the peculiar maneuvers allegedly performed by UFOs.

In the world of flying saucers an all-purpose electromagnetic (E-M) force, unknown to earth scientists, is supposed to be able to produce light and heat, disturb a compass, render an object radioactive, stop a wrist watch without damaging the man who wears it, interfere with the functioning of radio and TV sets, turn out the lights of automobiles, stop the action of gasoline engines, and aid in the creating of artificial gravitational fields (G-fields) around extraterrestrial spaceships.

UFOs equipped with E-M powers have occasionally been reported in France since 1954[IX-1], but they had rarely appeared in the United States until late in 1957 when freak weather in Texas, plus the birth of the space age, started a new wave of flying-saucer incidents. Few spectacular UFOs had appeared since the 1952 panic (_Chapter_ VII) and the average citizen had almost forgotten about flying saucers. Then on October 4, 1957, when Sputnik I went into orbit and opened the door to outer space, people once more began to watch the heavens uneasily. Uneasiness became alarm a month later when, with American satellites still sitting on the launching pad, Sputnik II roared into space. A ball of fire floating over a field in western Texas provided the small stimulus needed to turn alarm into hysteria, and for several weeks people tended to see spaceships in every cloud and every unfamiliar light in the sky. The reasoning seemed to be that if man with his limited powers could launch satellites to orbit the planet, why shouldn’t interplanetary ships already be visiting the earth?

In the months of November and December the Air Force received more UFO reports than during the entire ten months preceding, and the reports had their highest frequency in the single week following November 2[IX-2]. For a period of about eight days, if all the stories were true, our skies were crowded with flying saucers.

Spaceships with electromagnetic powers roved from the Dominican Republic to Alaska; they stopped automobiles, turned off headlights, jammed radios and stopped clocks in cars, blurred TV sets in the home, dimmed the cabin lights in airplanes, and altered a speedometer to register a dangerously high speed instead of the legal sixty miles per hour. (Whether the driver in question offered this novel defense to a judge in traffic court is unknown.) Police in squad cars pursued UFOs in Elmwood Park, Illinois; Danville, Illinois; and Hammond, Indiana. In Brazil, an orange-colored, whistling UFO hovered near Fort Itaipu and first caused a temporary failure of the lights, then knocked out the generating plant for several moments. A driver in Santa Fe, New Mexico, saw a UFO that not only stalled his car but also stopped the dashboard clock and the driver’s own wrist watch. A driver in western Texas saw a UFO that, not content with stopping the engine and radio of his car, also magnetized the right half of the bumper and a part of the fender. One driver reported that his car and those of several other motorists had stalled near Cortez, Colorado; he had not thought of looking at the sky, but any saucer enthusiast could have told him that a UFO must have been hovering there.

In addition to these special models equipped with Medusa-like powers, other spaceships allegedly landed briefly at the military installation at White Sands, New Mexico; harassed a United States Coast Guard ship in the Gulf of Mexico; landed in Ohio and raised the radioactivity level of the ground; and stopped in Nebraska for repairs.

_Stormy Weather in Texas_

The new type of UFO with electromagnetic (E-M) powers first attracted notice in this country by allegedly appearing near Levelland, Texas, on the night of November 2, 1957, a few hours before Sputnik II went into orbit. A small town with a population of about 8000, Levelland lies on the plains of western Texas about sixty miles from Plainview, site of a famous meteor shower, and only twenty-five miles from Lubbock, which a few years earlier had gained national fame with its “Lubbock lights” (p. 123). The region is normally an arid one, but at the beginning of November it was experiencing unusual weather--electrical storms and rain (the month proved to be the wettest ever recorded in western Texas).

About 11:15 that Saturday night, a farmworker named Pedro Saucedo (or Saucido) with his friend Joe Palaz (also given in various printed accounts as Palav, Salav, Salaz, Salvaz) was driving home from Levelland. A few miles northwest of the town he had turned off Route 116 into a side road, when both men noticed a flash of light in a field at the right. Evidently unalarmed, he continued driving and talking until suddenly the engine died and the lights went out. While trying to restart the motor, Saucedo (the similarity between “Saucedo” and “saucer” presents a diverting coincidence) glimpsed over his left shoulder something that looked like a flaming ball or a fiery tornado drifting rapidly toward the truck. A veteran of combat in Korea, Saucedo reacted instantaneously to the blazing unknown. As he described the experience later that night, “I jumped out of the truck and hit the dirt because I was afraid. I called to Joe but he didn’t get out. The thing passed directly over my truck with a great sound and a rush of wind. It sounded like thunder and my truck rocked from the flash.... I felt a lot of heat.” Crawling out and seeing the object disappear in the direction of Levelland, he restarted the engine and drove back to Levelland to report the incident to the sheriff[IX-2].

The sheriff was soon receiving reports from other persons who had been driving in the same area at about the same time. They said that they, too, had seen a blazing object which they described as a “flying egg” or “egg-shaped fireball.” Their cars, like Saucedo’s, had stalled and then restarted when the object disappeared. A number of townspeople telephoned the authorities to report bright flashes in the sky, and the police comment that “everyone who called was very excited”[IX-3] was probably an understatement.

Under headlines such as “Mystery Object Stalls Autos in West Texas,” these stories hit newspapers all over the nation. The news spread fast. All day Sunday dozens of persons in Texas and New Mexico were relating that they, too, had seen fiery objects and flashes of light in the sky the night before. An amazingly large number of citizens seem to have been out late that stormy Saturday night, but apparently none of them noticed any ordinary lightning--only phantom “somethings” variously described as a burning mass, a big light, an egg-shaped object 200 feet long lighted up as though it were on fire, something like neon lights, objects that were red, glowing, brilliant, fiery, bluish-green, or pulsating green.

Not surprisingly, with all this publicity, the original incident quickly began to take on new dimensions. Saucedo amplified his first statements and recalled that the object had been “torpedo-shaped,” “like a rocket, but much larger,” and that lights on the object had seemed to be winking on and off[IX-4].

For days the Russian satellites had to share the spotlight with the American flying eggs, while both amateur and professional investigators tried to solve the mystery. The proponents of UFOs deduced the presence of a flying saucer with E-M powers. Various astronomers, when urged by newsmen, reluctantly advanced off-the-cuff theories based on the meager printed accounts. Dr. La Paz, of the Institute of Meteoritics in New Mexico, suggested that the things seen at Levelland might have been fireballs. A reporter assigned to the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatories to cover Moonwatch observations of the new Sputnik gave a sketchy summary of the incident to Dr. Menzel, who also concluded that Saucedo might have seen an unusually bright meteor and, startled by its brilliance, might accidentally have killed the engine. Lacking news of Sputnik II, the reporter sent in a facetious story asserting that, according to the director of the Harvard College Observatory, the flying eggs were mirages that so frightened the drivers that they reacted by pressing a “nervous foot” on the accelerator and killing the engine. When the weather conditions at Levelland became known, of course, the meteor theory was immediately discarded. Dr. Nininger, of the American Meteorite Museum in Arizona, made the best guess of all: Saucedo had observed an example of that rare phenomenon, ball lightning[IX-5].

Within a few days an Air Force investigator visited Levelland to study the incident. Members of civilian saucer groups complained later that, since he spent only seven hours in the area, he had obviously not taken the problem seriously and could not have found the correct solution. Even seventy hours of labor, however, could not have produced a clearer picture. Saucedo had unquestionably had a frightening experience, very much as he originally described it. But as in many UFO sightings, most of the other reports had been stimulated chiefly by the general excitement. Three persons, not “dozens,” had seen the phenomenon near the ground. From ten to fifteen others (including the sheriff) had not observed it at close quarters but had merely seen brilliant flashes of light in the sky.

After studying the weather reports and the descriptions given by the various witnesses, the Air Force issued an explanation, unfortunately ambiguous because it omitted the necessary word “either,” stating that the phenomenon observed at Levelland had been “ball lightning or St. Elmo’s fire.” Supporters of the saucer theory seized on this ambiguity to protest, correctly, that ball lightning and St. Elmo’s fire are two different phenomena. They went on to conclude by some process of peculiar logic that neither ball lightning nor St. Elmo’s fire was involved and that the phenomenon had actually been a flying saucer.

Saucer publications have printed thousands of words to support this argument. The evidence, however, leads to an overwhelming probability: the fiery unknown at Levelland was ball lightning.

_The Phenomenon of Ball Lightning_

Most of us know very little about lightning. On the average, it causes some 180 deaths each year. Many persons when caught outdoors by a thunderstorm run to shelter under a tree, not realizing that the tree itself offers the most attractive target to the electrically charged clouds overhead. Even the scientists who make a special study of the phenomenon still have much to learn about the conditions that produce lightning and its various manifestations[IX-6].

The most familiar type is the lightning we see in stormy weather; it flashes in brilliant zigzags from zenith to horizon, darts from cloud to cloud, or strikes like a javelin toward earth. At night, particularly in the country where no city lights mask its brilliance, lightning can be a frightening elemental force. A form popularly called “heat” or “sheet” lightning is a familiar, almost playful phenomenon in the midwest and southwest, although comparatively rare on the east coast. In hot, humid weather it flares intermittently near the horizon, noiseless because the luminous “sheets” are merely reflections of an ordinary zigzag flash that is too far away to be heard. “Bead lightning” has also been reported, appearing as a chain of spheroids that gradually fade away as they discharge. A spectacular display of “pinched lightning,” an even rarer phenomenon (see Plate Va), was photographed in late August 1961 at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during a severe thunderstorm[IX-7]. Ball lightning, which seems to be commoner in Europe than in North America (just as tornadoes are commoner in North America than in Europe) is so little understood that some scientists have doubted its reality. In recent years, laboratory research has added much to our knowledge of ball lightning and Soviet scientists in particular have studied it as a possible weapon against enemy planes[IX-8].

Ball lightning is usually described as a luminous ball whose diameter ranges from a few inches to several feet; the color may be red to orange or blue to white. These lightning balls appear most frequently toward the end of an electrical storm when the air is highly ionized, often just after a nearby lightning flash. They look and act like solid objects. They can hang motionless or drift in the air, glide along telephone wires or fences, roll down chimneys and across the floor to radio or TV sets, float a few inches above the ground or high in the sky. The ball persists as an entity for a time ranging from several seconds to many minutes; it may then evaporate noiselessly, or may disappear with an explosive noise and a force that can damage nearby objects[IX-8a]. One of the few existing photographs of ball lightning was taken at Lincoln, Nebraska, on August 30, 1930 (see Plate Vb).

American, European, and Soviet scientists have suggested various theories, none of them entirely satisfactory, to explain the formation of ball lightning[IX-9, IX-10, IX-11]. These evanescent fiery globes probably represent some sort of continuous electric current perhaps held together by its own magnetic field, like the fabled hoop snake that could roll along the ground by holding its tail in its mouth.

In 1938 the pilot of a BOAC plane en route to Iraq, flying in dense cloud and rain at 8500 feet, reported that a ball of fire had entered the rear cabin and burst with a loud explosion. One or two minutes later it (or another lightning ball) entered the cockpit through the window which was open for visibility, singed the hair and eyebrows of the pilot, then bounced on through the forward passenger cabin and into the rear cabin, where it again exploded[IX-12].