Part 17
Similar incidents have been reported by Soviet pilots. In the summer of 1956, a Soviet transport plane flying at about 10,000 feet was struck by ball lightning during a very rough flight through a stormy cold front. A fiery red-orange ball ten to fifteen inches in diameter appeared in front of the aircraft, swerved to the left, struck the left propeller and exploded with a loud detonation and a blinding white flash. The intense electrical discharge destroyed radio communication between the plane and the ground and disabled the radio compass. In attempting to disconnect the antenna, the radio operator received an electric shock. When the plane landed and was examined, one of the blades of the left propeller was found to be slightly damaged and a small fused area and a deposit of soot were found on the edge of the airfoil a few inches from its end[IX-13].
A similar case occurred in December 1956, when a Soviet jet had entered a storm cloud and was climbing through it. As the plane reached the top of the cloud, at an altitude of 12,000 to 15,000 feet, ball lightning suddenly appeared a short distance ahead and to the right of the plane, and exploded with a dull but piercing noise and a blinding flash; the ball then broke into a series of beads. Although one of the engines close to the ball died at the instant of the explosion, the crew were able to start it again and the flight continued normally. After landing and finding no mechanical damage, they concluded that the engine had failed temporarily because the explosion had formed a region of intense rarefied air that deprived the engine of oxygen[IX-13].
Ball lightning has often been reported near the ground, as in the Levelland case. In the summer of 1934 Mr. Durward, a British meteorologist, while driving along the bank of a lake observed the phenomenon: “It began to rain heavily, with slight or moderate thunder and lightning. His son, a boy of twelve, was opening the iron gates, spaced at intervals on this road, and found one difficult to open. Mr. Durward, while walking the short distance from the motor-car to the gate to assist his son, saw among the pine trees on his left what looked like a ball of fire about 12 in. in diameter moving towards them. It struck the iron gatepost farthest from the latch. There was no noise, but the boy, who had his hand on the latch, gave a yell; for the next few hours he was unable to lower his arm.”[IX-12]
In Levelland the night of November 2 conditions were ideal for the formation of ball lightning. For several days the area had been experiencing freak weather, and on the night in question had been visited by rain, thunderstorms, and lightning. Shortly before the glowing sphere approached the truck, the two men had noticed a lightning flash in a nearby field. The original description of the phenomenon--a “flaming ball” or a “fiery tornado” that floated toward and over the truck and detonated with light and heat--fits the classic picture of ball lightning. The truck’s engine may have died for one of several reasons. The rain during the evening could have seeped under the hood and soaked the ignition or dampened the spark plugs. The feed line may have been clogged. Or the region of highly rarefied air created by the ball lightning may temporarily have deprived the engine of oxygen.
Of the other drivers near Levelland that night who reported having trouble with balky motors and seeing a blazing object like an egg-shaped fireball, three probably saw ball lightning. Others, after hearing Saucedo’s frightening story, perhaps unconsciously dramatized their own experiences and magnified ordinary lightning flashes into attacking fiery objects. It is significant that although the night was stormy, only Saucedo reported seeing the ordinary lightning that normally accompanies a thunderstorm.
Since ball lightning is short-lived and cannot be preserved as tangible evidence, its appearance in Levelland on the night of November 2 can never be absolutely proved, even though this explanation fits all the facts--facts that in themselves do not warrant so lengthy a study. Only the saucer proponents could have converted so trivial a series of events--a few stalled automobiles, balls of flame in the sky at the end of a thunderstorm--into a national mystery. Ball lightning doubtless accounts for other UFO reports, such as the phenomenon observed at Lock Raven Dam on October 26, 1958, when two men returning late at night from a fishing trip saw a flaming ball hovering above the superstructure of a bridge; the ball exploded with a loud noise and a brilliant white flash and disappeared.
_E-M and Non-E-M Saucers_
The next UFOs reported in this series belonged to the old-fashioned, non-E-M variety. From White Sands Proving Grounds near Alamogordo, New Mexico, came a report that military police, while patrolling the up-range in a jeep about 2:30 Sunday morning (a few hours after the Saucedo incident), had seen a brilliant reddish-orange light, shaped like an egg, hovering in the sky. From its apparent distance (two to three miles away) and apparent size (as large as a grapefruit held at arm’s length), the men deduced that it was a huge object, 75 to 100 yards in diameter[IX-2]. After remaining motionless for about three minutes, it descended toward the ground and disappeared. (According to some versions, it later rose into the sky and then disappeared.) Members of another jeep patrol soon matched this tale with the report that on Sunday night about eight o’clock they had seen a bright, glowing object hovering in the sky but, instead of landing, it suddenly climbed until it got so far up it looked like a star. Both jeeps, it should be noted, continued to function normally.
Officials at White Sands soon dampened the excitement. The description of the light that appeared at 2:30 A.M. included certain doubtful factors. The night had been overcast and so dark that the stars were not visible, although the cloud cover was broken at intervals. Since the sighting had not included any object of known distance or known size for comparison, the estimates of the UFO’s distance and size were of no value. The light might have been small and close; it might equally well have been huge and far away. Under the circumstances, the most probable explanation was that the men had glimpsed the moon (then roughly half full) through broken clouds, and that the apparent movement was an illusion produced by the moving clouds. The Sunday evening UFO was unquestionably the planet Venus. Then nearly at maximum brilliance, it was a conspicuous object in the western sky after sunset and inspired many saucer reports during this week of anxiety.
The White Sands incidents had reached the papers, however, and contributed to the general hysteria. By Monday afternoon, flying eggs were allegedly stopping automobiles as far north as Canada, but the Southwest continued to hold the center of the UFO stage against all competition.
On Monday night, November 4, the Alamogordo, New Mexico, radio station broadcast a dramatic interview with an engineer from Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico, describing his sighting of an E-M-radiating UFO at least 500 feet long. About one o’clock on Monday afternoon, Mr. X stated, he was returning to base after a weekend in El Paso[IX-4]. While driving along a desert stretch of U. S. Highway 54 near the town of Orogrande, he noticed a group of cars stopped ahead of him, their passengers standing in the road, pointing at the sky. Looking up, he saw an iridescent egg-shaped object at least 500 feet long--more than twice the size of the UFOs reported in the preceding two days. As it approached, the flying egg exerted a force that killed the engine of his car, generated a wave of heat that gave him a bad burn, and demonstrated a startling new characteristic: it silenced the radio in his car. (During the next few days, reports of similar encounters usually included a jammed radio.) When the UFO took off toward the mountains and disappeared, Mr. X started his car again and drove on into Alamogordo to the home of a friend, Mrs. Coral Lorenzen.
One of the most zealous amateur investigators of UFO reports, Mrs. Lorenzen had founded the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) (see _Chapter_ XIII) in January 1952, and from 1954 to 1956 had been employed at Holloman Air Force Base. After listening to Mr. X’s story and examining the notes he had scribbled during the sighting (unfortunately they proved to be illegible, but for some reason no one has ever suggested that the pen or pencil was also hexed by the UFO), she hurried him down to the local radio station where he made the taped interview that was broadcast later that evening.
A daylight visit by an E-M flying egg 500 feet in length would supposedly have attracted the attention of many witnesses. Air Force investigators could find only one: Mr. X. According to his testimony, the passengers of several automobiles (his estimate of the number of cars varied from time to time but he eventually settled on ten) had stood in the road watching the unknown object. A persistent search by Air Force officials failed to locate any one of these persons. The witness showed no sign of the burns he allegedly suffered. In short, the only evidence to support his story was Mr. X’s own and the authorities sensibly concluded that the incident was either a hoax or a hallucination, inspired by newspaper publicity about Levelland’s flying eggs.
Tuesday morning’s chief contribution to the UFO epidemic was not to be laughed off so easily, for it was made by trained military personnel. At 5:10 A.M. on November 5, the Coast Guard cutter _Sebago_, traveling north in the Gulf of Mexico, detected an erratically maneuvering UFO on the radarscope. The swiftly moving object would race across and off the scope, only to reappear almost immediately from another direction and position and again move off the scope at incredible speed. After ten minutes the radar target vanished, but watchers on the deck glimpsed a glowing object, brilliant as a planet; it streaked across the sky just above the northwest horizon and vanished. The unknown radar targets then returned and continued to fill the scope with their incredible movements until 5:37, when they finally disappeared and did not return.
This mystery, too, yielded to orderly investigation. Air Force radar experts made a detailed analysis of the data and positively identified the mysterious returns. They had not come from the complex air traffic overhead, as had first been suggested, nor from a fantastically maneuverable spaceship. They were merely false targets produced by the weather conditions (see _Chapter_ VIII). The brilliant light that flashed across the sky was not reported by the radarscope and had no relation to the radar returns. In view for a few seconds at most, brilliant in the morning twilight (the sun rose some fifty minutes later), the flash of light was probably a distant meteor--November is rich in meteor displays.
_The Saturnian Visitors_
Tuesday evening while the nation was still wondering about the flying eggs in New Mexico and the invisible UFOs that buzzed the _Sebago_, welcome comic relief appeared. A man named Schmidt, a grain buyer, announced that during the afternoon he had visited with the crew of a flying saucer that had landed to make repairs. While driving in the country near Kearney, Nebraska, he said, he had noticed a bright flash about a quarter of a mile away. Going closer to investigate, he perceived a huge silvery ship a hundred feet long, thirty feet wide, and fourteen feet high, which had landed in a dry river bed. The motor of his car then died. He got out and was walking toward the ship when a light shot out and paralyzed him. The ship opened and two men emerged. After searching him for concealed weapons, they released him from paralysis and invited him into the ship, where he spent half an hour chatting with these strangers and their female companions, mostly in High German and English. (He knew that they came from outer space but not until some weeks later, when they paid him a second visit, did he discover that they were natives of the planet Saturn.)[IX-14] After he left the ship it rose straight up into the sky and disappeared, while he hurried back to town to report to the sheriff, to broadcast an account of his experience over the local radio, and to give his story to the newspapers.
It is perhaps a measure of the panic level that week that local officials actually examined the ground at the “landing” site, looking for evidence. They found none. The four “hydraulic rams” that allegedly supported the huge machine had left no imprint on the sand of the dry river bed. Traces of oil found on the ground were tested chemically and proved to be the same brand that the witness carried in the trunk of his car.
Gaining national notoriety from this incident, Schmidt soon became a popular lecturer at flying-saucer clubs, thrilling the audience with tales of later visits from the Saturnians and his journeys in their spaceship to the Arctic Circle, through the waters under the North Pole, and even into outer space. A year or so later his extraterrestrial friends allegedly tipped him off to the location of certain valuable minerals on earth, including veins of quartz that had the desirable property of curing cancer. To mine this quartz and thus make it available to humanity, he enlisted the sympathy and financial aid of a number of lonely, wealthy widows. Some of these ladies eventually came to believe that they had been the victims of fraud and, in 1961, a California jury agreed with them. The Saturnians apparently have not yet reappeared to help their friend out of his difficulties.
_Surveillance by Flying Eggs_
Wednesday November 6 was relatively calm on the UFO front, although automobile engines died, radios malfunctioned, and TV screens blurred at about the time that lights were reported in the sky in Texas, New Mexico, Illinois, and Canada. Accounts received later by saucer organizations stated that on Tuesday (or Wednesday) night an orange-colored, whistling, E-M type of UFO had hovered near Fort Itaipu in Brazil, caused a temporary failure of the electric lights, and then knocked out the generating plant for several moments. Since the alleged visitation occurred in a foreign country it was not, of course, open to study by the United States Air Force. In any case investigation would have been difficult, since the report failed to include such facts as the exact time of appearance, position, and direction of movement of the UFO. The witnesses, whose names were not given, apparently related the incident under pledge of secrecy to other persons who insisted on remaining anonymous, who passed the story on to still others who refused to be named, who in turn gave the news to reporters, who signed only their initials[IX-15]. So insubstantial a tale obviously does not merit serious investigation. The dimming of electric lights and the capricious behavior of a generating system are not extraordinary phenomena and no UFO is required to account for them.
The next incident to gain publicity in this amazing week occurred on Thursday (or Wednesday) evening when a UFO allegedly landed in Ohio and then vanished. Driving home in the early evening along a country road, a Mr. Olden Moore saw a glowing UFO in the sky. At first it looked small, like a star, but it rapidly increased in size and split apart in the air as it descended and apparently landed in a nearby field. Moore stopped his car, intending to investigate, but for some reason he changed his mind and instead drove on home to get his wife. When they returned and searched the field they found nothing. Nevertheless, they reported the incident to the authorities and next day a Civilian Defense official, arriving to check the ground where the UFO supposedly had landed, reported the level of radioactivity “far above normal.”
A woman living half a mile away from the field in question reported that, although she herself had not seen a UFO, her TV set had blurred at about the time of the sighting, and on the following day she found that her car, parked near the house, was pockmarked. Applying his Geiger counter to the car, the Civilian Defense official pronounced it radioactive[IX-16]. This UFO apparently possessed highly selective E-M powers: it did not stop the engine of Mr. Moore’s car but did interfere with the operation of a TV set half a mile away!
Air Force investigators patiently collected and sifted the facts. The supposed landing site showed nothing abnormal--the grass was not burned, the earth was not disturbed, no foreign material could be found. The normal radioactivity of the ground in the area measured .18 milliroentgens; at the supposed landing site the measure had been .20 milliroentgens. This difference of .02 is not “far above normal” but well within the probable error in the calibration of the instruments.
Interviews with other Ohioans who had also seen the glowing unknown provided the answer: the UFO was a large meteor, conspicuous in the dusk of early evening. Traveling directly toward the witness, it had looked like a glowing sphere suspended in the air and rapidly increasing in brightness. Near the end of its flight it split into two or more pieces and fell silently to the earth, not “in the next field” but perhaps many miles away. The blurring of the TV set may have been mere coincidence or, if the meteor had actually passed close by, may have resulted from the ionized trail of the meteor (see _Chapter_ V).
_Saucerdom’s Miraculous Electromagnetic Force_
Most of us remember the nursery tale of Chicken-Little, who started a panic in the barnyard kingdom with her eyewitness report that the sky was falling: “I saw it with my eyes, I heard it with my ears, and a piece of it fell on my tail.” Calm was restored in the kingdom, after a time, when the prosaic truth came to light: a falling acorn, not a piece of the sky, had grazed the credulous chick.
In somewhat similar fashion, the hysteria caused by the car-stalling flying eggs subsided. As the Russian satellites gliding across the night sky proved more interesting to the public than hypothetical spaceships, flying-saucer stories occupied less and less space in the daily papers and the number of UFO reports dwindled. Air Force investigators worked hard at the job of separating facts from fantasy and by Saturday November 9, 1957, the end of a wild week, the panic was over. During the two years following, 1958 and 1959, fewer than a dozen E-M-equipped UFOs were reported over the entire American continent.
The civilian flying-saucer groups, however, rejected the normal explanations of the November reports except that of the Schmidt-Saturnian meeting, which all but the cultists indignantly denounced as a hoax publicized to embarrass sincere students of UFOs. Dissatisfied with the solutions found by the Air Force, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) carried out an independent study (see _Chapter_ XIII) of the November sightings, and in June 1960 issued a booklet entitled “Electro-Magnetic Effects Associated With Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO’s).” After examining many reports of E-M phenomena and rejecting an unspecified number as unreliable, members of the investigating committee studied the evidence in a series of eighty-one incidents occurring over a period of fifteen years, roughly a third of which were reported during the week of the Levelland panic[IX-17].
The cases include instances in which, allegedly, electrical appliances failed to function, at the same time and the same place in which a witness observed a UFO. In some cases a witness observed electromagnetic effects but did not see a UFO, at the same time that a neighboring witness saw a UFO but did not observe electromagnetic effects. The effects in question include the stopping, missing, sputtering, and near-quitting of automobile motors; the dimming or flickering of automobile headlights; static, roar, or fading of car radios; the dimming and brightening of house lights; the dimming and brightening of cabin lights in airplanes; the blurring of TV screens; the temporary loss of picture and/or sound in a TV set; the stopping of watches and clocks; and odd noises over a telephone wire.
This list may astonish the average citizen who has often endured similar annoyances and never thought of blaming UFOs for his troubles. Most householders know that watches run down, that houselights dim and brighten with the changing demands made on the city electrical system, and that a plane flying over a house can blur the image on a TV screen. There can be few readers of this book who have not at some time experienced such brief frustrations with automobiles, radios, TV sets, and timepieces--the ordinary troubles that keep our repairmen in business without assistance from UFOs.
To the heterogeneous data provided by these eighty-one cases, the committee attempted to apply the precise tools of logic and mathematics in order to establish a correlation between UFOs and electromagnetic effects, and concluded that a cause-and-effect relationship probably did exist.
With suitable material, statistical methods can suggest a correlation between any two sets of facts and can estimate the probability that the correlation is significant and not due to chance. No competent statistician, however, would try to apply the methods to such amorphous and uncertain data as those used by the committee. More than a third of the incidents cited come from newspaper accounts or the private files of saucer organizations in foreign countries. All leave many unanswered questions. At least two involve fully identified objects: the great fireball of September 18, 1954 (p. 92), and the three fireballs of April 6, 1955, may well have caused some radio interference but they were not UFOs. Even with the well-reported cases, a conscientious historian would find it nearly impossible to determine precisely what the witnesses saw, what they heard, what they did, and what they said.
The various printed accounts of the Levelland incidents, for example, vary in many details. The events took place in an atmosphere of excitement and the stories inevitably changed slightly with each retelling. The reports of Air Force investigators, records in the files of civilian saucer organizations, statements in newspapers, magazines, and books--no two give exactly the same version of any given incident. Although the points of disagreement are often trivial, they are sometimes vital to finding the correct explanation.
Even if, for the sake of argument, a statistician were willing to accept the evidence of the eighty-one cases at face value, he would still not attempt to establish a correlation between UFOs and E-M effects. The probability that a (postulated) UFO will appear at a given time or place is unknown; the probability that an electrical appliance will fail to work at a given time or place is equally unknown. Hence the probability that the two phenomena will occur together at a given time and place is a concept that has no meaning.
_Effects and Causes_
Asked to explain what caused the failures of engines, radios, watches, etc. reported during the week of the Levelland sightings, any high school physics student who answered, “Some new kind of electromagnetic force” would properly receive a grade of zero. Admittedly there are physical phenomena that the scientist does not yet understand, but he does know that electrical and magnetic forces do not and can not perform all the feats attributed to them by saucer enthusiasts.