Part 6

In rejecting the Air Force explanation of this incident, flying-saucer addicts ignored several embarrassing questions: If Captain Killian actually saw interplanetary craft, how did he fail to see the earthly aircraft operating at the same time and place? If the unknowns moved at a speed of 2000 miles an hour, how did Captain Killian and the crews of several other planes, flying at less than 300 miles an hour, keep the unknowns in sight for forty minutes? In that length of time the UFOs should have covered most of the distance to the Pacific.

Few persons, given the facts by responsible officials, would persist in denying the reality of the tankers and conjuring up a fleet of flying saucers to occupy the relevant cubic area of space. To the true enthusiast, however, these refueling planes remain incontrovertible proof that spacecraft are among us.

_... And Kites and Soap Bubbles_

Objects need not be as large as Skyhook balloons or jets to start a flying-saucer scare. Brightly illuminated advertising blimps have caused many UFO reports. Unfamiliar circumstances or a faulty perspective can manufacture spaceships out of things as small as seeds, spider webs, scraps of paper, or toy balloons.

In the autumn of 1947, during the first months of the saucer scare, many such UFOs were reported. One experienced observer, formerly a combat pilot, reported a flying saucer overhead at a height he estimated as 5000 feet. More careful study showed that the object was at a height of only about 250 feet and was suspended from small balloons. Later he learned that, as a joke, some boys had launched a paper saucer carried by helium-filled toy balloons. During this same period when everyone was talking about flying saucers, spaceships reported over an Iowa town one night turned out to be glowing bits of paper drifting from a fireplace chimney[III-13].

On March 16, 1961, according to the British radio, a resident of East Suffolk reported to the police that he had seen a spaceship land in a nearby field. Investigators soon found the craft: a fuel tank that had fallen from a passing plane.

A fleet of UFOs appeared late one afternoon in July 1961 to an observer driving west along Highway 54 from El Paso, Texas, to Alamogordo, New Mexico. It had been raining in the mountains, and wind and dust storms had forced the driver to stop several times during his trip, but now the sun was shining between patches of dark cloud in the western sky. Driving toward the outskirts of Alamogordo, he was startled to see a V-shaped formation of huge saucers flying directly toward him. Stopping his car, he saw that they were glowing a deep red, were moving at high speed, and seemed to be as high as the clouds. When they had reached a point nearly overhead, they suddenly seemed to drop down toward the observer. Rapidly revising all his first estimates of size, height, and speed, he recognized their true identity. They were merely a group of tumbleweeds that had been carried aloft in the strong winds and were soaring past at a height of only 100 feet. Illumination from the setting sun had produced their weird reddish glow.

A spectacular flying saucer hovered near the Smithsonian satellite-observing station in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles, on the night of October 17, 1961. The station crew observed it with binoculars, by apogee telescope, and photographed it with the Baker-Nunn satellite camera. A brilliantly glowing object, it shone in the eastern sky, moving erratically and fluctuating in brightness. After watching it for nearly an hour and finding that the nearby airport could not observe the object, the observers concluded that it must be less distant than it seemed, and set out by car to try to get a closer look. About a mile and a half from the station they stopped, and solved the mystery. A plantation manager and his servant stood in a field, hanging on to one end of a 1200-foot kite string. At the other end, high in the sky, soared a kite; hanging from it was a lighted pressure lantern[III-14] (see Plate IIa).

In 1954 malfunction of a sewage-disposal plant in western Pennsylvania produced one of the most spectacular saucer reports on record. An oversupply of detergent, whipped by a stiff breeze, foamed into a mountainous tower of bubbles. A sudden gust of wind broke the tower and launched a colossal mass of bubbles as large as a ten-story building. This brilliant, scintillating, super-giant bubble bath rose to great heights and drifted for miles. Widely reported as a UFO, this apparition was merely an unusual by-product of modern technology. The UFOs photographed over Kentucky on July 7, 1947, were probably vapor trails, a less familiar sight then than now; or they might possibly have been the smoke trails from an exploding meteor (see Plate IIb).

A saucer incident that might have become a classic Unknown occurred in Denver at 10 A.M. on a summer’s day in 1950. A man was sitting on the shady porch of his house, reading. Beyond the porch roof the sun shone brightly. Glancing up from his book, he was startled to see a formation of perhaps a dozen spherical objects, shining iridescently, traveling toward the distant mountains. As he watched, those in the front of the procession seemed to vanish instantly while others appeared out of nowhere to join the parade at the rear. Measuring their size against the mountain background, he decided they were “immense” and they moved at fantastic speed, covering the thirty or so miles to the mountains in a matter of five or six seconds.

Too stunned to take action, he was still numb from shock when he heard a faint “Hello,” and looked up--to realize that the little girl across the street was blowing soap bubbles. If the man had jumped up when he first saw the objects and had rushed into the house to telephone the nearest saucer club, he might never have found out that the “spaceships” were only bubbles[III-15].

[III-1] Ruppelt, E. J. _The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects._ Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1956.

[III-2] Air Force Files.

[III-3] Menzel, D. H. _Flying Saucers._ Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953.

[III-4] Tacker, L. J. _Flying Saucers and the U. S. Air Force._ Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960.

[III-5] Keyhoe, D. E. _Flying Saucers from Outer Space._ New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1953.

[III-6] Scully, F. _Behind the Flying Saucers._ New York: Popular Library, Inc., 1951, p. 144.

[III-7] Sarson, P. B. “Aircraft Condensation Aura,” _Meteorological Magazine_, London, Vol. LXXXV (1956), p. 217.

[III-7a] Johannesburg _Star_, April 14, 1958.

[III-8] Case 142, CRIFO _Orbit_, Vol. II (March 2, 1956).

[III-9] Detroit _Times_, Feb. 25, 1959.

[III-10] Barker, G. “Chasing the Flying Saucers,” _Flying Saucers_ (July 1959), p. 24 ff.

[III-11] Kirsch, F. A. “Air Force Right on Killian ‘Saucer’?” _Flying Saucers_ (August 1960), p. 17 ff.

[III-12] “Report on Unidentified Flying Objects Observed Feb. 24, 1959, by American-United Airline Pilots.” Compiled by Unidentified Flying Objects Research Committee, Akron, Ohio, Feb. 24, 1960.

[III-13] Wylie, C. C. [Speech] _Popular Astronomy_, Vol. LVI (1948), p. 217.

[III-14] Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, _The SAO News_, Vol. I, No. 6 (November 1961).

[III-15] Dean, C. W. Personal communication.

_Chapter_ IV

THE SPANGLED HEAV’NS: STARS AND PLANETS

Shortly before dawn on March 3, 1955, a spectacular flying saucer appeared over Alaska. The witness, a civilian scientist with the rank of Commander in the United States Navy, was returning from the North Pole on the daily Air Force Ptarmigan weather flight; his mission had been to study the effect of the aurora on radio propagation, for the Department of Defense. He described his experience as follows:

_A Mirage of Sirius_

“We were flying southwest of Point Barrow, Alaska, not far from Bering Strait, en route to Eielson Air Force Base in Fairbanks, and our course was roughly southeast. The night was clear and the stars shone brilliantly. I was looking out of the western bomb blister when suddenly I saw a bright object shoot in at tremendous speed from the horizon, directly toward the plane. At first I thought it was a meteor or a fireball and I instinctively ducked, but the object came to a sudden skidding stop about 300 feet away, thereafter riding along with our plane and keeping pace with our speed. I could scarcely believe my eyes. The thing possessed green and red signal lights that flashed back and forth, and something that looked like a lighted propeller on the top. Beyond question, it was a flying saucer.

“I wondered if the thing might be a hallucination, brought on by fatigue. After all, we had been in the air almost seventeen hours. I cleaned my spectacles and rubbed my eyes, but the Saucer was still there, pacing the plane and bobbing up and down as the plane itself occasionally wove or dipped. My next thought was to eliminate all possible chance that the thing was an internal reflection. I pulled my fur parka up over my head and put my face smack against the bulging surface of the blister that formed the window. Thus shielded from all internal illumination, I could still see the glowing object. I next drew a pencil from my pocket and held it out at arm’s length, and was surprised to find that the glowing disk was somewhat smaller than the eraser. I made a rapid calculation and concluded that if the sphere was actually 300 feet away, as it seemed, then it was only a foot or two in diameter, not much larger than a basketball. My next thought was whether one of the radio parachutes had somehow or other got attached to the plane by the string. These objects, brilliantly lit by an electric light, can be quite startling. But it had been nearly half an hour since the last parachute release and the meteorologists were just getting ready to lower another through the trap. I decided to call the meteorologist to look at the thing. But before I could call out, as if it had read my mind the object suddenly took off at top speed and disappeared. Now I was really concerned. In less than two seconds the UFO had vanished over the coast of Siberia, some 200 miles away. It must have been traveling at the fantastic speed of more than 100 miles a second. The Korean War was over but our relations with the Soviet Union were still tense, and I wondered if the object might be a secret Russian missile on reconnaissance. I kept my eyes glued to the point where the saucer had disappeared and suddenly, a couple of minutes later, it shot back toward the plane, more brilliant and spectacular than the first time.

“You can perhaps imagine my relief when I suddenly realized what the object was, and at the same time realized that I had hit on the answer to a great many flying-saucer reports of a similar nature. Only someone familiar with the constellations could have identified the object. It was a mirage of Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens. Actually Sirius was slightly below the horizon at this time, but the bending of the light had raised the image above the horizon and had diffused the beam into the saucerlike form. The flashing red and green lights were common phenomena associated with star twinkling, and the apparent structure, including the whirling propeller, resulted from distortion by the earth’s atmosphere.

“But why had the image taken off the way it did, and then rushed back? The moving plane of course was continually changing position relative to the ground features. A mountain peak on the distant horizon had briefly come between the plane and the star, obscuring the light. The light was not cut off all at once, however. Thus as the image dimmed it seemed to shrink, as though it were racing away. This temporary barrier also explained the sudden stops and starts and the tremendous instantaneous acceleration the object seemed to make at the instant it appeared. The large atmospheric lens was simply focusing the light of the star in the general direction of the plane and thus it was centered with my eye. That is why the object seemed to duplicate the motion of the plane.

“I watched the object for several minutes after its return. I was able to get full confirmation of this identification when the star rose over the western horizon; it rose in the west because the southward motion of the plane more than compensated for the westward rotation of the star. And as Sirius came up from the horizon, the ‘flying saucer’ sank back into the brilliant hemisphere of stars, where it belonged.” (The witness in this case was the senior author of this book.)

Sirius has inspired many UFO reports. On December 10, 1952, at 7:15 P.M. P.S.T., the pilot and radar observer of an F-94 on routine patrol duty were over the town of Odessa, Washington, at about 26,000 feet when they saw a large white light in the east[IV-1]. Dim reddish-white lights seemed to be coming from “windows,” and no trail or exhaust was visible. The pilot attempted to intercept but the object performed amazing feats--did a _chandelle_ in front of the plane, rushed away, stopped, and then made straight for the aircraft on a collision course at incredible speed. The pilot banked away to avoid collision, and afterward was not able to locate the object. The radar man then got a brief return but soon lost contact. Although the visual and radar contacts had not coincided, both men assumed that they referred to the same object[IV-2, p. 65].

Investigators suggested at first that the object might have been one of the Telemuk balloons, but this idea had to be discarded and the sighting was listed as Unknown. A review of the evidence by the present authors suggests a highly probable explanation. Above the low cloud cover at 3000 feet the night was clear and moonless. In the east, Sirius was just rising over the horizon at the exact bearing of the unknown object. Atmospheric refraction would have produced exactly the phenomenon described. The same atmospheric conditions that caused the mirage of the star would have caused anomalous radar returns (see _Chapter_ VIII).

_Earth’s Distorting Atmosphere_

In everyday life we often look at familiar objects through a distorting medium. Houses and persons seen through a pane of poor window glass look peculiar and wrongly shaped, and images of trees and clouds reflected in a pool or a stream of rippling water may continually shift and break, but these distortions do not deceive us because we are used to them. The child who stands before the crazy mirrors in an amusement park may laugh at himself for looking so fat or so thin, so tall or so short. Knowing that the image is only a ludicrous approximation to his real appearance, he is able to recognize himself without difficulty. But a stranger, placed so that he could see only the distorted image and not the person who made it could not make the necessary corrections and probably would not recognize the child if they met in the street.

Like window glass, water, or mirrors, a mere layer of air can distort an image. For the astronomer, the earth’s atmosphere is a lifelong frustration. Acting as an imperfect lens, it continually falsifies the true position, color, size, and shape of the heavenly bodies he tries to study. Under certain conditions it can change the image of a star or a planet into an unrecognizable stranger. When light enters the atmosphere, the rays are bent or “refracted” so that the image is moved upward, somewhere above the true position of the star (see Figure 6). When we are admiring a sunset and think we are watching the very top rim of the sinking sun as it drops below the horizon, we are actually seeing only its projected image. The sun itself has already set, but its light is bent upward by the air that clings to the earth’s surface. The greater the density of the air, the greater the displacement of the image. If there were no air at the earth’s surface, the sun would vanish and darkness would come instantaneously, with no intervening period of twilight.

[Illustration: _Figure 6._ Bending of light by the atmosphere. A star below the horizon is visible because refraction raises the image.]

A star’s light does not bend uniformly, however. Light rays of different wave lengths bend at different angles, so that when white light is scattered or “dispersed” into its component colors, the blues and greens are bent more than the reds. The density and the temperature of the air also affect the beam, so that as a star’s light travels from the thin upper atmosphere to the denser air near the earth, the colors shift constantly and the star seems to twinkle, flicker, and change in color and brightness.

Such changes are most noticeable when a star is low on the horizon at dawn or at dusk, so that its light reaches us only after traveling through miles of dense atmosphere. The sun displays these effects dramatically. At sunrise and sunset its scattered light may illuminate the entire horizon. Clouds turn red and gold, hills and the tops of buildings take on a ruddy glow, and the entire sky may flame. The red wave lengths remain, while most of the blues and greens have been scattered out of the beam or may appear briefly at the top of the sun’s disk, as a “green flash,” at the instant it sinks below the horizon.

Similarly, a star or planet observed low on the horizon at sunrise or sunset may appear extraordinarily large and brilliant. It may seem to have structure, showing an intense red glow at the bottom and bright blue at the top. Watching it, the startled observer may see the object apparently in motion, hovering, pulsating, and flashing red and green lights. If he is so inclined, he can easily interpret the image as a strange machine, the red as the glow from an exhaust, and the blue as the illumination system of an interplanetary craft.

[Illustration: _Figure 7._ Displacement of light image by temperature inversion.]

Normally the air is warmest at the surface of the earth and steadily gets colder at greater and greater heights. Sometimes this condition is reversed, particularly in the broad deserts and prairies of the Southwest, where the changes between the day’s heat and the night’s cold may be sudden and extreme. The ground cools off rapidly during the night and imparts this coldness to the layer of air immediately above. Thus the air may be warmer some distance above the ground. When such a “temperature inversion” occurs, light going through the air bends in a peculiar way (see Figure 7), so that the image is displaced far more than normally. The inversion may produce fuzzy or greatly distorted images, and when there are several layers of alternating hot and cold air, the effects may be spectacular. At the boundaries between the layers the distortion and displacement increase greatly. A star or a planet seen through such an atmosphere may display apparently violent motions, peculiar shapes, and fantastic color changes; light clouds drifting over the bright stars may increase this illusion of motion[IV-3]. The rising or setting sun, although actually below the horizon, may project upward several images of itself, one on the top of another, to form a kind of Chinese pagoda, or a “bell pepper.” And the twinkling top rung of the pagoda may simulate a whirling propeller.

_The “Whipping Girl” of Saucerdom_

The planets are wanderers. Each day they move to a new position among the constellations. Astronomers and navigators have learned the paths of the planets and the positions of the brightest fixed stars, but most of us, when we look up at the night sky and see a brilliant stranger among the familiar star groups, must cudgel our brains to account for it. According to our dispositions, we may consult a newspaper or telephone an observatory to find out the name of the intruder, or we may conclude that the unknown is an alien spacecraft.

The planet Venus has been chased at least once by patrolmen in a squad car, has several times caused the scrambling of jet interceptors, and has been named the culprit in so many UFO mysteries that saucer enthusiasts somewhat cynically refer to it as “the whipping girl” of saucerdom.

The brightest of the planets and the closest to earth, Venus never moves more than 45 degrees from the sun and thus is most often visible in our skies near sunrise or sunset, preceding or following the sun. The apparent size of the planet varies according to its distance from the earth and its phase. When it is farthest from the earth, the disk has a diameter of ten seconds; at its closest, the diameter has grown sixfold, to sixty-four seconds. The human eye and the ordinary camera see it as a brilliant white star. Being nearer the sun, Venus receives almost twice as much light from the sun as does the earth, and when at greatest brilliance, can be seen in the daytime sky. Viewed momentarily through rapidly moving cirrus clouds, it may seem to be racing across the sky like a flying saucer, but a longer look will reveal that the object is actually making very slow progress, like a planet[IV-4].

To the airman in the cockpit of a plane, the planet in the dawn sky can be a breathtaking sight. As one veteran pilot has described the experience, “Venus rose to signal me from the eastern horizon, so brilliant and inconsistent in color, changing at once from yellow to green to purple and then reversing the show, that I thought for a time it was another aircraft equipped with special lighting devices. But Venus steadied in time, proving its identity.”[IV-5]

During the spring of 1956 Venus stimulated an unusual amount of flying-saucer excitement. About 9:00 E.S.T. on the nights of March 20, 21, and 22, dozens of persons in Cincinnati, Ohio, telephoned the newspapers and the local headquarters of Civilian Research Interplanetary Flying Objects (CRIFO), to report an unidentified flying object that was burning “like a beacon” in the western sky. A reporter for the Cincinnati _Enquirer_ stated: “To the naked eye, the object appeared to be an extraordinarily intense bluish white light ... through binoculars, the object appeared to be a compact galaxy of lights, changing form as they revolved slowly. At one point, with binoculars set slightly out of focus, it assumed the appearance of a diamond brooch ringed with emeralds turning lazily on an eccentric axis.” The object was visible for nearly an hour, moved slowly to the northwest, and disappeared.

Astronomers quickly identified the unknown as Venus. To the saucer enthusiasts, however, it appeared as a low-flying luminous object with swept-back wings, hovering in the west, making no sound, and displaying colors that changed from red to white. While admitting that some of the reported sightings might have been Venus, the editor of _Orbit_ (the official publication of CRIFO) argued that an object that changed shape and sparkled like diamonds and emeralds could not possibly be Venus. He stated “that the public should know that out of seventeen UFO reports received for a three day period, ten were explainable as Venus but _six were not_! These stubborn six defied all conventional explanation.”[IV-6]