Part 7

While the fate of the seventeenth UFO may require further explanation, the flying saucer reports did not offer a real puzzle. The time, the position, the colors, and the apparent motions of the object were entirely consistent with those expected for the planet under the prevailing atmospheric conditions. Dr. Paul Herget of the Cincinnati Observatory had easily identified the “mysterious” object. He added that Venus would continue to get brighter and brighter until the middle of May, and that the number of UFOs sighted would probably increase correspondingly.

He was right. Less than three weeks after the excitement in Cincinnati, Venus inspired one of the most notorious “Unknowns” in the history of saucerdom, one that evoked charges of fraud, falsehood, and conspiracy on a grand scale.

_The Ryan Case_

An American Airlines plane had just taken off on a flight from Albany to Syracuse, New York, on the night of April 8, 1956. The sky was clear with a very thin overcast. At 10:15 E.S.T., while at about 6000 feet over Schenectady, Captain Ryan and his first officer sighted an unidentified flying object and reported it to Griffis Air Force Base. Bright orange in color, it glowed ahead of the plane in the northwestern sky. At first it seemed to be traveling at great speed, 800 to 1000 miles an hour. Then it appeared to slow down to the plane’s speed, about 250 miles an hour, and thereafter kept a steady distance ahead. The tower operators at the Albany and Watertown airports also saw the object, as did the crews of four other plane flights, who decided it was probably a star or a planet.

The shift supervisor on duty in the tower at Griffis Air Force Base, alerted by Captain Ryan, was able to observe the unknown through binoculars. He described it as apparently round, larger than any star, at an estimated altitude of 3000 or 4000 feet; when first sighted it looked white with an orange tint but after about ten minutes changed to orange with a red tint. During the twenty-three minutes he watched it, the unknown slowly descended over the horizon. Interceptors from Griffis Air Force Base were scrambled (Air Force jargon meaning to take off and pursue as quickly as possible) at 10:48 and 10:52, but returned to base without finding anything. Captain Ryan, having watched the object during most of the flight, landed his plane at Syracuse and made the customary report.

The newspaper accounts that followed caused a short-lived flying-saucer scare, but when officials from ATIC investigated they had no difficulty in solving the mystery. The evidence was plain and unmistakable. The object was the planet Venus. According to the reports of Captain Ryan and the other observers in the air and on the ground, the object was low in the northwest; estimates of its azimuth varied from 290 to 330 degrees. A plot of the planet’s actual position at 10:20 P.M., when the UFO was first picked up by the tower operator at Griffis Air Force Base, showed that Venus was slightly above the horizon at an azimuth of 301 degrees, and that it set at 304 degrees at about 10:42 (when allowance is made for the effects of atmospheric refraction)--the time the UFO disappeared from the view of the Griffis observers. Of the four other commercial and military pilots who reported the object, all described it as essentially stationary, and all positively identified it as Venus. In confirmation, the glowing light reappeared the following night at the same time and position. The intercepting jets had not been able to find the alleged UFO because by the time they left the ground, around 10:50, the planet had already set[IV-1].

There the matter should have ended. The puzzle was solved, and forgotten by all but a few saucer addicts. Some twelve months later, however, Major Donald Keyhoe reopened the case. As the new Director of the National Investigations Committee for Aerial Phenomena, commonly known as NICAP (see _Chapter_ XIII), he charged the Air Force with concealing the true facts of the incident, and himself tried to get in touch with Captain Ryan to obtain information to support the charge. Receiving no answer to letters or telephone calls, Major Keyhoe then gave his story to certain government agencies. Using as evidence a newspaper account[IV-7] and interpretations of Captain Ryan’s remarks in a TV interview, NICAP alleged that the object sighted on April 8, 1956, had been a UFO; that the captain, on orders from Griffis Air Force Base, had abandoned his scheduled route to chase the unknown craft, had lost it somewhere over Lake Ontario, had then turned back and landed at Syracuse and, finally, that his flight log must have been falsified to conceal the facts of this pursuit[IV-8].

The original question, the identity of an unknown object, was all but forgotten. In letters, telegrams, and telephone calls to various officials of American Airlines, Congress, the Air Force, the Civil Aeronautics Board, and the Civil Aviation Authority, NICAP requested an official investigation of the incident. The first requests evoked no response but continued efforts were successful. After hints of publicity and of possible senatorial interest, the beleaguered agencies at last yielded to NICAP pressure and reopened the case. Captain Ryan, a reliable officer with twenty-three years’ experience as a pilot, was subjected to official interrogation. Busy government bureaus were forced to invest further time, money, and energy to confirm facts that had never been in doubt.

To the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), Captain Ryan replied that he had observed an unidentified object, but that he had not altered the course of his flight. He repeated this explicit statement to officials of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) and of American Airlines. Airline records provided independent confirmation. Since the scheduled time of the flight between Albany and Syracuse had been 49 minutes, and the actual time elapsed on the night in question had been 48 minutes, he could not possibly have spent time in making a detour over Lake Ontario as alleged.

These declarations, according to NICAP, were worthless. They merely proved that Captain Ryan had given false answers to his questioners; that the government agencies involved knew the answers were false; and that a gigantic conspiracy existed to suppress the truth. Among those suggested as possible members[IV-8] were the American Airlines Company, the Civil Aeronautics Board, the Civil Aviation Agency, the United States Air Force, and possibly even the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council!

Saucer publications still list this sighting of Venus as an Unknown.

_Venus as a Morning Star_

One of the “best” UFOs of the year 1950 appeared when Venus performed in plain sight of the ATIC offices at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio[IV-2, p. 103].

About midmorning on March 8 a TWA plane, coming in to land at Dayton municipal airport, was circling to get into the traffic pattern when both pilot and copilot noticed an extremely bright light hovering in the southeast. Much brighter and larger than a star, it appeared and disappeared in the high, thick, scattered clouds. The tower operators, who also saw it, immediately telephoned the Ohio Air National Guard and officials at ATIC. Within minutes the UFO had attracted an audience of exceptionally well-qualified observers. Air Force experts on unidentified flying objects watched it from the ground, technicians studied returns on the radar screens at the laboratory at Wright Field, and the pilots of two hastily scrambled F-51s tried to intercept it.

The radar operators, who reported returns from both UFO and pursuit planes, called the pilots and vectored them in toward the target. Both pilots could see the light at first, but when they had climbed to about 15,000 feet they found themselves in clouds so thick that neither could see the other plane, and the unknown was no longer visible. Since ground radar reported that the planes were getting closer to the target, the pilots decided to continue, on instruments, but they separated to avoid the danger of colliding with each other. In a few seconds they were deep in dense cloud. Flying conditions were far worse than they had expected and the planes were icing up fast. Nevertheless the pilots kept climbing until ground radar advised them that they were almost on target. Realizing that if a solid object actually were ahead of them they would hit it before they could see it, the pilots immediately descended to below the clouds and circled, hoping for a break in the overcast, until ground radar reported that the target was fading fast. The planes then landed. When the clouds broke momentarily, after about an hour, the UFO was not visible.

A conference took place at ATIC that afternoon to discuss the identity of the mysterious light and the cause of the radar echoes. A check showed that the position of the UFO had been identical with that of Venus. The light, the conference concluded, had been Venus. One pilot later disagreed, arguing that the light had not looked to him like a planet and that if the object had been Venus it should have appeared, but did not, at the same time on the following day. But the weather conditions the first day would have distorted the image and made it unlike the pale light of Venus occasionally visible in the daytime. It was not visible at all the following day because of different weather conditions.

The radar returns, the investigators found, had come from the ice-laden clouds and were unrelated to the light. Both planes had encountered unexpectedly severe icing conditions which increased as they approached the center of the cloud. Radar, tracking their course during these moments, had shown the planes approaching close to the unknown target. All the evidence, the radar experts agreed, indicated that the unknown target was ice[IV-1].

_Venus as an Evening Star_

In the spring of 1959 Venus again, this time in the evening, caused reports of flying saucers. At 6:20 P.M. on March 13, a clear evening with visibility of about fifteen miles, an unidentified flying object was sighted in the western sky near Duluth, Minnesota[IV-1]. Witnesses described its shape as tubular or round and its color as red, orange, green, or white. Two interceptors of the Air Defense Command were scrambled to investigate and headed for the object at top speeds, but they could get no closer and eventually gave up the chase and landed. Military personnel at ground stations and in the air observed the object visually and picked up radar returns; it disappeared, after about thirty minutes, by fading from sight. Although this spectacular unknown had seemed to keep pace with the aircraft, at times rushing toward the planes on a collision course and at other times reversing direction and racing away, all witnesses agreed that the object had remained at a magnetic bearing of approximately 300 degrees.

The radar screen at the ground station had been photographed and the film was forwarded to ATIC at Dayton. Analysis showed that the echoes had not come from a real target but were “angels” caused by interference (see _Chapter_ VIII). Some operators had reported sharp contacts, others fuzzy; on some sets the target had faded suddenly, on others it rushed off the scope at incredible speeds. Contact was intermittent, for short periods of from ten seconds to a minute, and each new contact gave a different position for the target.

At the time of the sighting Venus was just on the western horizon, at the same position occupied by the unknown, and probably would have been invisible except for the refraction by the earth’s atmosphere. Layers of air with different temperatures had produced the apparent motion and changes in color. The object had maintained the same size and relative position during the entire period of observation; it disappeared by fading from sight, sinking farther below the horizon. The following night, under similar atmospheric conditions, the object reappeared in the same position. The unknown was positively identified as Venus.

Venus was again reported as a UFO on the night of October 19, 1959, in Korea. An observer reported a crescent-shaped silver object moving very slowly toward the west. Observing it for three hours and twenty minutes through the telescope of a transit, he obtained very exact data on the bearing and altitude, which provided the facts required for identification. The object moved westward at a rate of approximately 12 degrees an hour, a rate close to the rotational velocity of the earth and the apparent rotational velocity of the stars. Venus at the time occupied exactly the same position as the object, and went below the horizon shortly after the reported sighting[IV-1].

_The Rotating Lights of Japan_

One of the most famous exploits of Venus took place over Japan and Korea in December 1952 and January 1953. The resulting UFOs, publicized as “The Rotating Lights of Japan,” were automatically identified as spaceships by saucerians. Noting the similarity to the “foo balls” often seen by airmen during World War II, however, Dr. Menzel concluded that the lights were probably a type of foo ball, “an exceptional mirage.”[IV-9, p. 96] The rotating cycle of colors suggested that the atmosphere was acting to break up and disperse the component colors of a luminous image, displaced from its true position. Without precise information on the time, position, and direction of motion of the unknown, this theory could not then be substantiated. During the preparation of this book, however, the authors were able to examine the original data on file at ATIC and to obtain the facts necessary for a complete solution.

The drama began on December 29, when UFOs were reported at many points over northern Honshu, the main island of Japan, and continued with similar sightings, particularly on January 9 and January 21. On the evening of December 29 the pilot of an F-84-G plane, engaged in local-area night flying, overheard a radio-telephone conversation between another plane and a radar station on the ground reporting an unusual light in the western sky. Although the sky was thinly overcast at 8000 to 10,000 feet, he was far above the clouds, flying in brilliant moonlight with a visibility of at least forty miles. At 7:48 P.M. local time, while at 27,000 feet, he observed an unidentified object above and almost due west of his plane. Turning off all his lights to make sure that the object was not merely a reflection of his own canopy, he climbed after the unknown and kept it in view for three minutes, then lost it briefly. He soon located it again at 35,000 feet, when he seemed to be level with the object and tried to close in on it. During this second sighting he observed it for about five minutes before the light disappeared in the west.

The pilot was a man of unusual experience, in command of a fighter escort wing, and well aware of the illusions a flyer can experience at night. He was also a remarkably accurate and resourceful observer, so that his report to Intelligence investigators is a model of exact statement. If all such reports were similarly precise and complete, few UFOs would remain unidentified and the civilian saucer groups would have to disband (see _Chapter_ XIII). Carefully separating what he observed from what he concluded, the pilot stated that the object looked larger than the stars or any planet; he assumed that it was circular, but could not determine the actual shape. He could not determine whether the object was silent or noisy because the noise of his own motors would have prevented his hearing any sound from the unknown. The object seemed to show a cluster of lights, red, white, and green, which slowly rotated in a counterclockwise direction from east to west; one complete cycle of revolution required a time estimated at four to eight seconds. The shifting of the three colors during the cycle resembled the rotating colors in some jukeboxes, and the effect was phenomenal. “As these colors rotated in the body of the object, at times the entire body was one solid color, either white, green, or red, but in the process of completing a revolution the body was frequently fractionally red, white, or white-green, plus the other possible combinations of the three colors.” Also there seemed to be three beams of white light radiating out from the main body in straight shafts which, unlike the colors, did not change their relative positions but remained constant at positions of roughly 11:00, 5:00, and 7:00. No phenomenon that might be an exhaust was observed. As to motion and behavior, the object seemed to travel exactly parallel to the plane and maintained a constant distance in spite of the pilot’s attempts to intercept it at speeds of around 500 miles an hour. At no time did it execute any maneuvers except for a gradual change of direction during the two observations. The sighting ended when the lights vanished in the west[IV-1]. These rotating lights were also seen by the crew of an F-94 interceptor who watched them for about forty minutes, by the crew of a B-26 bomber who watched them for about seven minutes, and by various ground observers.

To make a positive identification, the investigator must know the weather conditions, the bearing of the observing aircraft, and the position of the object. Atmospheric conditions were found to be conducive to the formation of mirages. At the time of the first sighting on December 29, the observing plane was headed slightly to the east of north; the UFO was in the west, apparently traveling north on a course parallel with that of the plane. After the pilot lost sight of the object, he circled and hunted and was flying slightly east of south when he again picked up the object, which was still in the west.

A check of the astronomical situation showed that the sun had set about three hours before the sighting. Venus was following roughly three hours behind the sun and was extremely brilliant, with a magnitude of nearly -4.0. At 7:48 P.M., when the pilot sighted the unknown, the planet was about 3 degrees above the western horizon. When Venus finally sank beneath the horizon and disappeared, the “unknown” also vanished.

The similar UFOs reported from Japan during the same period, on January 9 and January 21, 1953, were also mirages of the planet Venus. The cases of “The Rotating Lights of Japan” in the Air Force file on UFOs have now been shifted from the category “Unknown” to the category “Solved.” In many other UFO cases of the “rotating lights” variety, the Air Force has positively identified the unknown as the planet Jupiter.

_UFOs and the Opposition of Mars_

Venus is not the only heavenly body to simulate a flying saucer. Jupiter and even Mercury, the smallest of the planets, have inspired their share of UFOs. Mars, which can also be very bright, has frequently been reported as a spaceship.

On June 21, 1952, an F-47 aircraft was on routine patrol over the Atomic Energy Commission installation at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, when at 10:58 P.M. a spotter from the Ground Observer Corps informed the pilot that a slow-moving craft was moving in the area at very high altitude. At about the same time the pilot observed a blinking white light, of no definite shape and with no exhaust or trail, apparently making passes at him. For the next eighteen minutes the pilot tried vainly to intercept the unknown. The plane was at 15,000 feet, moving at about 250 knots. As the pilot turned to meet the pass, the UFO would pull up some 4000 to 5000 feet above the plane and then move in again. When the plane reached 22,000 feet, the UFO appeared to make a final dive from 28,000 feet, pulled back up to its previous altitude, and then disappeared. The pilot’s reaction is indicated by his answer to one of the routine questions on the Air Force report form: “Did you stop at any time during the sighting?” His reply read: “Ha Ha!”

Investigating the incident, officials from ATIC at first suspected that the object might have been a balloon, released as a hoax; only a few weeks earlier a crank had launched a flight of balloons near Oak Ridge and had been caught. But after interviewing the witnesses, the investigators concluded that the UFO was far more probably the planet Mars. As so often happens, however, they could not convert the “probable” into a “positive” identification because they lacked one essential fact: the bearing of the aircraft[IV-1].

Some flying-saucer enthusiasts consider Mars as the probable home port of many spaceships, which allegedly visit the earth in particularly large numbers when Mars is in opposition--the point in its path that is nearest the earth; these ships supposedly seize the chance to hop over to earth when the distance between the two planets is at a minimum.

It is to be hoped that the Martians, if any, are more competent navigators than the terrestrial saucerians who propose this theory. No sensible Martian would plan a journey scheduled to land him on earth during the few weeks when the two planets are closest. Traveling between Mars and earth is not like jumping across a mountain stream where the banks remain stationary: the jumper, of course, chooses the narrowest part of the stream and leaps across in a straight path. But in space travel both planets are moving; they travel in elliptical orbits of different sizes and at different speeds. To reach earth, the Martian, too, must get into an elliptical orbit of a size and shape that will eventually intersect the earth’s orbit. According to calculations by terrestrial rocket experts, the path that requires the least fuel is about 735 million miles long--some twenty times the distance between the two planets when they are closest. To follow this course, which takes 260 days of travel, the Martian must leave 260 days before the day that his ship and the earth will converge and meet at a particular position in space. Therefore he plans to blast off at a time when earth in its orbit is 76 degrees of arc behind Mars in its orbit (see Figure 8). By the time he lands on earth, the planet Mars is lagging 44 degrees of arc behind the earth[IV-10].

Any increase in UFO reports that may occur when Mars is in opposition should be attributed not to spaceships but to the heightened brilliance of the planet itself glowing in the night sky.

_The Gorman “Dogfight”_

One of the most puzzling of the classic saucer mysteries began on the evening of October 1, 1948, when George F. Gorman, manager of a construction company and a lieutenant in the North Dakota Air National Guard, was returning to Fargo, N.D., from a cross-country practice flight in an F-51 fighter. About 9:00, Lieutenant Gorman called the control tower at the local airport for landing instructions, and asked the identity of a moving light that was blinking on and off in the air below him. Informed that a Piper Cub was coming in from the south, he continued to circle, and at 9:05 again called in to report that he could see the Cub below him at about 1000 feet. He could also see an unidentified light moving rapidly at about the same altitude.

[Illustration: _Figure 8._ Orbit of spaceship. Mars_{1} and earth_{1}, positions of planets when ship leaves Mars; Mars_{2} and earth_{2}, positions when ship lands on earth.]