Part 8

The assistant traffic controller then walked to the south window of the tower and looked out. He could see the Cub in the air and, a little above it, a clear white light. The light was moving swiftly to the north, then shifted and continued in a straight line toward the northwest. After watching it for several seconds, he returned to his post. A few minutes later Gorman called the tower for the third time to say that he was going to try to close in on the unknown. The traffic controller then stepped to the south window of the tower. Through his binoculars he could see a light moving rapidly over the field in a straight line toward the northwest. It had no particular shape and was merely a clear white light about the size of a plane’s tail lamp. After a few seconds he returned and resumed communication with Gorman.

The pilot of the Cub glimpsed the light briefly as he was landing his plane. He supposed it to be the tail light of another ship going very fast in a straight line in a westerly direction, and was puzzled by the fact that an army plane seemed to be pursuing it. After landing he delivered some bottles of Coca-Cola to the tower operators and, overhearing the conversation between them and Gorman, stepped to the balcony at the southeast corner of the tower to see what was happening. From there he could see the light going west, with the army plane after it. The light shifted briefly to the southeast but almost immediately resumed its northwest course and disappeared after a few seconds.

Lieutenant Gorman, meanwhile, had begun a weird “dogfight.” The UFO seemed to be at an altitude of about 1000 feet, was traveling about 250 miles an hour, and was blinking off and on. As he approached, the light banked to the left. Gorman dived after it but could not catch up. The light then began to climb in a rapid turn. Attempting to turn with it, Gorman blacked out temporarily from the excessive speed.

Continuing the chase, this time at 5000 to 7000 feet Gorman noticed that the light was now traveling fast, apparently faster than the F-51 could go, so he began trying to cut it off in turns with his fighter at full power. As the object circled to the left, Gorman cut back to the right for a head-on pass. When collision seemed inevitable he dived and the light seemed to pass over his canopy at a distance of about 500 feet. According to the description he later gave the Air Force, the unknown at this closest approach seemed to be a round white light, somewhat flattened, from six to eight inches in diameter--about a quarter the apparent size of the full moon. Gorman then made a climbing turn. When he could see the light again it suddenly reversed direction and headed straight for the plane, attempting to ram. It was no longer blinking off and on but was a steady white. Just before collision it pulled up and Gorman, too, pulled up. The light went straight up, with Gorman following until, at 14,000 feet, his plane went into a power stall while the object circled some 2000 feet above him. As he resumed the battle, the light seemed to retreat, then attack. Gorman dodged and circled to the left to get in position for another intercept. Finally, when these maneuvers had taken him some twenty-five miles southeast of Fargo, he was at 14,000 feet with the object below him at 11,000 feet. He dived after it. The UFO turned and started a head-on pass, then broke it off, climbed straight up, and disappeared. The time was 9:27. Gorman returned to the Fargo airport and landed, convinced that some intelligence had been controlling the actions of the unknown[IV-1].

With the memory of the Mantell tragedy (p. 33) and the Chiles-Whitted sighting (see _Chapter_ V, p. 109) still fresh in mind, officials from ATIC arrived at Fargo in less than twenty-four hours to investigate this new incident [IV-2, p. 63 ff.]. They carefully questioned Lieutenant Gorman and the three other witnesses, but could find no obvious explanation. No other aircraft had been in the neighborhood at the time of the sighting. The weather had been clear, visibility unlimited, with some auroral activity in the northeast. When tested with a control group of five other F-51s that had flown during the same period, Gorman’s plane showed no more radioactivity than did the control group--the slightly higher amount shown by all planes after flight. Gorman’s report was confusing, in parts, and reconstructing the exact sequence of maneuvers by UFO and plane proved impossible. There were almost as many theories offered in explanation as there were investigators, but eventually a reasonable solution did appear.

A lighted weather balloon had been released from the weather station at Fargo at 8:50, ten minutes before Lieutenant Gorman’s first call. As observed from the station, the balloon had traveled west and then northwest. At 9:00 it would have been near the airport about where the unknown light was first reported. A balloon could well have accounted for the events described in the first phases of the incident, but less well for those in the last. Officially, however, the cause was listed as a lighted weather balloon[IV-2, p. 67]--an answer that was not entirely satisfactory.

[Illustration: PLATE I

_a._ "Grindstone" clouds over Mount Rainier. (CHAP. II)]

[Illustration: PLATE I

_b._ A "stack of plates" near the Maritime Alps northeast of Marseilles. (CHAP. II)]

[Illustration: PLATE II

_a._ Kite with lantern photographed at Curaçao, B.W.I. (CHAP. III)]

[Illustration: PLATE II

_b._ UFOs over Kentucky, 10:35 P.M., CST, July 7, 1947. Jet trails? Bolides? (CHAP. III)]

[Illustration: PLATE III

_a._ Meteor trail. (CHAP. V)]

[Illustration: PLATE III

_b._ Fireball over Puerto Rico, January 12, 1947. (CHAP. V)]

[Illustration: PLATE IV

_a._ Coast Guard photograph of UFOs over Salem, Massachusetts, July 16, 1952. (CHAP. VI)]

[Illustration: PLATE IV

_b._ UFO near the village of Arbleterre, in northern France, October 2, 1954. (CHAP. VI)]

[Illustration: PLATE IV

_c._ Radar "ghosts" at Salina, Kansas, September 10, 1956. (CHAP. VIII)]

_Only a Balloon?_

A review of the evidence, made by the authors during the preparation of this book, emphasized some puzzling inconsistencies. Lieutenant Gorman had had the UFO in view for about twenty-seven minutes. During the first five or ten minutes it had traveled horizontally at low altitude in a fairly steady course. Then it had suddenly changed tactics, had climbed to high altitude, turned, darted in and out, and performed both evasive and aggressive actions. The three witnesses on the ground, however, did not see the UFO perform _any_ of these combat maneuvers. It had been traveling steadily north and northwest and had disappeared from view ten or fifteen minutes before the aerial dogfight ended.

These differences strongly suggested that two unknowns were involved in the sighting. According to this theory, the light seen by the ground observers was the weather balloon; the light first seen over the airfield by Gorman was also the weather balloon. His adversary during the major part of the dogfight was a second unknown, not a physical object but some kind of optical phenomenon, very probably a mirage of the planet Jupiter. The reconstruction based on this theory would account for all the puzzling aspects of the case.

As first described by Lieutenant Gorman and by the three witnesses on the ground, the light was small, bright, and clear; no structure was visible; it made no noise and left no trail or exhaust. It was south of the control tower, was traveling horizontally west and northwest, seemingly at high speed, on a straight course, at low altitude. On these points all the witnesses agreed.

They did not agree in their estimates of its actual distance and height--a fact that is not surprising when we consider the circumstances. The night was clear and cloudless. It was also dark. The sun had set more than two hours earlier and there was no moonlight (new moon on October 2). On a dark night, the height and distance (and hence the speed) of a moving light of unknown size are notoriously difficult to estimate. According to Lieutenant Gorman, the light when he first saw it was about 1000 feet above the ground and 1000 yards--a little more than ½ mile--from his plane. The three men on the ground saw the UFO, for a few seconds, at different times during a period of less than ten minutes. Like Gorman, they were experienced airmen but they differed from him and from each other in their estimates. According to the assistant traffic controller, the altitude and distance from the control tower were 2000–2500 feet and 1–2 miles. According to the traffic controller, they were 4000–5000 feet and ½ mile; according to the Cub’s pilot, they were 5000–6000 feet and 1 mile.

In spite of the discrepancies, these estimates are in general agreement and, together with the details of the UFOs appearance, are consistent with the description of the weather balloon that had been released at 8:50, about ten or fifteen minutes before the UFO was sighted from the ground. The balloon carried a small white light, moved west and then northwest, was at low altitude and slowly climbing, and would soon have disappeared from the view of ground observers.

The object that Lieutenant Gorman first saw and pursued was also the balloon, climbing and turning. As it bobbed and swayed in the air currents it would have seemed to blink off and on, just as he reported. Underestimating its height and distance and overestimating its velocity as did the pilot in the Cuban dogfight (p. 42), he tried to follow its apparent climbing turn and, as he stated, blacked out briefly because of his excessive speed. During this interval, short as it may have been, he of course lost track of the object. Shortly afterward, when the UFO passed over his canopy and he dived, he again lost sight of the object.

When he resumed the chase he supposed that he had located the same object he had been following earlier--but the evidence suggests that he had picked up a different target. The unknown was going much faster than before, was at a much higher altitude, and shone with a steady brilliance instead of blinking off and on. In such a tense situation he could understandably have mistaken one strange light for another. Pursuing an apparently hostile unknown, less than a year after the still mysterious death of Mantell in a similar encounter, he might justifiably have been frightened.

The most probable source of the second light is the planet Jupiter. The sun had set at 6:24 P.M. Following some three hours behind the sun, the planet had a magnitude of -1.7 and was thus brighter than Sirius, the brightest star. Shortly after 9:10 when the UFO began its violent maneuvers (the exact time is not known), Jupiter was very low in the southwest sky, between two and three degrees above the horizon, at a bearing of about 231 degrees. The UFO was also attacking from the southwest, as is shown by Gorman’s tactics: in trying to cut it off in circles to the left, he gradually moved to the southeast.

The weather bureau records for that evening, obtained from radiosonde observations, show that temperature inversions existed both near the ground and at higher altitude. Thus conditions were ideal to produce a furiously twinkling planetary mirage. When a planet is close to the horizon this twinkling, together with the defocusing action of the earth’s atmosphere, can spread out the image so that it looks huge, with an apparent diameter as great as ten minutes of arc. Under such conditions, both the size and the intensity of the light fluctuate. When they diminish, the object seems to be racing away from the observer; when they increase, it seems to be rushing directly towards him on a collision course. The peculiar lens-like action of the atmosphere makes the image seem to be, not at infinity, but only a few hundred feet away from the observer.

Seen through the distorting atmospheric lens, the image of Jupiter could have performed exactly as Gorman described: it would have darted back and forth, seemed to attack, retreat, and carry out the “controlled” maneuvers that actually depended partly on the movement of the plane itself. Gorman apparently assumed that he was dealing with a material object (as indeed he was in the beginning), and therefore did not consider the possibility that he was seeing merely an optical image.

The geographical situation would have helped produce the illusion. Fargo lies at an elevation of about 900 feet and the land rises gradually to the west. Due west is Bismarck at 1670 feet. To the south lies a series of buttes, some of them as high as 3500 feet. Thus in the southwest where Jupiter was setting and where the UFO attacked from, the buttes would repeatedly have cut off the planet from view as Gorman maneuvered, so that the image would have seemed to race in and out and perform evasive actions, just as did the mirage of Sirius in Alaska (p. 60). Since Jupiter was very low, however, the buttes served to conceal it from the observers on the ground.

[Illustration: _Figure 9._ Positions of refracted image of Jupiter from 9:00 to 9:29 P.M. at Fargo, North Dakota, on October 1, 1948. Azimuth measured north through east.]

The times involved provide the last piece of the puzzle. The dogfight ended at about 9:27. The time of the geometrical setting of Jupiter was 9:25. The usual lag due to refraction is between two and three minutes (see Figure 9). The planet therefore remained visible for about two minutes longer. The image actually sank below the horizon and disappeared from view between 9:27 and 9:28, the same time that the UFO climbed straight up into the sky and disappeared. When Jupiter vanished, the unknown also vanished and did not return.

Absolute proof of this solution is of course impossible. Nevertheless, the description of the UFO, its behavior, its direction, its time of disappearance--all are consistent with its identification as Jupiter. The Gorman case might reasonably be removed from the “Balloon?” category and listed as “Balloon plus planetary mirage.”

_Jupiter through a Jet Trail_

Venus, Mars, and Jupiter seen under unusual conditions can mystify even the most hardheaded witness. Unrecognized air turbulence and increased scattering of the light can easily create the illusion of a flying saucer.

An ex-army man, a trained observer with a good knowledge of physics and optics, reports the following unnerving experience[IV-11].

“On January 30, 1954, my buddy and I had been fox hunting in southwestern Indiana. We hunted until well after sundown and headed for the car. As we neared it, a jet plane thundered through the darkening sky, from north to south. Placing game and guns in the car, I walked around it to see if the tires were OK. Happening to glance skyward, I let out a yell. There it was, and no mistaking it. A flying saucer blazing in the sky. A real illuminated spaceship. Only it wasn’t moving, just hanging in the sky. Football-shaped, about as long as the apparent diameter of the full moon, it showed red, yellow, and bluish green. [Here he sketched a football shape, glowing red knobs placed at the two ends, yellow lights girdling the middle, and yellow and green arcs curving between the two ends (see Figure 10).] I carry an eight-power field glass when hunting and I immediately trained this on the celestial wonder. The result was weird. It seemed to be pulsating with a quivering, twinkling light. We watched it for some five minutes, trying to figure out what we were seeing. Then the spaceship began to get smaller, simply reducing in size without moving. Smaller and smaller it became and in another five minutes it suddenly contracted into a planet--Jupiter, I believe it was. [Jupiter was in the eastern sky 50 to 60 degrees above the horizon.]

[Illustration: _Figure 10._ Witness’s sketch of Jupiter seen through a jet trail.]

“When we realized what we were watching we began to try to figure out the ‘why.’ Suddenly we realized we were looking directly through the path of the plane at the planet and our best guess was that the atmospheric turbulence and temperature change caused by the passage of the jet was to blame for the strange aberration we had witnessed. And we wondered if refraction of the golden light could cause the reds, greens, and blues. Since neither of us uses snake-bite medicine in any form, we figured our observations were about as substantial as our feeble scientific understanding would permit.

“But anyway, I found out how people may see flying saucers and be perfectly honest in their incomplete observations. Had a person inclined to the supernatural taken a good look, jumped in his car, and headed for home at high speed, he would steadfastly have believed he had seen a flying saucer which was evidently observing the earth preparatory to an attack from outer space.”

[IV-1] Air Force Files.

[IV-2] Ruppelt, E. J. _The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects._ Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1956.

[IV-3] Tacker, L. J. _Flying Saucers and the U. S. Air Force._ Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960, p. 59.

[IV-4] Payne-Gaposchkin, C. _Introduction to Astronomy._ Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1954.

[IV-5] Gann, E. K. _Fate Is The Hunter._ Crest Reprint, New York: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1962, p. 172.

[IV-6] Case 151, CRIFO _Orbit_, Vol. III (April 6, 1956).

[IV-7] Buffalo _Evening News_, April 10, 1956.

[IV-8] Keyhoe, D. E. _Flying Saucers: Top Secret._ New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1960.

[IV-9] Menzel, D. H. _Flying Saucers._ Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953.

[IV-10] Ley, W., and von Braun, W. _The Exploration of Mars._ New York: The Viking Press, 1956.

[IV-11] Main, O. Personal correspondence.

_Chapter_ V

OUT OF THE SKY: METEORS AND FIREBALLS

About one o’clock in the afternoon on November 30, 1954, a spectacular meteor flared across the southeastern part of the United States and exploded. Many persons in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi saw the bright flash high in the sky, followed by a trail of smoke, and heard three violent detonations. Over the town of Sylacauga, Alabama, a nine-pound fragment of the falling meteoric body crashed through the roof of a house, bruised the left arm and hip of the unlucky resident, and came to rest on the floor. Members of the American Meteor Society collected detailed descriptions of the event from many witnesses and added this daylight fireball to the official list of observed meteorite falls from which meteorites are recovered[V-1, p. 128].

UFO addicts, however, apparently regarded both the meteor and its fragments as unnatural phenomena, implied some doubt that the fragment was really a meteorite, and characterized the incident as peculiar[V-2].

To the astronomer who specializes in the study of meteors the only peculiar aspect of the episode is that saucer publications list so few mysterious UFOs for that particular week when similar spectacular fireballs were almost a commonplace in the southeast states. On November 29 a meteor flew over Alabama at 5:30 P.M., and about two hours later another with a long trail soared over Florida. On November 30 at 5:00 P.M., a few hours after the fall at Sylacauga, another bright fireball flashed over Alabama. Shortly before midnight the same night a meteor flamed over North Carolina, so brilliant that its copper-green light illuminated the interior of cars on the highway; blue-green fire shot out above the treetops, changed to magnesium white, and then slowly faded. Detailed observations of all these appeared in the scientific journal _Meteoritics_[V-1, p. 128].

_Stones from Heaven_

Until roughly a hundred and fifty years ago meteors and meteorites had the status of cosmic orphans, unacknowledged members of the astronomical family. Few persons doubted the existence of the fixed stars, the solar planets, comets, or even of “new stars” or novae, but they rejected a natural explanation for meteors and interpreted them as falling stars, flying dragons, or fountains of fire in the sky. Most astronomers as well as laymen laughed at the recurrent idea that “stones from heaven” could fall on the earth. Then in 1803 the French scientist J. B. Biot described an extraordinary rain of meteorites that fell at L’Aigle on April 26[V-3]; he convinced the French Academy of Sciences that the stones had indeed pelted from the sky during the great meteor display. Meteoritics is thus a relatively young science. Much remains to be learned about these cosmic visitors, but certain basic facts have been established[V-4].

Meteors enter the earth’s atmosphere continually, by day as well as by night, and they show great variety. Some are so brilliant that they are visible even in broad daylight. Some are so faint that even in darkness they can be seen only through a telescope. Others, still fainter, can be detected only by radar specially designed for this purpose. Because of the friction created when they penetrate the earth’s atmosphere, most meteors vaporize and vanish many miles above the ground. We see them as only bright streaks of light, quickly extinguished. If the meteoric body is large enough, has the right chemical constitution, and enters the atmosphere at a favorable angle and velocity, some of it may survive the journey and fall to the earth as a meteorite. A distinct odor sometimes accompanies the fall--the smell of sulphur, onions, or cyanide. About 40,000 tons of meteoritic material fall on the earth each day, most of it in the form of fine dust. The object may be a chunk of metal or stone the size of a pebble or a boulder, or it may be a mass weighing several tons, so enormous that it gouges out a crater at the place where it hits and comes to rest far beneath the earth’s surface. Some meteors, fortunately extremely rare, apparently can strike the earth and devastate a large area but, like the wind, leave behind no physical trace. According to present theory, members of a regular shower are probably remnants of comets, which have an icy structure, and the minute bits of frozen debris vaporize in a flash of light high in the atmosphere. Meteors that survive to reach the earth as meteorites are thought to be fragments of asteroids, or tiny planets. Meteorites vary so widely in their physical and chemical structure that they require a complex system of classification. Nevertheless the specialist can distinguish between a meteorite and earthly rocks and stones by laboratory tests[V-5].

_Meteor Streams and Showers_

Any clear night displays its quota of meteors. But at certain times, when the earth happens to collide with a stream of cosmic debris moving in an elliptical orbit, a shower of meteors takes place. (For a list of the major night meteor streams, see TABLE I.) Most meteor streams probably result from the breakup of comets; if the debris is distributed uniformly in the comet’s orbit, a meteor shower occurs each time the earth crosses the orbit. For example, the Perseids, fragments of Comet 1862 III, have reappeared every August for more than 1200 years, and the Leonids, debris of Comet Temple (1866 I), regularly return around the third week in November. Like the Taurids, another dependable stream, the Leonids are notable for their brilliant fireballs, which have deposited some of the largest meteorites ever found on the earth.