November 22, 1953
The American Weekly
Special Deputy to Chief of Information, U.S. Navy
What are these things we call Flying Saucers, the mysterious objects which have been reported floating, zooming, wobbling and soaring glowingly over our heads these last few years? Are they optical illusions, guided missiles, maybe Russian, maybe men from Mars?
The Navy and the Air Force reject the popular name, Saucers, as well they might, because it belittles the subject. To those experts, the baffling phenomena are UFOs — Unidentifiable Flying Objects.
It has to be a doggone good unidentifiable flying object to earn the degree of UFO, but the percentage of those that pass the rigid examination runs pretty high. To surmount the test, the UFO has to be seen by persons of proved honesty and objectivity, who are able to report on the Thing's size, apparent shape, luminosity, speed and, if possible, radar return.
Persons like, for example, the then Secretary of the Navy Dan Kimball, and the officers of his plane flying the Pacific. A UFO buzzed his aircraft. It buzzed the accompanying plane some miles in the rear, seconds later. Mr. Kimball forwarded the data to Washington. With it went an order that the Office of Naval Research redouble its probing into the subject.
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| Dan Kimball, then Secretary of the Navy, was convinced that "flying saucers" are not figments of the imagination after a UFO buzzed his airplane during a trans-Pacific flight. |
For the last six years, or ever since a sudden increase in reported sightings, UFOs have been the subject of a co-ordinated and integrated study. Employing civilian astronomers, military and naval experts in aerodynamics, meteorology and kindred sciences, the investigation is an Air Force project. The laboratory is in the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Field in Ohio. The Office of Naval Research, in Washington, is partner in the enterprise.
What have the experts learned?
An analysis of some 2,000 reports, many supported by photographs, eliminates 50 per cent of the sightings under the heading of "Insufficient Data," a sort of big garbage pail into which the ATIC dumps the accounts volunteered by persons who "saw something" but can't satisfactorily describe it, suspected hoaxes, possible self-delusions, and so on.
There go half the Saucers!
More than 30 per cent have proved, under study, to be accurately identifiable as weather balloons, airplane lights and flares, electronic and meteorological phenomena, including "Shooting Stars" and even newspapers borne aloft in a whirlwind.
But about 20 per cent are labeled identifiable Flying Objects. In short, objects proved beyond doubt to have been where they were seen for which ATIC has no explanation.
It is a high proportion of the total when nearly a fifth of the Things are officially certified to be — apparently — vari-sized illuminated shapes, evidently solids, that travel at speeds never achieved by human beings but giving every indication of being guided by intelligent minds. The descriptions, as furnished by the airplane pilots and aerologists upon whom ATIC places credence and confidence, are generally uniform.
They are reports of disc-shaped objects which emit an orange-hued glow that seems to increase as they accelerate, and travel at speeds which the fastest USAF jet can not approximate; discs which can execute a tight 90-degree turn or suddenly go into a reverse that would disintegrate any known aircraft and strip the flesh from the bones of its occupants; discs which travel as readily on edge, wheel-like, as they do horizontally They have been seen, by credited observers, leaping up and down like a giant yo-yo, hundreds of vertical miles at a bound, and returning to the stratosphere for another jump
A "phenomenon," not yet awarded the degree of UFO because it is still under study from the motion picture film shot by a Navy warrant officer, shows 10 blobs of light traveling across the sky in the most complicated (and, to Earth minds, meaningless) maneuver yet observed. One of the Things moved calmly ahead with an undulating motion like a ship plowing through ground swells. But its companions, while keeping forward pace with it, revolved about the nucleus (or guide ship, or whatever you want to call it) not in the flat orbit of planets around a sun but in a steep, tight, funnel-shaped spiral.
If — IF — the UFOs either carry or are directed by rational living creatures, why and for what purpose should one bounce like a child's rubber ball on an elastic string, others cavort in an intricate, dizzying maneuver?
Such variation from comprehensible motion cause some of the scientific minds to theorize that there is a logical, natural explanation for the UFOs. Something as remote from interplanetary travel as the bouncing of St. Elmo's Fire, or the Northern Lights.
Even the most prosaic descriptions of UFO maneuvers make one think of the actions of half-grown puppies rather than the operation of space ships. A group of the Things will appear on radar, evidently going places like a puppy-pack across a meadow, and then break up.
Some will loaf around, others dart hither and yon. A passenger plane bumbles into the field, and the nearest Flying Beagle will dart over like a brave pup going up to sniff at a cow, and then break away as if its curiosity was satisfied. But let the airplane, or some hastily summoned jets, try to get closer, and the UFO will go into reverse and scram out of there, with the whole pack streaking away — at 7,000 miles an hour.
The longest step toward solving the mystery will come when somebody gets close enough to a UFO to see it in detail. So far there is not even an acceptable photograph that shows more than a blur of light.
The author of this article guarantees that, at this writing, he never has seen anything like the UFOs except the "Brown Mountain Lights," which were eerie enough to satisfy him for all time.
In Avery County, in northwestern North Carolina. there rears on the fringes of the Great Smokies a rounded peak known as Brown Mountain, the source for many years of UFOs of its own. There, one night, I was taken to the top of a facing mountain by a friend, a professor of physics, at whose summer camp I was visiting.
We sat on a ledge on the west face of the opposite mountain crest, and waited a chilly half hour for the reward of observing a startling, spooky but beautiful manifestation of the mystery.
Suddenly, as we gazed across the broad, inky-black valley between, there soared from the crest of Brown Mountain a glowing ball, to my eyes at that distance, about the size of an orange. A second or two later another leaped into view, as if pursuing the first. The two rose vertically, at no superhuman speed, and vanished.
Twenty minutes passed, and then another light soared briefly into view against the faintly star-lit sky. Then, for an hour, they rose thick and fast, some rapidly, some mounting like a lazy rocket; some a dull orange, others greenish-white; some as clear in outline as a baseball held in the hand, but most as fuzzy as a ball of wool.
"Marsh gas!" I guessed bravely.
"There are no marshes anywhere on the slopes of Brown Mountain," said the physicist. I've explored it many times."
Maybe Brown Mountain houses an industrial village of subterranean gnomes who build and launch Flying Saucers just for kicks. Anyhow, the photographs I've seen of UFOs certainly look exactly like the Brown Mountain Lights to me, which proves nothing, of course.
Not all UFOs studied by Air Technical Intelligence are disc-shaped. There was one shaped like an arrow-head, seen almost simultaneously over two widely separated cities in Texas. Another, followed for miles by a military aircraft, would be dubbed "Flying Breeches" if the scientists had a sense of humor. It was accompanied by a streaming wake that, from descriptions, resembled a three-mile long pair of baggy pants.
The sighting, however, that really convinced the authorities that Saucers (as they are not called in official circles) are nothing to jeer at, occurred over Washington, D. C, 40 minutes after midnight on July 20, 1952, and lasted for nearly five hours.
Seven "blips" appeared on a radar screen at the National Airport's Radar Center as if instantly materialized out of nowhere. The lone would be dubbed "Flying Breeches" if the scientists had a sense of humor. It was accompanied by a streaming wake that, from descriptions, resembled a three-mile long pair of baggy pants.
The sighting, however, that really convinced the authorities that Saucers (as they are not called in official circles) are nothing to jeer at, occurred over Washington, D. C., 40 minutes after midnight on July 20, 1952, and lasted for nearly five hours.
Seven "blips" appeared on a radar screen at the National Airport's Radar Center as if instantly materialized out of nowhere. The lone operator fiddled with his machine, but the blips couldn't be dislodged. He leaped across the room to a second radar console. The blips were there, too. Alarmed, he summoned his chief.
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| Washington, D.C. — radar scopes, like the one shown above — "saw" seven mysterious objects flying over the capital on July 20, 1952. Scientists were unable to explain the phenomenon. |
The operators called the Airport tower, a quarter of a mile away. The excited response was that the radar there showed the identical pattern. Andrews Field, the Air Force base across the Potomac in Maryland, was queried. The worried reply was that the radars there showed seven blips. With three "fixes" like that, the operators were able to compute that one of the UFOs was directly over the Capitol, while two hovered over the White House, many thousands of feet in the air, but visible to observers in the tower.
Every licensed pilot in America knows that the sky above the Capitol and the White House is forbidden territory. What did it mean — some sort of aerial Pearl Harbor blitz?
A hurried call was put in to New Castle, Delaware, the nearest point at which available Air Force jets were based. The planes did not appear over Washington until nearly two hours had passed. Meanwhile the air waves were filled with chatter from the observers.
Five minutes before the jets roared into the search area, the UFOs vanished. Five minutes after the jets returned to base, after a fruitless search, the UFOs returned and stayed until dawn.
Pressed that day by newspapermen for comment, the officials put forth their best guess. The lights were reflections from the earth on an "inversion," a dense and mirroring layer of air high above the city. A mirage, in other words.
Reflected lights, mirror images and the like, do not send back a radar return. It takes a fairly dense mass to do that. And radar scopes at three separate places had tracked the UFOs as clearly as if they were Flying Boxcars.
The radar operators checked and rechecked and computed the speed of the Things at 7,200 miles an hour. Nothing made by man, except guided missiles, travels at a tenth that speed. And neither rockets nor guided missiles can loaf around in one spot for hours and hours-not unless their makers had the Law of Gravitation repealed.
What were they?
Not "Saucers." Remember, officially there is no such Thing. Neither were there Saucers when "strange globes of light" maneuvered over Florence, Italy, on December 9, 1731. Or over Switzerland on November 2, 1761. Over London, March 29, 1845, and elsewhere in England in 1855, 1859, 1860 and 1864. They visited Bloomington, Indiana, on September 7, 1877; buzzed ships in the Yellow Sea in 1893, ships in the Atlantic in 1904.
They weren't Saucers then, nor even UFOs. Just something weird to be noted, discussed and exaggerated into "angels with flaming swords" and "dragons" in the sky.
These phenomena are no help to us today except to prove, should you choose to believe that the UFOs are Visitors from Space or Soviet Spies, that the men from Mars and/or the Kremlin were scouting the skies hundreds of years ago.
For the time being, then, let's leave the Saucers in the categories where the official investigators put them — 50 per cent phonies, 30 per cent of explainable origin, and 20 per cent Unidentifiable Flying Objects.
Project 1947
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