INCIDENT 1
EVALUATION
INCIDENT 2
EVALUATION
INCIDENT 3
EVALUATION
INCIDENT 4
EVALUATION
INCIDENT 5
EVALUATION
INCIDENT 6
EVALUATION
INCIDENT 7
EVALUATION
INCIDENT 8
EVALUATION
INCIDENT 9
EVALUATION
EVALUATION
In this case LIFE's informant is an Air Force officer who
holds a top military post at a key atomic base. Since his
assignment and whereabouts must be kept a secret he has asked
LIFE to withhold his name. He has the highest security
rating given. Before he took his present assignment, this officer
was in command of the radar equipment that keeps watch over a
certain atomic installation. One day in the fall of 1949, while
watching a radarscope that covered an area of sky 300 miles wide and
100,000 feet deep, he was startled to detect five apparently
metallic objects flying south at tremendous speed and great height.
They crossed the 300-mile scope, in less than four minutes. The
objects flew the whole time in formation.
There is no dead-certain explanation of this phenomenon –
radar is as full of tricks as an old-maid's imagination. However,
the officer involved is an experienced observer, well aware of the
eccentricities of the instrument. He believes that in this instance
he made a legitimate radar contact. If so, it can be said that the
only natural objects known to travel at such a speed are meteors,
but meteors do not fly in formation. If the officer picked up
machines, they were performing in a manner that rocket experts agree
is still beyond the capabilities of earth's most advanced
weapons.
"Civilian Saucer Investigations" was organized by Sighter
Ed J. Sullivan (standing), who urges other sighters to write to P.O. Box
1971, Main Post Office, Los Angeles. CSI includes Dr. Walter Riedel (behind
Sullivan), who was chief designer at great German rocket laboratory at
Peenemunde.
On May 29, 1951 at 3:48 p.m., three technical writers for the aerophysics
department of North American Aviation's plant at Downey, outside Los Angeles,
were chatting on the factory grounds. They were Victor Black, Werner Eichler
and Ed J. Sullivan. All at once they stared at the sky. Sullivan describes
what they saw: "Approximately 30 glowing, meteorlike objects sprayed out
of the east at a point about 45 degrees above the horizon,
executed a right-angle turn and swept across the sky in an
undulating vertical formation. . .that resembled a tuning fork on
edge. It took each of them about 25 seconds
to cross 9O degrees of the horizon before performing another right-angle
turn westward toward downtown Los Angeles.... We estimated their diameter
at 30 feet and their speed to be 1,700 mph. Each appeared as an intense
electric blue light, round and without length. They moved with the motion
of flat stones skipping across a smooth pond."
No known natural or optical phenomenon, makes the peculiar light,
in bright day, attributed to these objects by Sullivan and his colleagues;
nor can any natural object, hurtling at such a speed, execute a right angle
turn. As in the Moore theodolite sighting, the execution of such a turn
would have crushed any human crew under the impact of "G" forces. Finally,
of course, no known machine travels at 1,700 mph without making a sound
or leaving an exhaust or vapor trail.
On Jan. 20, 1951, at 8:30 p.m., Captain Lawrence W. Vinther of Mid-Continent
Airlines was ordered by the control tower at the Sioux City airport, to
investigate a "very bright light" above the field. He took off in his DC-3
with his copilot, James F. Bachmeier, and followed the light. All at once
the light dived at the DC-3 almost head on; it passed silently and at great
speed about 200 feet above its nose. Both pilots wrenched their heads back
to see where it had gone, only to discover that the thing had
somehow reversed direction in a split second and was now flying
parallel to the airliner
heading in the same direction. It was a clear moonlight night and both
men got a good look at the object. It was as big or bigger than a B-29,
had a cigar-shaped fuselage and a glidertype wing, set well forward, without
sweepback and without engine nacelles or jet pods. There was not exhaust
glow. The white light appeared to be recessed in the bottom of the plane.
After a few seconds the object lost altitude, passed under the DC-3 and
disappeared. A civilian employee of Air Intelligence was a passenger on
the flight, saw the object and confirms the description by the
pilots.
The conditions for observation were excellent. One fact alone –
the astonishing reversal of direction performed by the object –
suffices
to classify it as a device far beyond the known capacities of aeronautical
science. Although its shape is different, the soundlessness of the object
and the absence of observable means of propulsion relate it to the saucer
class of phenomena.
At 6:45 a.m., just before sunup on Feb. 18, 1952, a photographer
named C. E. Redman was driving through Albuquerque, N. Mex. on his
way to photograph a wedding. Stopped for a traffic light, he
noticed two bright things in the sky. "They were hovering above
Tijeras Canyon.... The one to the north was on its edge. The other
was lying horizontally. They were bright, bluish white.... It was
probably the most astonishing thing I've ever seen. Those things
were soundless. They were not jets or vapor trails. I've seen
hundreds of jets and vapor trails." Redman was questioned later the
same day by a LIFE reporter and a prominent scientist, working
together. From his testimony, and from the lay of the land, it was
estimated that the disks were 20 miles away and four miles in the
air, and that they had a diameter of about 136 feet. Another
witness saw the same objects Redman saw, and at the same time, but
from the other side of town. W. S. Morris, a retired master
sergeant of the Air Force who is now a newsdealer in Albuquerque,
was out to drop off his morning papers when he saw two strange
objects over Tijeras Canyon. "I watched them for 12 minutes. They
were a blinding silver, long and thin, gleaming all over. They
hovered, one kind of above the other to the right. They seemed
brighter than the sun, which wasn't yet over the Sandia mountains.
It just touched their bottoms and they glowed red. They didn't
flutter or move. They just hung there. It must have been 20 miles
away. Then they just suddenly dropped down behind the mountain, and
the upper one tilted so that I could see its profile. It looked
like a bell pepper-with a bump on top, that is."
Kirtland AFB acknowledged that there were no aircraft in that area
at that time. The observations reinforce each other and point to several
striking facts. First, one disk proved itself three dimensional when it
tilted, to descend. Second, the suddenness of the disk's descent indicates
that the bodies contained a source of power. Third, the power that can
suspend a three-dimensional body, of the size Morris describes and in the
position he indicates, without turning a blade or roaring a jet, is
unknown.
How discs looked in relation to each other is shown by
C.E. Redman of Albuquerque.
On Jan. 29, 1952, just before midnight, a B-29 was on solo mission
over Wonsan, Korea. It was flying at a speed somewhat less than 200
miles an hour, at an altitude somewhat above 20,000 feet.
Simultaneously the tail gunner and the fire-control man in the waist
saw a bright round orange object in the sky near the plane. Both
said it was about three feet in diameter, flew with a revolving
motion on a course parallel to theirs, and wore a halo of bluish
flame. It also appeared to pulsate. The object followed the B-29
for about five minutes, then pulled ahead and shot away at a sharp
angle. On the same night a similar globe was seen by the tail
gunner and waist man of another B-29, 80 miles away over Sunchon,
but flying at about the same height. The globe followed the plane
for about a minute, then disappeared.
Theoreticians in the Air Force believe the fireballs were not
natural phenomena but propelled objects. They bear some similarity
to the balls of fire called "fireball fighters" or "foo fighters"
– which flew wing on Allied aircraft over Germany and Japan
during 1944-45 and which have never been satisfactorily explained.
In the Korean incidents, the fireballs seem – on the evidence of
their sharp acceleration, their blue light and their abrupt, angular
swerve – to resemble the saucers described earlier.
The same disks sighted by Redman were seen by W.S. Morris,
ex-Air Force master sergeant
On the night of Nov. 2, 1951 a ball of kelly-green fire, larger
than the moon, and blazing several times more brightly, flashed
eastward across the skies of Arizona. It raced, straight as a
bullet, parallel to the ground, and then exploded in a frightful
paroxysm of light — without making a sound. At least 165 people
saw the incredible thing; hundreds more witnessed the similar flight
of countless other fireballs that since December 1948 have bathed
the hills of the Southwest in their lunar glare. In the last year
they have been seen as far afield as Pennsylvania, Maryland and
Puerto Rico. The chief Air Intelligence officer for the Albuquerque
district saw one. Colonel Joseph D. Caldara, USAF, attached to the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, saw one in Virginia. Hundreds of pilots,
weather observers and atomic scientists have sighted them. Reports
came so thick and fast during 1948 that in 1949 [April 1, 1950] the
Air Force established "Project Twinkle" to investigate them. Project
Twinkle established a triple phototheodolite post at Vaughn, N. Mex. to
obtain scientific data on the fireballs. Day and night, week in,
week out, for three months [six months], a crew kept vigil.
Ironically, while fireballs continued flashing everywhere else in the
Southwest, they saw nothing until the project was transferred to the
Holloman Air
Force Base at Alamogordo, N. Mex. There, during another three-months
siege, they saw a few but were unable to make satisfactory
computations because of the fireballs' great-speed. Search parties
have had no better luck. They have combed in vain the countryside
beneath the point of disappearance; not a trace of telltale
substance has been found on the ground.
The popular Southwest belief that a strange meteor shower was
underway has been blasted by Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, mathematician,
astronomer and director of the Institute of Meteoritics at the
University of New Mexico. He points out that normal fireballs do
not appear green, they fall in the trajectory forced on them by
gravity, are generally noisy as a freight train, and leave
meteorites where they hit. The green New Mexican species does none
of these things. Neither do the green fireballs appear to be
electrostatic phenomena – they move too regularly and too
fast
If the fireballs are the product of a U.S. weapons project, as
some Southwesterners believe, it is a very secret one indeed: the
Atomic Energy Commission and every other government agency connected
with weapons development has denied to LIFE any responsibility for
the fireballs.
Could they be self-destroying Russian reconnaissance devices? Not
likely. While the U.S. believes the Russians have an intercontinental guided
missile, there is no intelligence that indicates they have developed silent
power plants or objects capable of moving nearly as fast as meteors (12
miles a second). Yet – for whatever it may be worth – the
only reports of green fireballs prior to 1948 came from the Baltic
area.
If the fireballs do not respond to gravity, they could only be
explained as lighter-than-air craft or electrical phenomena –
but they have characteristics which rule these out. Therefore they
must be propelled. If propelled and not natural phenomena, they
must be artificial. The extreme greenness of the fireballs has
impressed most witnesses. When asked to indicate the approximate
color on a spectrum chart, most of them have touched the band at
5,200 angstroms, close to the green of burning copper. Copper is
almost never found in meteorites; the friction of the air oxidizes
it shortly after the meteor enters the upper atmosphere. However, a
curious fact has been recorded by aerologists. Concentrations of
copper particles are now present in the air of Arizona and New
Mexico, particularly in "fireball areas." These were not encountered
in air samples made before 1948.
WHAT THEY ARE NOT – AND WHAT THEY MAY BE
What are the flying saucers, the luminous fuselages, the foo
fighters and the green fireballs? The answer – if any answer at
this time is possible – lies in the field of logic rather than of
evidence. What the things are may be adduced partially by reviewing
what they are not.
THEY ARE NOT PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA. Although the Air Force
cheerily wrote off its 34 unexplained incidents with this pat
theory, the explanation does not hold up. There is no evidence,
beyond textbook speculation, for such a supposition, and there is
the direct evidence already cited against it. To doubt the
observers in the foregoing cases is to doubt the ability of every
human being to know a hawk from a handsaw.
THEY ARE NOT THE PRODUCT OF U.S. RESEARCH.
LIFE investigated this possibility to exhaustion. Not fully
satisfied by the public denials of President Truman, Secretary
Johnson and others, the investigators put the question directly to
Gordon Dean, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. He said:
"There's nothing in our shop that could account for these things,
and there's nothing going on that I know of that could explain
them." Still unconvinced, LIFE checked the whereabouts and
present business of every scientist who might have anything to do
with the development of superaircraft. All were accounted for in
other ways. Careful feelers through the business and labor world
encountered no submerged projects of the immensity necessary to
build a fleet of flying disks. And there is still the conclusive
fact: U.S. science has at its command no source of power that could
put a flying machine through such paces as the saucers perform.
THEY ARE NOT A RUSSIAN DEVELOPMENT. It is
inconceivable that the Russians would risk the loss of such a
precious military weapon by flying a saucer over enemy territory.
No man-made machine is foolproof; sooner or later one would crash in
the U.S. and the secret would be out. Nor is there any reason to
believe that Russian science, even with German help, has moved
beyond not only the practical but the THEORETICAL horizons of U.S.
research.
THEY ARE NOT DISTORTIONS OF THE ATMOSPHERE RESULTING FROM ATOMIC
ACTIVITY. To quote the answer David Lilienthal, former
AEC commissioner, once made to that suggestion: "I can't prevent
anyone from saying foolish things." Nor are they aberrations of the
northern lights. Magnetic disturbances cannot account for them and
neither can a notion (recently fathered by Dr. Urner Liddel, the
Navy physicist) that they are "vertical mirages" – reflections from
a vertical (instead of a horizontal) layer of heated air.
THEY ARE NOT SKYHOOK BALLOONS. This was the original
Liddel explanation, and in a few instances it may have been correct.
But not many. They could scarcely be "fireflies in the cockpit," as
one Air Force colonel suggested, since most of the observers were
not in a cockpit when they saw their saucers. And it is hard to
believe that saucers could be the reflections of automobile
headlights on clouds, when they are seen in daylight under cloudless
skies. These being the dead-end alleys of negative evidence, is
there hope of an explanation on the open avenues of scientific
theory? The answer is yes.
The rank of science has taken the saucers far more seriously than
the file of laymen and, after five years of close watch on all
reports, a number of scientists were ready with some conclusions.
One of these was Dr. Walther Riedel, once chief designer and
research director at the German rocket center in Peenemunde, now
engaged on secret work for the U.S. Dr. Riedel has never seen a
saucer himself, but for several years he has kept records of saucer
sightings all over the world. He told LIFE: "I am completely
convinced that they have an out-of-world basis."
Dr. Riedel has four points to his argument: "First, the skin
temperatures of structures operating under the observed conditions
would make it impossible for any terrestrial structure to survive.
The skin friction of the missile at those speeds at those altitudes
would melt any metals or nonmetals available.
"Second, consider the high acceleration at which they fly and maneuver
... In some descriptions the beast spirals straight up. If you think of
the fact that the centrifugal force in a few minutes of such a maneuver
would press the crew against the outside, and do likewise to the blood,
you see what I mean.
"Third.... There are many occurrences where they have done things that
only a pilot could perform but that no human pilot could stand.
"Fourth, in most of the reports there is a lack of visible jet. Most
observers report units without visible flame...and no trail. If it would
be any known type of jet, rocket, piston engine, or chain-reaction motor,
there would be a very clear trail at high altitude. It is from no power
unit we know of..."
Dr. Riedel's arguments are reinforced by those of Dr. Maurice A.
Biot, one of the leading aerodynamicists in the U.S. and a
prominent mathematical physicist. From an aerodynamical viewpoint,
says Dr. Biot, the saucer shape makes very little sense if the
machine is to travel in the atmosphere. A disk has a high drag and
is a poor airfoil unless stabilized; when whirled at high speed
through the air, it "wobbles" distressingly – a movement
observed in several of the saucers sighted. However, for space
travel, where there is no atmosphere to oppose, the disk has
significant advantages. The sphere, theoretically better, presents
several difficult problems of construction and utilization. The
disk, easier to build, has almost all the virtues of the sphere and
some of its own. Reviewing the evidence presented here, Dr. Biot
said: "The least improbable explanation is that these things are
artificial and controlled. . .My opinion for some time has been
that they have an extraterrestrial origin."
WHO? WHAT? AND WHEN?
There, at least, is a plausible explanation of the disk shape. But the
real depths of the saucer mystery bemuse penetration, as the night sky
swallows up a flashlight beam. What of the other shapes? Why do the things
make no sound? How to explain their eerie luminosity? What power urges
them at such terrible speeds through the sky? Who, or what, is aboard?
Where do they come from? Why are they here? What are the intentions of
the beings who control them?
Before these awesome questions, science – and mankind –
can yet only halt in wonder. Answers may come in a generation
– or tomorrow. Somewhere in the dark skies there may be those
who know.
Read Letters To LIFE Magazine
