The World of Flying Saucers: A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space Age

If thousands of aircraft from other planets have indeed been patrolling the earth for many years (according to some authors, for centuries), they have achieved an incredibly perfect safety record. Disabled or wrecked flying saucers have occasionally been reported, but the debris and bodies to be expected from such incidents have never been located.

A “mummified man,” sometimes referred to as proof of such a catastrophe, may be seen at Caspar, Wyoming. Found in the Rocky Mountains in the autumn of 1932, this little creature measures 6½ inches high in a sitting position and weighs three-quarters of a pound. Paleontologists recognize it as Hesperopithecus, an anthropoid denizen of earth during the Pliocene period. The mummified body of another such creature, supposedly found in Arizona, has also been called the remains of “a little green man.”[XI-1] In 1952 four spaceships were supposed to have crashed in the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, carrying the bodies of thirty-four “little men”[XI-2], but the only evidence offered for this disaster was a chunk of “unknown metal” that proved to be ordinary aluminum, and the entire drama was shown to be the work of a known hoaxer[XI-3]. Although a few flying-saucer organizations regard such “humanoid” evidence with some doubt, others, such as the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) are less skeptical of the reality of “little men.”[XI-4]

UFO publications have reported the finding of various substances alleged to have been produced by UFOs. The offices of Air Force investigators at Dayton house a small museum of such “pieces of saucers”—old batteries, meteorites, parts of primitive radios, rocks, corroded lead pipe, tangles of wire, strips of tin foil. Although a few of these specimens have been sent in by optimistic hoaxers, most of them have been submitted by genuinely puzzled citizens. When analysis shows the normal origin of such an object, the finder usually accepts the verdict calmly, whether he is disappointed or relieved, but occasionally he rejects the identification and indignantly accuses the Air Force of theft, substitution, or plain lying to suppress the “truth.” Nevertheless, not a single fragment studied so far—animal, vegetable, or mineral—shows any evidence that it grew or was constructed on an alien world.

Angel Hair and Spiders

Some centuries ago the primitive inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands, observing the feathery, hairlike threads of volcanic glass left on the ground from ancient eruptions, accounted for the substance by the legend that the goddess Pelee had once stopped somewhere in the neighborhood to comb her hair. “Angel hair,” a term in UFO parlance used to describe any unfamiliar fibers, strands, threads, liquids, granules, and powders found on the earth and supposedly deposited from flying saucers, offers an interesting analogy.

Fils de la Vierge—the hair of the Virgin Mary—is the usual French phrase for gossamer or cobwebs, whose origin was long a mystery. Similarly the English “gossamer” commonly means cobwebs. According to one source, the word may be derived from gaze à Marie—the gauze of Mary. According to legend, cobwebs were formed from threads that fell from the shroud of the Virgin Mary on her Assumption. UFO enthusiasts in France began to use fils de la Vierge in 1952, to describe the cobwebby material that allegedly fell from flying saucers. Translators of the French UFO publications, instead of using the English equivalent “gossamer” or “cobwebs,” chose to create the new term “angel hair” which, unlike the French, implies an entirely strange substance, one that has no apparent connection with such ordinary earthly phenomena as spiders.

Two remarkable falls of angel hair were reported in France on October 17 and 27, 1952. In both incidents, witnesses observed in the sky a strangely shaped, cottony cloud at a height of several thousand feet. Above it was a long, narrow, cylindrical object trailed by a white plume, moving slowly across the sky and accompanied by twenty or thirty smaller objects that looked like puffs of smoke. Following a broken path, they made rapid zigzag motions, and left a broad ribbon of white substance that slowly drifted to the ground and clung to trees, telephone wires, and roofs of houses. These masses of white threads were described as like wool, nylon, or Fiberglas. When rolled into a ball they became gelatinous and disappeared within a few hours; set on fire, they burned like cellophane.

One witness was able to disentangle a single strand more than ten yards long. None of the material, unfortunately, was preserved for study.

Students of UFOs pondered the unusual phenomenon: “If the observers really did see what they described, and if all these objects were machines guided by a single intelligence, then what mysterious experiment were they performing? What purpose was served by the strange ballet of paired saucers? What was the meaning of the whitish streak appearing between two saucers on separation? What, finally, was the ‘angel’s hair’ that sublimed so readily in the air?”[XI-5, p. 150] UFO enthusiasts have suggested various theories of the nature and origin of the mysterious substance. According to one hypothesis[XI-5, p. 149], angel hair might be produced in the wake of a spacecraft moving in a force field; ionization of the atmosphere would produce ultraheavy particles which would react with ordinary air to form a kind of precipitate-angel hair—which would disintegrate as ionization decreased (see Chapter IX). Another theory suggests that angel hair might be a chain polymer of cellulose containing radioactive carbon 14 (the carbon 14 being produced by the action of cosmic rays on atoms of nitrogen in the atmosphere), hydrogen, and oxygen from moisture in the air, the three elements combining under the action of ultraheavy particles produced by ionization[XI-6]. This theory overlooks the fact that cellulose is not formed from a combination of carbon dioxide, oxygen, and hydrogen in air. Rather, it is made by living organisms in a series of complicated enzymic reactions. Even if cellulose could be made by the hypothetical reaction suggested, it would contain no more carbon 14 than does the ordinary carbon dioxide in the air.

To French entomologists, the angel hair seen in October 1952, was no mystery at all. The objects dancing the strange ballet were not spaceships, but spiders. Far from performing a mysterious experiment, they were merely carrying out the well-established routine of migration.

Each year the young spiders of most species leave the nests of their infancy and prepare to establish their own homes. Crawling by the hundreds or the thousands to the tops of fence posts, walls, or trees, they spin long silken webs which, inflated by the air, carry the tiny emigrants up from the ground. These gossamer parachutes drift up and along on rising air currents, sometimes to great heights; they may soar for a few yards or for many miles over hills and valleys. These migrating balloonists have been observed as high as 14,000 feet, and at sea 200 miles from any land. Eventually drifting back to earth, the spiders detach the now useless parachutes and move off to build new nests for the coming year, while the abandoned gossamer may pile up in great masses on trees, fences, telephone wires, and ground, to decay and vanish in a matter of hours. These gossamer showers sometimes include so many outworn webs that the filmy blankets of fine silk may be several inches deep and may cover an entire landscape like snow.

These migrations occur in spring or, more frequently, in autumn—but only when the weather is exactly right. Spiders may sit patiently for days, waiting for a calm, clear, windless day. On such days the steady upward currents of air from the sun-warmed ground carry the spiders gently aloft[XI-7]. The association of angel hair with UFO sightings is completely natural. The drifting patches of gossamer reflect the sun brilliantly. A whole armada of saucers can appear overhead and then vanish as the gossamer cascades to earth.

The description of the material and the date of the fall both indicate that the angel hair observed in France in October 1952 was of arachnid origin. Even the weather was exactly right—“superb, with a sky of cloudless blue”—for the migration of a smother of spiders.

A similar fall of angel hair occurred in the United States on October 22, 1954, near a school in Marysville, Ohio. At afternoon recess the pupils of the Jerome Elementary School noticed a dazzlingly bright object in the sky. It disappeared, and for the next forty-five minutes both children and teachers watched white, cottonlike tufts floating slowly down to the ground. The material was in long strands, very fine and soft, could be stretched and rolled into a tiny ball, but quickly vanished to nothing and left a green stain on the hands. The stuff clung to grass and cars, draped the telephone wires for a distance of three miles, and was like a misty canopy over the road[XI-6].

Unfortunately none of the material was preserved and no analysis was possible. Marysville is near Columbus, Ohio, an industrial center, and the stuff might have been waste products from one of the many factories. Since similar falls were reported in Indiana during the same period, the substance more probably was gossamer. As in the French incidents, the time was late October and the weather was perfect, a warm autumn day with a sunny, cloudless sky. Both the time and the weather were ideal for migrating spiders to take to the air, float down to earth on their fluffy parachutes, and then discard the no longer necessary fils de la Vierge.

Many falls of angel hair that occur in the warm days of Indian summer are probably abandoned gossamer. It is significant that of fourteen such incidents reported in Europe and the United States, all but three took place in October and November, the season of spider migration[XI-6]. In one of the three incidents reported in other months (Horseheads, New York, February 21, 1955) the angel hair was identified as waste products from the local milk plant.

One of the most recent reports of angel hair came from Sebree, Kentucky, on September 11, 1962, when state police and the local Civil Defense director were called in to investigate a strange substance that looked like spun glass, which had been floating down near the residence of Mr. Y in great quantities for more than an hour. The Air Force, when called for advice, suggested three possibilities: the material might be chemicals used in cloud seeding, might be refuse from a defective filter in a chemical or industrial plant, or might be gossamer formed by migrating spiders. The first two possibilities were quickly ruled out. The witnesses, when requestioned, remembered that they had indeed noticed spiders clinging to several bits of the material they had picked up. The troopers’ report concluded, “It is the belief of this unit the substance observed was gossamer formed by huge quantities of migrating spiders moving, which is normal for this season.”

The yearly migration of spiders and sloughing of gossamer is an established fact. As an explanation of angel hair it is far less fantastic than a still-hypothetical cruising spaceship.

Other Varieties of Angel Hair

Several types of angel hair not of arachnid origin have been reported in industrial areas, particularly in and near cities that have textile factories. When the filtering system of such a factory fails to work properly, lint and waste residues may be thrown into the air to be carried away by the wind and eventually deposited on the ground. Drifting fibers of nylon, rayon, and other fabrics can mystify an observer, especially if the residues break and disappear when touched. Some cities, such as Cincinnati, maintain an Air Pollution Center to deal with the problems resulting from air contamination by industrial wastes. Scientists at this and other centers often collaborate with ATIC in identifying unknown substances reported in connection with UFOs.

Late in the afternoon of September 25, 1956, a housewife in Cincinnati noticed a strange substance floating down into her yard, a white, fibrous material that curled when she touched it. Wondering if she had found some angel hair, she described the incident to the editors of Orbit, a saucer publication; in addition, she collected some of the material in a jar and sent it to the Air Force for analysis[XI-8]. Working in collaboration with the Air Pollution Center at Cincinnati, ATIC investigators subjected the material to chemical and microscopic tests and identified it as waste products from fibers of cuprammonium (Bemberg) rayon, from a local industrial plant[XI-9].

The possible varieties of angel hair increase with the development of new technologies. During March and April 1959, the Air Force received many reports that flying saucers were cruising over the mountains near Coburn, Virginia, regularly used a landing strip on an inaccessible peak of Sheep Rock Mountain, and frequently dropped angel hair on the nearby countryside. The investigating officer collected some of the material and identified it as a type of “window,” the rolls or long strips of aluminum foil used by the military in World War II to produce spurious radar echoes and confuse enemy anti-aircraft fire. The Coburn angel hair was identical with the foil used by Air Force planes carrying out experiments in the area. “Window” falls very slowly; dropped from a height of 40,000 feet, it may easily be visible for some time to ground observers, as well as interfere with local radar reception[XI-10].

A similar angel-hair incident was reported on November 23, 1960, when many residents in southern Michigan and the Midwest reported a mysterious, glowing white object in the eastern sky that was dropping strange material to the earth. Witnesses described the object variously as a comet, a satellite with a tail, or a saucer-shaped UFO. The angel hair was quickly identified as foil dropped by planes that were conducting a test of radar reception[XI-11].

Reports of angel hair still come in occasionally to ATIC and, if the explanation is not immediately obvious, are investigated. On the afternoon of October 12, 1959, officials at Robins Air Force Base, Georgia, received a telephone call stating that unidentified substances were falling from unknown objects in the sky near the town of Washington. Two Air Force investigators arrived in the town before evening to interview the witnesses and examine the material.

The first sighting had occurred shortly before noon, when a farm woman noticed an object in the sky, traveling not particularly fast from southeast to west. A stream of peculiar-looking substance, broad as the vapor trail of a jet plane, was trailing behind and floating toward the earth. The object itself was “as large as a football,” brown or black in color, and maintained a perfectly straight, even course. A few hours later in a town a few miles northeast, a man mowing his lawn noticed on the grass two whitish-gray streaks about ten feet long and eight inches wide, extending from east to west. Deciding that the peculiar streaks were a fungus or a mold, he mowed across them; at once a gray dust rose about twenty inches into the air and then settled back to earth.

The Air Force investigators took samples of the dusty earth and grass for analysis. Chemical tests showed the presence of silver iodide. Finding silver in such an unlikely place posed a problem, but it also pointed the way to a solution. Silver iodide and other silver halides are used in cloud seeding to produce rain; long “plumes” of this material, ejected from planes, have been successfully tracked in mountainous country for distances of thirty-five miles downwind. A few questions in the right places produced the answer: research teams from the University of Georgia at Athens and from the Lockheed plant at Marietta had been in the air that day, carrying out experiments in cloud seeding. The angel hair was the silver iodide used in the experiment[XI-10].

Angel hair of less mysterious origin has now found its way into the culinary world. The restaurant of the Hotel Bristol in Córdoba, Argentina, offers “Angel-hair soup,” very fine threadlike spaghetti in chicken broth.

The Wisconsin Pancakes

Of the many substances offered the public as proof of extraterrestrial visitors, probably few have evoked more publicity than the Wisconsin pancakes. According to a plumber named Joe Simonton, of Eagle River, Wisconsin, a flying saucer with three peculiarly dressed occupants appeared in his yard on April 18, 1961, and hovered a few feet above the ground. When one of the saucermen indicated by sign language that he was thirsty and held out a two-handled jug, Simonton obligingly filled it with well water and handed it back. Looking through the open hatchway, he saw another spaceman cooking something on a kind of grill. When the spaceman noticed the terrestrial’s interest, he presented him with three “pancakes” from the grill—thin, oblong, greasy, rubbery pastries perforated by small round holes and smelling strongly of goose grease. The saucer then departed. Although Simonton’s curiosity apparently stopped short of tasting these gifts, he took them to a friend of his in Eagle River, a county judge and a member in good standing of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP)[XI-12].

Eager to learn whether the flapjacks came from this world or another, the judge promptly mailed one of them to NICAP headquarters in Washington, D.C., explained its history and requested an analysis. At the same time he gave the story, as far as it went, to the newspapers. After two weeks of anxious waiting, on May 7 he again wrote to NICAP, protesting their failure to acknowledge his parcel and demanding either an analysis or the pancake. This time he received a prompt reply: NICAP deplored the publicity involving the organization with such a fantastic-sounding claim, but agreed to send the stuff to a chemist.

Meanwhile time was passing and pancakes, at least terrestrial ones, don’t last forever. Without waiting for the report from the chemist the judge submitted one of the remaining pancakes to Air Force investigators of UFOs. On May 25—the cakes were now more than a month old—he wrote a third letter, excoriating NICAP for its lack of enthusiasm over the evidence, and sent a carbon copy to Ray Palmer, editor of Flying Saucers, who in the early days of UFOs had been their staunch proponent (see Chapter II). The magazine promptly published the letter, with comments, as well as an editorial that solemnly reproached NICAP for its attitude toward contactee stories in general[XI-13].

If the magazine and the judge had planned the entire episode deliberately to embarrass NICAP, they could not have timed it better. Busy trying to promote a Congressional hearing on flying saucers, NICAP apparently had no time, facilities, or inclination to investigate flapjacks of such dubious origin. Interrupted by phone calls, besieged by reporters, and generally harassed, NICAP mailed the cake to an Ohio physics professor, a member of the organization, in the hope that he could induce his colleague in the chemistry department to analyze the cake. Since the chemistry professor was ill, the physics professor returned the specimen to headquarters in Washington. Old and tired as it must have been by this time, the cake then was dispatched to New York to another NICAP member, a chemist, who began some preliminary tests.

Sometime during these weeks the Air Force announced the results of its analysis. The pancakes consisted of starch, fat, buckwheat hulls, soybean hulls, wheat bran, and other common substances; bacteriological and radiation readings were normal[XI-14]. Obviously the specimen had been an ordinary pancake fried on earth—or else the spacemen’s home planet produced grains that are indistinguishable from those flourishing on earth.

NICAP, however, had the last word. Preliminary tests by their chemist had shown that the cakes contained a common type of hydrogenated oil shortening that melted at body temperature. Further tests were temporarily delayed because of the expense. However, NICAP assured the judge, the tests would be completed sometime, and any fragments left over would be saved and returned![XI-15]

The Moon Bridge

On the evening of July 29, 1953, Mr. J. J. O’Neill, a science reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, was looking at the moon through his small telescope when he saw what he believed to be a shaft of light shining from the mountainous ridge above the Mare Crisium crater and fanning out into the shadowed area of the crater wall. According to his interpretation, the light was coming from underneath a new structure, a gigantic natural bridge twelve to twenty miles long that arched over a gap in the mountainous rim. This region of the moon had been thoroughly studied and mapped during the previous century and no such feature had ever been noticed. The sudden appearance of so spectacular an object, if true, would indeed require explanation. Alerted by news reports of the moon bridge, a British amateur astronomer, H. P. Wilkins, reported a few weeks later that he, too, could see the mysterious arch through his telescope (see Figure 16).

To saucer enthusiasts these reports constituted proof that the moon was inhabited. Since Nature alone could not have formed such an arch in so short a time, they argued, the bridge must be artificial. The structure might have been built by creatures living on the moon, perhaps in enormous underground cities. These beings might be native Selenites, or they might be colonists from Mars or from planets belonging to another solar system who were using the moon as a base for their spaceships[XI-16].

Professional astronomers, queried about the mysterious bridge, pointed out that sunlight could not have produced the phenomenon in the way described. When a bright lamp shines through an open doorway into a darkened room, the light spreads out like a fan into the shadowed area because the light source is very near. But the supposed light source in this case was the far-distant sun. If a shaft of sunlight were shining under a huge lunar arch, as claimed, the opposite boundaries of the illuminated area would be essentially parallel, not divergent like the fan-shaped region described. Examining the Mare Crisium wall through the fifteen-inch Harvard telescope, Dr. Menzel (who was therefore labeled “one of the Army stooges”[XI-16a]) concluded that the bright area observed by the amateurs must have been a high plateau that was still illuminated by the setting sun while the rest of the crater wall was already in darkness. The roughly curved boundary of the illuminated plateau, seen against the shadowed mountains, had been mistakenly interpreted as a bridge. Dr. G. P. Kuiper, one of the world’s leading authorities on the moon, also studied the area with the eighty-two-inch reflecting telescope at the McDonald Observatory, and reached the same conclusion.

One writer offered further proof (derived from an unnamed source) for the reality of the new bridge. Astronomers at Mount Palomar Observatory, he asserted, had made a secret study that confirmed the presence of the structure; furthermore a spectrographic analysis was supposed to have proved that the bridge was made of metal[XI-16].

Sensible comment on these statements is not easy. A “secret” study would be impossible since the moon’s face is obviously open to all viewers, and the purported chemical analysis is sheer nonsense. The spectroscope can tell the physicist what luminous gases are present in the atmosphere around a heavenly body, but it cannot reveal the composition of a solid object on the surface of the body, unless the object is first heated until it vaporizes and is transformed into gas. Before a physicist could make a spectrographic analysis of the alleged lunar structure, he would have to land on the moon and chip off a piece of the “bridge” itself.

“Pieces of Saucers”

In UFO publications, any oddly shaped chunk of rock or metal is likely to be described as a fragment of an interplanetary craft. A six-inch meteorite that fell at Sylacauga, Alabama, (Chapter V) has been classified in one saucer book as an “unidentified crashed object.”[XI-16] By peculiar reverse logic, sometimes the absence of a solid fragment is adduced as equally valid evidence of flying saucers. The green fireballs of New Mexico (Chapter V) were identified as spacecraft partly because they did not leave material traces on the ground. Similarly, when a small object apparently struck and went through a metal signboard in New Haven, Connecticut, on August 19, 1953, the object itself could not be found. Nevertheless, from a study of the size and shape of the hole and the material around the hole, saucer investigators, with more than Sherlockian skill, concluded that the object must have been a missile from outer space.

To identify “pieces of saucers,” a new pseudoscience has now developed which we may call “xenochemistry,” the interpretation of substances allegedly from other planets. In xenochemistry, a full qualitative and quantitative analysis is usually not performed and exact results are not made public. From an identification and sometimes a quantitative estimate of one or two of the elements present in the specimen, the investigator infers the nature of the rest and treats the inference as proved fact. On the basis of this “analysis” he concludes that the object, before it entered our atmosphere, must have had a certain chemical composition that is unknown or impossible on earth and that the object therefore came from another planet.

Silver Rain in Brazil

One of the most publicized substances to be analyzed in this way was the “silver rain” that allegedly fell from an unidentified flying object in Brazil. The incident occurred on December 13, 1954, in the city of Campinas and the witness was a housewife but, as in many UFO sightings, exactly what happened is not easy to find out[XI-17]. UFO publications in England, New Zealand, and the United States reported that the sighting had occurred at night but, in spite of the darkness, the witness had observed the objects in detail. She described three gray-colored, circular flying saucers; each was made up of two sections or plates, one placed on top of the other; the top plate rotated continuously and sent out a strong light. Moving soundlessly and in close formation, the three saucers had performed fantastic acrobatics over the city, apparently unnoticed by the other residents. Suddenly one of them had peeled off and dived low over the roof of the woman’s house, lighting up the whole neighborhood with the brilliant glare of its rotating section; then, going into a high-speed climb, it dropped at her feet a liquid substance that fell “like silver rain.”

According to the more generally accepted and more probable version, the incident occurred in the morning in full daylight. The housewife was feeding her poultry when she heard a noise on the ground near her feet. Stooping down, she observed a pool of shiny liquid, like silver rain, which solidified within a few seconds. Looking up, she saw three large objects moving rapidly high in the sky and they looked to her like flying saucers.

A reporter on the Campinas Correio Popular, hearing rumors that a flying saucer had dropped strange material “something like lead,” interviewed the woman, collected some fragments that a neighbor had picked up, and took them to a local chemist for analysis. The newspaper then reported that the stuff was absolutely pure tin—that is, it was about 90 per cent pure tin and the rest was either oxidation or metal alloys that were unknown on earth[XI-17, XI-18, XI-19].

Understandably interested in this report, members of the Brazilian Air Force also interviewed the witness and collected some of the fragments she showed them, as well as other fragments that had fallen about the same time in other parts of the city. Laboratory analysis showed the material to be merely solder. Several large airports not far from Campinas might well have had large planes in the air; they could have dropped the solder. The Air Force obviously saw no need to invoke the presence of extraterrestrial vehicles to account for the incident and considered the problem solved, but Brazilian saucer enthusiasts refused to accept this explanation. In their opinion the Air Force had either gotten hold of the wrong material or was covering up the true facts.

Two years later, in the autumn of 1956, the reporter who had ordered the original analysis received another collection of fragments and turned them over to a group of civilian investigators of UFO phenomena. Although he did not know the full history of the new fragments (unfortunately he had forgotten the names of the persons who gave them to him), he himself was convinced that they were part of the original shower of silver rain. Accepting this theory, the civilians sent the fragments to the United States for analysis: one part to a sympathetic scientist at an Ohio college, who asked a chemist colleague to test the material, and another to a commercial chemist in New York. When the New York chemist, like the Brazilian Air Force in 1954, reported that the material was an ordinary tin solder, the UFO group concluded that the fragment sent him must have been spurious, and refused to accept his findings. The Ohio chemist reported that his specimen contained tin, did not contain antimony, and had a density of 10.3. Since the density of tin is 7.3, the sample obviously contained other elements in addition to tin.

With the reports in hand, the editor of the Brazilian UFO Critical Bulletin published the xenochemical conclusion under the headline, “Stuff Analyzed by American and Brazilian Scientists Proves the UFOs Are Non-Terrestrial Flying Machines.”[XI-18]

The full facts on which this conclusion rests should presumably be available for study, but they have never been published. The origin of the 1956 fragments is unknown; they may or may not have been part of the 1954 fall. But the 1954 incident at least offered an apparently ideal chance to establish beyond doubt the exact composition of a substance that fell from some object in the sky, and to determine whether it came from earth or from beyond. The material did not deliquesce or disappear, as gossamer and industrial waste may do, but remained available for analysis. Incredibly, this ideal chance was lost. Of the several chemists involved, none made a complete qualitative, quantitative, and spectroscopic analysis, and none published his complete data. The Ohio chemist, busy with ordinary duties, had time to make only a preliminary analysis of the 1956 fragment. He did not determine the amount of tin present and did not determine what elements other than tin were in the sample. The density of the 1954 sample is not known and the results of the complete qualitative, quantitative, and spectrographic tests, if performed, are not available.

When a businessman sends a specimen to a commercial chemist for analysis, he expects to receive a specific list of exactly what elements it contains and in what percentages. If he received, instead, results such as those of the silver-rain analysis, plus the chemist’s opinion that the specimen used to consist of something else in different proportions, the businessman would very properly refuse to pay.

No competent chemist would use the meager data available to assert that the 1954 and 1956 fragments had an identical origin, or that they were originally composed only of pure tin. A quantitative analysis theoretically could show that a given sample is composed entirely of a certain element such as tin, but if the sample contains only 90 per cent tin, 10 per cent obviously consists of other elements, and the specimen is not 100 per cent pure tin.

With so few facts available, the actual identity of the silver rain can only be guessed at, but overwhelming evidence indicates that it was made right here on earth.

The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics lists a large number of possibilities. At least 5 alloys of tin and lead, without antimony, have densities between 9.43 and 10.33, like the 1956 fragments. Ordinary “plumber’s solder” is 67 per cent lead, 33 per cent tin, and has a density of 9.4. “Tinman’s solder” is 67 per cent tin and 33 per cent lead. Many aluminum solders have neither antimony nor lead, but contain tin in percentages ranging from 50 to 97 per cent, combined with varying proportions of zinc, aluminum, copper, cadmium, or phosphorus.

One judicial-minded investigator of flying saucers gently pointed out to the editor of the UFO Critical Bulletin that the use of the word “proved” for the extraterrestrial origin of the silver rain was premature, and suggested the need for obtaining and publishing a complete analysis before drawing any conclusions. The editor responded with the peculiar logic of the xenochemist:

“What more is necessary to convince so severe and thickheaded person as Dr. ——? Would be necessary a statement in conjunction with some highly worldly considered scientist? ... Would be necessary a statement in conjunction from Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the Pope?—This he’ll never get of course. Would be necessary a UFO landing on his private garden?”[XI-17]

Another type of colored substance is the “blue rain” that sprinkled a thirty-mile stretch of countryside near London on September 9, 1962. Falling without warning from clear skies, it left a blue stain that wouldn’t wash off. Investigation showed that the substance came from jet planes taking part in Britain’s annual giant air show at Farnborough. The jets were using the blue dye to color their vapor trails and make a more spectacular display.

Other Mysterious Fragments

In the spring of 1960 Mrs. Coral Lorenzen, director of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, publicly challenged the truth of the Air Force statement that “no physical or material evidence, not even a minute fragment of so-called ‘flying saucer’ has ever been found.”[XI-20] Mrs. Lorenzen announced that she had in her possession two fragments of an extraterrestrial vehicle that had met with disaster in the earth’s atmosphere. Without specifying the date and location of the event, the identity of the witnesses, or any corroborative details of the alleged disaster, she merely said that several persons had witnessed the catastrophe. She went on to assert, somewhat astonishingly, that “the gratifying aspect of this case, however, is that we do not have to depend on the testimony of witnesses to establish the reality of the incident for the most advanced laboratory tests indicate that the residual material could not have been produced through the application of any known terrestrial techniques.”[XI-21]

Sending a letter and two photographs of the fragments to Colonel Lawrence J. Tacker, then in the Office of Information, United States Air Force, she simultaneously released to the press copies of both letter and photographs, and suggested that the Air Force could “vindicate” itself by analyzing the material. The newspaper photographs showed one fragment about four inches long and two inches wide resembling petrified wood in appearance, and a smaller piece shaped roughly like a flattened cupcake, whose surface showed pits and whorls like those on the trailing end of a meteorite.

Two days later, without waiting for a reply from Washington, Mrs. Lorenzen through the newspaper amplified her challenge. If the Air Force wanted to examine the mysterious fragments, she said, they would first have to agree to certain conditions[XI-22]:

“(1) APRO officers, together with duly appointed Air Force liaison personnel, would establish a board of experts representing both military and civilian UFO researchers.

“(2) This board of experts would decide what meaningful tests need to be performed on the material in question.

“(3) The board then would select a qualified testing agency to perform these tests under its cognizance.”

In all its history, the United States Air Force can surely have received no more extraordinary proposition. Whatever he may have felt, Colonel Tacker merely suggested that Mrs. Lorenzen could submit the material to ATIC for analysis.

The fragments were never forwarded to the Air Force.

Eventually APRO published some information about the “disaster.” Early in September 1957 a group of fishermen on a beach near Ubataba, Brazil, had supposedly sighted a disk-shaped object flashing down toward the sea. The UFO had suddenly veered upward and exploded, showering down fragments and sparks like fireworks. Several pieces had been obtained by a Brazilian representative of APRO, who submitted them to a chemist for complete tests including spectrographic and X-ray diffraction analyses.

The analyses have apparently never been published. Although they evidently showed the presence of at least three elements common on earth—magnesium, hydrogen, and oxygen—APRO somehow deduced that the fragments in their original state had consisted of pure magnesium and that the hydroxide must have formed when they came in contact with the water. The final conclusion stated that the object consisted, at least in part, of 100% magnesium. Similarly, perhaps, a cook might assert that since chocolate fudge consists, at least in part, of 100 per cent sucrose, fudge must originally have been composed entirely of pure sugar, except for a little chocolate and milk it picked up in passing through the kitchen.

From the few facts available a positive identification of the fragments is impossible. The description of the object seen by the fishermen fits that of a meteor that broke into pieces near the end of its flight. In the photographs the fragments look like ordinary meteorites, which often contain a fair amount of magnesium (see Chapter V). There is no evidence to suggest that the fishermen’s “wrecked spaceship” was anything but an exploding meteor.

In the last fifteen years the Air Force has patiently analyzed dozens of odd substances ranging from angel hair to pancakes. The statement made in 1960 by General Thomas D. White, Chief of Staff, United States Air Force, still holds true:

“By an act of Congress the United States Air Force is charged with the Air Defense of the United States. Rapid identification of anything that flies is an important part of air defense. Thus the Air Force initiated and continues the unidentified flying object program. Under this program all unidentified flying object sightings are investigated in meticulous detail by Air Force personnel and qualified scientific consultants. So far, not a single bit of material evidence of the existence of spaceships has been found.”[XI-23]