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

Thousands of reports of “flying saucers,” “unidentified flying objects,” or “UFOs” have appeared in print during the last fifteen years. Although most of the things seen have later been explained as unusual but normal phenomena, some enthusiasts continue to regard them as mysterious, and thus help perpetuate the myth that the “saucers” are actually spaceships from other planets, busily carrying out a patrol of the earth.

This saucer myth owes an unacknowledged debt to Charles Fort, a talented reporter, writer, and self-appointed gadfly of science. With a strong curiosity about the world of nature but without training in the disciplines of research, Fort liked to challenge scientists in general and astronomers in particular with tales of “impossible” happenings culled from books of folklore, old journals, and newspapers. He mistrusted orthodox knowledge because, he believed, it smugly damned to oblivion all reports of marvels that it could not explain: pyrogenic persons; rains of fish, frogs, and stones; accounts of telepathy, teleportation, the vanishing of human beings, luminous objects in the sky. Although he never claimed that he believed the stories himself, Fort enjoyed collecting them and before his death in 1932 had completed four volumes of these anecdotes.

Science-fiction writers have found an inexhaustible mine of ideas in The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo!, and Wild Talents, which also provide the chief elements of the saucer myth:

“Unknown, luminous things, or beings, have often been seen, sometimes close to this earth, and sometimes high in the sky. It may be that some of them were living things that occasionally come from somewhere else in our existence, but that others were lights on the vessels of explorers, or voyagers, from somewhere else.”[I-1] These extraterrestrials may have been in communication with earthmen for many years, Fort suggested, and they may sometimes kidnap and carry away human beings.

UFO Reports and the Air Force

Most flying-saucer reports have come from reliable citizens who have seen something extraordinary, something they do not understand. Genuinely puzzled, they often report the incident to the nearest Air Force base. The evaluation of such cases is the responsibility of the United States Air Force. Since the beginning of the saucer scare in 1947, the chief investigating agency has been that at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio, and has borne a succession of names—Project Sign, Project Grudge, Project Blue Book, and the Aerial Phenomena Group of the Aerospace Technical Intelligence Center, usually known as ATIC. Until recently this group operated under the jurisdiction of the Assistant Chief of Staff, Intelligence. On July 1, 1961, it was transferred to the jurisdiction of the Air Force Systems Command. To simplify discussion in this book, however, the group that investigates unidentified aerial phenomena is generally referred to as ATIC.

In military parlance the phrase “unidentified flying object,” abbreviated as UFO, is used to indicate any air-borne phenomenon that fails to identify itself to, or to be identified by, trained witnesses on the ground or in the air who are using visual or radar methods of observation. Created in the early days of the saucer era, the term UFO is unfortunately misleading because it seems to imply that the unknown is a solid material object. Many of them are not. The more dramatic phrase “flying saucer” is similarly misleading because not all the unknowns are shaped like a saucer, and not all of them are flying. Since no one has been able to devise a more accurate brief term that will apply to all reports in this category, both “UFO” and “flying saucer” have remained in common use.

Air Force investigators and scientists have been able to account for almost every reported “spaceship” as the result of failure to identify some natural phenomenon. Some were the product of delusion or deliberate hoaxes. A few remain technically “Unknown” because, although the probable explanation is obvious, too few facts are available to permit a positive identification. No such report suggests the possibility that interplanetary craft are cruising in our skies.

The Scientist’s View

If a spaceship from another planet should ever visit the earth, no one would be more eager to acknowledge it than our government officials and our scientists. All governments would feel their responsibility to protect the human race if necessary, and to establish diplomatic relations with the alien race if possible. The scientists would want to study, analyze, and try to understand the nature of both the ship and its occupants.

Many persons, sincerely believing that flying saucers do exist, berate the investigator who denies their reality and characterize him as stupid, willfully obtuse, or intellectually dishonest because he does not accept the saucer reports at face value but weighs them by the same methods most of us use in weighing evidence in everyday life. When told there’s a horse in the bathtub, for example, the sensible man realizes that the alleged visitation, while not impossible, is extremely improbable. Therefore he does not immediately begin speculating on the color of the horse, where it might have come from, what its purpose may be, and whether it will wreck the bathroom. Instead he adopts the scientific method and first goes to find out whether the horse is really there.

Like Fort, some flying-saucer believers are consciously or unconsciously antagonistic to the scientific method and resent its restrictions as a child objects to discipline. Suggesting that a strictly logical approach deprives us of valuable truths about the nature of the universe, and bluntly asserting that present-day physicists and astronomers have closed their minds to the possibility of new knowledge, these enthusiasts imply that we should require less rigorous proof for the reality of saucers than for other types of physical phenomena.

Because so many amateur investigators have misunderstood, misrepresented, and condemned the scientists’ attitude, the authors of this book (asking the indulgence of their colleagues) will briefly outline the principles a researcher ordinarily applies to the study of any new problem—the nature of radioactivity, the cause of a disease, or the origin of flying saucers.

The Question of “Evidence”

Most physicists, chemists, biologists, and astronomers will agree that life in some form probably exists in other parts of the galaxy. These other life forms, if they exist, may or may not have a kind of intelligence similar to our own; if they have, we might or might not be able to recognize it. Such speculations, while fascinating, lie entirely in the realm of theory. They are not facts and do not provide the slightest support to the often stated corollary that intelligent creatures do live on other planets and frequently visit the earth.

In approaching the spacecraft hypothesis, the scientist asks first: What facts are we trying to account for? And second: Does the spacecraft theory account for these facts better than the normal explanations that are already available? After studying hundreds of UFO reports, however, he concludes that much of the startling “proof” that saucers are spacecraft is merely inference. Of the established facts, none requires a new theory to account for it; and no evidence exists that even faintly suggests, to the expert, that interplanetary visitors are involved.

In the study of UFO phenomena this question of “evidence” is crucial. The careful investigator tries always to distinguish sharply between an observed fact, which is evidence, and an interpretation of that fact, which is not evidence no matter how reasonable it may seem.

As a simple analogy, consider this situation: A man is sitting in his living room late at night; the rest of the family have gone to bed. Suddenly he is startled by a loud noise somewhere upstairs. Trying to account for the noise, he thinks of various possible causes—a burglar, the “settling” of the house, a mouse in the wall, someone dropping a shoe, the wind rattling a door, the sonic boom from a distant plane. If, without having further information, he decides that any one of these is the true cause, he is accepting a guess as though it were a fact. The real cause of the noise may be one of these or it may be something else that he hasn’t even thought of.

Amateur investigators of UFOs publish many reports which they characterize as absolute proof that spaceships exist. The expert, analyzing the same reports, finds no proof at all because the actual facts and the interpretations of the witnesses are hopelessly confused. An early UFO case provides a typical example.

According to Air Force records[I-2], on the morning of December 6, 1952, a B-29 bomber was over the Gulf of Mexico returning from a training mission. At 5:25 A.M. the student radar operator, using an uncalibrated set, observed four bright blips (radar jargon for bright spots on a radarscope; such a spot indicates the presence of an object reflecting the radar pulses, but does not reveal the nature or shape of the object). The blips were apparently returns from objects about twenty miles away, in no specific group, which rapidly moved off the scope. Similar groups of fast-moving blips appeared at intervals during a period of about five minutes, and appeared also on two auxiliary radarscopes. After the first set was calibrated, the blips reappeared; none was observed after 5:35 A.M. From the radar data estimates of size and distance were made; calculations based on these estimates indicated a probable speed of 5000 to 9000 miles an hour. During the ten-minute period two visual observations were made, lasting about three seconds, which bore no obvious relation to the radar observations: at the right of the plane one crewman saw a single blue-white streak going from front to rear under the wing, and another crewman saw two flashes of blue-white light.

An explanation of the incident was not found immediately, and ATIC at first classified it as an Unknown. Some saucer enthusiasts interpreted the facts to mean that several groups of saucers had been in the area, machines flying so fast that they were visible only as blue-white streaks, whose presence was confirmed by radar. These conclusions were merely deductions from fact, not observed facts. The radarscope is not a camera and does not, at least at present, picture the shape or physical structure of the phenomenon it reports; it shows only spots of light that change position and size. Similarly, the blue-white streaks were mere flashes of light without size or shape.

In a later study of the evidence, the Air Force experts recognized this incident as one of false targets on radar (see Chapter VIII). The radar phantoms may have been caused by beacon returns triggered by another radar; by variations in the atmosphere; or, if “ducting” conditions existed, by reflections from objects that were far beyond the normal range of the radar set. The blue-white flashes had no relation to the radar returns and were probably meteors; the date corresponded with the beginning of the annual Geminid shower (see Chapter V).

This Gulf of Mexico incident is neither complicated nor puzzling. We mention it chiefly to illustrate why the saucer enthusiasts so often disagree with the conclusions reached by the Air Force experts. The amateur assumes that the instrument operated faultlessly and detected a solid object; he uses these assumptions to interpret the data, uses the interpretation as fact, and by this “bootstrap” process deludes himself into thinking he has proved what he assumed in the first place.

Various Types of UFO

A biologist trying to identify a group of unusual animals which are said to represent a new species begins by collecting all possible information about their appearance and behavior. After he has determined their typical size, shape, color, mode of reproduction, manner of locomotion, etc., he compares these characteristics with those of animals of known species and eventually classifies the strange specimens. In a similar way the professional investigator of UFO phenomena begins by asking the question: What is a typical unidentified flying object?

The published reports comprise a heterogeneous collection of facts, fiction, and guesses. The investigator must first separate and discard accounts that are obvious hoaxes or delusions. There are many of these. The remaining material he divides into two classes. The first includes statements made by competent, careful witnesses, describing what they have seen and heard—for example, “I saw a brilliant light moving swiftly without sound.” The second class includes statements of opinion or belief about the thing seen—for example, “The strange light obviously was controlled by intelligence.” Putting aside this second class of material for the time being, he looks at the information in the first and immediately faces an awkward conclusion: apparently no “typical” flying saucer exists.

Descriptions of UFOs

No two reports describe exactly the same kind of UFO. There are dozens of types of saucers, resembling each other as little as turnips do comets. Hoping to find some consistent pattern, the investigator opens his notebook and starts listing the data.

Shape—The flying saucer varies greatly in shape (see Figure 1). At different times and places it may be a circular disk like a saucer, often with a small protrusion in the center like the knob on a tea-kettle lid; elliptical or bean-shaped like a flattened sphere; a circular base supporting a dome-like superstructure; a sphere surrounded by a central platform, like Saturn in its rings; long and thin like a cigar; a tapered sphere like a teardrop; spindle-shaped, with or without knobs on the ends; or a double- or triple-decked form like a stack of plates.

Size—The saucer varies greatly in size. Estimated diameters range from 20 or 30 feet to several thousand. While under observation it may instantaneously increase or decrease in size.

Color—The saucer varies greatly in color. It may be white, black, gray, red, blue, green, pink, yellow, silver; may be luminous or dull; may be a solid color; may be circled by a central band of different color; may display flashing lights of various colors. It may change color or luminosity while being observed.

Motion—The saucer displays a wide variety of motions. It may travel very slowly; very fast, approaching the speed of light; at jet speed; at meteoric speed; may hover motionless over one place. At any speed it can instantaneously change velocity and direction of motion—can move horizontally, vertically, toward the observer, away from the observer, in a straight path, a zigzag, a spiral. Like the Cheshire cat, it can vanish instantly or slowly fade away.

Means of propulsion—Unknown. Some saucers move in complete silence; others produce noises: a hiss, a whistle, a roar, a thunderclap, or a detonation like a sonic boom.

Incidence—Saucers may appear at any hour of the day or night, but they appear most frequently in the hours before and after sunset, and before and after sunrise. Their numbers may suddenly increase at certain places and certain times. The objects can appear singly, in random groups, in groups showing a geometrical pattern. A single object may split and multiply into a group, or a group may merge into one. Saucers almost always appear in the air, rarely on the earth’s surface or in bodies of water. They almost never come within touching distance of the observer. The length of their stay varies greatly, from about two seconds to two or three hours.

Structure—Unknown. A saucer may be visible or invisible to the observer; visible to the human eye but not to the camera or radar; visible to the camera or radar but not to the eye. Some obey the laws of gravity and inertia, others do not.

Purpose—Unknown. No officials in the government, the press, the churches, or the universities have received any attempt at communication. No saucer has produced intelligible visible, audible, or radio signals.

Long before finishing this tabulation the investigator realizes that he is not dealing with one thing but with many. No single phenomenon could possibly display such infinite variety. However, before he starts trying to classify the descriptions and to explain them, he takes a look at the second class of material—the conclusions offered by saucer enthusiasts. Leaving the realm of observation for that of interpretation, he is suddenly catapulted into a world of fantasy.

A “Baedeker’s Guide” to Saucerdom

One of the commonest themes in science fiction is that of parallel universes—a number of nearly identical worlds coexisting in alternate space-time continua. Occasionally, at a vulnerable spot, the barrier between two of these worlds will dissolve so that they overlap near the point of contact. After such an accident a man may find himself unhappily living two lives at once, identical in some ways but so different in others that if one is real, the other cannot be. Until the break is repaired and the incompatible worlds are safely separated once more, the man exists in a state of desperate confusion and performs agonizing mental acrobatics, trying to maintain a foothold in both worlds until he can decide which one is valid.

From the “damned” phenomena collected by Charles Fort, plus the legends of Atlantis, Mu, and Lemuria, flying-saucer addicts have constructed a multiplicity of such alternate worlds. Although they differ in minor ways, all are in direct conflict with the real world known to science. Let us ignore, for the moment, the descriptions given by the “contactees” (Chapter X) and consider only the beliefs and/or theories offered by serious proponents of the interplanetary theory and publicized by writers such as Donald E. Keyhoe[I-3, I-4, I-5] Aimé Michel[I-6], and Morris K. Jessup[I-7]. A “Baedeker’s Guide” to saucerdom based solely on statements and speculations in the books published by these investigators would portray a fantastic universe:^[A]

“In saucerdom, alien spacecraft continually visit the earth and have done so for centuries. Constructed and controlled by intelligent extraterrestrial beings, the craft perhaps come from secret bases on artificial earth satellites; on the moon; on Mars; on Venus; on Jupiter; perhaps on the planets supposed to be orbiting the binary stars 61 Cygni and 70 Ophiuchi; or from planets supposed to be in orbit around the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, about eleven light-years distant from earth. Radio transmitters serving as beacons for space navigation may exist on both Venus and Jupiter.

“These spacecraft can perform maneuvers that, on earth, are possible only for rays of light. They fly at speeds of many thousands of miles an hour, can reverse direction instantaneously at any speed, ascend or descend vertically, and hover motionless in the air. They accomplish these feats perhaps by using the power of cosmic rays and by generating and manipulating artificial gravitational fields, which they could also use to prevent the transmission of sound waves and to become invisible.

“The extraterrestrial visitors may be explorers sent to study the earth, descendants of a race living thousands of light-years away from the solar system. They may be the ancestors of the human race, which itself is a remnant of a colony established on earth thousands of years ago and then abandoned. More than 300,000 years ago the inhabitants of earth had found the secret of space travel, and human beings mapped the earth by an aerial survey at least 5000 years ago. It is also possible that these craft come not from space but from time; they may be earthmen of the future who have traveled backward through time to explore their own past.

“The purpose of these visitors is still unknown. They shun close contact with human beings, rarely if ever land their ships, and never allow close-up photographs, perhaps because they are afraid of human savagery or are afraid of starting a panic. Nevertheless they attempt to signal to earthmen in various ways: they have caused the production of gigantic letters of the alphabet [U and Z] on earth radarscopes; from a material that radiates light they have built an enormous letter W, spanning more than 1000 miles on the surface of Mars; they have sent out wireless signals in Morse code to represent the letter S. They may occasionally abduct earthmen in order to use them as language teachers.

“Although these visitors are probably not hostile to human beings, they often manifest their presence in destructive ways. They cause many airplane crashes; seize and carry off ships, human beings, and airplanes; destroy flocks of birds; interfere with the operation of radio, TV, gasoline and electric motors; pelt the earth with rocks, metal, and strange organic substances; create loud noises and detonations; damage the windshields of cars; set fire to highways; hurl various types of missiles; drop chunks of ice; cause storms; and cause radioactive rain.

“One of the most peculiar features of saucerdom is the role played by government officials and scientists who, knowing the space visitors are real, yet deny their existence and unite in a gigantic conspiracy to deceive the public.”

These excerpts from a hypothetical Baedeker have summarized the ideas publicized by the most literate and most persuasive advocates of the saucer theory. The chapters that follow will examine certain flying-saucer cases. As the discussion continues and is able to account for specific UFOs in terms of normal physical phenomena, these anarchistic worlds of saucerdom will gradually dissolve and merge with reality as we know it—a world that holds many mysteries but is still subject to the laws of nature.