Chapter IX
E-M AND G-FIELDS IN UFO-LAND
The phenomenon of magnetism has always fascinated both scientists and laymen. Paracelsus believed that he could use a magnet to draw disease out from a person, transfer it to the ground, and thus cure the patient. Later practitioners believed that a sick person could regain his health by sleeping with head and feet oriented north to south so as to be in line with the earth’s magnetic poles. Laputa, the saucer-shaped floating island visited by Gulliver in his travels, was propelled by the attracting or repelling forces of a large magnet imbedded in the center of the island. In recent years magnetism has similarly been called on to account for some of the peculiar maneuvers allegedly performed by UFOs.
In the world of flying saucers an all-purpose electromagnetic (E-M) force, unknown to earth scientists, is supposed to be able to produce light and heat, disturb a compass, render an object radioactive, stop a wrist watch without damaging the man who wears it, interfere with the functioning of radio and TV sets, turn out the lights of automobiles, stop the action of gasoline engines, and aid in the creating of artificial gravitational fields (G-fields) around extraterrestrial spaceships.
UFOs equipped with E-M powers have occasionally been reported in France since 1954[IX-1], but they had rarely appeared in the United States until late in 1957 when freak weather in Texas, plus the birth of the space age, started a new wave of flying-saucer incidents. Few spectacular UFOs had appeared since the 1952 panic (Chapter VII) and the average citizen had almost forgotten about flying saucers. Then on October 4, 1957, when Sputnik I went into orbit and opened the door to outer space, people once more began to watch the heavens uneasily. Uneasiness became alarm a month later when, with American satellites still sitting on the launching pad, Sputnik II roared into space. A ball of fire floating over a field in western Texas provided the small stimulus needed to turn alarm into hysteria, and for several weeks people tended to see spaceships in every cloud and every unfamiliar light in the sky. The reasoning seemed to be that if man with his limited powers could launch satellites to orbit the planet, why shouldn’t interplanetary ships already be visiting the earth?
In the months of November and December the Air Force received more UFO reports than during the entire ten months preceding, and the reports had their highest frequency in the single week following November 2[IX-2]. For a period of about eight days, if all the stories were true, our skies were crowded with flying saucers.
Spaceships with electromagnetic powers roved from the Dominican Republic to Alaska; they stopped automobiles, turned off headlights, jammed radios and stopped clocks in cars, blurred TV sets in the home, dimmed the cabin lights in airplanes, and altered a speedometer to register a dangerously high speed instead of the legal sixty miles per hour. (Whether the driver in question offered this novel defense to a judge in traffic court is unknown.) Police in squad cars pursued UFOs in Elmwood Park, Illinois; Danville, Illinois; and Hammond, Indiana. In Brazil, an orange-colored, whistling UFO hovered near Fort Itaipu and first caused a temporary failure of the lights, then knocked out the generating plant for several moments. A driver in Santa Fe, New Mexico, saw a UFO that not only stalled his car but also stopped the dashboard clock and the driver’s own wrist watch. A driver in western Texas saw a UFO that, not content with stopping the engine and radio of his car, also magnetized the right half of the bumper and a part of the fender. One driver reported that his car and those of several other motorists had stalled near Cortez, Colorado; he had not thought of looking at the sky, but any saucer enthusiast could have told him that a UFO must have been hovering there.
In addition to these special models equipped with Medusa-like powers, other spaceships allegedly landed briefly at the military installation at White Sands, New Mexico; harassed a United States Coast Guard ship in the Gulf of Mexico; landed in Ohio and raised the radioactivity level of the ground; and stopped in Nebraska for repairs.
Stormy Weather in Texas
The new type of UFO with electromagnetic (E-M) powers first attracted notice in this country by allegedly appearing near Levelland, Texas, on the night of November 2, 1957, a few hours before Sputnik II went into orbit. A small town with a population of about 8000, Levelland lies on the plains of western Texas about sixty miles from Plainview, site of a famous meteor shower, and only twenty-five miles from Lubbock, which a few years earlier had gained national fame with its “Lubbock lights” (p. 123). The region is normally an arid one, but at the beginning of November it was experiencing unusual weather—electrical storms and rain (the month proved to be the wettest ever recorded in western Texas).
About 11:15 that Saturday night, a farmworker named Pedro Saucedo (or Saucido) with his friend Joe Palaz (also given in various printed accounts as Palav, Salav, Salaz, Salvaz) was driving home from Levelland. A few miles northwest of the town he had turned off Route 116 into a side road, when both men noticed a flash of light in a field at the right. Evidently unalarmed, he continued driving and talking until suddenly the engine died and the lights went out. While trying to restart the motor, Saucedo (the similarity between “Saucedo” and “saucer” presents a diverting coincidence) glimpsed over his left shoulder something that looked like a flaming ball or a fiery tornado drifting rapidly toward the truck. A veteran of combat in Korea, Saucedo reacted instantaneously to the blazing unknown. As he described the experience later that night, “I jumped out of the truck and hit the dirt because I was afraid. I called to Joe but he didn’t get out. The thing passed directly over my truck with a great sound and a rush of wind. It sounded like thunder and my truck rocked from the flash.... I felt a lot of heat.” Crawling out and seeing the object disappear in the direction of Levelland, he restarted the engine and drove back to Levelland to report the incident to the sheriff[IX-2].
The sheriff was soon receiving reports from other persons who had been driving in the same area at about the same time. They said that they, too, had seen a blazing object which they described as a “flying egg” or “egg-shaped fireball.” Their cars, like Saucedo’s, had stalled and then restarted when the object disappeared. A number of townspeople telephoned the authorities to report bright flashes in the sky, and the police comment that “everyone who called was very excited”[IX-3] was probably an understatement.
Under headlines such as “Mystery Object Stalls Autos in West Texas,” these stories hit newspapers all over the nation. The news spread fast. All day Sunday dozens of persons in Texas and New Mexico were relating that they, too, had seen fiery objects and flashes of light in the sky the night before. An amazingly large number of citizens seem to have been out late that stormy Saturday night, but apparently none of them noticed any ordinary lightning—only phantom “somethings” variously described as a burning mass, a big light, an egg-shaped object 200 feet long lighted up as though it were on fire, something like neon lights, objects that were red, glowing, brilliant, fiery, bluish-green, or pulsating green.
Not surprisingly, with all this publicity, the original incident quickly began to take on new dimensions. Saucedo amplified his first statements and recalled that the object had been “torpedo-shaped,” “like a rocket, but much larger,” and that lights on the object had seemed to be winking on and off[IX-4].
For days the Russian satellites had to share the spotlight with the American flying eggs, while both amateur and professional investigators tried to solve the mystery. The proponents of UFOs deduced the presence of a flying saucer with E-M powers. Various astronomers, when urged by newsmen, reluctantly advanced off-the-cuff theories based on the meager printed accounts. Dr. La Paz, of the Institute of Meteoritics in New Mexico, suggested that the things seen at Levelland might have been fireballs. A reporter assigned to the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatories to cover Moonwatch observations of the new Sputnik gave a sketchy summary of the incident to Dr. Menzel, who also concluded that Saucedo might have seen an unusually bright meteor and, startled by its brilliance, might accidentally have killed the engine. Lacking news of Sputnik II, the reporter sent in a facetious story asserting that, according to the director of the Harvard College Observatory, the flying eggs were mirages that so frightened the drivers that they reacted by pressing a “nervous foot” on the accelerator and killing the engine. When the weather conditions at Levelland became known, of course, the meteor theory was immediately discarded. Dr. Nininger, of the American Meteorite Museum in Arizona, made the best guess of all: Saucedo had observed an example of that rare phenomenon, ball lightning[IX-5].
Within a few days an Air Force investigator visited Levelland to study the incident. Members of civilian saucer groups complained later that, since he spent only seven hours in the area, he had obviously not taken the problem seriously and could not have found the correct solution. Even seventy hours of labor, however, could not have produced a clearer picture. Saucedo had unquestionably had a frightening experience, very much as he originally described it. But as in many UFO sightings, most of the other reports had been stimulated chiefly by the general excitement. Three persons, not “dozens,” had seen the phenomenon near the ground. From ten to fifteen others (including the sheriff) had not observed it at close quarters but had merely seen brilliant flashes of light in the sky.
After studying the weather reports and the descriptions given by the various witnesses, the Air Force issued an explanation, unfortunately ambiguous because it omitted the necessary word “either,” stating that the phenomenon observed at Levelland had been “ball lightning or St. Elmo’s fire.” Supporters of the saucer theory seized on this ambiguity to protest, correctly, that ball lightning and St. Elmo’s fire are two different phenomena. They went on to conclude by some process of peculiar logic that neither ball lightning nor St. Elmo’s fire was involved and that the phenomenon had actually been a flying saucer.
Saucer publications have printed thousands of words to support this argument. The evidence, however, leads to an overwhelming probability: the fiery unknown at Levelland was ball lightning.
The Phenomenon of Ball Lightning
Most of us know very little about lightning. On the average, it causes some 180 deaths each year. Many persons when caught outdoors by a thunderstorm run to shelter under a tree, not realizing that the tree itself offers the most attractive target to the electrically charged clouds overhead. Even the scientists who make a special study of the phenomenon still have much to learn about the conditions that produce lightning and its various manifestations[IX-6].
The most familiar type is the lightning we see in stormy weather; it flashes in brilliant zigzags from zenith to horizon, darts from cloud to cloud, or strikes like a javelin toward earth. At night, particularly in the country where no city lights mask its brilliance, lightning can be a frightening elemental force. A form popularly called “heat” or “sheet” lightning is a familiar, almost playful phenomenon in the midwest and southwest, although comparatively rare on the east coast. In hot, humid weather it flares intermittently near the horizon, noiseless because the luminous “sheets” are merely reflections of an ordinary zigzag flash that is too far away to be heard. “Bead lightning” has also been reported, appearing as a chain of spheroids that gradually fade away as they discharge. A spectacular display of “pinched lightning,” an even rarer phenomenon (see Plate Va), was photographed in late August 1961 at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during a severe thunderstorm[IX-7]. Ball lightning, which seems to be commoner in Europe than in North America (just as tornadoes are commoner in North America than in Europe) is so little understood that some scientists have doubted its reality. In recent years, laboratory research has added much to our knowledge of ball lightning and Soviet scientists in particular have studied it as a possible weapon against enemy planes[IX-8].
Ball lightning is usually described as a luminous ball whose diameter ranges from a few inches to several feet; the color may be red to orange or blue to white. These lightning balls appear most frequently toward the end of an electrical storm when the air is highly ionized, often just after a nearby lightning flash. They look and act like solid objects. They can hang motionless or drift in the air, glide along telephone wires or fences, roll down chimneys and across the floor to radio or TV sets, float a few inches above the ground or high in the sky. The ball persists as an entity for a time ranging from several seconds to many minutes; it may then evaporate noiselessly, or may disappear with an explosive noise and a force that can damage nearby objects[IX-8a]. One of the few existing photographs of ball lightning was taken at Lincoln, Nebraska, on August 30, 1930 (see Plate Vb).
American, European, and Soviet scientists have suggested various theories, none of them entirely satisfactory, to explain the formation of ball lightning[IX-9, IX-10, IX-11]. These evanescent fiery globes probably represent some sort of continuous electric current perhaps held together by its own magnetic field, like the fabled hoop snake that could roll along the ground by holding its tail in its mouth.
In 1938 the pilot of a BOAC plane en route to Iraq, flying in dense cloud and rain at 8500 feet, reported that a ball of fire had entered the rear cabin and burst with a loud explosion. One or two minutes later it (or another lightning ball) entered the cockpit through the window which was open for visibility, singed the hair and eyebrows of the pilot, then bounced on through the forward passenger cabin and into the rear cabin, where it again exploded[IX-12].
Similar incidents have been reported by Soviet pilots. In the summer of 1956, a Soviet transport plane flying at about 10,000 feet was struck by ball lightning during a very rough flight through a stormy cold front. A fiery red-orange ball ten to fifteen inches in diameter appeared in front of the aircraft, swerved to the left, struck the left propeller and exploded with a loud detonation and a blinding white flash. The intense electrical discharge destroyed radio communication between the plane and the ground and disabled the radio compass. In attempting to disconnect the antenna, the radio operator received an electric shock. When the plane landed and was examined, one of the blades of the left propeller was found to be slightly damaged and a small fused area and a deposit of soot were found on the edge of the airfoil a few inches from its end[IX-13].
A similar case occurred in December 1956, when a Soviet jet had entered a storm cloud and was climbing through it. As the plane reached the top of the cloud, at an altitude of 12,000 to 15,000 feet, ball lightning suddenly appeared a short distance ahead and to the right of the plane, and exploded with a dull but piercing noise and a blinding flash; the ball then broke into a series of beads. Although one of the engines close to the ball died at the instant of the explosion, the crew were able to start it again and the flight continued normally. After landing and finding no mechanical damage, they concluded that the engine had failed temporarily because the explosion had formed a region of intense rarefied air that deprived the engine of oxygen[IX-13].
Ball lightning has often been reported near the ground, as in the Levelland case. In the summer of 1934 Mr. Durward, a British meteorologist, while driving along the bank of a lake observed the phenomenon: “It began to rain heavily, with slight or moderate thunder and lightning. His son, a boy of twelve, was opening the iron gates, spaced at intervals on this road, and found one difficult to open. Mr. Durward, while walking the short distance from the motor-car to the gate to assist his son, saw among the pine trees on his left what looked like a ball of fire about 12 in. in diameter moving towards them. It struck the iron gatepost farthest from the latch. There was no noise, but the boy, who had his hand on the latch, gave a yell; for the next few hours he was unable to lower his arm.”[IX-12]
In Levelland the night of November 2 conditions were ideal for the formation of ball lightning. For several days the area had been experiencing freak weather, and on the night in question had been visited by rain, thunderstorms, and lightning. Shortly before the glowing sphere approached the truck, the two men had noticed a lightning flash in a nearby field. The original description of the phenomenon—a “flaming ball” or a “fiery tornado” that floated toward and over the truck and detonated with light and heat—fits the classic picture of ball lightning. The truck’s engine may have died for one of several reasons. The rain during the evening could have seeped under the hood and soaked the ignition or dampened the spark plugs. The feed line may have been clogged. Or the region of highly rarefied air created by the ball lightning may temporarily have deprived the engine of oxygen.
Of the other drivers near Levelland that night who reported having trouble with balky motors and seeing a blazing object like an egg-shaped fireball, three probably saw ball lightning. Others, after hearing Saucedo’s frightening story, perhaps unconsciously dramatized their own experiences and magnified ordinary lightning flashes into attacking fiery objects. It is significant that although the night was stormy, only Saucedo reported seeing the ordinary lightning that normally accompanies a thunderstorm.
Since ball lightning is short-lived and cannot be preserved as tangible evidence, its appearance in Levelland on the night of November 2 can never be absolutely proved, even though this explanation fits all the facts—facts that in themselves do not warrant so lengthy a study. Only the saucer proponents could have converted so trivial a series of events—a few stalled automobiles, balls of flame in the sky at the end of a thunderstorm—into a national mystery. Ball lightning doubtless accounts for other UFO reports, such as the phenomenon observed at Lock Raven Dam on October 26, 1958, when two men returning late at night from a fishing trip saw a flaming ball hovering above the superstructure of a bridge; the ball exploded with a loud noise and a brilliant white flash and disappeared.
E-M and Non-E-M Saucers
The next UFOs reported in this series belonged to the old-fashioned, non-E-M variety. From White Sands Proving Grounds near Alamogordo, New Mexico, came a report that military police, while patrolling the up-range in a jeep about 2:30 Sunday morning (a few hours after the Saucedo incident), had seen a brilliant reddish-orange light, shaped like an egg, hovering in the sky. From its apparent distance (two to three miles away) and apparent size (as large as a grapefruit held at arm’s length), the men deduced that it was a huge object, 75 to 100 yards in diameter[IX-2]. After remaining motionless for about three minutes, it descended toward the ground and disappeared. (According to some versions, it later rose into the sky and then disappeared.) Members of another jeep patrol soon matched this tale with the report that on Sunday night about eight o’clock they had seen a bright, glowing object hovering in the sky but, instead of landing, it suddenly climbed until it got so far up it looked like a star. Both jeeps, it should be noted, continued to function normally.
Officials at White Sands soon dampened the excitement. The description of the light that appeared at 2:30 A.M. included certain doubtful factors. The night had been overcast and so dark that the stars were not visible, although the cloud cover was broken at intervals. Since the sighting had not included any object of known distance or known size for comparison, the estimates of the UFO’s distance and size were of no value. The light might have been small and close; it might equally well have been huge and far away. Under the circumstances, the most probable explanation was that the men had glimpsed the moon (then roughly half full) through broken clouds, and that the apparent movement was an illusion produced by the moving clouds. The Sunday evening UFO was unquestionably the planet Venus. Then nearly at maximum brilliance, it was a conspicuous object in the western sky after sunset and inspired many saucer reports during this week of anxiety.
The White Sands incidents had reached the papers, however, and contributed to the general hysteria. By Monday afternoon, flying eggs were allegedly stopping automobiles as far north as Canada, but the Southwest continued to hold the center of the UFO stage against all competition.
On Monday night, November 4, the Alamogordo, New Mexico, radio station broadcast a dramatic interview with an engineer from Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico, describing his sighting of an E-M-radiating UFO at least 500 feet long. About one o’clock on Monday afternoon, Mr. X stated, he was returning to base after a weekend in El Paso[IX-4]. While driving along a desert stretch of U. S. Highway 54 near the town of Orogrande, he noticed a group of cars stopped ahead of him, their passengers standing in the road, pointing at the sky. Looking up, he saw an iridescent egg-shaped object at least 500 feet long—more than twice the size of the UFOs reported in the preceding two days. As it approached, the flying egg exerted a force that killed the engine of his car, generated a wave of heat that gave him a bad burn, and demonstrated a startling new characteristic: it silenced the radio in his car. (During the next few days, reports of similar encounters usually included a jammed radio.) When the UFO took off toward the mountains and disappeared, Mr. X started his car again and drove on into Alamogordo to the home of a friend, Mrs. Coral Lorenzen.
One of the most zealous amateur investigators of UFO reports, Mrs. Lorenzen had founded the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) (see Chapter XIII) in January 1952, and from 1954 to 1956 had been employed at Holloman Air Force Base. After listening to Mr. X’s story and examining the notes he had scribbled during the sighting (unfortunately they proved to be illegible, but for some reason no one has ever suggested that the pen or pencil was also hexed by the UFO), she hurried him down to the local radio station where he made the taped interview that was broadcast later that evening.
A daylight visit by an E-M flying egg 500 feet in length would supposedly have attracted the attention of many witnesses. Air Force investigators could find only one: Mr. X. According to his testimony, the passengers of several automobiles (his estimate of the number of cars varied from time to time but he eventually settled on ten) had stood in the road watching the unknown object. A persistent search by Air Force officials failed to locate any one of these persons. The witness showed no sign of the burns he allegedly suffered. In short, the only evidence to support his story was Mr. X’s own and the authorities sensibly concluded that the incident was either a hoax or a hallucination, inspired by newspaper publicity about Levelland’s flying eggs.
Tuesday morning’s chief contribution to the UFO epidemic was not to be laughed off so easily, for it was made by trained military personnel. At 5:10 A.M. on November 5, the Coast Guard cutter Sebago, traveling north in the Gulf of Mexico, detected an erratically maneuvering UFO on the radarscope. The swiftly moving object would race across and off the scope, only to reappear almost immediately from another direction and position and again move off the scope at incredible speed. After ten minutes the radar target vanished, but watchers on the deck glimpsed a glowing object, brilliant as a planet; it streaked across the sky just above the northwest horizon and vanished. The unknown radar targets then returned and continued to fill the scope with their incredible movements until 5:37, when they finally disappeared and did not return.
This mystery, too, yielded to orderly investigation. Air Force radar experts made a detailed analysis of the data and positively identified the mysterious returns. They had not come from the complex air traffic overhead, as had first been suggested, nor from a fantastically maneuverable spaceship. They were merely false targets produced by the weather conditions (see Chapter VIII). The brilliant light that flashed across the sky was not reported by the radarscope and had no relation to the radar returns. In view for a few seconds at most, brilliant in the morning twilight (the sun rose some fifty minutes later), the flash of light was probably a distant meteor—November is rich in meteor displays.
The Saturnian Visitors
Tuesday evening while the nation was still wondering about the flying eggs in New Mexico and the invisible UFOs that buzzed the Sebago, welcome comic relief appeared. A man named Schmidt, a grain buyer, announced that during the afternoon he had visited with the crew of a flying saucer that had landed to make repairs. While driving in the country near Kearney, Nebraska, he said, he had noticed a bright flash about a quarter of a mile away. Going closer to investigate, he perceived a huge silvery ship a hundred feet long, thirty feet wide, and fourteen feet high, which had landed in a dry river bed. The motor of his car then died. He got out and was walking toward the ship when a light shot out and paralyzed him. The ship opened and two men emerged. After searching him for concealed weapons, they released him from paralysis and invited him into the ship, where he spent half an hour chatting with these strangers and their female companions, mostly in High German and English. (He knew that they came from outer space but not until some weeks later, when they paid him a second visit, did he discover that they were natives of the planet Saturn.)[IX-14] After he left the ship it rose straight up into the sky and disappeared, while he hurried back to town to report to the sheriff, to broadcast an account of his experience over the local radio, and to give his story to the newspapers.
It is perhaps a measure of the panic level that week that local officials actually examined the ground at the “landing” site, looking for evidence. They found none. The four “hydraulic rams” that allegedly supported the huge machine had left no imprint on the sand of the dry river bed. Traces of oil found on the ground were tested chemically and proved to be the same brand that the witness carried in the trunk of his car.
Gaining national notoriety from this incident, Schmidt soon became a popular lecturer at flying-saucer clubs, thrilling the audience with tales of later visits from the Saturnians and his journeys in their spaceship to the Arctic Circle, through the waters under the North Pole, and even into outer space. A year or so later his extraterrestrial friends allegedly tipped him off to the location of certain valuable minerals on earth, including veins of quartz that had the desirable property of curing cancer. To mine this quartz and thus make it available to humanity, he enlisted the sympathy and financial aid of a number of lonely, wealthy widows. Some of these ladies eventually came to believe that they had been the victims of fraud and, in 1961, a California jury agreed with them. The Saturnians apparently have not yet reappeared to help their friend out of his difficulties.
Surveillance by Flying Eggs
Wednesday November 6 was relatively calm on the UFO front, although automobile engines died, radios malfunctioned, and TV screens blurred at about the time that lights were reported in the sky in Texas, New Mexico, Illinois, and Canada. Accounts received later by saucer organizations stated that on Tuesday (or Wednesday) night an orange-colored, whistling, E-M type of UFO had hovered near Fort Itaipu in Brazil, caused a temporary failure of the electric lights, and then knocked out the generating plant for several moments. Since the alleged visitation occurred in a foreign country it was not, of course, open to study by the United States Air Force. In any case investigation would have been difficult, since the report failed to include such facts as the exact time of appearance, position, and direction of movement of the UFO. The witnesses, whose names were not given, apparently related the incident under pledge of secrecy to other persons who insisted on remaining anonymous, who passed the story on to still others who refused to be named, who in turn gave the news to reporters, who signed only their initials[IX-15]. So insubstantial a tale obviously does not merit serious investigation. The dimming of electric lights and the capricious behavior of a generating system are not extraordinary phenomena and no UFO is required to account for them.
The next incident to gain publicity in this amazing week occurred on Thursday (or Wednesday) evening when a UFO allegedly landed in Ohio and then vanished. Driving home in the early evening along a country road, a Mr. Olden Moore saw a glowing UFO in the sky. At first it looked small, like a star, but it rapidly increased in size and split apart in the air as it descended and apparently landed in a nearby field. Moore stopped his car, intending to investigate, but for some reason he changed his mind and instead drove on home to get his wife. When they returned and searched the field they found nothing. Nevertheless, they reported the incident to the authorities and next day a Civilian Defense official, arriving to check the ground where the UFO supposedly had landed, reported the level of radioactivity “far above normal.”
A woman living half a mile away from the field in question reported that, although she herself had not seen a UFO, her TV set had blurred at about the time of the sighting, and on the following day she found that her car, parked near the house, was pockmarked. Applying his Geiger counter to the car, the Civilian Defense official pronounced it radioactive[IX-16]. This UFO apparently possessed highly selective E-M powers: it did not stop the engine of Mr. Moore’s car but did interfere with the operation of a TV set half a mile away!
Air Force investigators patiently collected and sifted the facts. The supposed landing site showed nothing abnormal—the grass was not burned, the earth was not disturbed, no foreign material could be found. The normal radioactivity of the ground in the area measured .18 milliroentgens; at the supposed landing site the measure had been .20 milliroentgens. This difference of .02 is not “far above normal” but well within the probable error in the calibration of the instruments.
Interviews with other Ohioans who had also seen the glowing unknown provided the answer: the UFO was a large meteor, conspicuous in the dusk of early evening. Traveling directly toward the witness, it had looked like a glowing sphere suspended in the air and rapidly increasing in brightness. Near the end of its flight it split into two or more pieces and fell silently to the earth, not “in the next field” but perhaps many miles away. The blurring of the TV set may have been mere coincidence or, if the meteor had actually passed close by, may have resulted from the ionized trail of the meteor (see Chapter V).
Saucerdom’s Miraculous Electromagnetic Force
Most of us remember the nursery tale of Chicken-Little, who started a panic in the barnyard kingdom with her eyewitness report that the sky was falling: “I saw it with my eyes, I heard it with my ears, and a piece of it fell on my tail.” Calm was restored in the kingdom, after a time, when the prosaic truth came to light: a falling acorn, not a piece of the sky, had grazed the credulous chick.
In somewhat similar fashion, the hysteria caused by the car-stalling flying eggs subsided. As the Russian satellites gliding across the night sky proved more interesting to the public than hypothetical spaceships, flying-saucer stories occupied less and less space in the daily papers and the number of UFO reports dwindled. Air Force investigators worked hard at the job of separating facts from fantasy and by Saturday November 9, 1957, the end of a wild week, the panic was over. During the two years following, 1958 and 1959, fewer than a dozen E-M-equipped UFOs were reported over the entire American continent.
The civilian flying-saucer groups, however, rejected the normal explanations of the November reports except that of the Schmidt-Saturnian meeting, which all but the cultists indignantly denounced as a hoax publicized to embarrass sincere students of UFOs. Dissatisfied with the solutions found by the Air Force, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) carried out an independent study (see Chapter XIII) of the November sightings, and in June 1960 issued a booklet entitled “Electro-Magnetic Effects Associated With Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO’s).” After examining many reports of E-M phenomena and rejecting an unspecified number as unreliable, members of the investigating committee studied the evidence in a series of eighty-one incidents occurring over a period of fifteen years, roughly a third of which were reported during the week of the Levelland panic[IX-17].
The cases include instances in which, allegedly, electrical appliances failed to function, at the same time and the same place in which a witness observed a UFO. In some cases a witness observed electromagnetic effects but did not see a UFO, at the same time that a neighboring witness saw a UFO but did not observe electromagnetic effects. The effects in question include the stopping, missing, sputtering, and near-quitting of automobile motors; the dimming or flickering of automobile headlights; static, roar, or fading of car radios; the dimming and brightening of house lights; the dimming and brightening of cabin lights in airplanes; the blurring of TV screens; the temporary loss of picture and/or sound in a TV set; the stopping of watches and clocks; and odd noises over a telephone wire.
This list may astonish the average citizen who has often endured similar annoyances and never thought of blaming UFOs for his troubles. Most householders know that watches run down, that houselights dim and brighten with the changing demands made on the city electrical system, and that a plane flying over a house can blur the image on a TV screen. There can be few readers of this book who have not at some time experienced such brief frustrations with automobiles, radios, TV sets, and timepieces—the ordinary troubles that keep our repairmen in business without assistance from UFOs.
To the heterogeneous data provided by these eighty-one cases, the committee attempted to apply the precise tools of logic and mathematics in order to establish a correlation between UFOs and electromagnetic effects, and concluded that a cause-and-effect relationship probably did exist.
With suitable material, statistical methods can suggest a correlation between any two sets of facts and can estimate the probability that the correlation is significant and not due to chance. No competent statistician, however, would try to apply the methods to such amorphous and uncertain data as those used by the committee. More than a third of the incidents cited come from newspaper accounts or the private files of saucer organizations in foreign countries. All leave many unanswered questions. At least two involve fully identified objects: the great fireball of September 18, 1954 (p. 92), and the three fireballs of April 6, 1955, may well have caused some radio interference but they were not UFOs. Even with the well-reported cases, a conscientious historian would find it nearly impossible to determine precisely what the witnesses saw, what they heard, what they did, and what they said.
The various printed accounts of the Levelland incidents, for example, vary in many details. The events took place in an atmosphere of excitement and the stories inevitably changed slightly with each retelling. The reports of Air Force investigators, records in the files of civilian saucer organizations, statements in newspapers, magazines, and books—no two give exactly the same version of any given incident. Although the points of disagreement are often trivial, they are sometimes vital to finding the correct explanation.
Even if, for the sake of argument, a statistician were willing to accept the evidence of the eighty-one cases at face value, he would still not attempt to establish a correlation between UFOs and E-M effects. The probability that a (postulated) UFO will appear at a given time or place is unknown; the probability that an electrical appliance will fail to work at a given time or place is equally unknown. Hence the probability that the two phenomena will occur together at a given time and place is a concept that has no meaning.
Effects and Causes
Asked to explain what caused the failures of engines, radios, watches, etc. reported during the week of the Levelland sightings, any high school physics student who answered, “Some new kind of electromagnetic force” would properly receive a grade of zero. Admittedly there are physical phenomena that the scientist does not yet understand, but he does know that electrical and magnetic forces do not and can not perform all the feats attributed to them by saucer enthusiasts.
The electrical failures ascribed to E-M forces undoubtedly had a variety of causes. Automobile engines can stall for many reasons. Rain seeping under the hood of a car can soak the ignition and temporarily interfere with smooth operation. Sand or dust or a vapor lock in the fuel line can do the same. The body of an automobile is metal and completely encloses the ignition system and the motor. The engine stops if it is deprived of gasoline or oxygen, but it does not stop if lightning strikes the car. The metal body acts as a shield that electrical forces cannot penetrate.
Every driver knows that the reception on a car radio normally varies from poor to fair; it rarely remains constant. While moving beneath a power line, a car may receive no radio signals at all. A high-tension line can be surrounded by an electrical field that makes a radio set hum or buzz raucously and completely jams the reception. Static or a powerful interfering signal can easily jam a car’s radio, but no electrical field, static or oscillating, can kill a car’s motor or shut off its lights or stop the dashboard clock; it could not stop the driver’s wrist watch, and it could not stop a man’s watch without seriously injuring the wearer, even if he were standing in an open field.
Radio and TV sets may function badly for one of many reasons. They may simply need a good repairman! A passing plane, a more powerful transmitting station on the air, auroral activity, stormy weather, ultraviolet radiation, or clouds of ejected atoms from the sun—any of these can disrupt radio or TV communication, but they do not interfere with the operation of gasoline engines.
All meteors bright enough to be seen can cause some radio and TV interference—and in the first week of November the Taurid shower is approaching its maximum. Although meteors do not, by themselves, emit any appreciable amount of radio energy, the friction between the swiftly moving meteoric body and the atmosphere produces a train of hot gases that can momentarily reflect radio waves. The brightest meteors leave behind them a persistent cloud of luminous, electrified gas that can absorb radio waves and thus blanket incoming signals for several minutes after the meteor has passed. A spectacular fireball observed about 8:30 P.M. M.S.T. on April 18, 1962, momentarily turned off the street lights in the town of Eureka, Utah; it was so bright that it triggered the photoelectric control, just as daybreak does[IX-17a].
No imaginable single force—electric, magnetic, or gravitational—could possibly have caused all the effects attributed to saucerdom’s miraculous electromagnetic force. An E-M field with the postulated powers is as improbable as a force that would lift fallen apples from the ground and draw them up to reunite with the branches of their parent tree.
Let us suppose for a moment, however, that the incidents in the Levelland epidemic might have occurred just as they are described by the NICAP committee. If UFOs had been visiting the earth that week, projecting a force field that performed as claimed, certain other events should also have occurred.
Thousands of automobiles should have been, but were not, temporarily disabled in the neighborhood of every car-stopping UFO. Fantastic traffic jams have sometimes been caused by torrid weather and consequent vapor locks in the fuel lines of automobile engines. In June 1961, for example, a sudden heat wave in Boston caused a vapor-lock epidemic that tied up traffic on the main highways for three hours. On some stretches of road so many cars were immobilized that, with their hoods up to cool off, they looked “like a convention of pelicans.” No such traffic jams were reported in connection with the 1957 UFOs. In South Springfield, Ohio, a car and a taxicab stalled but the vehicles around them experienced no trouble. One car stalled in Houston and another in Santa Fe, but the traffic around them proceeded as usual.
Hundreds of TV sets should have blurred, but did not, in the neighborhood of every TV-blurring UFO.
Equally surprising, no one complained of UFO interference with hi-fi sets, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines, irons, freezers, or electric razors. No airplane, helicopter, motorcycle, or ocean liner reported engine trouble.
At least two landings were reported, in New Mexico and Ohio. No physical evidence of landing could be found—shrubs were not crushed, grass was not scorched, ground was not disturbed.
Except for the Sebago, no radar reported the presence of a UFO.
Moonwatch teams, trained specifically to detect, observe, and plot the exact path of moving objects in the sky, were on the alert that week all over the United States and Canada. They did not see even one unidentified flying object.
“G-Fields” and UFO Propulsion
Even more fantastic than the E-M force that stops cars and silences radios is the artificial gravitational field or “G-field,” which saucer enthusiasts call on to account for all UFOs whose reported behavior clearly contradicts the laws of physics. Employing electromagnetic forces, the UFOs supposedly can create a variety of G-fields as needed, to be used as a defense weapon, a means to invisibility, or a method of propulsion[IX-18, IX-19].
Writers of science fiction have regularly utilized similar handy expedients such as “gravity shields,” “force fields,” “inertia drives,” and “space warps” to move their heroes quickly from earth to remote parts of the galaxy. Physicists, too, dream of revealing new aspects of nature that would allow man to nullify the effects of gravity and make short cuts through space, but they realize that such devices, even if theoretically not impossible, must await unimaginable discoveries about nature and are at least far in the future.
Unlike the amateur investigator of UFOs, both the storyteller and the physicist know that if and when such advances are made, they will enlarge our understanding of the cosmos, as did the creative insights of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, but new discoveries cannot invalidate what we have already learned about how the universe works. Many of the properties ascribed to UFOs imply a complete breakdown of physical law. They belong to the realm of magic, not science. Traveling at speeds approaching the velocity of light, reversing direction instantaneously, achieving maximum acceleration or deceleration in a fraction of a second, becoming invisible at will—such feats are impossible for a solid body moving either in an atmosphere or in space. Most of the serious proponents of the saucer hypothesis acknowledge that such actions are impossible, according to our present knowledge, but they argue that alien races more advanced than earthmen have undoubtedly found new sources of power and developed new methods of propulsion. Elaborate theories have been constructed, phrased in nearly incomprehensible scientific jargon, to show that UFOs do not flout the laws of physics but merely operate under laws that are still unknown to human beings.
To UFO investigators whose professional training lies chiefly in fields other than physics—business, the arts, entertainment, military science, government, the law, medicine, or religion—such theories might well seem plausible. But to the physicist they seem so irrational that they do not even deserve discussion, and he dismisses them as nonsense. Saucer believers thereupon denounce the physicist as a bigot, complain of his “closed mind,” and piously invoke the ghost of Galileo. They forget, apparently, that the persecutors of Galileo were specialists in theology and had only a nodding acquaintance with astronomy.
One of the earliest theories of UFO propulsion suggested that saucers got their motive power by tapping the lines of force in the earth’s magnetic field. One author wrote:
“The earth being simply a huge magnet, a dynamo wound with magnetic lines of force as its coils, tenescopically [the meaning of this impressive word is unknown to the present authors] counted to be 1,257 to the square centimeter in one direction and 1,850 to the square centimeter in the other direction (eddy currents), indicates that natural law has placed these lines as close together as the hairs on one’s head. And yet they never touch or cross each other if let alone. If done so by accident the catastrophe would spread like a searchlight and destroy everything in its path.”[IX-20, p. 139]
The same author asserts that such a “catastrophe” is the true explanation of Mantell’s death (p. 33). Supposedly objecting to his close approach, the occupants of the saucer he was chasing manipulated some of the lines of force until they crossed in front of Mantell; the resulting surge of power knocked the plane out of the air. Under some conditions, he adds, the crossing of the lines can produce desirable effects, such as the Aurora Borealis, when “we have magnetic lines of force that are crossing one another at or near the geographic and the magnetic poles and as a result we see those beautiful colored lights.”[IX-20, p. 141]
To the physicist, these statements are an unsavory verbal hash. Lines of force cannot provide a source of power and they cannot cause explosions—they are not even real. Created merely to describe the behavior of magnetic fields, they have no more objective existence than a train of thought. By using the convenient fiction that lines of force emerge from the north magnetic pole, spread apart as they flow around the earth, and then crowd close together again as they enter the south magnetic pole, the physicist is able to map observed variations in the earth’s magnetic field. In a similar way the geographer uses contour lines to map high and low areas on the earth’s surface.
A spacecraft could not propel itself by hitching to magnetic lines of force any more than a man could travel from Philadelphia to Peru by sliding down the 75th line of longitude.
The more sophisticated students of UFO behavior do not propose magnetic lines of force as a source of power. In fact they skip lightly over the awkward question of how the saucers are propelled and vaguely assert that extraterrestrial vehicles obtain energy (apparently without doing equivalent work) by somehow plugging in to the cosmic rays and magnetic fields that exist in space. Thus having access to unlimited power, a saucer supposedly draws on E-M forces to create and enclose itself in a kind of cocoon of artificial gravity. This G-field cuts off the attraction of the earth and other heavenly bodies, enables the saucer to attract or repel any approaching object, and allows it to travel almost as fast as light without suffering an increase in mass or a transformation into energy[IX-18].
The G-Field Myth
To explain the alleged properties and behavior of flying saucers, a variety of speculations have been published on the nature and operation of the G-field[IX-18, IX-19, IX-21]. In the physicist’s view, most of these ideas belong more to the realm of magic than of science but we shall summarize them briefly, with a few parenthetical comments.
A UFO supposedly can travel at speeds of thousands of miles an hour and shatter the sound barrier without making any noise because the G-field would create a kind of protective envelope around the saucer. But if the G-field breaks down for any reason, so that the protective envelope is opened, then the ionized moving air hits ordinary static air and creates the thunderous detonation produced by some UFOs. (Even with an intact G-field, a boundary or gradient would always exist somewhere between the air that was dragged along by the saucer and the air that was not. A thunderous impact would certainly occur at this barrier.)
The “invisible” UFOs supposedly become so by using the G-field to bend or deflect rays of light. (It is true that starlight passing near the sun’s gravitational field suffers a deflection that makes the star appear slightly displaced from its actual position on the celestial sphere, but a shift in apparent location does not dim a star and does not make it invisible. Furthermore the amount of deflection is only 1.75 seconds of arc, less than half of a thousandth of a degree! To produce even this small deflection, a covey of saucers would have to be able to increase its mass to equal that of the sun: 1.97 times 1033 grams! What this increase in mass would do to the rest of the solar system doesn’t bear thinking of.)
Angel hair (see Chapter XI) is supposed to be a waste product from the operation of the G-field. The ionization of the air inside the G-field allegedly would create heavy atoms that reacted chemically with the atoms in ordinary air to produce a kind of precipitate that falls to the ground and disappears as the ionization decreases. (In the physics laboratory, ionization means taking an electron away from an electrically neutral atom. The resulting atom would not be heavier. The contact between ordinary air and that in the ionized trail of a meteor has never yet produced “angel hair.” No laboratory has ever reported that isotopes of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and other elements in the atmosphere can react with their normal analogues to produce precipitates. A change in ionization cannot make a chemical compound disappear.)
The envelope of air enclosed by the G-field is supposed to allow a UFO to accelerate or change direction instantaneously, even when flying at enormous speeds, because the UFO would not encounter atmospheric friction. (Vehicles moving in the earth’s gravitational field are also surrounded by a cushion of air, but they still must overcome friction.)
At this point the whole G-field myth falls apart. One of the fundamental laws established by Newton, to which no exception has ever been found in the laboratory, states that a moving object will continue to move in a straight line unless it encounters an applied force. Let us suppose, for the moment, that a gravity shield could suddenly be interposed between a spacecraft and the earth, and thus make the craft reverse its direction of flight. The occupants would still be subject to the law of inertia. They would be hurled against the wall of the craft with a violence far greater than that experienced by a plane crashing to earth from an altitude of 30,000 feet. There could be no cushioning of the blow.
Such dreams demonstrate an almost contemptuous disregard for reality. Physicists admittedly do not yet understand the basic nature of gravity, but they do know a great deal about how it acts. Gravity is the force that holds the universe together. It exerts a pull on all objects in the physical world—the earth, the moon, the planets, our sun, the distant stars, and even the stars in other galaxies. All these bodies without exception move according to the law of universal gravitation as formulated by Newton and refined by Einstein: Every particle in the universe attracts every other particle with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. The magnitude of the force depends only on the masses of the bodies and on their distances from each other. It does not depend at all on the nature of the medium that separates them. It operates unchanged through stone, metal, water, air, or empty space. With a metal shield we can reduce electrical forces to zero; with a soft-iron shield we can weaken magnetic forces; but no substance existing in nature can act as a shield to shut out the force of gravitation.
Electricity, Magnetism, and Gravity
No responsible scientist would assert that man has found out all there is to know about the universe, and few would insist that some kind of a shield for gravity is an absolute impossibility. As yet, however, no laboratory has detected any phenomenon that might be a clue to “negative gravity.” In recent years nuclear physicists have occasionally caught fleeting glimpses of what has been called “anti-matter,” electrons with positive charges and protons with negative charges—the reverse of their charges in the normal world. Some investigators have speculated on the gravitational properties of anti-matter, and have wondered whether it might exert a force that would repel instead of attract.
So far no one has been able to think of an experiment to test the idea. Even if someone could find a way to collect a thimbleful of anti-matter, when he brought it into contact with normal matter, it, he, and his surroundings would instantly detonate like a super-colossal neutron bomb. Many physicists believe that, since electrical forces operate independently of gravitational forces, interchanging the charges on protons and electrons would probably have no effect on the gravitational field. Theoretical study and computations may someday yield an answer.
For years scientists have been searching for a “unified field theory,” a single equation that would describe the interrelationship among electrical, magnetic, and gravitational forces. Such a mathematical statement would reveal the mysterious bond that holds together the atomic nucleus, imparts to atoms their unique structure, and keeps the stars in their courses. But this unifying equation, when it is found, will not make our present knowledge invalid. Enthusiasts are deluding themselves when they base their belief in flying saucers on the hope of overthrowing the laws of gravity and inertia. Gravity, magnetism, and electricity are actual physical forces, as real as light, air, houses, trees, or persons. They can act only according to the laws of nature which, unlike the laws passed by legislatures, are not subject to repeal. No juggling of words, no argument, no wish can change these laws any more than they can stop the rising of the sun or the waning of the moon.
If man is ever to learn to control the force of gravity, he will succeed not by denying the reality of the laws but only by finding out what they are and by trying to understand them.