Only a Balloon?

A review of the evidence, made by the authors during the preparation of this book, emphasized some puzzling inconsistencies. Lieutenant Gorman had had the UFO in view for about twenty-seven minutes. During the first five or ten minutes it had traveled horizontally at low altitude in a fairly steady course. Then it had suddenly changed tactics, had climbed to high altitude, turned, darted in and out, and performed both evasive and aggressive actions. The three witnesses on the ground, however, did not see the UFO perform any of these combat maneuvers. It had been traveling steadily north and northwest and had disappeared from view ten or fifteen minutes before the aerial dogfight ended.

These differences strongly suggested that two unknowns were involved in the sighting. According to this theory, the light seen by the ground observers was the weather balloon; the light first seen over the airfield by Gorman was also the weather balloon. His adversary during the major part of the dogfight was a second unknown, not a physical object but some kind of optical phenomenon, very probably a mirage of the planet Jupiter. The reconstruction based on this theory would account for all the puzzling aspects of the case.

As first described by Lieutenant Gorman and by the three witnesses on the ground, the light was small, bright, and clear; no structure was visible; it made no noise and left no trail or exhaust. It was south of the control tower, was traveling horizontally west and northwest, seemingly at high speed, on a straight course, at low altitude. On these points all the witnesses agreed.

They did not agree in their estimates of its actual distance and height—a fact that is not surprising when we consider the circumstances. The night was clear and cloudless. It was also dark. The sun had set more than two hours earlier and there was no moonlight (new moon on October 2). On a dark night, the height and distance (and hence the speed) of a moving light of unknown size are notoriously difficult to estimate. According to Lieutenant Gorman, the light when he first saw it was about 1000 feet above the ground and 1000 yards—a little more than ½ mile—from his plane. The three men on the ground saw the UFO, for a few seconds, at different times during a period of less than ten minutes. Like Gorman, they were experienced airmen but they differed from him and from each other in their estimates. According to the assistant traffic controller, the altitude and distance from the control tower were 2000–2500 feet and 1–2 miles. According to the traffic controller, they were 4000–5000 feet and ½ mile; according to the Cub’s pilot, they were 5000–6000 feet and 1 mile.

In spite of the discrepancies, these estimates are in general agreement and, together with the details of the UFOs appearance, are consistent with the description of the weather balloon that had been released at 8:50, about ten or fifteen minutes before the UFO was sighted from the ground. The balloon carried a small white light, moved west and then northwest, was at low altitude and slowly climbing, and would soon have disappeared from the view of ground observers.

The object that Lieutenant Gorman first saw and pursued was also the balloon, climbing and turning. As it bobbed and swayed in the air currents it would have seemed to blink off and on, just as he reported. Underestimating its height and distance and overestimating its velocity as did the pilot in the Cuban dogfight (p. 42), he tried to follow its apparent climbing turn and, as he stated, blacked out briefly because of his excessive speed. During this interval, short as it may have been, he of course lost track of the object. Shortly afterward, when the UFO passed over his canopy and he dived, he again lost sight of the object.

When he resumed the chase he supposed that he had located the same object he had been following earlier—but the evidence suggests that he had picked up a different target. The unknown was going much faster than before, was at a much higher altitude, and shone with a steady brilliance instead of blinking off and on. In such a tense situation he could understandably have mistaken one strange light for another. Pursuing an apparently hostile unknown, less than a year after the still mysterious death of Mantell in a similar encounter, he might justifiably have been frightened.

The most probable source of the second light is the planet Jupiter. The sun had set at 6:24 P.M. Following some three hours behind the sun, the planet had a magnitude of -1.7 and was thus brighter than Sirius, the brightest star. Shortly after 9:10 when the UFO began its violent maneuvers (the exact time is not known), Jupiter was very low in the southwest sky, between two and three degrees above the horizon, at a bearing of about 231 degrees. The UFO was also attacking from the southwest, as is shown by Gorman’s tactics: in trying to cut it off in circles to the left, he gradually moved to the southeast.

The weather bureau records for that evening, obtained from radiosonde observations, show that temperature inversions existed both near the ground and at higher altitude. Thus conditions were ideal to produce a furiously twinkling planetary mirage. When a planet is close to the horizon this twinkling, together with the defocusing action of the earth’s atmosphere, can spread out the image so that it looks huge, with an apparent diameter as great as ten minutes of arc. Under such conditions, both the size and the intensity of the light fluctuate. When they diminish, the object seems to be racing away from the observer; when they increase, it seems to be rushing directly towards him on a collision course. The peculiar lens-like action of the atmosphere makes the image seem to be, not at infinity, but only a few hundred feet away from the observer.

Seen through the distorting atmospheric lens, the image of Jupiter could have performed exactly as Gorman described: it would have darted back and forth, seemed to attack, retreat, and carry out the “controlled” maneuvers that actually depended partly on the movement of the plane itself. Gorman apparently assumed that he was dealing with a material object (as indeed he was in the beginning), and therefore did not consider the possibility that he was seeing merely an optical image.

The geographical situation would have helped produce the illusion. Fargo lies at an elevation of about 900 feet and the land rises gradually to the west. Due west is Bismarck at 1670 feet. To the south lies a series of buttes, some of them as high as 3500 feet. Thus in the southwest where Jupiter was setting and where the UFO attacked from, the buttes would repeatedly have cut off the planet from view as Gorman maneuvered, so that the image would have seemed to race in and out and perform evasive actions, just as did the mirage of Sirius in Alaska (p. 60). Since Jupiter was very low, however, the buttes served to conceal it from the observers on the ground.

The times involved provide the last piece of the puzzle. The dogfight ended at about 9:27. The time of the geometrical setting of Jupiter was 9:25. The usual lag due to refraction is between two and three minutes (see Figure 9). The planet therefore remained visible for about two minutes longer. The image actually sank below the horizon and disappeared from view between 9:27 and 9:28, the same time that the UFO climbed straight up into the sky and disappeared. When Jupiter vanished, the unknown also vanished and did not return.

Absolute proof of this solution is of course impossible. Nevertheless, the description of the UFO, its behavior, its direction, its time of disappearance—all are consistent with its identification as Jupiter. The Gorman case might reasonably be removed from the “Balloon?” category and listed as “Balloon plus planetary mirage.”

Jupiter through a Jet Trail

Venus, Mars, and Jupiter seen under unusual conditions can mystify even the most hardheaded witness. Unrecognized air turbulence and increased scattering of the light can easily create the illusion of a flying saucer.

An ex-army man, a trained observer with a good knowledge of physics and optics, reports the following unnerving experience[IV-11].

“On January 30, 1954, my buddy and I had been fox hunting in southwestern Indiana. We hunted until well after sundown and headed for the car. As we neared it, a jet plane thundered through the darkening sky, from north to south. Placing game and guns in the car, I walked around it to see if the tires were OK. Happening to glance skyward, I let out a yell. There it was, and no mistaking it. A flying saucer blazing in the sky. A real illuminated spaceship. Only it wasn’t moving, just hanging in the sky. Football-shaped, about as long as the apparent diameter of the full moon, it showed red, yellow, and bluish green. [Here he sketched a football shape, glowing red knobs placed at the two ends, yellow lights girdling the middle, and yellow and green arcs curving between the two ends (see Figure 10).] I carry an eight-power field glass when hunting and I immediately trained this on the celestial wonder. The result was weird. It seemed to be pulsating with a quivering, twinkling light. We watched it for some five minutes, trying to figure out what we were seeing. Then the spaceship began to get smaller, simply reducing in size without moving. Smaller and smaller it became and in another five minutes it suddenly contracted into a planet—Jupiter, I believe it was. [Jupiter was in the eastern sky 50 to 60 degrees above the horizon.]

“When we realized what we were watching we began to try to figure out the ‘why.’ Suddenly we realized we were looking directly through the path of the plane at the planet and our best guess was that the atmospheric turbulence and temperature change caused by the passage of the jet was to blame for the strange aberration we had witnessed. And we wondered if refraction of the golden light could cause the reds, greens, and blues. Since neither of us uses snake-bite medicine in any form, we figured our observations were about as substantial as our feeble scientific understanding would permit.

“But anyway, I found out how people may see flying saucers and be perfectly honest in their incomplete observations. Had a person inclined to the supernatural taken a good look, jumped in his car, and headed for home at high speed, he would steadfastly have believed he had seen a flying saucer which was evidently observing the earth preparatory to an attack from outer space.”