About one o’clock in the afternoon on November 30, 1954, a spectacular meteor flared across the southeastern part of the United States and exploded. Many persons in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi saw the bright flash high in the sky, followed by a trail of smoke, and heard three violent detonations. Over the town of Sylacauga, Alabama, a nine-pound fragment of the falling meteoric body crashed through the roof of a house, bruised the left arm and hip of the unlucky resident, and came to rest on the floor. Members of the American Meteor Society collected detailed descriptions of the event from many witnesses and added this daylight fireball to the official list of observed meteorite falls from which meteorites are recovered[V-1, p. 128].

UFO addicts, however, apparently regarded both the meteor and its fragments as unnatural phenomena, implied some doubt that the fragment was really a meteorite, and characterized the incident as peculiar[V-2].

To the astronomer who specializes in the study of meteors the only peculiar aspect of the episode is that saucer publications list so few mysterious UFOs for that particular week when similar spectacular fireballs were almost a commonplace in the southeast states. On November 29 a meteor flew over Alabama at 5:30 P.M., and about two hours later another with a long trail soared over Florida. On November 30 at 5:00 P.M., a few hours after the fall at Sylacauga, another bright fireball flashed over Alabama. Shortly before midnight the same night a meteor flamed over North Carolina, so brilliant that its copper-green light illuminated the interior of cars on the highway; blue-green fire shot out above the treetops, changed to magnesium white, and then slowly faded. Detailed observations of all these appeared in the scientific journal Meteoritics[V-1, p. 128].

Stones from Heaven

Until roughly a hundred and fifty years ago meteors and meteorites had the status of cosmic orphans, unacknowledged members of the astronomical family. Few persons doubted the existence of the fixed stars, the solar planets, comets, or even of “new stars” or novae, but they rejected a natural explanation for meteors and interpreted them as falling stars, flying dragons, or fountains of fire in the sky. Most astronomers as well as laymen laughed at the recurrent idea that “stones from heaven” could fall on the earth. Then in 1803 the French scientist J. B. Biot described an extraordinary rain of meteorites that fell at L’Aigle on April 26[V-3]; he convinced the French Academy of Sciences that the stones had indeed pelted from the sky during the great meteor display. Meteoritics is thus a relatively young science. Much remains to be learned about these cosmic visitors, but certain basic facts have been established[V-4].

Meteors enter the earth’s atmosphere continually, by day as well as by night, and they show great variety. Some are so brilliant that they are visible even in broad daylight. Some are so faint that even in darkness they can be seen only through a telescope. Others, still fainter, can be detected only by radar specially designed for this purpose. Because of the friction created when they penetrate the earth’s atmosphere, most meteors vaporize and vanish many miles above the ground. We see them as only bright streaks of light, quickly extinguished. If the meteoric body is large enough, has the right chemical constitution, and enters the atmosphere at a favorable angle and velocity, some of it may survive the journey and fall to the earth as a meteorite. A distinct odor sometimes accompanies the fall—the smell of sulphur, onions, or cyanide. About 40,000 tons of meteoritic material fall on the earth each day, most of it in the form of fine dust. The object may be a chunk of metal or stone the size of a pebble or a boulder, or it may be a mass weighing several tons, so enormous that it gouges out a crater at the place where it hits and comes to rest far beneath the earth’s surface. Some meteors, fortunately extremely rare, apparently can strike the earth and devastate a large area but, like the wind, leave behind no physical trace. According to present theory, members of a regular shower are probably remnants of comets, which have an icy structure, and the minute bits of frozen debris vaporize in a flash of light high in the atmosphere. Meteors that survive to reach the earth as meteorites are thought to be fragments of asteroids, or tiny planets. Meteorites vary so widely in their physical and chemical structure that they require a complex system of classification. Nevertheless the specialist can distinguish between a meteorite and earthly rocks and stones by laboratory tests[V-5].

Meteor Streams and Showers

Any clear night displays its quota of meteors. But at certain times, when the earth happens to collide with a stream of cosmic debris moving in an elliptical orbit, a shower of meteors takes place. (For a list of the major night meteor streams, see Table I.) Most meteor streams probably result from the breakup of comets; if the debris is distributed uniformly in the comet’s orbit, a meteor shower occurs each time the earth crosses the orbit. For example, the Perseids, fragments of Comet 1862 III, have reappeared every August for more than 1200 years, and the Leonids, debris of Comet Temple (1866 I), regularly return around the third week in November. Like the Taurids, another dependable stream, the Leonids are notable for their brilliant fireballs, which have deposited some of the largest meteorites ever found on the earth.

Some regular showers produce great numbers of meteors at intervals of several years. For nearly a millennium, A.D. 902 to 1866, a marked increase in the number of Leonids occurred every thirty-three years. The display in 1833 was one of the most spectacular in history, and witnesses said that the “stars were falling” as thick as snowflakes. Before the scheduled major shower of 1899, however, the main stream was deflected by passing close to the planet Jupiter and the periodic spectacle did not take place. Since then, the Leonids have been considered a “lost” stream, but some members of the shower have continued to appear each November. On November 16 and 17, 1961, they produced an unexpectedly awesome display with many brilliant fireballs.

The close approach of a comet sometimes causes a fantastic shower of “shooting stars,” and hundreds or even thousands may be counted in a single night. At the approach of the debris of Comet Biela on November 27, 1885, some 75,000 meteors were visible from a single place during a period of an hour. Irregularly occurring or sporadic meteors not associated with a known comet also occur and pelt the earth unexpectedly.

The Green Fireballs

On the evening of September 18, 1954, a group of astronomers and their wives from the observatory at Sacramento Peak, New Mexico, were having a picnic at the White Sands National Monument, near Alamogordo. In this great desert of pure white gypsum the air is extremely hot during the daytime but cools to a pleasant warmth after sunset. Supper finished, the picnickers had taken off shoes and stockings to wade in the soft warm sand. By 8:30 it was dark and some of the astronomers had already left but others (including Dr. Menzel) had lingered to watch the stars, which stand out sharply in the clear skies over the desert.

Suddenly, far to the north, appeared an enormous green fireball. Of blinding brilliance, it was moving slowly and majestically from east to west in a substantially horizontal path about seven degrees above the horizon, leaving behind a luminous trail that persisted for at least fifteen minutes. At about the same time thousands of other persons on the ground in New Mexico and Colorado, as well as the crews of several planes in flight, were observing the fireball. It passed over a crowded football stadium in Santa Fe, interfered with radio and TV transmission as it appeared over Albuquerque, and over Denver turned night into day. A United Airlines pilot at about 15,000 feet near Laramie, Wyoming, saw the blue-green ball crossing his course and for some ten minutes observed the luminous cloud it left behind[V-6]. At almost the same instant, the fireball was sighted in the Bay of San Francisco, 1000 miles away. One publication cited this meteor as two separate UFOs, one flying over San Francisco, the other over New Mexico and the Southwest[V-2].

When telephone calls swamped the newspaper offices, reporters interviewed Dr. Lincoln La Paz of the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico. Although he had not observed this particular specimen, he had seen similar green fireballs a few years earlier and he commented that this was no ordinary meteor but something unusual. A new wave of UFO excitement began to sweep the country. Were mysterious machines from outer space again patrolling New Mexico?

The astronomers who had admired the fireball at White Sands were amazed at the public reaction. As professionals who had spent their lives in observing and analyzing astronomical phenomena, they agreed that the object had been unusual in its slow movement, its color, and its brilliance. But an unusual meteor is still only a meteor, not a spaceship, and they easily recognized it as a green fireball of the type that had appeared over the Southwest a few years earlier.

The first epidemic of green fireballs had begun in early December 1948, and for nearly two months the brilliantly burning objects had appeared almost every night in the skies over New Mexico[V-7, p. 71]. Their apparent collision course startled plane crews in the air, and their steady, seemingly purposeful motion frightened observers on the ground. The fireballs showed a family resemblance in their bright-green color, their great size and brilliance, their level flight path, their noiseless disappearance, and their failure to leave material fragments on the ground.

New Mexico was a particularly sensitive area, studded with military bases and research installations carrying out vital work in ballistics, guided missiles, atomic energy, and space science in general. Since the unusual meteors seemed to be concentrating on New Mexico, Air Force Intelligence had to face the question: Were the fireballs natural astronomical phenomena or were they experimental guided missiles from another country, perhaps Russia?

After consulting Dr. La Paz and hearing his evaluation of the evidence, the Air Force felt growing concern. Perhaps unconsciously influenced by the general hysteria of the past year, Dr. La Paz concluded that the objects were not meteors but must be “something unusual” because they differed from “normal” meteors in their color, trajectory, velocity, size, brilliance, and apparent lack of fragments.

With very little knowledge of meteors and great faith in machines from outer space, saucer enthusiasts reasoned that since the fireballs were not normal meteors they must be artificial objects. Since they were artificial, they must be under intelligent control. Since they were intelligently controlled, they must be unmanned missiles or manned vehicles launched from an alien spaceship hovering hundreds of miles above the earth whose purpose might or might not be destructive, or they might be merely ranging devices sent as a warning to earthmen.

The Air Force was not particularly worried about interplanetary visitors, but it was concerned with the possibility that the fireballs were man-made vehicles, a potential danger to the country. One scientist had suggested that the Russians might have constructed a guided missile whose nose cone, the final stage in a multistage rocket, was made of ice and various other chemicals. In re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, such a cone would burn up; the vaporizing ices would account for the green color observed, for the silent disappearance of the object, and for the lack of material traces on the ground. Whatever the true explanation, members of the Air Defense Command could not afford to guess; they had to know.

In mid-February 1949 they assembled at Los Alamos a conference of military and intelligence officers, physicists, and astronomers, to discuss the problem of the green fireballs. After two days of studying the evidence, most of the members agreed that the fireballs were meteors of an unusual type and, as natural phenomena, not a threat to national security. To take care of the extremely remote chance that this conclusion might be wrong, the conference turned over the problem to the scientists at Air Force Cambridge Research Center which, in the late summer, organized Project Twinkle to equip and establish three cinetheodolite stations in New Mexico. Fitted with a diffraction grating to split the spectrum into its component colors (and thus identify the chemical elements present), the cameras were to photograph and record the altitude, size, speed, and spectrum of the luminous objects.

Since the green fireballs, meanwhile, had all but vanished from the skies, enthusiasm for the research project diminished. Only one camera (designed by Dr. Menzel) was ever put into operation and it never found anything to photograph. After two months of futile searching, the Air Force finally abandoned Project Twinkle as a waste of time.

In the years following, green fireballs occasionally appeared. An astronomer observed one over Lafayette, Colorado, at 7:45 P.M. on June 4, 1950. One soared over the New England states and eastern Canada on November 2, 1950, and a year later, on November 2, 1951, a plane crew over Texas sighted another which was dramatically publicized in Life magazine, and described in another publication as a missile that ejected flaming balls. Few other fireballs made the headlines until the one of September 18, 1954, but even that caused only brief excitement and the Air Force expressed no alarm.

Meteors in the Records

The American Meteor Society, whose members specialize in the study of meteors and meteorites, for years have collected reports of such phenomena. From a large enough number of good descriptions of a given meteor, astronomers can analyze the data mathematically and determine the meteor’s radiant—the point in the heavens from which it seems to come. The meteor is then identified by its radiant and given an AMS number. For several years the data were published in Meteoritics, a journal issued jointly by the Meteoritical Society and the Institute of Meteoritics of the University of New Mexico. Dr. Charles P. Olivier, president of the American Meteor Society, was a contributing editor.

The records in Meteoritics for the years 1950 to 1955 list dozens of fireballs, many of them green, that were somehow overlooked by saucer enthusiasts. On August 11, 1950, during the maximum of the Perseid shower, a blue-green fireball (AMS 2336) apparently oval- or cigar-shaped appeared over Washington, Oregon, and Idaho at 7:30 P.M. and was reported by more than 100 witnesses. So brilliant that it showed a noticeable disk, it flew in a horizontal path, silently broke into three pieces, and disappeared[V-8, p. 379].

September 20, the same year, was a big day for meteors. At 1:35 A.M. a giant fireball (AMS 2326) roared over southeastern Illinois from north to south, leaving a luminous train visible in five states and illuminating the sky and countryside from St. Louis to Louisville and from Memphis to Knoxville. The final detonation, over western Kentucky, was heard over an area 1000 miles square and shook buildings from Paducah to Memphis. Fragments showered farms over a twenty-five-mile area, struck five buildings, and penetrated one roof. About fifty pounds of meteorites dropped in Murray, Calloway County, Kentucky, and are now in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. That same night about 10:45 P.M., fireballs were reported by plane crews flying over a six-state area—Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico[V-9, p. 115]. Similar fireballs that vanished without trace were reported on September 28, 1953 (AMS 2331); October 4, 1953 (AMS 2330); May 15, 1954; and October 27, 1954 (AMS 2337).

The green fireballs still appear now and then, as they always have. None of them has yet changed into a spaceship.

Fallacies about Meteors

Most flying-saucer enthusiasts still refuse to believe that the green fireballs were natural phenomena. Misinterpreting or distorting the statements made by professional astronomers, they cite the unusual nature of these meteors as proof that they were not meteors at all but machines from another world. Advocates of this belief need more than a refresher course in logic; they also need to learn some facts about meteors.

The space-vehicle interpretation rests on a series of mistaken beliefs and illogical conclusions about the nature and behavior of meteors. These false premises may be summarized as follows:

1. Color. Meteors do not contain copper; since the peculiar shade of green shown by the green fireballs could come only from copper, the fireballs were not meteors but spacecraft.

2. Speed and trajectory. Meteors do not travel at a slow rate of speed and do not follow a horizontal path; since the green fireballs did both, they were not meteors but spacecraft.

3. Size and brilliance. Meteors do not show such great size or brilliance as did the green fireballs, which were therefore not meteors but spacecraft.

4. Sound. Meteors produce a loud noise; since the green fireballs moved silently, they were not meteors but spacecraft.

5. Fragments. Meteors deposit material fragments on the earth which can be located if the investigator maps the flight path and makes a search; since the green fireballs left no fragments, they were not meteors but spacecraft.

In the pages that follow we shall attempt to correct each of these mistaken ideas in turn, to present the actual facts known to astronomers, and to show clearly that the green fireballs were not spacecraft, but meteors.

Facts about Meteors

1. Color. Copper-green meteors are not a new phenomenon. This unusual shade of green is only one of the many possible colors that meteors may display—white, green, blue, yellow, orange, red, and all shades in between. Descriptions received by the Meteoritical Society include adjectives such as bright-green, copper-green, blue-green, fiery white, green-white, orange, blue, yellowish, silver, red-orange. Perceptions of color vary greatly among different observers, so that several witnesses may choose different words for the color of the same object. The most common adjective used is “brilliant”; an observer who has only a few seconds to look at the object often has real difficulty in deciding just what color accompanied the brilliance. Very common phrases are blue-green, greenish-white, orange-yellow, orange-red, greenish-yellow, yellow-green.

Both the chemical structure and the velocity of the meteoric body help determine its apparent color. As the burning object plunges through the atmosphere and vaporizes, the chemical elements produce their typical colors. At higher velocities, atmospheric friction heats the body to higher temperatures and whitens the color; as the body slows down and becomes less hot, it is apt to appear redder.

In a few instances astronomers have been able to photograph the color spectrum of a meteor in flight, to analyze the spectral lines and determine exactly what elements were present[V-10]. As a rule, however, the chemical content must be found from a laboratory analysis of recovered meteorites. Some meteors do contain traces of copper, and free nodules of pure copper have been found in several meteorites [V-5, p. 81]. Magnesium occurs in fairly high percentages in most meteorites and the amount is unusually high in green meteors[V-11]. It produces a color almost identical with that from copper. Seeing the green of a vaporizing meteor, no observer could tell whether the color came from copper or from magnesium unless he could photograph the spectrum or make a chemical analysis of the meteorite.

The color displayed by the New Mexico fireballs may have come from copper, but more probably from magnesium. Another possible source is frozen nitrogen. Laboratory experiments relating to problems of satellite re-entry[V-12] have shown that when frozen nitrogen vaporizes, it emits a brilliant green glow whose wave length is almost identical with that of the New Mexico fireballs, as judged from the paintings made by witnesses. One of the prevailing theories suggests that meteors of this type may be icy “cometoids”—cometary debris, chunks of ice, and frozen gases (including nitrogen) at very low temperatures. When they enter the earth’s atmosphere and are slowed down to speeds of several hundred miles an hour, they become heated and vaporize, and the surface alternately melts and refreezes; the vaporizing nitrogen would produce the green color seen in the fireballs. Such a process would account for the color, the short lifetime, and the lack of fragments of the New Mexico meteors.

To summarize: Meteors can exhibit the particular green color shown by the New Mexico fireballs. It can result from copper, magnesium, or frozen nitrogen, which can normally occur in meteors.

2. Speed and trajectory. Meteors vary widely in their velocities and flight paths. They plunge from space into the earth’s atmosphere at speeds estimated to range from seven to forty-five miles a second relative to the earth—from 25,000 to more than 150,000 miles per hour. Members of a particular meteor stream usually show a characteristic velocity. The Perseids, for example, travel at high speed, some thirty-six miles a second, while the Geminids saunter in at a mere twenty-one miles a second. Most of these “falling stars” become visible to us when they have descended to around sixty or seventy miles above the earth. Flashing down in a steep path, they usually burn up and vanish by the time they have fallen to around fifty or forty miles. The larger the meteor’s body, the longer its life and the lower its point of disappearance. Most meteors maintain a straight course as they descend toward earth. A typical path is that photographed by Smithsonian astronomers in New Mexico on the night of November 23, 1960 (see Plate IIIa). Some fireballs have been reported to change course after exploding. More probably, the witness is actually observing the shifting pattern of the smoke cloud left by the meteor. The Puerto Rico fireball of January 12, 1947, left an erratic trail of this type, which was photographed ten to twenty minutes after the meteor had disappeared (see Plate IIIb).

The original entrance velocity, angle of entry, size, and chemical structure all influence the shape of a meteor’s path and its time of survival. The apparent angle of descent as seen by the observer depends on the distance and the direction the object is moving relative to the observer. When the meteor travels parallel to the observer’s line of sight, it seems much slower than when it passes the line of sight at right angles. The greater the distance between the observer and the meteor, the slower its apparent motion[V-13].

Some meteors move very slowly; traveling at an almost leisurely rate, they soar through the sky on a long, level path almost parallel with the earth. The slow fireballs in the great meteor procession of 1913 maintained a horizontal course over a distance of several thousand miles, from western Canada to Brazil[V-14].

Astronomical records show that green meteors are usually slow. Some 230 persons reported to the American Meteor Society that on November 28, 1953, at 6:30 P.M., a fireball moved slowly through the sky from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania. Described as blue-white-green, changing to orange-yellow-red, it was huge, disk-shaped, and vanished silently without depositing fragments [V-1, p. 273]. On May 15, 1954, at 11:22 P.M., more than 100 persons observed (and reported) a slow-moving fireball, blue-green changing to red, of luminosity so great that it woke sleeping people. Toward the end of its course it seemed to stop, spiraled a couple of times, and then simply vanished without leaving fragments [V-8, p. 336].

To summarize: Meteors can travel at low velocities and in apparently horizontal paths.

3. Size and brilliance. Giant meteors of great luminosity have been recorded throughout history. Some fireballs have been visible to observers throughout an area of thousands of square miles. Typical descriptions are: dazzling, like an airplane falling in flames, bigger than the full moon, of blinding brilliance, so bright it turned night into day, like the headlight of a locomotive, as big as the setting sun but three times as brilliant.

The luminosity does not depend on the actual size of the meteoric body. A fragment no larger than a pinhead can create a brilliant flash as it vanishes. A spectacular fireball that lights up the country over hundreds of miles may have a small body that burns up completely miles above the earth. A larger body can survive longer, so that it continues to flare for several seconds or more. The larger, long-lasting fireballs may explode into smaller fragments and cascades of sparks. In exploding, they can produce a luminous cloud of particles that remains visible for fifteen or twenty minutes and then peppers the ground with meteorites that fall like hail or buckshot. A giant fireball can deposit chunks of metal weighing a ton or more like those found in Mexico, or can leave a truly enormous body that penetrates the ground and carves out a great crater like those in Arizona and Texas.

To summarize: Huge fireballs of great brilliance are not new.

4. Sound. Some meteors produce noise; others do not. Most meteors silently vaporize high above the earth. When one does reach the ground, it may strike with no noise but the faint thud of its impact. Shooting through the air, it sometimes makes weak noises that have been described as rumbling, crackling, rustling, whistling, or hissing.

Meteors sometimes explode with one or more crashing detonations that rattle or even break windows. The noise has been described as like a heavy clap of thunder, the explosion of a volcano, or a whir as if a million bumblebees had been disturbed. The noise from the explosion of the Siberian meteor in 1908 was heard over a distance of 600 miles, and the shock registered as an earthquake in England.

Many meteors, like the Pennsylvania fireball of January 29, 1952, (AMS 2328) are completely silent. This blue-green object, so large that it showed a definite disk, was reported to the American Meteor Society by more than 400 witnesses from Maine to Virginia and from New York to Ohio; none of the observers heard any noise [V-1, p. 264].

To summarize: Some meteors end with a bang, but most of them don’t even whimper.

5. Fragments. Most meteors burn up high in the atmosphere. A few, if they are large enough in size (at least ten to twenty pounds) and tough enough in structure, survive to reach the earth as stony or metallic fragments. Marked differences characterize the various meteor streams. The Taurids (maximum November 12) are relatively rigid structures, unusually tough, and show little tendency to break up in their flight. The many Taurid fireballs show that fairly large bodies have survived. The Geminids (maximum December 14) are of average strength but appear to be very dense, while the Draconids (October 10) are featherlike and fragile, with low density. Some of the most brilliant fireballs may be structures of ice and frozen gases which quickly vaporize on reaching the earth and hence leave no detectable fragments. The fiery object that struck Siberia in 1908 may have been such an “icy cometoid”; although it devastated an area of hundreds of square miles and uprooted or knocked down some eighty million trees, it apparently left no physical trace[V-15].

If some of the physical body does survive to reach the earth’s surface, finding it is still a problem. Recovery is rare even when the fall occurs in daylight over well-populated country and the flight path can be charted from the accounts of reliable witnesses. When the fall occurs at night, recovery is even rarer[V-5]. After dark, even experienced observers find it difficult to judge true directions and distances, and they may plot a place of fall that is many miles from the actual point of impact. Meteoriticists know that there is small chance of finding meteorites that fall at night except in regions where most of the land is under cultivation. In the fifty years between 1898 and 1948, of forty-eight recoveries from observed meteorite falls in the United States, only seven were made from falls occurring after 8 P.M.[V-5].

Recovery depends on many factors: the number of persons who saw the event, the accuracy of their estimates of distance and direction, the size of the meteorites, the patience of the searchers, the time and money available for the search, and, most important of all, just plain luck.

The Norton County fall of February 18, 1948, illustrates both the detective work and the luck required. At about 4:56 P.M. C.S.T. a brilliant detonating fireball soared over an area including Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas, and left a large white cloud that was visible for about an hour afterward. Newspapers publicized the phenomenon as a flying saucer and a few excited witnesses agreed. One man affirmed that shortly before the explosion the strange craft hovered over his yard at eye level, belching fire and showering sparks, then suddenly took off, climbing fast, and exploded.

Meteoriticists at once recognized the characteristic pattern of an exploding meteor and determined to find the remains. From newspaper reports and personal interviews with the witnesses, H. H. Nininger of the American Meteorite Museum in Arizona plotted the path and determined that the probable point of explosion was thirteen miles west and three miles north of Norton, Kansas[V-16]. From similar investigations, Lincoln La Paz of the Institute of Meteoritics in New Mexico determined the probable place of impact as an area eight miles long and four miles wide, about thirty-two square miles, on the Kansas-Nebraska line.

During the Easter vacation a field-survey party from New Mexico drove north into Kansas to hunt for the meteorite, but blizzards and snow-blocked roads stopped the work. A second search, begun on April 27, suggested that the main mass of the meteorite must have fallen somewhere in Furnas County, Nebraska. When persistent hunting failed to reveal it, the searchers moved south into Kansas, where a farmer had found a strange stone that smelled of sulphur and contained metallic specks. Although many stony meteorites of various weights turned up in this area, the main mass remained hidden until July 3 when a farmer located it, by accident, in a field that the official party had already examined and abandoned some three months earlier. This meteorite, although it weighed more than a ton and had dug out a six-foot crater in the ground, had eluded the hunters because “at the time of the fall the only dwelling close to the point of impact was unoccupied and ... the impact occurred in a field so overgrown with weeds and stubble that even the large crater made by the record-breaking main mass of the fall was finally located only when by chance a caterpillar tractor started to fall into it.”[V-17]

To find these meteorites, several highly trained searchers had spent days of effort, made a number of field surveys, driven more than 10,000 miles, and interviewed hundreds of persons who observed the flight of the fireball. Even so, they counted themselves lucky because many “meteorites of such composition and structure, although large enough to produce spectacular light and sound effects in the intermediate layers of the atmosphere, might disintegrate so completely during transit through the denser lower atmosphere that only dust would survive to reach the earth.”

The green fireballs of New Mexico were silent; they were probably icy structures and hence produced no meteorites. Even if they had, locating the place of fall would have been nearly impossible because the meteors appeared at night in a sparsely populated area.

To summarize: Many meteors do not leave fragments. Even when they do, finding the meteorite requires luck as well as hard work.

Unusual Fireballs

The officers and crewmen of a plane in flight have a front-row seat at the drama of the heavens, where astronomical events seem doubly vivid against the dark night sky. The pilot has been trained to recognize the major constellations, the brightest stars, and ordinary phenomena such as meteors and the Aurora Borealis. As a rule, however, he limits his study to the needs of the job. The few who have an astronomer’s intimate acquaintance with the heavens have often made valuable contributions to our knowledge. Comet 1957d was first observed by an airman and Comet 1948l was discovered by a pilot flying from the Fiji Islands to Australia. Comet Wilson, discovered on July 23, 1961 (and reported to the Air Force by some persons as a UFO), was first recognized by A. Stewart Wilson, navigator on a Pan American flight over the Pacific. All members of the crew were skilled and experienced fliers, but he alone was equipped to see the significance of the intruder in the constellation Gemini[V-18].

One of the most fantastic apparitions to confront a pilot is a group of luminous objects flaming through the air in more or less geometrical formation. The objects often seem to be heading directly toward the plane on a collision course but, as though under intelligent control, seem to veer off at the last possible instant and then disappear at incredible speed. The pilot usually recognizes this frightening phenomenon as an exploding meteor or a cluster of fireballs. Occasionally the sight is so extraordinary that he insists it could not have been a mere meteor but must have been some weird spacecraft. Airmen of unquestioned competence have made this mistake, sometimes because they more than half believed in extraterrestrial visitors, but more often because they knew less than they supposed about meteors.

In trying to identify the alarming objects approaching his plane, the pilot often thinks first of a meteor, then rejects the idea with some form of the remark, “Whatever it was, it was certainly not a meteor; I’ve seen meteors and I can’t be fooled.” He usually adds that no meteor could travel so fast (or so slowly) as the one he saw; so high (or so low); could have such a color; steer so “obvious” a collision course; fly as part of so orderly a group; move in so level (or so steeply angled) a path; maintain so steady a course; change course so abruptly; move so silently; or create so loud a detonation.

Such an incident occurred on a Pan American flight from New York to San Juan early on the morning of March 9, 1957. At about 3:30 A.M. when the plane was off Jacksonville, Florida, the pilot and the flight engineer saw a burning, greenish-white, round object coming out of nowhere, seemingly only a half mile away and headed across their nose on a direct collision course[V-19]. In such a situation a plane’s captain cannot waste time in analyzing what he sees, but must act. In a violent evasive move he put the plane into a climb of about 1500 feet, during which several passengers were thrown out of their seats and injured. At the same moment the crews of at least seven other flights within an area of 300 miles were reporting the same object. One witness saw it split in two and the fiery rear section drop away. About an hour earlier, the pilot of another plane in the area had seen the breakup of a similar meteor but had not reported it. In spite of all the evidence that the unknown was a normal meteor, breaking apart as many meteors do, the Pan American pilot, “having seen thousands of meteors,” could not accept the object as a natural phenomenon although he did realize, after he heard the other reports, that he had greatly underestimated its distance. The object showed all the characteristics of a typical fireball, but the flying-saucer cultists have still tried to convert this undoubted meteor into an unknown object.

The number of meteors reported as flying saucers or spaceships has diminished in the last few years, but the Air Force has continued to investigate all doubtful or puzzling sightings to determine whether they in any way represent a possible threat to the nation’s security. Every sure identification of a UFO as merely a meteor, not a ballistic missile, brings a certain amount of relief.

A typical case, successfully solved, is that of June 20, 1959. About 2:15 A.M. the pilot of a United Airlines flight over the Pacific reported by radio to Flight Operations that he had observed an apparent rocket firing about thirty-five miles west of the plane position; radar detected the presence of a surface vessel at about the same position. The pilot first noticed a flash of light, then the entire sky lighted up and he saw four round, fiery globules, of an intense bluish-white color, with no tails. Flying two by two in a straight line, they made no sound and disappeared after about two seconds. The weather was clear and calm, the visibility excellent. The copilot, sitting at the right, saw only the first flash, but the pilot of another plane some 120 miles to the west reported seeing the same objects at the same time[V-19].

Because this sighting occurred in a very sensitive area where military officials were expecting a Russian test firing of an ICBM, the Air Force made an exhaustive study of this report and identified the object as a meteor. Their evaluation proceeded as follows:

The United Airlines pilot estimated the distance of the objects as only about thirty miles and their rate of travel as about 15 degrees in two seconds. These figures indicated a velocity of approximately 14,500 miles per hour, about the speed of a ballistic missile. But the relatively low altitude, the flat trajectory, and the fact that a visible “power plant” was apparently still operating at this stage of flight ruled out the possibility of a missile. However, if the observer had underestimated the distance and the objects were actually hundreds of miles away, then the data would indicate a speed of about 50,000 miles an hour, in the range of meteor velocities. The descriptions given closely matched that of the classic fireball, whose colors range over white, blue, green, red, and yellow, and whose luminosity may be as great as -3 magnitudes. The Air Force concluded that the object sighted was, in all probability, a meteor.

A similar sighting, which saucer enthusiasts have publicized as a brilliantly lighted UFO that appeared to hold a definite course, occurred at 3:02 A.M. on July 11, 1959, also over the Pacific[V-19]. The pilot of a Pan American Airlines flight reported that a mysterious bright object accompanied at its left by four smaller lights had approached his plane at “inconceivable speed,” made a sharp right turn, and then disappeared. The objects seemed to be flying evenly spaced in formation, and the pilot, who had never seen anything like it in all his years of flying, told the newspapers, “I’m a believer, now.”

The official investigation began immediately. Four other commercial flights had reported seeing the object at the same time. In each case, the pilot stated that the objects seemed to head straight at his plane at high speed on a collision course, then made a 90-degree turn and disappeared. The various reports, however, showed significant disagreements. Some witnesses gave the color as white, some as orange-yellow. Of the several pilots, each gave a different description of the “formation”: a big light with four smaller lights flying at the left; a big light surrounded by a cluster of six or seven smaller lights; a big light followed by four smaller lights; a big light in the center of a rectangle formed by four smaller lights. Of the five pilots who made official reports, one said the phenomenon was definitely not a meteor, two said it could have been a meteor, and two did not venture an opinion. The pilots of several other flights stated, on landing, that they too had seen the object but had not radioed a report because they assumed it to be a meteor.

After mapping and correlating all the observations, ATIC completed the analysis and released the result to the press on July 14, only three days after the sighting, a remarkably efficient piece of work. Conclusion: the object was a fireball[V-20].

The literature of flying saucers contains dozens of similar incidents that fit perfectly into the meteor pattern. Pointing to this list of “unidentified” flying objects, saucer addicts still abuse the Air Force for concealing the “fact” that these UFOs are actually spaceships!

Great Meteor Processions

Even more dramatic than the ordinary exploding meteor whose fragments naturally fall into a pattern around it, a cluster of fireballs or a great procession of meteors occasionally startles the world. On December 21, 1876, about 8:45 P.M. such a swarm of fireballs appeared over Kansas and disappeared some three minutes later over Pennsylvania, having traveled the thousand-mile distance at a velocity of 20,000 to 25,000 miles an hour. Hundreds of persons in Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania saw the display, which included nearly 100 separate fireballs; the leader was more brilliant than the full moon and many of the followers were brighter than Venus or Jupiter. Perhaps fortunately for the nerves of the public, the most recent such display occurred before the saucers began to fly (March 24, 1933). This cluster of fireballs was visible chiefly in the skies over New Mexico and left a great cloud that was visible for at least three hours.

The most spectacular of such formations was the great meteor procession of February 9, 1913. At about 9:05 in the evening the leader or leaders appeared in the sky over western Canada, their fiery red bodies followed by long streaming tails. These immense fireballs showed no tendency to fall toward the earth but, like the green fireballs of New Mexico, “moved forward on a perfectly horizontal path with peculiar, majestic, dignified deliberation,” and disappeared in the distance to the southwest. No description can surpass that given by Professor Chant[V-21] who spent two weeks in locating and interviewing many of the witnesses.

“Before the astonishment aroused by this first meteor had subsided, other bodies were seen coming from the northwest, emerging from precisely the same place as the first one. Onward they moved, at the same deliberate pace, in twos or threes or fours, with tails streaming behind, though not so long nor so bright as in the first case. They all traversed the same path and were headed for the same point in the southeastern sky.

“Gradually the bodies became smaller, until the last ones were but red sparks, some of which were snuffed out before they reached their destination. Several report that near the middle of the great procession was a fine large star without a tail, and that a similar body brought up the rear.

“To most observers the outstanding feature of the phenomenon was the slow, majestic motion of the bodies; and almost equally remarkable was the perfect formation which they retained. Many compared them to a fleet of airships, with lights on either side and forward and aft;... Others, again, likened them to great battleships, attended by cruisers or destroyers.”

No other recorded meteors have persisted for so great a distance. Thousands of persons saw this great procession as it soared over Saskatchewan, central Canada, Toronto and the Great Lakes region, New York and Pennsylvania, the shipping lanes from New York to Bermuda, and on over the South Atlantic, where before it vanished it was observed by ships as far south as Brazil—a distance of some 5000 miles, one fifth of the earth’s circumference. The descriptions do not vary significantly and they all mention the slow, level flight, parallel to the earth’s surface.

Some astronomers have suggested that these unusual meteors may have been a group of natural satellites deflected by the earth’s gravitation, slowing down and finally disintegrating as they made their final revolution[V-14]. But if the UFO cult had existed in 1913, the flying-saucer enthusiasts would probably have regarded the fireball procession as a fleet of spaceships, and would have speculated on the problem of what planet dispatched them and for what purpose.

The Chiles-Whitted Sighting

The Chiles-Whitted UFO, sighted on July 24, 1948, is one of the most publicized of the classics. Although the object appeared, passed, and vanished in an interval of roughly ten seconds, and the descriptions given by the three witnesses differed on several vital points, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, astronomer consultant to ATIC, in his report of April 30, 1949, identified it as an undoubted meteor. Nevertheless, not until 1959 did the Air Force officially accept this solution, and the literature of saucerdom still cites the incident as indisputable proof of alien spaceships.

On the evening of July 23 an Eastern Airlines DC-3 took off from Houston, Texas, en route for Boston, with an experienced pilot and copilot in the cockpit. By 2:40 A.M. C.D.S.T. July 24 the plane was a few miles southwest of Montgomery, Alabama, flying at an altitude of 5000 feet. The night was clear, and a bright moon just four days past full shone through a layer of broken clouds about 1000 feet above the plane. At 2:45 A.M. the pilot, Captain C. S. Chiles, noticed a dull red glow some distance ahead, approaching from a little above and to the right of the plane. He remarked to his copilot, Lieutenant J. B. Whitted, “Look, here comes a new Army jet job.”[V-19] In the next few seconds, however, he changed his mind about the identity of the object. As both men watched, the brilliantly glowing unknown continued to approach with incredible swiftness, apparently on a collision course; it seemed to veer slightly, passed the plane on the right almost level with and parallel to the flight path, then seemed to pull up sharply and disappear into the clouds. Captain Chiles estimated that the object was in sight for about ten seconds. The one passenger who was awake, sitting at the right of the cabin, saw the light for only an instant as it flashed by.

The brief impressions of these three witnesses were the sole foundation for newspaper stories that the plane had narrowly escaped collision with a spaceship.

In their official report both pilots agreed on the general appearance of the UFO: it looked like a wingless aircraft with no fins or protruding surfaces, was cigar-shaped, about 100 feet long, and about twice the diameter of a B-29 superfortress. It seemed to have two rows of windows through which glowed a very bright light, brilliant as a magnesium flare. An intense dark-blue glow like a blue fluorescent factory light shone at the bottom along the entire length, and red-orange flames shot out from the rear to a distance of some fifty feet. Neither man heard any sound and neither saw any occupants. In their original report to ATIC both men agreed that “no disturbance was felt from the air waves, nor was there any prop wash or mechanical disturbance when the object passed.” The third witness, the passenger, did not report any turbulence or rocking of the plane. Some of the later versions of the incident gloss over these facts, however, and thus exaggerate the startling nature of the sighting. One account subtly implies the presence of a pilot in the UFO and several state that, as the object passed, the plane hit turbulent air[V-7, p. 61] or was “rocked” by the UFO[V-20, p. 21].

Like most eyewitness descriptions of a startling event, the testimony of the three men differed. Chiles stated that at the front of the UFO was a lighted pilot compartment or cockpit with a “snout” similar to a radar pole, and that a kind of nozzle projected from the rear from which the flames fanned out to a width of twenty or thirty feet. Whitted did not see a cockpit, a snout, or a rear nozzle; he thought the flames flared out from the entire rear and were never any wider than the width of the UFO itself. The third witness, the passenger, saw no shape or form, only an intensely brilliant streak of light that appeared and vanished before he was able to focus his eyes. As responsible officers, both pilots had obviously tried to separate the observed phenomena from their interpretation. They differed widely on the estimated distance of the UFO (the passenger did not offer an estimate). Chiles thought it passed them with a margin of only about 700 feet, but Whitted believed the distance to be more than ten times greater, about a mile and a half. However, when we remember that these men had the UFO in sight for only a small fraction of a minute and that their study of the side view (“windows,” “cockpit,” etc.) must have been limited to the instant of passing, these disagreements are not remarkable.

When Captain Chiles and Lieutenant Whitted reported their frightening experience, the Air Force made a prompt investigation. Since Captain Chiles explicitly stated his belief that the UFO was under intelligent control, the case required careful consideration. A check of the air traffic showed that no other planes had been in the area at the time, so the object could not have been a normal aircraft. Furthermore, other equally reliable witnesses reported seeing unusually bright meteors in the Southeast that night. Since the bare physical description of the UFO, apart from the inferences made, was identical with that of a fireball, Dr. Hynek concluded that it was an unusually bright meteor.

But the climate at ATIC that summer was not friendly to a prosaic explanation. Remembering the tragic death of Captain Mantell some six months earlier while he was chasing a UFO, then unidentified (p. 33), some officials were more than half ready to believe in invading space fleets as the answer to every puzzling phenomenon in the sky. They rejected the fireball explanation. Instead of accepting the Chiles-Whitted UFO as a meteor, they identified the other two meteors seen that night as UFOs!

And yet the evidence is overwhelming that the UFO was a fireball.

The major meteor showers that occur on schedule every year have accounted for hundreds of alleged UFOs over the last fifteen years. Several of these showers begin in mid-July; thus July 24 falls in a period of greatly increased meteor activity, when the earth is moving through the Aquarid streams and is encountering the forerunners of the Perseids. All during the year, and particularly during these weeks of shower meteors, amateur astronomers throughout the country spend many evenings watching the sky, counting meteors, mapping their paths, and reporting the data to various observatories. On an average night outside the shower periods, if there are few clouds and no moon, an experienced watcher may count about half a dozen meteors in an hour’s time, but during a shower he usually sees many more. For the week of July 23 to 30, 1948, the records of the American Meteor Society, the Harvard College Observatory, and the Flower and Cook Observatory show that, in spite of the interference of a bright moon, large numbers of meteors were counted and the paths of many of them were mapped and plotted.

The reports from the Southeast for that week have particular interest for the Chiles-Whitted case. A regular observer in Alabama counted fifteen meteors in one hour’s watching on the evening of July 24, and twenty-one in two hours the following night[V-22]. On the evening of July 26 he apparently took a holiday, but many other persons saw a huge fireball that flashed over North Carolina and Tennessee at 9:36 P.M. E.S.T.; its radiant (AMS 2322), plotted from many reports, showed it to be a member of the Delta Aquarid stream, then approaching its maximum. Early on the morning of July 27 another fireball soared over Tennessee and apparently exploded[V-23]. On the night of July 28 the Alabama watcher recorded fifteen meteors, from which he obtained the radiants AMS 3269, 3270, and 3271[V-9, p. 521].

These facts alone—the occurrence of scheduled showers and the number of well-plotted meteors observed during the period—point strongly to the probability that the Chiles-Whitted UFO was a meteor. The probability becomes virtual certainty when we examine the available records for the night of July 23 and morning of July 24, the period when this particular UFO appeared. The watcher in Alabama was not on duty, but another observer in Iowa counted fourteen meteors in one hour[V-22], more than double the rate for an average night. About an hour before the UFO appeared in Alabama, ground observers at Robins Air Force Base near Macon, Georgia, reported an unusually bright meteor going from north to south. A few minutes before the Alabama sighting, two Air Force officers flying between Blackstone, Virginia, and Gainsborough, North Carolina, reported an unusually bright meteor traveling in a southerly direction.

When Chiles and Whitted observed their UFO, its appearance and manner of motion were identical with those of many other bright meteors but the pilots, startled by the sudden apparition, misinterpreted what they saw. They probably overestimated the length of time the meteor was in view and they almost certainly underestimated the distance. Meteors notoriously mislead even the experienced observer, who often sees them disappearing “just behind the next hill,” when they may actually be fifty or a hundred miles away. Although the night was moonlit and clear except for broken clouds, the witnesses had no fixed reference point by which to determine either distance or size.

There can be no doubt that Chiles and Whitted misinterpreted the appearance of an unusually brilliant meteor, its body glowing to white (the momentarily persisting luminous train of a meteor often has a veined or fibrous structure that could easily have suggested the “lighted window” and “cockpit”) and blue incandescence (the glowing “undercarriage”) as it rushed through the atmosphere some fifty miles or more away, shooting off flaming gases (the “exhaust”) and vaporizing from the friction of the atmosphere. Flashing beyond their range of vision (“pulling up into the clouds”), it probably burned and disintegrated before it reached the earth.

This fresh analysis, based on meteor records for July 1948, has led ATIC finally to remove the Chiles-Whitted UFO from the category of Unknowns and, as Dr. Hynek suggested originally, add it to the file of recorded meteors.

A more recent sighting that closely resembled the Chiles-Whitted incident occurred on the evening of January 8, 1959, and was promptly reported to ATIC [V-19]. Two Air Force pilots were flying in a C-45 type of aircraft from Phillipsburg to Brookville, Pennsylvania, at an altitude of 8000 feet. The night was clear and moonless. At 6:14 P.M. E.S.T. they observed what appeared to be a brilliantly lighted solid object rushing toward them. Bluish green in color, shaped roughly like a teardrop and about 200 feet in diameter, it made no audible sound. Glowing like a small sun, it seemed to be flying level with the aircraft, less than a mile away and headed straight for the plane.

The frightened pilot jerked on the controls in an attempt to dodge the object, but almost before the plane could respond the unknown had disappeared. It had been in sight about three seconds. In his official report he estimated that the object had been the size of a pool ball held at arm’s length and that it had been not more than a mile away. The copilot, however, did not agree. A man with special training and unusual experience in the study of UFOs, he estimated the object to be the size of the head of a pin held at arm’s length and the distance to be at least 300 miles. The extreme brilliance of the object against the night sky, he thought, had made it seem larger. In his opinion, supported by Air Force investigation, the unknown had been a fireball at least fifty miles high that had burned out and vanished as they watched.

As in the Chiles-Whitted case, ground observers also saw the object and thus provided independent confirmation of the analysis. A member of the Ohio State University reported to the Harvard College Observatory that on the night of January 8, at approximately 6:15 P.M. E.S.T., he had watched a brilliant bluish-white meteor streak across the sky over Columbus and vanish within a few seconds. The fireball must indeed have been high and spectacular to be visible at the same moment from points nearly 300 miles apart.

Other Flaming UFOs

Not all spectacular UFOs are meteors, of course, any more than they are all planets or balloons or rockets. Sudden brilliant illuminations of the night sky can have any one of a dozen or more explanations. The atmosphere is crowded with potential Unknowns, more than at any time in man’s history. The air surrounding our planet plays host not only to meteors and fireballs, birds and insects, but also to military and commercial planes, private planes, jets, helicopters, weather balloons, experimental rockets, and an ever-growing number of artificial satellites. An ear-shattering detonation that rattles a house or breaks a window may come from an exploding fireball or it may come from a jet penetrating the sound barrier. Without an exact knowledge of all the circumstances, only the foolhardy would attempt to say positively what caused any given unusual aerial phenomenon.

Let us consider a sighting that might have received various wrong interpretations and would probably have become one of the most famous of the UFOs cited by saucerdom, had investigators lacked full information.

Shortly after midnight one spring morning reliable witnesses on the east coast, particularly in Connecticut and Long Island, reported a brilliant bluish-white object flying at high altitude and incredible speed. As it flashed overhead, it changed color to become reddish, and several smaller objects apparently detached themselves from the main body and followed it in orderly fashion. About five minutes later more than fifteen ships in the Caribbean area observed similar objects soaring overhead but the reports varied in many details. Ship number two saw brilliant short flames darting about behind the main body, which had a long, tapered tail. Ship number four saw a flaming white object more brilliant than the full moon. Ship number seven reported a flaming green ball followed by a group of several small objects. Ship number nine observed at least fifteen smaller objects that suddenly separated from the main body and fell into formation behind it. Ship number eleven saw an object with a trail several miles long, brilliant as a peacock’s tail, so luminous that the deck and sea around were bathed in pale light as the mass crossed overhead. Ship number twelve reported, “The main body appeared to have a blue-white head, then a short dark space before the glowing orange-yellow tail. Twenty-seven separate particles were actually counted as they appeared in the main plume. Each followed the main body and each developed its own glowing tail on leaving it.” The main body was several times brighter than Venus, while the offshoots were each twice the magnitude of Sirius. One observer described it as round on top and bright blue-white, while the lower half, which was emitting sparks, seemed to be flattened and reddish in color.

During this period of less than five minutes, similar objects were observed from the ground by witnesses in the Virgin Islands. One man in Martinique saw a luminous green globe, brighter than Venus, followed at a slight distance by a flaming red, enormously long, cigar-shaped object. Observers in Barbados saw two huge objects followed by from twelve to eighteen “offspring” shaped like the main body; some of the offspring subdivided to form two small cometlike objects. The object disappeared into a cloud bank and vanished. No observations were reported from areas farther south.

These unidentified objects were reported over an area stretching from Connecticut to the coast of British Guiana, a distance of about 2700 miles. They flew in a straight course. All of the objects were noiseless. They were remarkably brilliant. They seemed to have one or more leaders, to discharge smaller objects, and to fly in formation. They maintained a substantially horizontal path, and only the last observers, who saw the things disappear into the cloud bank, noted any tendency to descend. No fragments were ever found, and all witnesses agreed that the objects were not like meteors. If all the observers were describing the same single phenomenon, it was flying at the incredible speed of more than 16,000 miles an hour.

What was it?

With only these facts to build on, an investigator might interpret the sightings according to his own prejudices: an invasion fleet from another planet making a reconnaissance in force, the mother ships discharging the smaller craft at intervals; a mass hallucination; a peculiar meteoric display.

Without knowledge of one essential fact, some hundreds of landsmen and seamen in the United States, the Caribbean islands, and the British West Indies might now feel firmly convinced that they had witnessed a genuine “Unknown.” The date was April 14, 1958. The privileged observers had witnessed the death of Sputnik II, the Russian satellite launched on November 3, 1957[V-24].

The UFO reports inspired by this event presented no problem to the Air Force. All information on the re-entry of artificial satellites is immediately accessible to ATIC. Whenever a reported UFO shows any possible resemblance to a falling satellite, Air Force investigators check at once with Spacetrack. Astronomers who had been tracking this satellite as it circled the earth had predicted more than a month in advance that it would spiral toward the earth and fall sometime between April 12 and April 15. A few days before the actual event they had refined their estimate and predicted the time of the fall within a few hours.