A gamekeeper in Norfolk, England, in the year 1897 observed the flight of an unusual luminous object. According to his story, he was “... out one very dark night stopping up fox-earths. While I was so engaged I saw a very bright blue light pass close to my face and was very much startled as I saw it going away from me ... I put it down as some insect.” After the mysterious light reappeared a few nights later, the gamekeeper prudently began carrying his gun and eventually he managed a shot at the light. To his amazement he brought down “a poor old half-starved barn owl, Tyto alba, whose body continued to glow for some hours after death.”[VI-1]

The Luminous Owls of Norfolk

Some ten years later, on the night of February 3, 1907, another Englishman and his son while taking a walk observed a similar luminous phenomenon. Apparently about a quarter of a mile away, it moved horizontally over a course several hundred yards in length, reversed direction, then rose into the air to the height of forty feet or more. “It then descended and again went through the same evolutions many times. The light was slightly reddish in the centre, and resembled a carriage lamp for which we at first mistook it. We watched it for twenty minutes and were quite at a loss to ascertain its cause.

“On December 1st, 1907, when again reaching the top of Twyford Hill, I noticed what I took to be the lamp of a motor bicycle moving rapidly along the Bintree road to the south. The light suddenly stopped, rose into the air above the trees and retraced its course. This it did several times, sometimes rising twenty to forty feet into the air, and then rapidly descending. I called my groom and his wife from their cottage a few hundred yards away, and they watched it with me for several minutes. I then went to my house about half a mile off, and from one of the attic windows watched it with my son and three servants for a short time....”

The mysterious light appeared frequently for a period of weeks, maneuvering silently, its luminosity sometimes so great that “it literally lighted up the branches of the trees as it flew past them.” Attempts to identify it through a telescope were unsuccessful but eventually one observer was lucky enough to hear a sound as the light soared past, and at once identified it by its unique call as a white owl, Strix flammea[VI-2].

If these sightings had occurred half a century later, the witnesses might well have called them flying saucers.

Things That Glow in the Dark

The luminous owls of Norfolk have appeared at intervals since 1866 to frighten the superstitious and puzzle the naturalist, but ornithologists managed to solve the mystery some years ago[VI-3]. The birds acquire their temporary luminosity from contact with a common fungus, Armillaria mellea, popularly known as “honey-tuft.” This mushroom, which mycophagists prize for its delicious flavor, grows in large clumps on dead trees and stumps. The dark-brown cap is rough, with fibrous scales, while the white gills are hooked or toothed at the end and the spores are white. The dense white lacework of the root system or mycelium, which gives off a phosphorescent light, may permeate the entire tree and extend even into the fibers at the base of the tree. Wood infested with the fungus can glow in the dark, sometimes so brightly that a man could read his watch by its light.

Many of the tales of fox fire, corpse candles, and lanternmen undoubtedly come from glimpses of this fungoid phosphorescence. Owls that seek refuge in the dark interiors of hollow trees during the daytime may brush against the veins of the mycelium, which adheres to the feathered body. Flitting about at night, the luminous bird becomes the dancing flame of the will o’ the wisp.

Other luminous mushrooms abound in woods, swamps, and marshy areas. Decaying, they may produce an unearthly light and can give off a peculiarly unpleasant odor. Unexpectedly seeing and smelling a bird touched with the substance, on a dark night, a witness might well feel bewildered and even frightened. Polyporus sulfureus, which grows in dense masses on dead trees, often phosphoresces brilliantly in the early stages of its decay, as does Clytocobe illudens, the jack o’ lantern. In the tropics these fungi may produce enough light to read by. Birds, insects, and animals that brush against them can carry away some of the luminous material and thus, for a time, appear to be luminous themselves.

Most of us recognize fireflies, lightning bugs, or glowworms—which are not worms but beetles. The wingless females must creep on the surface of ground or branch, but the winged males flit through the air. These sparkling creatures form part of the diet of birds and bats, and when carried aloft to be consumed in flight can make one more mysterious, swiftly moving light to frighten the apprehensive. The earth teems with other self-luminous organisms such as frogs’ eggs, which most of us have never seen and would not recognize. Luminous parasites sometimes live in the feathers of birds and make them glow. The plumage of the great blue heron, a North American bird, can emit a pale light sometimes known as the birds’s “lantern” because it is supposed to help him while fishing. Fish or meat when decaying can become infected with luminous bacteria and thus shine brilliantly in the dark. The sea is filled with phosphorescent fish and plants which help perpetuate tales of sea serpents. Some waters in the Caribbean contain so dense a population of phosphorescent algae that a bird, dipping its wings to snatch a meal, will glow for minutes after it soars again into the air. These luminous birds, innocently fishing for dinner, probably account for many reports that flying saucers come and go from underwater[VI-4].

Many of the erratically behaving UFOs observed at night over wooded areas, swamps, and marshes have undoubtedly been one of these will o’ the wisps—winged creatures glowing with borrowed fire. Unfortunately proof of this explanation is rarely possible. Before the startled observer can recover his wits the flitting “saucer” has gone, taking with it the evidence of its identity.

Fear of the unknown is not confined to Homo sapiens. A news item published in England a few years ago reveals that the animal kingdom, too, may have its ghosts. Under the headline, Owl Attacks Luminous Man, the article reads:

“A Bournemouth long-distance runner, Ken Baily, was attacked by an owl last night when he was running through the centre of Bournemouth in a luminous track suit. The bird ripped the front of his suit before it flew back into the trees.

“Baily said afterwards: ‘I heard it hooting before it attacked. The suit is luminous so that motorists can see me, but if it attracts owls like this I’d rather take a chance with the traffic.’”[VI-5]

Sea Gulls as UFOs

Early in the afternoon of December 10, 1941, three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a research technician standing at the fourth-floor window of a laboratory in Boston saw a number of bright objects maneuvering high in the sky and slowly descending over the city. Making a quick guess at their distance, size, and speed, he concluded that the objects were parachutes, the first of a Japanese invasion. Only after they had dropped to the level of a nearby church spire was he able to gain the right perspective, correct his estimates, and identify the objects as sea gulls drifting down with the winds.

A decade later, the public was no longer worried about danger from Japan but was concerned about possible invasion from outer space. Sea gulls flashing in the sun were interpreted not as parachutes but as flying saucers.

Many luminous UFOs have in fact been ordinary living creatures, normal inhabitants of the earth—owls that had acquired a temporary luminosity, sea gulls reflecting the sunlight, flights of birds reflecting the lights of a town. But in trying to identify them, the witness is influenced by the pattern of his time. In 1897 and 1907 the world seemed reasonably secure. Observers of mysterious lights made fairly accurate estimates of their distance and size and compared them to familiar, everyday things—an insect and a carriage lamp. In 1941, three days after Pearl Harbor, the world was at war and the observer’s imagination, stimulated by a hundred rumors of imminent Japanese invasion, transformed cruising sea gulls into parachutes. By 1950, when space travel had become at least a theoretical possibility and scientists were discussing ways to reach the moon, uneasy persons fantastically overestimated the height and size of mysterious lights in the sky and sometimes saw birds as spaceships from another planet.

A well-publicized incident took place on the morning of July 16, 1952, when a Coast Guard photographer at Salem, Massachusetts, happened to glance out of a window and see four bright, egg-shaped objects moving in the sky. Grabbing his camera, he managed to take a picture before the objects were lost from view. According to some saucer enthusiasts, certain reproductions of the photograph show typical UFOs shaped like two saucers arranged face to face, as though joined by a ring at the mid-line[VI-6]. The official Coast Guard photograph however, shows merely four bright, fuzzy-edged blurs arranged in a rough V formation. Only imagination could convert these spots of light into spaceships. Many readers of this book have probably seen similar objects gleaming briefly in the sun, mysterious for the moment, and then identified them as gulls or airplanes when a shift in orientation cut down the reflection.

On the morning of the Coast Guard photograph the day was exceptionally clear, the sun extremely bright, and the sky a deep blue unusual on the Massachusetts coast. Under these circumstances, objects reflecting the sun look larger and brighter than normal. Because the picture was taken with a dirty lens through a window, the images were further distorted. Since the UFOs did not produce highlights on the tops of the cars in the foreground, as luminous objects overhead would have done, they were probably not in the sky at all. Elaborate Air Force experiments with photo-flood lamps showed that the images were reflections in the window glass from an interior light source behind the camera (see Plate IVa).

Weird and frightening apparitions do occur; Air Force files bulge with reports suggesting that unfamiliar objects are moving around us day and night, by land, sea, and air. Imagination endows them with life or turns them into mysterious, saucer-shaped craft manned by creatures from Mars, Venus, or even from some planet of a star beyond our solar system. The UFO photographed over France on October 2, 1954 (a weekend when every French village was reporting saucers by the dozen), shows no details and might be almost anything: a bird, a balloon, a cloud of gossamer, the sun, a plane, or merely the result of a lens defect (see Plate IVb).

How many of the UFOs listed in the saucer publications originate from birds, insects, and animals we cannot know, but the number must be large. Most of us have only a sketchy acquaintance with the non-human forms of life that share the earth with us. Seeing an unfamiliar creature suddenly, or a familiar creature under unusual circumstances, we often imagine it to be whatever we most fear—vengeful spirits of the departed, fire-breathing dragons, devils, parachutes, or flying saucers.

The Lubbock Lights

The luminous objects sighted in Texas during the last week of August, 1951, would probably have been explained and forgotten in a week’s time, except for the publication of alleged photographs of the unknowns. This complication converted a simple incident into a conglomerate of puzzles which, though actually unrelated, were lumped together to form a classic Unknown. The most detailed published account of this case[VI-7, p. 133 ff.] contains a number of statements that differ in detail from those in the official files. When discrepancies exist, the facts as given in this chapter are those in the original Air Force reports[VI-8].

The Saturday night of August 25, 1951, was uncomfortably hot in the Southwest, and many persons spent the evening in the relative coolness out of doors. In the town of Lubbock, a professor of geology was sitting in his yard with two guests, fellow members of the faculty, discussing micrometeorites and counting meteors, which for several nights had been more numerous than usual. The sky was clear and cloudless and seeing conditions were ideal. About 9:20 the men noticed a group of fifteen to twenty lights passing silently overhead, going from north to south. They were obviously not meteors or planes, but disappeared too quickly to be identified. About an hour later a second group of lights appeared, forming a rough semicircle or crescent like a string of beads. Shortly before midnight a third group soared overhead in a random pattern (see Figure 11).

Trying to account for the phenomenon, the men agreed that all three flights had appeared suddenly, not gradually, in about the same part of the sky. Only the second had shown any sort of pattern, all had moved silently from north to south, their luminosity was not constant but had varied in intensity, and all had disappeared suddenly, not gradually, at about the same point in the sky. The men did not agree on the color, which they described as yellowish to white, with a soft glow. The lights had passed too swiftly for the men to locate them in relation to specific stars and there were no clouds in the sky; thus they had no known reference points by which to judge altitude, distance, or size. Since the lights had apparently moved over about 30 degrees of sky in one second, however, and the observers estimated the altitude as 5000 to 50,000 feet, the unknowns must have had an enormous size and an incredible speed of from 1800 to 18,000 miles an hour—typical flying saucers.

Understandably curious, the host telephoned the managing editor of the local newspaper, the Lubbock Evening Avalanche, hoping that a printed account would elicit more information from other persons who had noticed the mysterious lights. The report appeared in the Sunday paper, August 26, but in the days that followed, no reader responded.

Then on Friday August 31, five days after the original story had appeared and apparently died, it suddenly came to life. A college freshman who occasionally sold news photographs to the Lubbock paper brought in five pictures of a group of mysterious lights he had photographed the night before. He had been lying in bed next to an open window, he explained, and shortly before midnight he had observed a formation of brilliant lights moving rapidly across the sky. Grabbing his camera, a Kodak 35-mm., he had rushed out into the yard and, after a brief wait, had been able to photograph two similar flights that raced overhead a few minutes apart. Each light had been brighter than Venus, they had maintained a perfect V formation, and had sped from horizon to horizon in a mere four or five seconds. Yet this amazing apparition had apparently gone unnoticed by all except the lucky amateur.

Fearing a hoax, both the editor and the staff photographer hesitated but, since the negatives displayed no obvious evidence of fraud, they finally bought and printed the pictures and distributed them over the country through the United Press.

People all over the nation could now argue the question: What were the Lubbock lights? A few said flying saucers. Many Texans said ducks, plover, or other migratory fowl. But the things in the pictures didn’t look like birds; and if they weren’t birds, what were they? Some persons bluntly called them a hoax.

Impelled perhaps by the growing publicity, the staff photographer of the Evening Avalanche several times tried to duplicate the pictures by photographing flights of birds at night. He allowed himself better equipment—a Speedgraphic camera loaded with a tungsten ASA 80 film, and a GE no. 22 flashbulb in a concentrating reflector. Opening the camera to f 4.7 at 1/10 second, he went up to the roof of the newspaper building to try his luck. After a brief wait he was able to photograph a flock of birds that appeared high overhead, reflecting the mercury-vapor lights of the street, flying noiselessly in a “ragged” V formation, but the image on the negative proved too faint for use. The next night he tried again, using a Kodak Reflex set at f 3.5, Super XX film, at 1/10 second, plus the flashbulb and concentrating reflector. The birds appeared on schedule, but again the images proved too faint for use. The experimenter concluded, probably correctly, that the amateur must have photographed something much brighter than birds.

Not until late October, nearly two months after the original incident, did the Air Force receive official notice of the mystery at Lubbock, and Captain Ruppelt of ATIC arrived to interview witnesses in Lubbock and the neighboring towns of Lamessa, Brownfield, and Big Spring. He quickly discovered that he had two mysteries to solve instead of one since, according to the witnesses who had started all the excitement, the objects shown in the pictures were wholly unlike the luminous phenomena observed by the three professors. The pictured lights formed a perfectly geometrical, flat V, while the original objects had formed a random pattern. Furthermore the pictures showed brilliant, sharply outlined lights as intense as unshaded electric bulbs, while the original objects had been softly glowing.

Meanwhile the professors themselves had been trying to solve their own mystery. During September and October they had observed at least a dozen similar flights, and in an attempt to obtain the true altitude of the objects they had organized a field survey, operating in the country to achieve better seeing conditions. Two groups of observers were stationed at two different points, a measured distance apart, with radio communication between the two. By making simultaneous observations, they hoped to calculate the true height of the objects and thus obtain accurate estimates of size and speed. This well-planned experiment failed because the lights never appeared to the watchers in the country even on nights when they were clearly visible in the town. Nevertheless the scientists did establish one fact: the altitude could not be as high as 50,000 feet, their original estimate. An astronomer in the group, calculating from the few data available, showed that the height must have been only 2000 to 3000 feet, less than a tenth of the first estimate.

Continuing his investigation, Captain Ruppelt found that other persons had seen the lights on the night of August 25—and identified them.

At Brownfield, Texas, some thirty miles from Lubbock, a rancher and his wife had been sitting in their back yard when they noticed a group of fifteen to twenty lights flying overhead from north to south, silently, in no particular formation. They appeared to be very high and had “a kind of glow, a little bigger than a star.” Some time later a second group flew over. When a third group appeared, flying lower, he could see that they were birds; as they moved on to the south and one of the birds emitted a cry, he recognized the familiar call of the plover. Plover have a wing span of a foot and their oily white breasts form an excellent surface for reflecting the lights beneath them.

Like most old-time residents of the area, the rancher was accustomed to the yearly exodus of migratory fowl. Traveling at night in groups of six to twenty, they usually flew at 1000 feet or lower at a maximum speed of about fifty miles an hour in the weeks from late August to mid-November. The rancher had read about the professors’ sighting, which sounded exactly like his own. It would have baffled him, too, he said, if he had not gotten a good look when the third flight circled the house and if he had not happened to hear the single call.

Another resident reported, much later, that he had often seen such lights and recognized them as birds. One night he had noticed “a formation of ducks pass over so low that you could actually see the whole bodies with their shiny white undersides glowing.” At other times he had seen ducks flying at low altitudes with only the undersides glowing and creating an illusion of objects moving very fast at a high altitude[VI-9].

In spite of the overwhelming evidence that the original objects had been birds, probably plover, reflecting the city’s lights, Captain Ruppelt chose to regard them as mysterious and listed the professors’ sighting as an Unknown. Several years later he wrote that a natural explanation did exist but, for some reason, he had promised not to divulge it[VI-7, p. 150]. Still later, he asserted without amplification that the lights had been night-flying moths reflecting the bluish green of mercury-vapor street lights[VI-10, p. 276]—a surprising anticlimax, in view of his earlier secrecy. In a reanalysis of the facts made in 1959, Major (now Lieutenant Colonel) R. J. Friend of ATIC and Dr. J. Allen Hynek, science consultant, determined beyond doubt that the objects had been plover.

The Lubbock Pictures

The problem of the photographs remained. In Dayton, Air Force experts studied the four available negatives.

The photographer had used a Kodak 35-mm. camera, lens at 3.5, Plus-X film, and an exposure time of 1/10 second. The negatives were badly scratched and dirty from much handling. According to the photographer’s story, each flight of unknowns had moved from horizon to horizon in four to five seconds and had passed directly overhead; he had “panned” his camera with the movement of the objects and had managed to snap two pictures during one flight and three during the next.

Analysis yielded no suggestion that the negatives had been tampered with but they offered no clue to the background, identity, height, distance, or speed of the things shown. The images themselves, however, aroused some doubts. Each frame showed twenty bright spots against a uniform dark background. No trace of stars or starlight could be found, although the sky that night had been clear and cloudless. The spots showed evidence of slight motion during the exposure but the amount of blurring was amazingly slight, considering the speed with which the photographer claimed to have moved his Kodak. Professional cameramen tried repeatedly to duplicate the performance, but failed. The most successful try produced only two pictures, badly blurred, in four seconds.

The most crucial discrepancy between negatives and story, however, was revealed by the pattern of the spots, which formed a flat V. The orientation of the V was the same on all the negatives. If the formation had actually passed directly overhead and the photographer had panned with it, as he claimed, then he must have taken all his pictures either as the lights approached him or as they receded. If he had taken two successive pictures, one as the formation approached and the next as it receded, the V would have reversed position in the second picture—V would have changed to ∧—unless he had managed to stand on his head while taking the second picture. And if he had actually taken all his pictures either as the lights approached or as they receded, he had performed the incredible feat of obtaining two clear, sharp photographs, while panning, in a mere two seconds.

Although these facts suggested that the explanation given for the pictures was at least highly improbable, Air Force experts refrained from labeling them frauds. Professional photographers can undoubtedly make various guesses as to how the pictures were made and the possible identity of the V of bright spots, but proof is impossible. In the Air Force files they remain in the category of Unknowns.

Other Winged UFOs

During the era of the saucers, winged creatures were responsible for many UFO stories. But winged creatures do not stay put, and in flying away they usually take with them the evidence that the alleged spaceships were actually only birds or insects.

One such incident occurred at Downey, California, on May 29, 1951. Late in the afternoon three technical writers for North American Aviation were standing outdoors chatting and looking at the sky when suddenly they noticed about thirty glowing, meteorlike objects moving in the east, about 45 degrees above the horizon. They made no sound and left no trail. Emitting an intense electric-blue light, the objects made fantastic right-angled turns and swept across the sky in an undulating vertical formation, apparently covering about 90 degrees of sky in about 25 seconds. The diameters of the objects were estimated at 30 feet and the speed at 1700 miles an hour[VI-11].

Many persons concluded that the unknowns must be interplanetary in origin because, as Life magazine commented, no natural object hurtling at such a speed could execute a right-angled turn, and no known machine could fly so fast without making a sound or leaving a trail. No one could quarrel with this statement, but it has no obvious relation to the incident in question. Technical writers are not necessarily trained observers, and these witnesses had no way to make a reliable estimate of the height of the objects. Without an accurate estimate of at least one quantity—true altitude, true size, or true speed—the others are meaningless. The unknowns were probably birds, but they could equally well have been butterflies, bits of paper, or merely ashes blowing over the two-story building.

Winged creatures sometimes avoid the interplanetary label only by staying in sight long enough to be examined. About sundown on May 19, 1955, switchboards at police stations in the Los Angeles area were swamped by telephone calls reporting a fleet of silvery flying saucers, changing formation with incredible speeds “as if playing tag in the sky.” One witness, however, had the presence of mind to get out his binoculars and look at the objects; they were birds with dark wing tips. Thinking they might be geese, he called the State Division of Fish and Game, which identified the “saucers” as a flock of Pelicanus erythrorhynchos, an inland species of pelican that float on the prevailing wind currents[VI-12].

Sometimes an observer identifies such objects correctly, but later begins to doubt his own judgment. About 7:30 in the evening of August 26, 1956, a man driving along a highway in California noticed a flock of about nine small birds flying northward, dark against the blue sky. In a random group, they moved freely among themselves as birds do but continued in a northern direction. The witness watched the birds as carefully as possible, but the intermittent glimpses possible when a man is driving a car did not allow him to make good estimates of their size or height. Nevertheless, he guessed at their distance and calculated that they covered an arc of 60 degrees in five seconds, which would mean a speed of about 1000 miles an hour.

Instead of questioning the accuracy of his estimate, for some reason he doubted his first identification. If the objects could fly 1000 miles an hour, he reasoned, then they were not birds after all, and must be flying saucers![VI-13]

The Tremonton Movies

One of the most famous controversies resulting from a flight of birds centered on the Tremonton, Utah, films of UFOs.

On the morning of July 2, 1952, a Navy photographer and his family were on their way to California, driving near the town of Tremonton, Utah, not far from the Great Salt Lake. At about 11:10 A.M. the man’s wife noticed something unusual in the sky. Stopping the car, the man observed about a dozen shiny, disklike objects “milling around the sky in a rough formation.” Getting out his movie camera, a Bell and Howell 16-mm. equipped with a 3-inch telephoto lens, he started photographing the group. Just before it disappeared toward the west, one object left the main group and headed east. The photographer obtained about forty feet of film before the objects vanished. After developing the film, he sent it to the Air Force for evaluation, together with his opinion that the objects had been huge and had traveled at very high altitude at supersonic speeds. This was only an impression, however, for as he told investigators from ATIC: “There was no reference point in the sky and it was impossible for me to make any estimate of speed, size, altitude, or distance.”[VI-8] The pictures are of such poor quality and show so little that even the most enthusiastic home-movie fan today would hesitate to show them to his friends. Only a stimulated imagination could suggest that the moving objects are anything but very badly photographed birds.

The movies show nothing that can be recognized—merely bright blurs of light moving at random. Their luminosity is not constant, and the spots fade out and then become bright again. The frames include no clouds, no trees, no house, no hill—no known reference point by which to calculate the altitude, size, or distance of the moving lights. After exhaustive study the photographic experts concluded that the negatives had not been tampered with and that, unlike the Lubbock stills, the pictures had been made exactly as described. But pictures of what? The objects were not balloons and not planes. At the time, the experts also rejected the theory that they might be birds because, in their [mistaken] opinion, birds could not produce such bright reflections.

If the Tremonton movies contained no proof that the objects were birds, still less did they contain proof that they were round machines from outer space, and ATIC finally classified the sighting as “Unknown.” Later, however, Captain Ruppelt noted the strong resemblance to sea gulls he observed “riding a thermal” in the sky above San Francisco. They were “so high that you couldn’t see them until they banked just a certain way; then they appeared to be a bright white flash, much larger than one would expect from sea gulls.” [VI-10, p. 290]

Air Force investigators later concluded that the famous Tremonton movies show merely the large white gulls that soar near Utah’s Great Salt Lake. The objects were photographed shortly before noon on a hot summer’s day, against a deep-blue sky without any clouds to obscure the high sun. The fading and brightening of the lights, their individual motion within the group, and the one object that suddenly left the group, all are consistent with the behavior of a flock of birds, probably gulls, whose plumage is reflecting the sun. The glossy feathers of these birds can flash as brilliantly as a satiny metal surface as they circle and change position with respect to the sun. The birds can be dazzling against the clear, dark-blue sky of the western states. So brilliant is the flash that it wholly obscures the object that is reflecting the light.

Like many other puzzling UFO reports, the objects in the Tremonton movies were living lights—a case for the ornithologist rather than the Air Force.

A bright light moving erratically as it crossed and recrossed the field of view caused an experienced pilot and copilot to execute violent and evasive maneuvers in a flight over the dark Pacific.[VI-14] The errant UFO proved to be only a firefly inadvertently trapped between the panes of the double windshield.