Few government employees in recent times have been subjected to more criticism than the men in the Aerial Phenomena Group at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. This agency (usually referred to in this book as ATIC) has the responsibility of investigating all official reports of unidentified objects in our skies. Of the thousands of such incidents studied so far, none suggests that the UFO in question came from outer space. In fact, the term UFO has proven to be one of the worst misnomers of history. In the most perplexing cases, the phenomena reported are seldom material Objects, very few of them are Flying and, when fully analyzed, almost none remain Unidentified.

Identifying strange objects in the air over the United States is vital to the country’s security. That military officers should be guilty of carelessness or casual guesswork in this serious business is unthinkable. Yet ATIC investigators, and through them the United States Air Force, of which they are members, for more than a decade have been the target of vicious attacks by civilian enthusiasts devoted to the cult of flying saucers.

Banded together in various “research” organizations and operating on the premise that UFOs are interplanetary in origin, most of these enthusiasts flatly reject the normal explanations—planets, meteors, satellites, balloons, reflections, birds, radar phantoms, hoaxes, or delusions. Flying saucers obviously cruise in our skies, the believers argue, and the Air Force failure to admit the obvious proves that its investigators are incompetent or dishonest or both, and that they are involved in a giant conspiracy to conceal the truth from the American public[XIII-1].

In the view of the saucer groups, the Air Force can do no right. If, after receiving a UFO report, the investigators require some time to collect all the relevant facts and to reach a sound conclusion, they are berated for the delay and accused of cover-up tactics, as in the Killian case (p. 52). On the other hand, when the answer is found quickly and released to the newspapers, UFO addicts deny its truth and assert that the explanation was hurriedly rushed into print in order to deceive the public, as in the Pacific sighting on July 11, 1959 (p. 106)[XIII-1a, p. 8]. Some of these peculiar beliefs may rest on an imperfect understanding of the actual aims, methods, and resources of Air Force investigators.

Official Study of UFOs

The report of an unidentified flying object, in about 90 per cent of the cases, comes first from an ordinary private citizen, who often notifies the local newspaper or radio station. Not until he reports the incident to a military official, however, is ATIC empowered to start investigation. The commanding officer at the Air Force base nearest the place of the sighting then makes a preliminary investigation and, if the facts seem to warrant further study, forwards the information to Dayton for evaluation.

With years of experience to draw on, the Aerial Phenomena Group can often identify the unknown after a brief study of the report. If not, they try to determine whether the report contains all the facts necessary for an explanation and whether the unknown may be of interest to Intelligence officers. Does it represent a possible danger to the nation? Does it have possible military significance? Does it have possible scientific or technical significance? If, after this review, the investigators conclude that the unknown might be of some importance, they carry out an intensive study in which they may have the help of an organization directly connected with the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence or of allied Intelligence agencies. When all the relevant facts are collected, a survey usually shows that the unknown fits a particular class of sighting. To complete the identification, ATIC can call on the expert knowledge of a specialist in the type of phenomenon involved.

Expert help is available from a large variety of sources:

1. Official consultant to the Air Force, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Director of the Dearborn Observatory and Professor of Astronomy at Northwestern University, formerly Assistant Director, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

2. Members of the Air Force with special scientific and technical training, whose full duty is the study, investigation, and analysis of UFO reports.

3. A panel of military and civilian experts in all branches of science and technology.

4. The scientific and technical laboratories (photographic, ballistic, chemical, etc.) of all branches of the Air Force and of other government agencies.

5. The meteorological records of the United States Weather Bureau, the United States Coast Guard, and other government agencies.

6. Commercial laboratories under contract to carry out special work.

With the best scientific resources of the nation available, the Air Force can make sure that a puzzling UFO phenomenon will undergo study by an expert. Reports involving radar sightings are analyzed by the research scientists who know most about the behavior of radar. If satellites or astronomical objects might be involved, astronomers study the evidence. If the report includes photographs or physical evidence, experts provide the appropriate laboratory analysis. If a UFO still proves difficult to explain, the complete facts are laid before a panel of experts for discussion. When a sighting has been completely analyzed, the conclusions—known or unknown—are filed with the record of the case. If the newspapers have publicized the incident, a summary of the analysis is given to SAFIS (Office of Information Services, Office of the Secretary of the Air Force) for release to the press.

In the early years of the flying-saucer saga, almost none of the men assigned to investigate UFOs had any special training in the optical and astronomical sciences or in investigative techniques. Since the specific facts of so many cases were classified, civilian scientists who might have helped explain the UFO puzzles were not able to get the necessary information. Unsurprisingly, the percentage of unexplained cases sometimes reached as high as 5 to 10 per cent, and once reached the staggering peak of 20 per cent! In recent years the techniques of collection, investigation, and analysis of the facts have greatly improved. Air Force investigators not only have excellent training, they also have a solid body of experience behind them. In later reviews they have found the answers to many, but not to all, of the backlog of “Unknown” cases which, if reported today, would probably cause no problem. Some of the old cases will probably never be solved because the men in charge at the time did not always know what questions to ask. Essential information was not obtained and can never be obtained now.

The Air Force never closes an unsolved case. Reports that have been listed as Unidentified or Insufficient Evidence are reanalyzed when new evidence becomes available. Occasionally new evidence produces a more complete or even a different explanation for a case that was previously considered probably solved.

Statistical summaries of the UFO sightings for each month and for each period of six months are forwarded to SAFIS for release. In recent years ATIC has been receiving fewer than 600 reports per year and solving about 98 per cent. In 1961, 578 UFOs were reported. Of those in which all the necessary information was available, all but thirteen—about two per cent—were completely explained.

Believers in flying saucers tend to ignore the 98 per cent of cases fully explained by the Air Force, and to focus attention on the 2 per cent that remain puzzling. Yet no distinguishable difference exists between the types of observation described in solved and in unsolved cases. From considering the original reports, the competence of the witnesses, and the appearance and movements of the various UFOs, no analyst could predict in advance which will be fully accounted for and which will not. The witnesses (often technically trained observers or experienced airmen) in the cases that are solved are just as reliable as—and no less so than—the witnesses in the unexplained cases. They report the same classes of phenomena—glowing UFOs, hovering UFOs, UFOs moving at high velocities, making incredible maneuvers, and behaving as though under intelligent control.

The Air Force has accounted for nearly all of these flying saucers. The various causes included aircraft, balloons, satellites, mirages, inversions, hoaxes, delusions, reflections, birds, lenticular clouds, ball lightning, radar anomalies, sundogs, meteors, planets, stars, the Aurora, and other astronomical phenomena. The few remaining cases report similar observations and undoubtedly have one of these causes—which cannot be proved because some essential fact is missing. No data in these unsolved cases suggest that the UFOs had an interplanetary origin or that they constituted a threat to the security of the United States.

When Air Force investigators have determined that a UFO report does not represent anything of interest to Intelligence, their primary duty ends. However, since many UFO puzzles are of interest for scientific or technical reasons, the investigators try to find the specific explanation of each case and, if it has attracted public attention, give the final solution to the press.

Civilian Saucer Groups

Since the first flying saucers were reported in 1947, dozens of civilian clubs have been organized throughout the world to collect UFO reports and publish “the truth” allegedly suppressed by government sources. During the last decade the roster in the United States has included such groups as the Borderland Sciences Research Associates (California), Interplanetary Intelligence of Unidentified Flying Objects (Oklahoma), Intercontinental Aerial Research Foundation (Nebraska), UFO Research Committee (Ohio), Civilian Saucer Intelligence (New York), Waukegan Contact Group (Illinois), Saucer Investigative Research Organization (Georgia), World Society of the Flying Saucer (Idaho), Civilian Research on Interplanetary Flying Objects (Ohio), and the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (Washington, D.C.). The oldest of these saucer clubs, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (Arizona) was founded in 1952 and issues a bimonthly news sheet, the APRO Bulletin. More or less regular publications (some now defunct) of these groups have included the Cosmic Researcher, Interplanetary News Service, CRIFO Orbit, Saucerian Bulletin, and UFO Critical Bulletin. In recent years some of the best factual accounts of UFO incidents (as well as some of the weirdest speculation) have appeared in the magazine Flying Saucers, which is not connected with any club.

A few clubs, chiefly in California, are semireligious in character, claiming repeated communication with ethereal beings in space. Some clubs accept “contact” stories as valid, others do not. Certain articles of faith are apparently common to all such groups: that UFOs are actually vehicles from outer space; that they sometimes land on earth and occasionally leave physical traces in the form of metallic or organic substances; that scientists who cannot accept these beliefs are hypocrites, archfiends, anti-Galileo reactionaries, stooges for the Army or the Air Force, and members of the conspiracy to delude the public.

NICAP

The largest and probably the most influential saucer group is the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), with affiliated subcommittees in various parts of the country. Many members of local organizations such as the UFO Research Committee of Akron, Ohio, also belong to NICAP and help maintain close liaison. The bimonthly news sheet, the UFO Investigator, is distributed to members of NICAP and to prominent persons in the government and other fields; it regularly lists recent UFO sightings reported by members, and occasionally prints a detailed report of a specific case. Few of the sightings reported can be independently evaluated because the accounts often omit such essential facts as exact times, dates, places, direction of motion, etc.

With headquarters in Washington, D.C., NICAP strongly reflects the views of its director, Major Donald E. Keyhoe, USMC (Ret.), that UFOs may be interplanetary in origin, sometimes land on earth, but rarely if ever make contact with human beings. Like most saucer believers, many members of NICAP tend to assume without adequate investigation that many unusual sky phenomena reported in the newspapers may be extraterrestrial objects, and they often maintain this attitude in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. When the BOAC Comet exploded near Calcutta on May 2, 1953, Major Keyhoe theorized that a UFO might accidentally or deliberately have collided with the plane. He continued such speculation even after British aviation officials announced, after months of study, that the crash was caused by metal fatigue[XIII-1]. Many of the items printed in the UFO Investigator are based on incomplete evidence. Under the headline “Strange Series of Fireballs Reported,” NICAP listed a UFO observed on March 7, 1960, at about 8:10 P.M., visible from the Canadian border to Florida, and described by some observers as three or four UFOs flying in formation[XIII-3]. This phenomenon was actually the satellite Discoverer VIII making its final descent to earth.

NICAP membership is theoretically open to any non-Communist citizen[XIII-4], but applicants from the “contactee” fringe are not encouraged. The committee once canceled the membership of a space evangelist when he claimed publicly to be a spokesman for NICAP, and in 1958 it canceled the membership of seven famous contactees who had been admitted without the knowledge of the director[XIII-5].

Investigations are carried out as spare-time projects of the members themselves, some of whom constitute an advisory panel of experts. Although many are highly respected in their own professions—television, journalism, military science, religion, government, aviation, engineering, medicine, psychology, and teaching in the physical sciences—few are recognized specialists in the fields required for the analysis of most UFO cases—radar propagation, the physics of optics, meteorology, and astronomy.

Since 1957 a major goal of NICAP has been a Congressional inquiry that supposedly would reveal an Air Force conspiracy to deny the reality of flying saucers[XIII-7]. In 1957 the director lodged a formal complaint with a member of the United States Senate charging that the Air Force continually made false statements on UFOs to the press, the public, and members of Congress. In support of this accusation Major Keyhoe submitted summaries of more than two hundred incidents[XIII-7].

The list cited a number of UFO reports that had never been submitted to the Air Force for analysis. These included reports from foreign countries (one in Sumatra in 1944 and one Holland in 1952) and from NICAP’s private files. Others, such as the Kinross case (p. 154), had not been within ATIC jurisdiction. Many others, such as the Mantell (p. 33) and the Chiles-Whitted (p. 108) cases, had long ago been fully explained. Still other cases, dating from the early days of the saucer era, remain unsolved only because vital facts, not determined at the time of the sighting, are necessary to a full explanation but cannot now be ascertained. The request for a Congressional inquiry was denied but has been repeated at intervals.

The “Conspiracy” Fantasy

Most UFO organizations cling to the belief that a conspiracy exists to conceal the existence of extraterrestrial vehicles, but they disagree on its precise composition. To NICAP and its affiliates, the chief culprit is the Air Force, helped occasionally by other government agencies and by well-known civilian scientists. APRO (Aerial Phenomena Research Organization), however, considers that the Air Force is involved only as the tool of still more powerful forces. The director of APRO has published her conviction that nobody in the Air Force, the Navy, or the Marines “has the brains” to contrive so successful a scheme and that the alleged plot “could only be borne [sic] of minds schooled in deception and contraception [sic]—the elite corps of the Central Intelligence Agency.”[XIII-8] In still another version (which makes the plots of E. Phillips Oppenheim seem amateurish) NICAP itself is a pawn in a superconspiracy so vast that thousands of American citizens have been made its unknowing tools[XIII-9]. The hundreds of strange phenomena observed in the skies, the controversial photographs of UFOs, the “spacemen” who visited Adamski and others, the “contact” and little-green-men stories, the analyses made by the Air Force, the formation of the various saucer clubs, NICAP and its war against the Air Force—all these phenomena, events, and persons are allegedly parts of a colossal drama planned, supported, and staged as a deliberate hoax on the American public. The prime mover is supposed to be the Central Intelligence Agency, whose motive is to conceal—something; just what is not clear[XIII-10].

In comparison with this fantasy, NICAP’s charges of simple Air Force cover-up seem tame.

UFO at Sheffield Lake, Ohio

One of the most notorious accusations of Air Force skulduggery, made in attempts to procure a Congressional inquiry, was that embodied in a saucerian study of the Fitzgerald sighting[XIII-11], published by the UFO Research Committee of Akron, Ohio, which maintains a close relationship with NICAP. Although the case was unimportant and was completely explained, we shall discuss it in detail to illustrate the peculiar views and methods of the flying-saucer groups.

In summary, a strange light observed on a dark night for roughly half a minute by a drowsy housewife was converted into a weapon to attack the Air Force. The incident inspired thousands of words of argument, caused the publication and distribution of a lengthy document, used the time of busy investigators, required an otherwise unnecessary expenditure of public funds, and evoked an exchange of letters among angry citizens, harassed Congressmen, and equally harassed Air Force officials. In all UFO history, no larger mountain has ever been made from so small a molehill.

On September 30, 1958, the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base received a letter from Mrs. William Fitzgerald of Sheffield Lake, Ohio, reporting that on September 21 she had sighted a UFO which she would like to have investigated. She enclosed a three-page summary prepared by members of the UFO Research Committee of Akron, and added, “I assure you that I will contact my congressman about this matter if some action is not taken soon to explain it.”[XIII-12]

The alleged UFO had appeared at about 3 A.M. in the yard of the one-story, two-bedroom house occupied by Mrs. Fitzgerald and her husband. She had been sitting up alone watching television and had gone to bed at the end of the late movie. The bedroom window was shut and the window curtains were closed. Outside, the night was dark; the moon had set, there were no street lights, and none of the neighboring houses was lighted. Lying with her arm over her eyes, trying to get to sleep, she suddenly realized that the room was illuminated and stood up on the bed to look out of the window.

According to her account, a disk-shaped object with a hump in the middle, a dull aluminum in color, was moving across the yard at a height of about five feet. The object did not glow and did not have lights on it; she could not determine the source of the light that made it visible to her. About twenty to twenty-two feet in diameter and about six feet high, the UFO moved north across the driveway into a neighbor’s yard, losing altitude on the way until it was only one foot above the ground. At a distance of fifty feet, it stopped and floated motionless for several seconds while pink-gray smoke billowed out from two openings in the rim and illuminated the UFO. Each opening contained seven pipes. The smoke did not come from the pipes but from the openings from which the pipes projected. The object then moved back into the witness’s yard, rising to a height of five feet. No longer emitting smoke, it made two quick clockwise turns with a radius of about three feet, and rose straight up. The roof of the house, jutting out over the window, cut it from further view. During the entire time of the sighting, about thirty-six seconds, she had heard a muffled noise like that of a jet engine warming up. She had tried several times to waken her husband, by kicking him, but without success. When the object had gone, she went back to bed and slept.

When she awoke at 11:00 the next morning and mentioned her experience to the family, she learned that ten-year-old John Fitzgerald, sleeping in the second bedroom, had also seen a strange light. He had apparently wakened during the night to go to the bathroom and had returned to bed, when he saw a bright light shining into his room and heard an unusual noise. Climbing up on the radiator to look out of his window, he saw something the color of a tin cup moving across the yard. After watching for a few seconds until the light had gone, he went to bed and to sleep.

Puzzled by the incident, Mrs. Fitzgerald telephoned the local newspaper, the Lorain Journal, and the story appeared in several Ohio newspapers. Members of the Akron Committee, one of whom lived in the nearby town of Lorain, soon arrived to question her and prepare the summary of her experience. Other witnesses in Lorain were reported to have seen the same UFO.

Even at first glance, the situation presented several unusual features. The witness had delayed more than a week before notifying Air Force investigators, yet she threatened to notify her congressman unless some action were taken soon. She had not waited for action, however, but by the same mail had written to her congressman requesting him to obtain an explanation from the Air Force. The summary of her experience, prepared with the help of members of the UFO Research Committee of Akron, was equally remarkable. Even though her dark-adapted eyes had just been assaulted by a bright light and the object had been in view for a maximum of only thirty-six seconds, she provided a description so detailed that it almost suggested a photographic memory.

On October 3, three days after her letter reached ATIC, two Air Force men, Technical Sergeant A and Technical Sergeant B, who were specially trained in the investigation of UFO incidents, arrived in Lorain. After a day spent in studying such pertinent matters as the local geography, the records of the Weather Bureau, the Coast Guard station, and the local railway, on October 4 they called on the witnesses.

Again the situation was unusual. Mrs. Fitzgerald’s husband did not appear. With Mrs. Fitzgerald and young John, however, was Mr. C, the member of the local UFO group who had spent several days helping her prepare her account. To the amazement of the sergeants, Mr. C seemed to assume that he was in charge of the interview, answered the questions put to Mrs. Fitzgerald, and continually interrupted with questions and statements of his own. After half an hour of this frustrating procedure, Sergeant A led Mr. C out into the yard. In the house, Sergeant B resumed the inquiry and filled out the official report form.

Few questions were asked of the boy because both the details and the phraseology of his description seemed to echo adult conversations overheard during the two weeks that had elapsed since the sighting. According to the account prepared by the Akron Committee, the boy had been frightened by a light so bright that he had to shield his eyes. (The time was unknown, and the light may or may not have been the one observed by Mrs. Fitzgerald.) Climbing on top of the radiator to look out of the window, he had seen the UFO and watched it take off into the air, and then had gone back to bed and to sleep. Sergeant B had a young son of about the same age. That a normal ten-year-old boy should not call out and try to awaken the household when confronted with a whirling, humming, dome-shaped spaceship some twenty-two feet in diameter and six feet high, moving through his own yard in the middle of the night, seemed too improbable to warrant serious questioning.

After finishing with the Fitzgeralds, the sergeants called on other supposed witnesses in Lorain. Satisfied that they had completed a thorough investigation, they returned to Dayton and presented the information to their superior officers for evaluation. None of the evidence suggested that the phenomenon had been a spacecraft[XIII-12]. The UFO had been the “special effect” of a peculiar combination of circumstances:

From these facts it was possible to reconstruct the probable sequence of events that produced the UFO: In the hour or so before the sighting, the witness had been sitting up alone watching the late movie on TV. The film that night was a horror movie, Dracula’s Daughter. About 3 A.M., soon after the witness had gone to bed, the Coast Guard cutter on Lake Erie was traveling east toward Lorain, was very near the harbor and was flashing its spotlight toward shore. The light had briefly illuminated the two bedrooms of the Fitzgerald house and had roused Mrs. Fitzgerald. At that distance, between three and four miles, the beam would have spread and would have been dispersed still more by the drops of rain falling. By the time Mrs. Fitzgerald reached the window and pulled back the curtains, the searchlight was gone. At the same time, however, the train that left Lorain at 2:52 was passing south of the house, using its rotating headlight and producing a roaring noise made more piercing by the moist atmosphere. Looking through the wet glass of the window, the witness saw the beam of the train’s headlight moving through the haze in the yard. Smoke from the nearby foundry was also being blown into the yard. Illuminated by the circular beam of light, the smoke seemed to be a glowing, solid object that moved back and forth and emitted clouds of gray-pink smoke.

In summary, the Air Force concluded that Mrs. Fitzgerald’s UFO was an illusion produced by a combination of factors: an excited frame of mind induced by Dracula’s Daughter, the spotlight on the Coast Guard cutter, the rotating headlight of the train and the noise of its engine, drifting smoke from the foundry, and the haze of the drizzly night.

This conclusion provoked an explosion from the witness, who wrote her congressman suggesting mental incompetence on the part of the Air Force official who analyzed the case.

“The Fitzgerald Report”

The UFO Research Committee compiled and on December 1, 1958, published a thirteen-page pamphlet (later reissued in amplified form and copyrighted) entitled: “The Fitzgerald Report, A Complete and Detailed Account of the Sighting of an Unidentified Flying Object, Sheffield Lake, Ohio, September 21, 1958.” This document charged “duplicity” in the Air Force treatment of UFO reports in general, and asserted that the Fitzgerald investigation in particular had been “criminally mishandled” and was a “disgrace to the U. S. Air Force and an insult to the American public....” It further suggested that Sergeants A and B be “disciplined” because their investigation was not adequate or thorough, and that they had had “little or no intention of making an honest investigation of this sighting.”

Copies of the pamphlet were mailed to eminent scientists throughout the country, members of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate, officers in the Air Force, the Secretary of the Air Force, and the Secretary of Defense. The publication of such charges against an ordinary private citizen might easily have caused a suit for libel. The Air Force investigators, whatever their private reactions may have been, had no such recourse; their accusers could act with fair assurance of immunity from legal action.

The document made a number of specific accusations. Because of the wide publicity given this attack, we shall discuss each point fully. Our comments, appended in brackets, are based on official records of the Air Force, the New York Central Railway, the United States Weather Bureau, and the United States Coast Guard. Most of these facts were available to the Akron Committee itself.

Charge 1. Because of the position of the Fitzgerald house, the headlight of the train could not have shone into the bedroom windows. [Correct. But the point is irrelevant. The Air Force did not suggest that the train’s light shone into the window. The light could have shone into the yard, however, and would have been visible to a witness looking out of the window. The brilliant light that flashed in the window and roused the witness did not come from the train but from the spotlight of the Coast Guard cutter.]

Charge 2. Events taking place on the lake could not have had any relation to the sighting because the shore was 3000 feet away and, because of intervening houses and trees, a witness in the Fitzgerald house could not see the lake. [Incorrect conclusion from the facts. The beam of a spotlight on a boat moving one or two miles offshore (as was the Coast Guard cutter at about 3 A.M.) could have been seen from the house. The beam of such a light can be visible for great distances. Reflected from the clouds and spread by the drops of moisture in the air, it could easily have flashed into the window with great brilliance.]

Charge 3a. The spotlight used by the Coast Guard cutter was of a type that could not be focused like a searchlight; therefore the beam could not have been reflected from the clouds to the Fitzgerald house. [Incorrect. The spotlight used could operate with either a diffuse or a narrow beam, could be focused like a searchlight, and could have been reflected from the clouds to the house.]

Charge 3b. The Coast Guard cutter had used its spotlight and turned the beam in the direction of the house only once that night, while signaling another boat at a time two hours earlier than the sighting and a place roughly five miles from the house. [The December 1, 1958, edition of the document gives the distance as 4½ miles; the 1959 edition gives 5½ miles. Whatever the true distance, the statement is incorrect. A signaling incident did occur at the time and about the place specified, but it had no relation to the Fitzgerald sighting. The light was used frequently in the hours between midnight and 4 A.M., as the cutter carried out its search for the missing cabin cruiser. In a statement obtained by the Akron Committee itself, the chief boatswain’s mate affirmed that “subject spotlight was flashed on and off a number of times during the night, picking up objects in all directions. It is hard to estimate how many times spotlights were snapped on and off during subject search, but they were used quite often during short periods of time.”]

Charge 4. The statement that the supposed confirmatory witness, Mrs. S, could not recall anything unusual for the night of the sighting was “a lie,” as evidenced by her signed statement. [Incorrect. When the investigators visited Mrs. S, she asserted that she had nothing to contribute. At about 2:30 A.M. (half an hour earlier than the Fitzgerald sighting) she had indeed noticed a bright-red glow that had startled her at first until she realized that it probably came from the nearby Ohio Edison plant or from the foundry. The signed statement printed by the Akron Committee in the December 1958 edition of the document bears no date. The notarized statement used in the 1959 edition is dated March 25, six months after the sighting had occurred. After the Air Force interview, apparently, Mrs. S had changed her mind for reasons unknown.]

Charge 5. The statement that another confirmatory witness, Mr. G, was not available for interview was “pathetic” because it was Mrs. G, not Mr. G, who saw the UFO. [The point of this accusation is not clear. Because of a typographical error in a letter, “Mrs.” was changed to “Mr.” The fact remains that the supposed witness, Mrs. G, was not available. Also, the light she reported had appeared about 2 A.M., an hour before the Fitzgerald sighting.]

Charge 6a. It was not true that a misty rain with haze and mist had occurred at the time of the sighting; the witness herself stated that it was not raining. [Incorrect. The Cleveland Weather Bureau recorded continual slight precipitation between midnight and 7 A.M.: .20 inches were recorded between 2 and 4 A.M. When asked whether it was raining when she saw the UFO, the witness replied, “It had rained a few hours before,” a vague response suggesting that she had not noticed the weather at the time of the sighting. Other parts of her account, however, strongly indicate rain. Although the night was warm (about 65 degrees F. at 3 A.M.), her bedroom window was closed.]

Charge 6b. It was not true that smoke from the steel plant southwest of the house could have been a factor in the sighting, because the direction of the wind was wrong. [Incorrect. The Weather Bureau recorded “WSW and SW” winds that night averaging ten miles an hour; coming from the southwest, the winds would have blown the smoke northeast, directly toward the house.]

Charge 7a. The sergeants did not make a house-to-house check among the neighbors to obtain confirmatory evidence. [Correct. Such a time-consuming procedure would not have been justified. The neighbors had had two weeks in which to report a visiting spaceship. No such report had been made, even by the neighbor in whose yard the noisy object was supposed to have hovered while emitting puffs of smoke.]

Charge 7b. They did not ask Mrs. Fitzgerald to make a drawing of the UFO. [Correct. Before their visit she had already made such a drawing, prepared with the help of members of the Akron Committee who had shown her a sketch of an alleged spaceship reproduced several years earlier in an Air Force pamphlet[XIII-13]. With this sketch before her to aid her memory, Mrs. Fitzgerald had described her UFO to a draftsman provided by the committee. Unsurprisingly, the resulting sketch was very similar to the picture used as an example. A drawing obtained in this way could have no value as evidence.]

Charge 7c. The sergeants failed to ask enough questions about the motions of the object. [Incorrect. The standard form for reporting unidentified flying objects contains questions specifically designed to describe the motion of an unknown; all these questions were asked and answered.]

Charge 7d. They used only the standard report form; it did not include questions that allowed Mrs. Fitzgerald to express all her ideas of what she had seen. [Correct. The questions are designed to elicit observed physical facts; it does not require all the witness’s interpretations.]

Charge 7e. They did not take notes during the interview. [Correct. In filling out the report form they obtained all the necessary information. They had been trained not to take additional notes because some witnesses become nervous when they see that their remarks are being written down.]

Basic charge 7. These “omissions” in procedure proved that the sergeants had little intention of making an honest investigation. [Incorrect. They omitted no query that might have yielded useful evidence. Their duty was to report and try to account for the phenomenon observed by Mrs. Fitzgerald, not to record her belief in a hypothetical spaceship. The details of structure and motion that Mr. C wanted to insert in the record were mere impressions based on his assumption that the UFO was a solid object under intelligent control.]

The document repeatedly charged that the investigators asked too few questions, and implied that they asked only five of Mrs. Fitzgerald—yet she answered all the many questions in the standard report form. Furthermore, Mr. C had no way of knowing just how many and what questions were asked; during all the latter part of the interview he was outside the house.

Perhaps the best comment on the Fitzgerald Report and on the activities of civilian saucer-investigation groups in general is that of Dr. Thornton Page, the eminent astronomer who in 1952 served on the scientific panel to evaluate UFO reports (see Chapter VII). After receiving a copy of the Fitzgerald Report, he wrote to a member of the Akron Committee:

“As a scientist I am interested in unexplained phenomena, but the one or ones responsible for Mrs. Fitzgerald’s sighting is or are undoubtedly highly complex. It is just as false to say simply that she saw a flying saucer 20 feet in diameter as it is to say that she saw nothing, or that she simply saw the train headlight on a mist. Certainly, I would not expect a pair of Air Force investigators to be able to explain her sighting (and the others) satisfactorily from interviews two weeks after the event. It would be ridiculous to propose that a team of experts in the fields of physics, psychology, meteorology, engineering and railroading be sent to Sheffield Lake, Ohio, to study these sightings from all possible angles.

“I have already written to you and to others that your fundamental error is in oversimplifying your explanations of complex natural phenomena by assuming a common cause without justification. If you say that everything you cannot understand is caused by gremlins, then gremlins are everywhere! And the Air Force would need a much larger budget to investigate every sighting or hearing or feeling of a gremlin!

“... The onus is not on the Air Force or me to prove that no flying saucer was present that night; the onus is on you and your UFO Research Committee to prove that there is no other explanation of what was seen and heard.”

The Open Mind

Of the many astronomical observatories in the United States and abroad, none has ever photographed an object that remotely resembled a spaceship. Since 1957, hundreds of members of Moonwatch teams throughout the world have watched the skies to record passages of the many artificial satellites, but no Moonwatch team has yet reported the presence of a spaceship. Radar stations on all continents keep track of every artificial satellite and fragment of satellite orbiting the earth. In February 1963 there were 284 such objects, originating in Canada, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States. If an interloper from beyond our planet should join the parade, Space Track stations would at once detect its presence.

The Air Force has found no evidence of any kind that anyone has ever seen, heard, smelled, photographed, touched, or in any way detected a trace of an interplanetary spacecraft. Extraterrestrial visitors have not yet arrived, and may never arrive. If and when they do, our Air Force wants to be the first to know.

The Air Force will continue to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects and to treat them as “serious business.”[XIII-14] The security of the nation depends on this watchfulness. When a pilot sees a bright object flashing through the sky and cannot immediately recognize it, he knows that he may be looking at a meteor, a balloon, a bird, a sundog, a planetary mirage, or another plane. On the other hand, since he may be catching a significant glimpse of a guided missile or an aircraft from beyond the United States, he promptly reports another UFO. The Air Force cannot afford to guess what is in our skies. They want to know.

The creative scientist, eternally curious, keeps an open mind toward strange phenomena and novel ideas, knowing that we have only begun to understand the universe we live in. He remembers, too, that Biot’s discovery that meteorites were “stones from the sky” was at first greeted with disbelief, and he hopes never to be guilty of similar obtuseness. But an open mind does not mean credulity or a suspension of the logical faculties that are man’s most valuable asset.

Human beings now stand on the threshold of space. Visits to and from other worlds may occur in the future, bringing new facts and new interpretations of reality that we cannot now imagine. No evidence yet found indicates that such visits have begun. No fact so far determined suggests that a single unidentified flying object has originated outside our own planet.