Scientists Debate the Question of UFO's

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

ferent from those of people with normal eyesight.

Another optical phenomenon that can produce an illusion: you may forget that the eyeball jumps a little every time that you blink. Walking transmits vibrations to the eye at every step. Many individuals think they see stars, planets or satellites oscillating when the movement is actually that of the eye it self.

Let me give you this quotation from a book:

On our return across Minnesota we had an experience which I have always remembered as illustrative of the fallacy of all human testimony about ghosts, rappings and other phenomena of that character. We spent two nights and a day at Fort Snelling. Some of the officers were greatly surprised by a celestial phenomenon of a very extraordinary character which had been observed for several nights past. A star had been seen, night after night, rising in the East as usual, and starting on its course toward the South. But instead of continuing that course across the meridian, as stars invariably had done from the oldest antiquity, it took a turn for the North, sank toward the horizon and finally set near the north point of the horizon. Of course, an explanation was wanted.

My assurance that there must be some mistake in the observation could not be accepted, because this erratic course of the heavenly body had been seen by all of them so plainly that no doubt could exist on the subject. The men who saw it were not of the ordinary untrained kind, but graduates of West Point, who, if anyone, ought to be free from optical deceptions. I was confidently invited to look out that night and see for myself. We all watched with the greatest of interest.

In due time, the planet Mars was seen in the East making its way towards the South. "There it is!" was the exclamation.

"Yes, there it is," said I. "Now, that planet is going to keep right on its course toward the South."

"No, it is not," said they; "you will see it turn around and go down towards the north. d For Release 2003/11/04

Hour after hour passed and as the planet continued its regular course, the other watchers began to get a little nervous. It showed no signs of deviating from its course. We went out from time to time to look at the sky.

"There it is," said one of the observers at length pointing to Capella, which was just rising a little to the East of North; "there is the star setting."

No, it isn't," said I. "There is the star we have been looking at, now quite inconspicuous near the meridian, and that star which you think is setting is really rising and will soon be higher up."

A very little additional watching showed that no deviation of the general laws of Nature had occurred, but that the observers of previous nights had jumped at the conclusion that two objects, widely apart in the heavens, were the same.

Those words came from a book called "Reminiscences of an Astronomer," published in 1903 by Simon Newcomb, who was in charge of the American Nautical Almanac office from 1877 until 1897. This event actually occurred in 1860. The similarity to modern UFO's is overpowering. A star cavorting across the sky! Military officers as reliable and responsible witnesses!

## Light Reflections

For you who wear eyeglasses, there is still another way of seeing a UFO. Look directly at some bright light. There are a lot of them around the room here. Keep your head turned slightly to the left or right and you will undoubtedly see a faint, roundish, out-of-focus spot. This is light reflected from the front surface of your eyeball, back to the lens and then back into the pupil of your eye. A bright source, to one side and slightly behind you, can also reach your eye through reflection from the internal surface of the spectacle lens.

To this moment I haven't mentioned still another meth-

the human eye. I mean radar. Radar is a machine. It can't make mistakes. Or at least that is the common argument advanced by the UFO buffs.

The previous speaker in his document violently discredits my work and reveals his ignorance of the phenomenon of radio propagation of these radar waves. It so happens that during that three-year service in the Navy, which has already been referred to, and 22 years since then as consultant to the Central Radio Propagation Laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards, I have had a little experience with this particular phenomenon and the conditions. Radar is cursed with all of the potential afflictions that any complicated electrical gadget can suffer. But let me mention only one: mirage.

Let me explain briefly what a radar does. It sends out a pulse of radio waves. We know the direction, northeast for example. We know the elevation above the horizon. An echo returns. From the interval between the transmission and the return of the signal we know how far away the object is that reflected the pulse. We think, therefore, we detect a plane or a UFO in flight because the radar directs its pulse upward.

But we haven't any way of following the pulse in its path toward the target. A layer of warm, dry air or even a layer containing a few bubbles of warm air will bend the radar beam back to earth. This is what we call partial trapping and this is, for example, what happened in Washington in the famous sighting in 1952.

The reflection of the beam after it has been directed backward comes back from a distant building, a train or a ship. No wonder that planes that were sent out to intercept the radar UFO found nothing. In one such case a well-known writer on flying saucers wrote: "The discovery of visible saucers had been serious enough. The discovery now of invisible flying

I know of no reliable cases of simultaneous visual and radar sightings. In view of the physical properties of the eye, the surprising fact is that so few cases have been reported.

Time won't permit me to elaborate on still another relevant phenomenon. The Air Force appears to have neglected completely the psychological angle of mass hallucination. Back in 1919, in Spain, a not unrelated phenomenon occurred. Thousands of people — reliable people — swore that they had seen images of saints rolling their eyes, moving their hands, dripping drops of blood, even stepping out of their panels. One person would call out, "Look, there it goes!" and everyone else would look and they would see this phenomenon. There were many similar events recorded through history.

## Many Hoaxes

Then there are hundreds and thousands, perhaps, of hoaxes, like that at the University of Colorado when some enterprising pranksters made hot air balloons from candles and plastic bags and it gave the university officials who were investigating the UFO phenomenon an opportunity to see how poor the evidence can be, a fact well known to the legal profession. This is still another point that the Air Force has sometimes failed to realize. Moreover, their poor questionnaire has only further confused an already confused picture.

Several times during this talk I have used the phrase "UFO's cavorting across the sky." I did so deliberately because it seems to be a favorite phrase of my good friend, Dr. J. Allen Hynek of Northwestern University, and consultant to the Air Force Project Blue Book. He has sometimes expressed doubts about the UFO because stars don't "cavort" across the sky.

Continued