Ufos--What Are They?

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

Curious are the observations of Menzel himself who twice was able to see this puzzling phenomenon. On the first occasion during a trip by auto Menzel noted over Sacramento two strange hazy saucers with faint pale-blue illumination. The saucers rapidly disappeared and reappeared "Unfortunately, I was forced to acknowledge," writes D. Menzel,"that I could not exactly explain this phenomenon." The second time Menzel and several astronomers at the Sacramento Peak Observatory "how suddenly in the sky there appeared a clear-yellow fiery sphere. It was at an altitude of about 100-130 km." Its identify has remained unknown.

Here is one of the first reports, made in August 1947. Two American pilots saw "a large dark cigar-shaped body, the shape of which was clearly outlined against the background of the night sky...It moved toward us and the plane barely avoided colliding with it by a sharp change of course. The dark object passed by. Attempts to pursue it were unsuccessful and after 4 minutes the mysterious object vanished. Other American pilots in July 1948 encountered a wingless "airplaine" of cigar-shaped form. "This object," one of them reports," flew straight at us, and we sharply veered to the left..Then the "pilot" of it, as though having suddenly noticed us and wishing to escape detection, pulled up the nose of his craft and vanished into a cloud, emitting backwards a tremendous shaft of alme such that our DC-3 shook from this powerful exhaust."

Several times American pilots attempted to attack UFOs but these invariably put on tremendous speed and, maneuvering strenuously, escaped pursuit. In some cases the pursuit ended with the crash of the pursuing plane as happened with Capt T. Mantel on 7 January 1948. Before the crash Mantel hastily reported by radio: "I am coming up to it...This thing is metallic in appearance and of enormous dimensions."

The famous American astronomer Claude Tombo (who in 1930 discovered the planet Pluto) late on the evening of 20 August 1949 together with his family observe the flight across the sky of strange rectangles illuminated with a pale greenish yellow light. In Tombo's words "in all the several thousand hours of my life which I have passed in observing the night sky, I have never seen anything stranger or more surprising."

In 1965 and 1966 the number of UFO observations again increased sharply. Here are some examples of recent reports.

In January 1965 observers at the Antarctic research stations of Chile and Argentina noticed in the air a mysterious lighted object, the color of which changed from red to yellow than back to yellow, blue, white, and, finally orange. These