Ufos--What Are They?

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

well as in several other countries, the riddle of UFOs has become a scientific problem and highly-qualified specialists (astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, sociologists, and others) have been called upon to solve it.

The American profess J. Valley, who took part in the International Mathematical Congress in 1966 in Moscow, recently published three detailed scientific monographs on UFOs. These comprise a complete investigation of this interesting problem and although the author does not come down in favor of any particular explanatory hypothesis, the idea of a foreign-planetary origin of UFOs appears to him worthy of attention. The well-known American astrophysicist and director of the Dearborn Observatory, Prof. J. Haynek[?] writes in a preface to one of Valley's books that he personally, as an astronomer, "has long been convinced that UFOs cannot be waved aside as senseless... The UFO phenomenon is a global one and is attracting the attention of many intelligent persons. At private conversations many scientists told me of their interest in this problem and desire that it be thoroughly studied...The reports are not only strikingly similar to one another; they continue to come from perfectly respectable individuals and this requires the conduct of scientific investigations."

So, let us proceed to several explanations for UFOs.

First Explanation.

All reports about "flying saucers" and other UFOs are complete nonsense, fabrications and concoctions of careless individuals.

This point of view is a very convenient one because it requires no intellectual effort and nips the problem in the bud. However there is some truth in it notwithstanding.

In the clamor which was raised after 1947 around "flying saucers" were heard the voices of mystics and simple adventurists seeking to profit from a passing sensation. It is sufficient to recall the notorious Adamskiy who maintained that he had succeeded in travelling in one of the "flying saucers"--to Venus! Unscrupulous individuals by a simple photographic trick transfroemd a discarded cap into a secret "visitor from space." Rumors were spread to the effect that "pilots" from the "saucers" had been seen to land on the earth.. But none of this has anything to do with the matter.

Unfortunately, at almost all the turning points in the history of science new facts and ideas have been denied, as a rule, and declared to be nonsense. For example, before 1803