The UFO Gap

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

"I read your book, Miss Crane, and found it delightfully uninhibited."

problem: an active rather than a passive attack. The scholarly study of UFO reports is capable of establishing the likelihood that the UFO phenomenon represents something heretofore not recognized in the present-day scientific framework. But no passive methods can prove this to be the case. They can provide only a measure of probability of its being so.

The passive method-painstakingly examining reports and then building a logical set of hypotheses-puts me in mind of the story told about the explorer who had come back from a dinosaur-egg-hunting expedition in the Gobi desert. In his lecture, the explorer presented many cogent reasons why the eggs they discovered were dinosaur eggs. He pointed out that they were about the size and weight to be expected of dinosaur eggs, allowing for desiccation and the ravages of time, and that they had about the right color, given the effects of weathering-all of this leading to the strong likelihood that the eggs were, indeed, dinosaur eggs. "And furthermore," the lecturer stated at the conclusion of his talk, "when we opened one of the eggs, it had a baby dinosaur in it." What is needed in the UFO problem is for us to find a baby UFO somewhere in the crates of UFO reports.

The next stage in the scientific approach to the UFO problem must clearly be an active one. Once the scientific fraternity is convinced that the UFO problem is worthy of serious attack (and this degree of conviction can come only after it is amply demonstrated that reports really do exist that find no conventional explanation, even after study by competent persons), we arrive at the interesting and challenging stage of the problem.

It is necessary to find out whether, when persons of high repute report a strange apparition, something of a physical nature does, in fact, exist. In short, an all-out effort must be made to obtain photographs. If unimpeachable photographs can be obtained, it follows that the stimulus that gave rise to the report was accompanied by an actual image on the retinas of the witnesses. This may seem a trivial or obvious point; yet should this not be the case, it would throw the problem into a totally different dimension. In any event, the existence of unimpeachable photographs would represent incontrovertible scientific evidence that UFOs, as we have defined them, exist.

Of course, the whole problem could be solved, or at least put on an extremely firm foundation, if tangible physical evidence, "hardware," of unimpeachable character were available. Meteorites were finally admitted to scientific respectability only after there had been a spectacular fall in France in 1803, a fall that not even the most skeptical of scientists could doubt. That was certainly

much easier than attacking the problem through a corresponding $ \Sigma C $ diagram for reports of meteorite falls. Similarly, the problem here could be solved should a fleet of UFOs land in the Rose Bowl during half time.

But how can we hunt the wily UFO without gun but with camera? Must we place automatic cameras along every roadside in the country? Well, hardly. A study of geographical distribution of the high $ \Sigma $ C cases, however, reveals (as a cursory inspection already shows) that certain areas of the country seem to remain "UFO hot" often for as long as days or even weeks. When the electronic computer indicates such a "hot" area, let a technical team be dispatched by jet helicopter (several of which we would keep in readiness in various parts of the country), and within hours of the receipt of the original report, cameras, tape recorders, movie cameras, spectrographs and Geiger counters would be there. The expense is trivial if study of the best reports indicates that there is, indeed, valuable scientific pay dirt hidden in the UFO phenomenon.

As a backup to the investigative readiness teams, and as an over-all means of garnering improved original data, a central UFO center in the United States should be established. A central telephone exchange (UFO-1000) could be manned 24 hours a day by competent interrogators capable of recognizing a true UFO report from a prankster's report, a simple misidentification by the untutored or the meanderings of an unsteady mind. Calls would be made collect to UFO-1000. Should the nuisance calls become a problem, these could be declared a misdemeanor or even a

Let us suppose lonely travelers, as in our first UFO case cited, encounter a UFO. As soon as they can get to a roadside telephone, they call UFO-1000. If the report passes preliminary and immediate screening, headquarters notifies the local police and they rush to the scene, already properly equipped with suitable cameras. If the case appears to warrant dispatching the UFO plane, this can be done very shortly thereafter.

criminal offense, comparable with tampering with the mailbox or the fire alarm on the corner.

Such a concerted effort would accomplish far, far more than the passive receipt and evaluation of reports possibly could. If UFOs as previously defined actually exist, we would have photographs, movies, spectrograms, plaster casts of indentations (if a landing occurs) and detailed measurements and quantitative estimates of brightnesses, speeds, and so on, within a year of the initiation of such a nononsense program. But if the UFO-1000 program is sincerely and intensively carried out for a full year and yields nothing, this, in itself, would be of great negative significance. Then we could go back to the "real, common-sense world" of preUFO days—shrugging it all off with, "There must have been a virus going around," an outlet successfully used in other fields of human inquiry.

Admittedly, I will be surprised if an intensive, yearlong study yields nothing. To the contrary, I think that mankind may be in for the greatest adventure since dawning human intelligence turned outward to contemplate the universe.