Documents / Document
This is a New Zealand Defence Force public release of RNZAF file AIR 39/3/3, "Flying Saucers," which covers 1952 to 1955 and was declassified in September 2010 under the Official Information Act. It collects sighting reports from the public and military personnel, press clippings, and a table of 1952 sightings. It also holds Carter Observatory opinions attributing some reports to meteors. A large part covers the inquiry into lights seen from National Airways Corporation Flight 108 on 31 October 1955, which the RNZAF could not fully explain as Venus.
“Open Minds”13 pages
# THE NEW BOOKS "THE COMPLETE BOOK OF OUTER SPACE," edited by Jeffrey Logan (London: Sidgwick and Jackson). WITH every second newspaper carrying reports of right WITH every second newspaper carrying reports of sightings of flying saucers, who can fail to have some interest in the subject of space travel? This book is a collection of fact and fiction, spectacularly illustrated with diagrams and drawings and photographs — some of them photographs of movie models purporting to peer into the future. The introduction confidently predicts that within 15 or 20 years people will see a "strange doughnutshaped moon" moving rapidly from horizon to horizon - a space station; and that a few years after that, a space ship from the earth will land on the moon. These, we are told, are facts. Serious men of science are working on the plans. Space travel has grown in 35 years "from primitive concepts to the exciting threshold of its realization." THIS deadpan earnestness is a bit hard for the ordinary unscientific man to take in—let alone accept. I found myself turning back to see if the learned authors really had said the things I had just read. I'm relieved to find that the experts don't all believe in flying saucers. They are called "probably the biggest mystery of this century" and the article dealing with them is headed "The Flying Saucer Myth." There is a space ship time schedule showing that time required for a trip to the moon could be five days, to Venus 146 days, and so on. They are all computed on a one-way basis. And you can check your weight on an interplanetary chart which shows that if your earth weight is, say 10 stone, your weight on the moon would be only 22lb, on Venus 119lb, but on the sun 3905lb. The space suit that the smart inter-planetary traveller will wear is visualized as having inbuilt air conditioning, walkie-talkie radio and a rear vision mirror. It will be of flexible metal with a white plastic outer layer, to reflect the sun's rays. THE book finishes with two pages of "space travel dictionary" which tells me that "galactic" means "within our own island universe, the Milky Way." Whether or not you are able to swallow it all, the book is fascinating even for a middleaged reader, and must be even more so for the youngsters who, if the time estimates of the enthusiasts are anything like realized, may see space travel in their lifetime.—H.A.S.
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 445 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.