Symposium on unidentified flying objects: hearings before the Committee on Science and Astronautics, U.S. House of Representatives, Ninetieth Congress, second session, July 29, 1968.

64
minute
of arc
(which
in
the
25
-power
theodolite
would
appear
to
Moore
as
about
three
-fourths
the
apparent
size
of
the
moon).
Discussion.—Moore's
sighting
is
carried
as
Unidentified
in
official
files.
Menzel
(Ref.
24)
says
of
it:
"This
incident,
kept
in
the
classified
files
for
more
than
two
years, presents
no
serious
difficulty
to
the person
who
understands
the
optics
of the
earth's
atmosphere.
The
air
can,
under
special conditions,
produce formations
similar
to
lenses.
And,
just
as
a
burning
glass
can
project
the
sun
into
a
point
of
light,
so
can
these
lenses
of
air—imperfect though
they
are—form an
image.
What
Moore
saw was
an
out
-of
-focus
and
badly
astigmatic
image
of the
balloon
above."It
would
be
interesting
to
hear
Menzel
present
a
quantitative
defense
of that
astonishing
disposition
of
this
interesting sighting.
Here
five
witnesses,
with
aid
of
a
tracking device giving
better
than rough
angular
-coordinate
information
on
the
movements
of
an
unknown
object,
observe
the
object
move
through
an
arc
of over
90
degrees that took
it
into
a
part
of
the
sky
about
that
same
large
angular
distance
from
the
real
balloon's
location,
and
Menzel
adduces
a
"lens
of
air"
to
explain
it
away.
Astronomers
find
atmospheric
scintillation
a
very
serious observational
problem because
stellar
images
are
often
erratically
shifted
by
tens
of
seconds of arc
from
their
mean
position
as
a
result
of atmospheric
turbulence
effects.
In
the
5/24/49
Moore
sighting,
Menzel
is
proposing
that the
atmosphere
carried
a
refracted
image
of
the
balloon
northeastward at
a
steady
rate
of
excursion
that
finally
totalled
several
thousand
times the
magnitude of
refractive
angular
image
-displacements
known
to
occur with
bad
seeing.
I
feel
obliged
to
repeat
an
observation
I
have
made
before:
If
the
transmission
pro-
perties
of the
Earth's
atmosphere
were
as
anomalous as Menzel assumes
in
his
handling of
UFO
observations,
he
and
his collegaues
would
be out
of
business.
The
official
categorization
of
Unidentified
for
the
Moore
sighting
seems
in-
escapable.
It
might
be
added
that,
over the
years,
there
have
been
very
many
UFO
observations
of
significant
nature
from
the
vicinity
of
White Sands
Prov-
ing
Ground,
many
involving
instrumental
tracking,
many
made
by
experienced
observers.
A
long
and
impressive
list
of
them
could
easily
be
compiled, yet
all
have
been
slowly
lost
from
official
cognizance
by
a
process
that
is
character-
istically
at
the heart of
response
to
the
UFO
problem.
5.
Case
30.
Admiralty
Bay,
Antarctica,
March
16,1961.
This
listing
of
UFO
sightings
by
meteorologists
could
be extended very
con-
siderably
by drawing on
my
file
of such
cases.
To
cite
just
one
more
that
also
indicates
the
global
scale
of
the
UFO
phenomena,
a
very
unusual luminous
un-
identified
aerial
object
seen
by
a
meteorologist
and
others
aboard
the
U.S.S.
Glacier
at about 6:15
p.m.
on
3/16/61
in
the
Antarctic
will
be
mentioned.
I
have
quite
recently received,
through
French
UFO
investigator
Rene
Fouere,
a
rather
detailed
summary
of
this sighting
by
Brazilian meteorologist
Rubens
J.
Villela,
whose
earlier
account
I
had
seen
but
paid
little
attention
to
(Ref.
10).
The
point
I
had
missed,
prior
to
reading
Villela'*
detailed description
of the circumstances
of
the
sighting,
was
the very
important
feature
of
a
low
cloud overcast present
at
about 1500
ft
above
the
sea.
With
three
spipmates
on
the
flying
bridge,
Villela
suddenly
saw
"a
multicolored
luminous
object crossing
the sky,"
an
object
which
for
a moment
they took to
be
an
unusual
meteor.
"It
was
egg
-shaped, colored
mainly
reddish at
first,
and
traveled
slowly
from
NE
to
SW
at about
50
degrees
above
the
horizon,
on
a
straight horizontal
trajec-
tory.
From
its
frontal
part,
several multicolored, perfectly straight 'rays' ex-
tended backwards,
diverging
outwards
at
an
angle; the
colors
of
these
rays
changed
continually,
predominantly
green, red,
and
blue.
Most
striking
of
all,
it
left
a
long
trail
of
orange
color
in the
form
of
a
perfectly straight
tube
which
gave the
distinct
impression of being hollow, faintly
comparable
to
a
neon
light,"
Villela
stated in his
summary.Then,
"Suddenly
the object divided
in two. It
was
not
an
explosion,
it
was a
controlled
division
in
two
equal
parts,
one
behind the
other,
each egg-shaped as
before
an,d
each
radiatiing
outwards
its
V-shaped
lateral rays.
Then
the object
shone with
a
slightly
stronger
light,
changing
color to blue
and
white,
and
disappearedcompletely. That's it—just disappeared, abruptly."