r.nnui.K iitRNstii^.. likf Ihc one (Iiis ]>Iaiu- is a p -

]>rourluiig, cxpluin some "disks,"' but not all.

WHAT you CAN BELIEVEABOUT FLYING SAUCERS

By SIDNEY SHALETT

Is there "something funny" about the silence that still envelops the

mysterious disks that alarmed us all and lured three military pilots to

crash deaths? Were they missiles from Russia? From Mars? Air Intel-

ligence probed 250 reports and here, for the first time, are its findings.

PART ONE

Kenneth Arnold, Idaho flier, twiee saw groupsof "saneers," set oflT coust-to-coast exciteincnt.

20

IATING as far back as the eighteenth century,• I and possibly earlier, the annals of our raceI I bulge with solemn reports of queer things

Keen undulating through the sky. Except inpublications frankly devoted to fantasy, Americanliterature and journalism have until recently beenrelatively free of such frightening accounts. Butthe Great Flying Saucer Scare, coming like a long-delayed and violent reaction, showed us to be, whenfrightened, as credulous as anyone else.

The scare had'its origin in June, 1947. On thetwenty-fourth day of that month, at one minute be-fore tbree P.M., Kenneth Arnold, of Boise, Idaho,piloting his three-place cabin plane in the state ofWashington, from Chehalis to Yakima, saw whatapjxsared to him to be nine shiny disks. Tbey seemedto be flipping and flashing along over Mount Rainier.Arnold reported his experience, and the Great Fly-ing Saucer Scare began.

Within a few days it had achieved a rich, full-blown screwiness. Observers in practically all theforty-eight states and the District of Columbia re-porled seeing "saucers." Descriptions of the myste-rious sky-borne objects achieved a lush variance.Besides disks, there were flying doughnuts andflame-spurting teardrops; there were wingless fuse-lages and balls of fire which streaked through theheavens at sujx-rsonic speeds, or hovered like ahelicopter, or oscillated like an electric fan.

In speculation, oral and published, the saucers—as the fearsome freaks came to he widely called —were attributed variously to the machinations of theRussians, of our own secret military research andeven of men from Mars. The deaths of three militaryaviators stemmed from the scare; one actually losinghis life in pursuit of one of the so-called saucers. Thefuror grew to such proportions that the UnitedStates Air Force —with considerable and under-standable reluctance—finally set up a special proj-ect to investigate the reported phenomena. To date,those in charge of the projects have collected reportson some 250 instances of "unidentified flying ob-jects," and, tbough tbe scare has subsided consider-ably in late months, the list of incidents continueslo grow.

The hardiness of the scare suggests that it mightbreak out again in full bloom at any time, maybe atan embarrassing moment in our international af-fairs, and, with this thought in mind, I have spentthe better part of two months investigating it. I havehad what seemed to be the wholehearted co-opera-tion of the Air Force in Washington and in otherparts of the country. I have found tbat if there is ascrap of bona fide evidence to support the notion thatour inventive geniuses or any potential enemy, onthis or any other planet, is spewing saucers overAmerica, the Air Force has been unable to locate it.

In reaching this finding, I am necessarily accept-ing the assurances of the highest officers of the AirForce, and those of its research and development ex-

jKjrts, that they have nothing concealed up theirsleeves. Of course, there are a lot of people, some ofthem quite sober citizens, who insist that there is"something funny" about the saucer business.These will probably insist tbat the Air Force is kid-ding me. But I don't think it is.

One of the men who would be hard to convince thatthe Air Force is being completely frank is KennethArnold, who saw those first famous nine. Arnold de-scribes himself as sole owner of a small concernwhich distributes fire-figbting apparatus in fiveWestern states. He also acts as Northwestern dis-tributor for the type of plane he was flying on theday he spotted the saucers.

Arnold was flying at 920C feet when he firet sawthem, be later wrote in tbe first of a series of articleshe did on the subject for a Chicago-published maga-zine called Fate. His first article, titled I Did Seethe Flying Disks, happened to appear in the maidennumber of Fate, which styles itself a "cosmic re-porter." The maiden issue also included articlestitled Behind the Etheric VeU and Invisible BeingsWalk the Earth. *

Arnold did a number of things to get a fix on thestrange objects. He concluded (a) that they were

saucerhke disks" with no tails; (h) that they fleWextremely fast and "in a rather chainlike line, as ifthey were linked together," and (c) that, at a dis-tance which he estimated as between twenty andtwenty-five miles, each appeared somewhat smallerthan a DC-4 airliner. Arnold said he had the flashingobjects in sight for two and one half to three min-utes, then they got away from him.

It was the immediate newspaper reports of Ar-nold s unusual experience which set off the excite-ment of June, 1947. Between then and the follow-ing Fourth of July, the newspapers and public offi-cials were deluged witb saucer reix>rt« from all over.Ihe newspapers, on tbe whole, played the thingbig most of them mixing a little nervous whimseywith the ujjsetting reports.

The baffling thing about the reporte was that,although some of the later ones obviously came fromhoaxers and publicity seekers, others were coming infrom persons whose standing in society was resjjecta-ble. Army officers assigned to scientific projects,sane and sober commercial-airline pilots. Air Forcetest pilots and intelligence officers, police officers anddeputy sbenfTs, businessmen, astronomere andweatber observers had incidents to describe.

One of the earliest of the more perplexing cases. occurred on July 8, 1947, two weeks after KennethArnold's experience, at Muroc Air Field in Califor-nia. Muroc is the Air Force's most hush-hush sanc-tum, where the Air Force and Navy test their secretsupersonic models, so it's not a place where youwould expect the personnel to get unduly excited bystrange things in the sky. But something did occurat Muroc, and the Air Force maintains that no ex-perimental craft was involved.

It was Lt. Joseph C. McHenry, the biUeting offi-cer, who, walking toward his office at 9:30 A.M., firstsaw " two silver objects of either spherical or disklikeshape, moving at about 300 miles per hour at approx-imately 8000 feet." He yelled at a couple of sergeantsand a stenographer, who were near by, and theysaw them too. Three more witnesses were sum-moned, but the ohjects had disappeared by thistime. However, a third object hove into sight, andfive out of the seven witnesses saw it. Everyone wascertain that, because of the apparent speed and thefact that they seemed to be traveling against theprevailing wind, the objects couldn't have been anytype of weather or cosmic-ray balloon.

At noon the same day, Maj. Richard R. Shoop,attached to the office of the Chief of Technical Engi-neering Division, had his attention directed by aColonel Gilkey to "what appeared to be a tbinmetallic object," which played lazily over the field,diving, climbing and oscillating for eigbt minutes.At the same time, a test pilot in the vicinity saw astrange whitish object floating to earth from a highaltitude. And another test pilot recalled that, on theprevious morning, he, too, had seen a roundish ob-ject whirling around at 12,000-feet altitude.

Four days prior to this, on the Fourth of July, thecity of Portland, Oregon, had fairly erupted withsaucer sightings. It hegan when Patrolman KennethA. McDowell was feeding the pigeons on the parkinglot back of Precinct I. '* I noticed," he reported later,"that the pigeons became quite excited over some-thing." He looked around to see what had disturbedthem and saw five large objects, disk-shajwd and ofundetermined color, in tbe air. They dipped up anddown in an oscillating motion at great s|>eed anddisappeared quickly. McDowell notified the policeradio, which broadcast an alert to all patrol cars.

At exactly the same time in another part of thecity, two other Portland patrolmen, W. A. Lissy,who is a private pilot, and D. W. Ellis, saw "threeflat round disks which flew at terrific speed instraight-line formation, the last disk fluttering veryrapidly in a sideway arc." They saw no evidence ofwhat made the things go, no vapor of smoke trailsand no sound. They estimated altitude of the disksas 40,000 feet. In still another part of the city.Patrolman Earl E. Patterson, a former Air Forcepilot, saw one disk, and a harbor pilot, hacked up bytwo witnesses, reported seeing "three to six " objectswhich resembled "a shiny chromium hub cap off acar." Various citizens also saw the things, includingone housewife who described it as looking "like anew dime flipping around."

T h e Geese \Vilh u Uumining Sound

IN near-by Vancouver, Washington, a crew of dep-uty sheriffs heard the Portland police broadcast.

They ran out to look at the sky and, sure enough,over Portland they saw " twenty to thirty objects...like a flight of geese." The deputies even heard "alow humming sound.'*

That evening Capt. E. J. Smith, of United AirLines, was piloting his ship from Boise, KennethArnold's home town, to Seattle. According to a re-port published in Fate, Captain Smith, before takingoff, had remarked, apropos of the disk stories, "I'llbelieve 'em when I see 'em." Over Emmett, Idaho,he said he did see nine strange objects, and his storyWas corroborated by Copilot lialpb Stevens andStewardess Marty Morrow. First there were five"somethings" which were "thin and smooth on thebottom and rough-appearing on top," Smith toldinvestigators. Later, four more came into view. Inall, they were observed for some twelve minutes,silhouetted against the sunset.

One of the strangest and most tragic of all thesaucer cases on record was the incident of January7, 1948, at Godman Field, an Air Force base at FortKnox, Kentucky. It was early afternoon —betweenl;45andl:50p.M. —wbenT/Sgt. Quinton A. Black-well, chief operator in the Godman control tower,first saw the object appear over the south portion oftbe field. Fifteen minutes earlier the sergeant fromthe commanding officer's office had telephoned himto be on the lookout, saying that Fort Knox mili-tary police and the state police had wamed that"a large, circular object, (Cimiimieittm Vage 136)

tiion^trrs 4if these traiislucetitA flying di 'k at rest? Kxpan^ion in the strato^^phcrc inakt'splastic bullooiis used by the Navy for co.sniic-iay rcst-arcli. They lia%e flouted over all parU of the U. S.

21

136 THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

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shotgun gripped across her bosom. Hecame to a full Btop.

"What's that?"She met his glance, her face crowded

with its embittering fear and its frozenpurpose, and for perhaps ten long-running seconds this enormous con-centration held her still; afterward aclear embarrassment thawed her ex-pression, and she dropped her eyes andwhirled away into the kitchen. Hewalked on to the bam. thinking. Why,she'd have killed him.

He rustled out the horses and threwon the harness and drove them up tothe Htage and made the hitch. Rhein-miller and Schwann and the rancherhad packed Cort to the shed, and nowcame back; the woman stood at thestage door, her glance waiting for Tag-gart. He moved around her and openedthe coach door and offered her his hand

"You're rested," be said, "and thenight drive vyill not he hard."

After she took her seat, she bent for-ward to speak, but he moved onand took the reins while Rheinmillermounted. The other passengers steppedinside, ready to go.

He said to Rheinmiller, "If youshould see Huckahine lying along theroad, send hack a shot. I'll come up forhim. Otherwise I'll go out /iret thingm the mornmg and make a hunt."

He threw the reins to Rheinmillerwho, kicking off the brake, gave thehorses a brisk shout and sent them onat a sudden run. Coach and animalsboomed over the hridge, made a longswing with the'winding road, and pres-ently passed into the narrow break ofthe side canyon.

In the kitchen, Mrs. Camphell saidto Ada, "I'll eat in the kitchen tonight,with Henry. You go out and eat withKalsey. Your hair looks nice . . . youlook nice. You go on."

" I can't help him," said the girl. " Ican't say anything I've not said before.He's seen me a thousand times."

"Always comes a time when a manlooks and sees what he didn't before."

Ada filled two plates with food keptwarm in the oven, and carried them tothe table. Sbe cbecked tbe table andcame back for the coffeepot and turnedwith it as Taggart walked into the frontroom from the yard. His head wasdown, and when he took his place, itapi«ared that the weight of wearinessshoved him into the chair. He laid hiselhowa on the table's top and laced hisfingers and sat this way in tbought,forehead against fingers.

Mrs. Campbell looked on, some faintkindness sweetening on a face lonesince settled into disillusion. Ada hadstopped at the kitchen's doorway withan airof panic upon her, and her breath-ing was quick and she seemed unableto move. She was, Mrs. Campbellthought, a pretty girl when strong feel-ing broke the mask on her face and thenice things came freely through. Adastared at the floor and seemed to pullall her resolution back, and went in toput the coffeepot on the table and to

April 30,19W

take ber place, but her face wassober again, hiding what she felt. Hereyes avoided Taggart. Mre. Campbellthought. You fool girl, didnU you learnanything from that ivoman ? She pushedthe door almost shut and stood closeto the small crack to spy upon thescene.

Taggartsaid, "You'd It ve shot him."'*I would . . . I'd have killed him,"

said Ada, and seemed to shrink away.Mrs. Campbell couldn't see Tag-

gart's expression, with his back to tbekitchen, but there must have been some-thing powerful in the continuing glancehe put on the girl, for presently shelooked to him and rose with a quicknessthat was straight out of impulse, andtook the coffeepot. She walked behindTaggart and stood at his side while shefilled his cup. Most clearly a wave ofcourage buoyed her; she laid her hand Alightly on Taggart's shoulder. It was a "terrible pity, Mrs. Campbell tho^igbt,that he didn't look around to nee thetenderness Ada silently poured uponhim.

"You've got it on your mind. Youmustn't think of it. He wasn't any good.Don't you let it trouble you any more."

"All right. Ada. What's done's done.It's a hard country. Must be harder onyou than on me."

Ada set aside the coffeepot and re-turned to her seat. '*You shouldn'tneglect your food —not the way youwork."

He dropped his hands to the tableand bent forward. "Ada," he said,"that a new comb?"

"I don't wear it much."Mrs. Campbell doubled both hands

together and softly wrung them witbanxiety. This toucb-and-go thing nowcoming on was so delicate tbat one cool ,look from the girl could kill it. The J-thickening silence ran forward. Tag-gart still hent in the chair to watch Ada.Whatever he said so insistently with hiseyes had its wonderful effect; beforeMrs. Campbell's delighted witnessing,Ada ceased to be a silent and obscuregirl from a hard-scrabble ranch, filledherself with the attention which thisman poured into her, and l>ecame awoman. Actually her face grew rounderand a glow came upon her, and she wassure of herself. It was in ber voice.

"I'll heat water enough for you totake a bath. You have a drink and goto bed."

" I ought to have a drink now."Ada laughed at him and rose. "All

right. One now, one then."Mrs. Campbell closed the door with-

out a sound. It was done, and nothingcould undo it, and the rest was as certain as tomorrow's sun. The womanfrom the stagecoach was a handsomeheast who bad used her flesh on Tag-gart without luck, but she had waken^him and, looking around, he had seenAda. She heard Henry come about tbehouse, and she put her head throughthe back door to summon him in, soamiable that he stared at her.

"You eat with me, Henry. The bot-tle's on the shelf and tbe food's warm."

WHAT YOU CAN BELIEVEABOUT FLYING SAUCERS

(Conliniied/mnt Page 21)

about 250 to 300 feet in diameter," hadlieen seen over Madisonville, Kentucky,oiily ninety miles away.

Technical Serjeant Blackwell begantelephoning and radioing, and in thirtyminutes his control tower was jammed

with practically all the brass bats onthe airfield, including the CO. him-self. Col. Guy F. Hix. For the next twohours and fifteen minutes there was alot of confusion. Everybody in the con-trol tower had something to say abouttbe object. Lt. Paul I. Orner, the de-tachment commander, thought it washovering, and that it was shaped like aparachute, but with some strange redlight reflecting from it. Capt. Gary W.Carter, the operations ofiicer, thought

THK SATUItDAY EVEMNG 137

was "round and white," and notedJ it could be seen through the clouds,^t- Col. E. Garrison Wood, the execu-' 6 oflicer, was sure it was "at least

^veral hundred feet in diameter." Colo-^^^ Hix reported, " It seemed at timesJo have a red border at the top and atfne bottom I just don't know what't was."

Into the middle of all this confusionflight of four P-51 fighter planes,

e fighters were Kentucky Air Na-l Guard planes returning frometta, Geoi^ia, to home base atdiford Field near LouisvUle. The

was led by twenty-five-year-oldt. Thomas F. Mantell, Jr., a husky

er who had flown in tbe Nor-invasion and who had some

^ military and civilian flying hourshis credit. Mantell, married and fa-r of two small sons, had been a part-i a G. I. flying school since the end

the war; he was skilled and coura-, but not foolhardy.

In the control tower. Captain Carter,Jne operations officer, suggested thatJ 6 P-51'8 be asked to chase the object.^ Blackwell relayed tbe sug-

by radio. One of the P-51'soff and headed for Standiford,

anteli and two other pilots, Lieu-lements and Hammond, roared

At 2:45 —five minutes after he begane bizarre chase—Mantel! reported byd i ; "Object directly abead and above

moving about half my speed." Athe reported: " Object is above and, moving about my speed (360) or faster. I'm trying to close in

hetter look."now, the three fighters were ap-

g the layer of the sky whereair is thin, and they had no oxygenipment. Five minutes later two ofships tumed back. Mantell kept

climbing.Mantell's wing man said afterward

jhat he lost tbe flight leader l>etween'8,000 and 20,000 feet. On the ground,'•le last word they had from Mantell*as: "Going to twenty thousand feet.*' no closer, will abandon chase."

Somewhere at this point—as investi-t since have reconstructed it —antell began to suffer from lack ofy At 25,000 feet, ManteU, his

^ xed on the gleaming object, must^Ve lost consciousness. His plane, nowPUotless, continued climbing to about' ' .000 feet. Then it went into a dive.

Somewhere between 20,000 and 10,-eet, the P-51 began to disintegrate.

Pieces of it were found scattered overtbe landscape as far as six tenths of amile from the place where most of it fell.

What was it tbat lured Mantell tohis death? I believe, as a result of myresearch, that it was either the planetVenus or a giant plastic balloon escapedfrom a Navy cosmic-ray-study projectnear Minneapolis, which is some 650miles away.

In Mantell's case, the Venus theoryis a strong probability. Dr. J. A. Hynek,professor of astronomy at Ohio StateUniversity, who has been retained as aconsultant by the Air Force to help un-scramble some of the confusion, esti-mates conservatively that 25 per centof the so-called saucer sightings can beblamed on planets, comets, shootingstars and other cosmic fireballs. Venus,the closest major planet to the earth, isa prime ofl"ender. In World War II,hundreds of rounds of antiaircraft am-munition were wasted on Venus attimes of the calendar when the planetwas particularly close to the earth andwas picking up rays from the sun.

Doctor Hynek, after carefully check-ing the position of Venus on the dayMantell was killed, reported that"nearly all of the sightings check ap-proximately with the pcsil icn of Venus,'*though he thought it "a little surpris-ing that it was so easily picked out dur-ing daylight by the naked eye." OnAugust 19, 1948, when another silveryspherical ohject came into sight overGodman Field, an astronomer was con-sulted before the fighter planes werecalled out. The astronomer reportedthat the ohject clearly was Venus, thenonly tliree weeks from its period ofgreatest brilliancy.

However, a responsihle naval-researchofficial in Washington told me unequiv-ocally that one of the Navy's giantplastic cosmic-ray balloons was knownto be loose in tbe Godman Field areathe day Manteli was killed, and he isfirmly convinced that the pilot met hisdeath chasing it. It is entirely possiblethat hoth Venus and the balloon wererampant in the area that day, becausethe thing —or one thing—was reportedseen over a bewildering course, stretch-ing through Illinois, Kentucky, Ten-nessee and Ohio.

Some weeks before the Mantell trag-edy, the Air Force had already madethe decision that the saucer businessniust be investigated. Gen. Hoyt S.Vandenberg, then Vice Chief (nowChief) of StafT for the Air Force, wasinstrumental in making the decision.

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However illogical and absurd the no-tion of imexplainable objects soaringover America might sound, the AirForce could not afTord to close its mindarbitrarily to the possibility that some-thing new might be in the skies.

There were a number of factorB thatwere subjects for legitimate concem.For one thing, reports of strange ob-jects in the air had started trickling infrom Alaaka, a strategic military area,and from parts of Scandinavia andNorth Germany, where it might be en-tirely possible to witness eome of theknown Russian experiments with guidedmissiles and rockets. Queer-shaped ob-jects leaving trails of green light wereseen coming from Peenemiinde, the ex-Nazi missile center now in Soviet hands.And Russian rockete had fallen insidethe American zone of occupied Ger-many.

We also knew that the Germans hadbeen much further along than we werein the missile field, and that the Rus-sians had scooped up all the Germanscientists they could corral. We knewthat the Russians, with the help ofGerman scientists, had developed somesmall disks with explosive edgeslaunched by a compressed-air catapult'for possible use as ai» ordnance it«m*We knew that the Russians were hotfor developing snorkel submarines ca-pable of launching buzz bombs; our ownNavy has been able to fire the Loon, itsversion ofthe German buzz bomb, fromsubmarines off Point Mugu, Califor-nia. And we remembered the Japanesewartime stunt of letting free balloonsdrift over to this country as a possiblemeans of initiating incendiary or germwarfare; it was a slightly screwball un-dertaking, but some of the balloons didget bere.

So the Air Force set up its project,under Air Intelligence, to investigate.'For some ohscure security reason, itstill is not permissible to mention thecode name of the project, so I will callit Project Saucer. Top supervision isfrom Washington, but the leg workcataloguing and evaluating are doneby the Technical Intelligence Divisionat Air Materiel Command Headquar-ters, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,Dayton, Ohio.

Project Saucer at Wright-Patt«rBonprovides a task force of intelligence of-ficers and civilian technical experts whocan jump into a plane any time an im-portant saucer sighting is reported and^o out to investigate. In practice, theask force has not personally investi-gated many cases on the scene, hut hasleft the questioning to local intelligenceofficers, who report all information hackto Dayton. However, General Vanden-berg feels that more of the originalinformation should he gathered by..he same men each time, so new in-Xructions have been issued which

should keep the task force travelingmore.

One of the tentative decisions madeby Project Saucer early in the gameis that there's nothing much new in anyof this. Strong suggestions of it appearn the published works of the lateCharles Fort, a writer from the Bronx,ivho spent a lifetime collecting obscurereferences to the unexplained phenom-3na of the ages. One of Fort's theseswas that Science was a fraud. Nobodywas ever quite sure whether Fort wasserious or had his tongue in his cheek,but the intelligence officers wadedthrough four of his books. Fort, theyleamed, had reports of elephant-sizedhailstones, orange-flavored and homedhailstones, flying disks, snowflakes thesize of plates, and strange airbome vis-itations of beef, blood, butter, coal.

April 30,19^»

salt, black powder, axes, clinkers, bricks,fireballs, human bodies, fish, frogs-toads, serpents, ants, womis and even ahaycock. Most of the phenomena wereslimly documented, many being basedsolely on newspaper-filler items tellingabout purported freaks of nature.

When I went to Wright Field armedonly with reports of what witnesses saidthey had seen, the Great Flying SaucerScare seemed reasonably mysterious tome. When I had finished my investiga-tion in Dayton, Washington and else-where, the thing seemed less mysterio"^than odd. There are any number of log-ical and perfectly normal solutions bywhich most of the saucer sightings canbe explained.

In addition to the 25 per cent or moi*bona fide cases of mistaken identifi-cation that can be blamed on astronom-ical phenomena, a lar^e percentage can.be accounted for by weather-observa'tion and radar-target balloons. The m^'

GROUNDSFOR DIV^ORCE

(COFFEE GROUNDS^ OF COURSK)

Percolator, vaciiiini, drip;iMy husband siiarls and curls his

lip;And instant coflcc he tums

down,While Turkish types call forth a

frown.I brought a higgin* hack from

France,His morning Java to enhance;He hales it, and his day is spoilcIf I offer coffee hoilcd.

Caffeine-free he will not drink;He pours my efforts down the

sink;But camping out, this captious

manI*rcw8 nccUr in an old tin can!•Early ij^,e of percolator

itary services and the Weather Bureauuse numerous types of balloons to re-cord atmospheric data. Some canysteady lights, some carry blinking ligb**and others hoist up gleaming gadget*of vanous shapes. There is no doubtthat balloons have bemused many »«sane observer. ^

The most common sources of inno-cent deception in the balloon field ai«the so-called RAWIN (radar-wind) tar-get balloons. The balloons generallyare white, and at 40,000 to 60,000 feettwhere they usually operate, they areinvisible to persons on the ground-Uanglmg below each balloon, however.f a six-comered " target" of aluminu"'loU, strung out on kitehke sticks. Radaroperators on the ground track tbes«alummum targets for weather informa-tion. The targets osciUate and gyrate i^the wind, and sunlight glinting frot^these shiny, wind-tossed objects ca"create a perfect illusion of a flying saU-cer. Movies of airbome RAWINs weretaken for me, and in some-riiots the o9'cillating aluminum targets appearedperfectly round.

At the very time the saucer sighting^were at their height, the Air Force hadjust tumed over thousands of surplusRAWINs to Weather Bureau station^ali over the country, so they were being

THE SATUKUAY EVENING I'OST 139

Used in greater numbers than ever be-fore. Sometimes several RAWINS werereleased together, which might accountfor "disk formations."

Another common—and obvious—so-lution lies in the field of cosmic-ray-study balloons. The armed forces, seek-ing to leam more secrets about atomicenergy, have set up projects all over thecountry to penetrate the stratosphere^ t h giant balloons. They are often re-leased in clusters.

The Navy, particularly keen to har-i esa atomic energy for submarine andWarship propulsion, has gone a step fur-ther in ita Operation Skyhook, which it^ carrying out in collaboration withthe General Mills aeronautical labora-t**ry at Minneapolis. A new type ofplastic balloon—a huge, translucentthing with a long tail — has been devisedto carry seventy pounds of equipment100,000 feet and more into the air.^hen the balloon starts aloft with its<S8e of instruments which is four feettall, it is filled to only one per cent of itsopacity with helium. When it reachesthe stratosphere, expansion causes it toswell to a monstrous thing 100 feet tallSnd 70 feet in diameter.

The Skyhook balloons are released^ the vicinity of Minneapolis, and theNavy even has released them from an^craf t carrier. Sometimes they carry'ights. They travel to widely separatecorners of the United States—onelifted as far as 1300 miles from base —before a timing device cuts loose theuistrument container, allowing it to de-scend by parachute. The released bal-loon then breaks into pieces, and thedescending fragments do some tricks oftheir ovi'n in floating earthward. Ac-cording to a General Mills scientist,"At sunset the balloons glow like alarge evening star in the reflected raysof the sun. Since they are far above theliorizon, they may be visible for as longas thirty minutes after darkness hasslirouded the earth. Tliousands ofpeople in the Minneapolis area haveobserved this phenomenon with mixedemotions, ranging from mild interestto terror."

How much of the scare can be blamedon experimental aircraft and missiles?Our research and development au-thorities insist that notliing they aredoing with aircraft or missUes shouldCause people to see flying saucers.However, some of the sightings havebeen in the White Sands, New Mexico,flrea, where the frightening marriageof the German V-2 and the WacCorporal is being forged, and the con-<Jusions are obvious. Also, after AirForce officials had said that they knewnothing of anything flying in the vicin-ity of their highly secret Muroc basethat might be making people seesaucers, it came out that a former testpilot near Muroc had been plajdngaround with a six-foot all-metal disk-shaped tow target. And both the Navyand Air Force, of course, are filling theair with strangely shaped experimentalplanes —needle-nosed things whichbreak the sonic barriers; a "flying flap-jack" plane that really lookec. like aSaucer, but now has been dropped bythe Navy; eight-engine "flying wing"bombers, rocket-assisted craft andplanes with fire-belching ram-jet en-gines on their wing tips.

However, the investigating authori-ties have leamed that all the logic inthe world will not convince the witnesswho wants to believe that the thing hesighted was something sinister ormaybe interplanetary. At Wright Field,for instance, there is a civilian techni-cal consultant, an expert on rockets inhis own right, who is convinced that the

saucers are visitations either fromMoscow or Mars.

Fate magazine, which has beat thedrum for the interplanetary-spaceshiptheory, printed an article signed byNeil Stanley and Chester S. Geier, stat-ing: "As no evidence has tumed up asyet to show that the disks originatedon this planet, it must be assumed thatthey are visitors from space." In anearlier issue, another writer opinedthat if Kenneth Arnold, who seemed tohave started it all, actually had seenwhat he described, it must have been" a train of spaceships from some otherplanet."

Arnold himself has been conductinga one-man campaign to prove that hedid see something out of the ordinarythat day over Mount Rainier. Severalwitnesses to saucer phenomena else-where told me that after their storieswere published they received corre-spondence from Arnold urging them todisclose full information. Arnold haswritten other articles for Fate —onetitled Phantom Lights Over Nevada,and another Are Space Visitors Here?In the latter, discussing a fisherman'sreport of seeing weird purplish sphereswith portholes maneuvering over theCrown River, in Ontario, Arnoldwrote: "Once again, we can be surethat these Canadian blue-green-purpleglobes are not meteors, nor are tbeyfragments of a comet or Venus. What,then, are they? Spacecraft from an-other world?"

I wrote to Arnold, asking for moreinformation about his activities andhis ideas. He replied, in part: "Sincemy first observation and report of theso-called 'flying disks' I have spent agreat deal of money and time thor-oughly investigating this subject. . . .It may be of interest to you to knowthere is a connection between tremen-dous amounts of furnace slag which isbeing found in giant dumps on ourocean floor, strange submarines, rocketships and flying disks. . . . There is nodoubt in my mind but what these ob-jects are aircraft of a strange design,and material that is unknown to thecivilization of this earth."

About five weeks after bis firstsaucer sighting, Arnold appeared inanother Northwestern town to investi-gate a report that two men had seen a"wounded" saucer—a sort of "dough-nut-shaped aircraft" escorted by fivesimilar craft — crash on an island off thecoast. Arnold's account of this investi-gation in Fate is a real cloak-and-dag-ger epic, and he mentions that whileflying to the scene of the invest^ationhe spotted another covey of sometwenty-five flying disks. He was joinedin his investigation by Capt. E. J.Smith, United Air Lines pilot who hadseen saucers while en route to Seattle.

Later, a Government investigationindicated that Amold probably badrun up against an elaborate hoax. Inthe course of his own investigation,Amold telephoned 4th Air Force intel-ligence at Hamilton Field, California,with the result that two officers, Capt.William L. Davidson and Lt. FrankM. Brown, were sent out to see what itwas all about. After talking with Ar-nold and the air line pilot. Smith, andalso to one of the supposed actual col-laborators in the hoax, the two officerspulled out after midnight to fly hackto Hamilton Field.

On the way back to Califomia, theB-25 bomber that Captain Davidsonand Lieutenant Brown were flyingcrashed. Both men were killed.

Editort' Note; This ii the first or two articles byMr. Shalett on the Flying Saucers. The secoiul willappear next week.

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