Lyle Gifford Boyd

“ One of the most fantastic apparitions to confront a pilot is a group of luminous objects flaming through the air in more or less geometrical formation. The objects often seem to be heading directly toward the plane on a collision course but, as though under intelligent control, seem to veer off at the last possible instant and then disappear at incredible speed. The pilot usually recognizes this frightening phenomenon as an exploding meteor or a cluster of fireballs. ”

“ Even the scientists who make a special study of the phenomenon still have much to learn about the conditions that produce lightning and its various manifestations [IX-6] .
The most familiar type is the lightning we see in stormy weather; it flashes in brilliant zigzags from zenith to horizon, darts from cloud to cloud, or strikes like a javelin toward earth. At night, particularly in the country where no city lights mask its brilliance, lightning can be a frightening elemental force. ”

“ Size and brilliance. Giant meteors of great luminosity have been recorded throughout history. Some fireballs have been visible to observers throughout an area of thousands of square miles. Typical descriptions are: dazzling, like an airplane falling in flames, bigger than the full moon, of blinding brilliance, so bright it turned night into day, like the headlight of a locomotive, as big as the setting sun but three times as brilliant.
The luminosity does not depend on the actual size of the meteoric body. A fragment no larger than a pinhead can create a brilliant flash as it vanishes. ”

“ The human eye and the ordinary camera see it as a brilliant white star. Being nearer the sun, Venus receives almost twice as much light from the sun as does the earth, and when at greatest brilliance, can be seen in the daytime sky. Viewed momentarily through rapidly moving cirrus clouds, it may seem to be racing across the sky like a flying saucer, but a longer look will reveal that the object is actually making very slow progress, like a planet [IV-4] .
To the airman in the cockpit of a plane, the planet in the dawn sky can be a breathtaking sight. ”

“ A man on the ground or even in a plane, watching the maneuvers of an object some 20,000 to 100,000 feet above him, finds it impossible to make an accurate estimate of its true height, diameter, distance, or speed. Strong windcurrents can change the orientation of the sphere, and the particular angle of vision of the observer can make the object look wholly unlike a balloon. It may assume the shape of a disk, a lens, a teardrop, a parachute, a sausage. Temperature inversions can produce a double image of a balloon so that it looks like a linked pair. ”

“ At night, when an observer notices a light appearing out of the darkness, he usually cannot see the object that produces or carries the light. Under familiar conditions on the ground or in the air he usually interprets the light correctly, by a kind of informed guesswork, as that of an automobile, an advertising sign, an airport beacon, a plane, a star, etc. But if it appears under unfamiliar conditions or in unexpected circumstances, he has to make an uninformed guess based on largely unconscious estimates of its size, distance, height, color, and rate of movement. ”

“ Like Fort, some flying-saucer believers are consciously or unconsciously antagonistic to the scientific method and resent its restrictions as a child objects to discipline. Suggesting that a strictly logical approach deprives us of valuable truths about the nature of the universe, and bluntly asserting that present-day physicists and astronomers have closed their minds to the possibility of new knowledge, these enthusiasts imply that we should require less rigorous proof for the reality of saucers than for other types of physical phenomena. ”

“ One of the fundamental laws established by Newton, to which no exception has ever been found in the laboratory, states that a moving object will continue to move in a straight line unless it encounters an applied force. Let us suppose, for the moment, that a gravity shield could suddenly be interposed between a spacecraft and the earth, and thus make the craft reverse its direction of flight. ”

“ With no suspense, little characterization, and ludicrously bad science, these naïve accounts are fiction of such poor quality that they would be rejected by even the most hard-pressed editor of fantastic tales. Whether from Venus, Mars, Saturn, or the planets of other solar systems, these gods from the machine all look just like human beings and either speak the colloquial language of the contactee or communicate by thought transference. ”

“ For years scientists have been searching for a “unified field theory,” a single equation that would describe the interrelationship among electrical, magnetic, and gravitational forces. Such a mathematical statement would reveal the mysterious bond that holds together the atomic nucleus, imparts to atoms their unique structure, and keeps the stars in their courses. But this unifying equation, when it is found, will not make our present knowledge invalid. Enthusiasts are deluding themselves when they base their belief in flying saucers on the hope of overthrowing the laws of gravity and inertia. ”

“ Traveling between Mars and earth is not like jumping across a mountain stream where the banks remain stationary: the jumper, of course, chooses the narrowest part of the stream and leaps across in a straight path. But in space travel both planets are moving; they travel in elliptical orbits of different sizes and at different speeds. To reach earth, the Martian, too, must get into an elliptical orbit of a size and shape that will eventually intersect the earth’s orbit. ”

“ In military parlance the phrase “unidentified flying object,” abbreviated as UFO, is used to indicate any air-borne phenomenon that fails to identify itself to, or to be identified by, trained witnesses on the ground or in the air who are using visual or radar methods of observation. Created in the early days of the saucer era, the term UFO is unfortunately misleading because it seems to imply that the unknown is a solid material object. ”

“ When a pilot sees a bright object flashing through the sky and cannot immediately recognize it, he knows that he may be looking at a meteor, a balloon, a bird, a sundog, a planetary mirage, or another plane. On the other hand, since he may be catching a significant glimpse of a guided missile or an aircraft from beyond the United States, he promptly reports another UFO. The Air Force cannot afford to guess what is in our skies. ”

“ In 1941, three days after Pearl Harbor, the world was at war and the observer’s imagination, stimulated by a hundred rumors of imminent Japanese invasion, transformed cruising sea gulls into parachutes. By 1950, when space travel had become at least a theoretical possibility and scientists were discussing ways to reach the moon, uneasy persons fantastically overestimated the height and size of mysterious lights in the sky and sometimes saw birds as spaceships from another planet. ”