Unidentified flying object

“ But the biggest argument against the object’s being a balloon was the fact that the pilot pulled in behind it; it was directly off the nose of his airplane, and although he followed it for more than a minute, it pulled away from him. Once you line up an airplane on a balloon and go straight toward it you will catch it in a matter of seconds, even in the slowest airplane. There have been dogfights with UFO’s where the UFO’s turned out to be balloons, but the pilots always reported that the UFO “made a pass” at them. In other words, they rapidly caught up with the balloon and passed it. ”

“ I think that this group of seven pilots pretty much represented the feelings of a lot of the airline pilots. They weren't wide-eyed space fans, but they and their fellow pilots had seen something and whatever they'd seen weren't hallucinations, mass hysteria, balloons, or meteors.
Three of the men at the Caffarello conference had seen UFO's or, to use their terminology, they had seen something they couldn't identify as a known object. ”

“ After this second sighting, according to the scientist, an investigation was started at the laboratory. The people who made the visual observations weren’t sure that the object they had seen couldn't have been an airplane. Someone thought that perhaps some type of radar equipment in the airplane, if that's what the object was, might have affected the radiation-detection equipment. So arrangements were made to fly all types of aircraft over the area with their radar in operation. ”

“ It was in a gradual turn to its left, and it wasn’t another airplane. The ground controller checked his radars but they had nothing, so the ground controller called the leader of the F-86’s back and told him to go after the object and try to identify it. The two airplanes started to climb.
By this time the UFO had crossed over them but it was still in a turn and was coming back. Several times they tried to intercept, but they could never climb up to it. Once in a while, when they’d appear to be getting close, the UFO would lazily move out of range by climbing slightly. ”

“ The two ladies, a mother and her daughter, had left their home in Matador, Texas, 70 miles northeast of Lubbock, about twelve-thirty p.m. on August 31. They were driving along in their car when they suddenly noticed “a pear-shaped” object about 150 yards ahead of them. It was just off the side of the road, about 120 feet in the air. It was drifting slowly to the east, “less than the speed required to take off in a Cub airplane.” They drove on down the road about 50 more yards, stopped, and got out of the car. ”

“ All we could do was hope the opinions we were getting were the best. My attempts to reach a definite conclusion as to what the professors had seen met another blank wall. I had no more success than I’d had trying to reach a conclusion on the authenticity of the photographs.
A thorough analysis of the reports of the flying wings seen by the retired rancher’s wife in Lubbock and the AEC employee and his wife in Albuquerque was made. The story from the two ladies who saw the aluminum-colored pear-shaped object hovering near the road near Matador, Texas, was studied, checked, and rechecked. ”

“ A matter of minutes after the sighting a pilot radioed Terre Haute that he had seen a UFO. He was flying from Greencastle, Indiana, to Paris, Illinois, when just east of Paris he’d looked back and to his left. There, level with his airplane and fairly close, was a large silvery object, “like a flattened orange,” hanging motionless in the sky. ”

“ If I could have found out, it would have been possible to plot the sightings in Lubbock, and if they were all located close to the lighted boulevards, birds would be an answer. This, however, it was impossible to do.
The fact that the lights didn’t make any perceivable sound seemed as if it might be a clue. Birds or light phenomena wouldn’t make any sound, but how about some object of appreciable size traveling at or above the speed of sound? Jet airplanes don’t fly as fast as the speed of sound but they make a horrible roar. ”

“ Thus we have been able to include detailed studies of particular incidents, to give the explanations found for most of them by Air Force investigators, to explain the causes of some hitherto unsolved cases, and to suggest highly probable solutions for several classic “Unknowns.”
To discuss each one of the thousands of unidentified flying objects reported during the last fifteen years is obviously impossible. We have therefore chosen to describe the common types of sighting and to analyze some of the representative and most interesting cases in each category. ”

“ Then they pointed out that some people are just plain nuts. Many people who read the Grudge Report took these two points to mean that all UFO observers either had spots in front of their eyes or were nuts. They broke the reports down statistically. The people who wrote the report found that over 70 per cent of the people making sightings reported a light- colored object. (This I doubt, but that's what the report said.) They said a big point of these reports of light-colored objects was that any high-flying object will appear to be dark against the sky. ”

“ All during the spring of 1948 good reports continued to come in. Some were just run-of-the-mill but a large percentage of them were good, coming from people whose reliability couldn't be questioned. For example, three scientists reported that for thirty seconds they had watched a round object streak across the sky in a highly erratic flight path near the Army's secret White Sands Proving Ground. And on May 28 the crew of an Air Force C-47 had three UFO's barrel in from "twelve o'clock high" to buzz their transport. ”

“ Civilians did not have a corner on the market. On July 6 a staff sergeant in Birmingham, Alabama, saw several "dim, glowing lights" speeding across the sky and photographed one of them. Also on the sixth the crew of an Air Force B-25 saw a bright, disk-shaped object "low at nine o'clock." This is one of the few reports of an object lower than the aircraft. At Fairfield-Suisun AFB in California a pilot saw something travel three quarters of the way across the sky in a few seconds. ”

“ That night at nine-twenty, four Air Force officers, two pilots, and two intelligence officers from Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama, saw a bright light traveling across the sky. It was first seen just above the horizon, and as it traveled toward the observers it "zigzagged," with bursts of high speed. When it was directly overhead it made a sharp 90-degree turn and was lost from view as it traveled south.
Other reports came in. In Milwaukee a lady saw ten go over her house "like blue blazes," heading south. A school bus driver in Clarion, Iowa, saw an object streak across the sky. ”

“ There is some legitimate doubt as to the accuracy of the speed and altitude figures that McLaughlin's crew arrived at from the data they measured with their theodolite. This doesn't mean much, however. Even if they were off by a factor of 100 per cent, the speeds and altitudes would be fantastic, and besides they looked at the UFO through a 25-power telescope and swore that it was a flat, oval-shaped object. Balloons, birds, and airplanes aren't flat and oval-shaped. ”

“ Since most people, even other pilots, have never seen a night aerial refueling operation and could not identify the odd lights they saw, the lights became UFO's.
In other instances common everyday objects look like UFO's because of some odd quirk in the human mind. A star or planet that has been in the sky every day of the observer's life suddenly "takes off at high speed on a highly erratic flight path." Or a vapor trail from a high-flying jet—seen a hundred times before by the observer—becomes a flying saucer. ”

“ But if you could accurately establish that some type of object was traveling 30,000 miles an hour—or even 3,000 miles an hour—through our atmosphere, the UFO story would be the biggest story since the Creation. ”

“ For anything flying in the air the stimulus could be anything that is normally seen in the air. Balloons, airplanes, and astronomical bodies are the commoner stimuli. Birds and insects are common also, but usually are seen at such close range that they are nearly always recognized. Infrequently observed things, such as sundogs, mirages, huge fireballs, and a host of other unusual flying objects, are also known stimuli.
On Project Blue Book the problem was to identify these stimuli. We had methods for checking the location, at anytime, of every balloon launched anywhere in the United States. ”

“ None of them were believers in flying saucers, but they recognized the fact that UFO reports were a problem that must be considered. With technological progress what it is today, you can’t afford to have anything, in the air that you can’t identify, be it balloons, meteors, planets or flying saucers. ”

“ In many instances it has been positively proved that people have reported balloons, airplanes, stars, and many other common objects as UFO’s. The people who make such reports don’t recognize these common objects because something in their surroundings temporarily assumes an unfamiliar appearance.
Unusual lighting conditions are a common cause of such illusions. A balloon will glow like a “ball of fire” just at sunset. Or an airplane that is not visible to the naked eye suddenly starts to reflect the sun’s rays and appears to be a “silver ball.” ”

“ Both witnesses were able and experienced observers. Nevertheless their determinations of distance and size, and hence of speed, are open to question because of the very fact that the disks were unidentified phenomena. Angular estimates are usually reliable when an observer is judging the position and speed of other known aircraft moving in the sky. But when the moving object is a strange one and is seen against an empty sky or flat ground containing no standards of comparison, estimates of actual size mean very little. ”

“ Maybe a dense blob of air tears off the airplane, floats along behind, and reflects the sunlight. Whatever it is, it gives the illusion of a saucer "chasing" an airplane. Sometimes it's steady and sometimes it darts back and forth. It only stays in view a few seconds and when it disappears it fades and looks for all the world as if it's suddenly streaking away into the distance.
Birds, bees, bugs, airplanes, planets, stars, balloons, and a host of other common everyday objects become UFO's the instant they are viewed under other than normal situations.
Then there is radar. ”

“ Maybe that great comedian, Jimmy Durante, has the answer: “Everybody wants to get into the act.” I am convinced that a certain percentage of UFO reports come from people who see flying saucers because others report seeing them. ”

“ An airplane at 20,000 to 30,000 feet picks up more cosmic rays than one shielded by the earth’s ever present haze.
Why can’t experienced pilots recognize a balloon when they see one? If they are flying at night, odd things can happen to their vision. There is the problem of vertigo as well as disorientation brought on by flying without points of reference. Night fighters have told dozens of stories of being fooled by lights. ”

“ To a person in an area where there isn't much high altitude air traffic, a thin, blood red streak in the sky at sunset, or shortly after, is a UFO. To anyone in an area where there are a lot of high flying jets even our myopic housewife, it's just another vapor trail. They're as common as the sunset.
When the flashing red strobe lights, now used on practically all aircraft, were still in the experimental stage back in 1951 they gave us fits. Every time an airplane with one of these flashing lights made a flight people within miles, including other pilots, called in UFO reports. ”

“ The pilots and the flight deck crew who saw the UFO had mixed feelings—some were sure that the UFO was a balloon while others were just as sure that it couldn’t have been. It was traveling too fast, and although it resembled a balloon in some ways it was far from being identical to the hundreds of balloons that the crew had seen the aerologists launch. ”

“ But take, for example, swallows flying around a chimney—they wheel, dart, and dip, but if you watch them closely, they have a definite pattern in their movements—an ordered motion. The definite pattern is intelligently controlled because they are catching bugs or getting in line to go down the chimney.
By the fall of 1952 we had a considerable number of well-documented reports m which the UFO’s made a series of maneuvers. If we could prove that these maneuvers were not random, but ordered, it would be proof that the UFO’s were things that were intelligently controlled. ”

“ This is one of the most typical UFO reports we had in our files. It is typical because no matter how you argue there isn't any definite answer. If you want to argue that the pilot didn't know where he was during the chase—that he was 3 or 4 miles from where he thought he was—that he never did fly around the northern edge of the field and get in behind the UFO—then the UFO could have been a balloon.
But if you want to believe that the pilot knew where he was all during the chase, and he did have several thousand hours of flying time, then all you can conclude is that the UFO was an unknown. ”

“ 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. ”