United States or Kenya ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
To use Newhouse's own words, "If they had been the size of a B-29 they would have been at 10,000 feet altitude." And the Navy man and his family had taken a good look at the objects they looked like "two pie pans, one inverted on the top of the other!" He didn't just think the UFO's were disk-shaped; he knew that they were; he had plainly seen them.
On the other side were those who didn't believe in flying saucers. At one time many of them had been believers. When the UFO reports were pouring in back in 1947 and 1948, they were just as sure that the UFO's were real as the people they were now scoffing at. But they had changed their minds.
Balloons drift with the wind and the wind was not blowing in the direction that the two UFO's were traveling. No exact speeds could be measured, but the lab could determine that the lights were traveling too fast to be birds and too slow to be meteors. This left airplanes as the only answer.
About five o'clock Sunday morning Major Fournet called and told me the story of the second sighting at Washington National Airport: About 10:30P.M. on July 26 the same radar operators who had seen the UFO's the week before picked up several of the same slow-moving targets.
Life, Time, Newsweek, and many other news magazines carried articles about the UFO's. Some were written with tongue in cheek, others were not. All the articles mentioned the Air Force's mass- hysterical induced hallucinations. But a Veterans' Administration psychiatrist publicly pooh-poohed this. "Too many people are seeing things," he said.
Then the UFO's were habitually reported from areas around "technically interesting" places like our atomic energy installations, harbors, and critical manufacturing areas.
We had no clear pictures of a saucer, just an assortment of blurs, blotches, and streaks of light. Also covered were our interviews with a dozen North American astronomers, the story of the unexplained green fireballs of New Mexico, and an account of how a committee of six distinguished United States scientists spent many hours attempting to answer the question, "Are the UFO's from outer space?"
One officer summed it up neatly when he told me, "It isn't the UFO's that give us the trouble, it's the people." As a double check I called several newspaper editors the other day and asked, "Why don't you print more UFO stories?" The answers were simple, it's the old "dog bites man" bit ninety-nine per cent have no news value any more. On May 10, 1956, the man bit the dog.
They are focused light-years away and their field of vision is so narrow that even if UFO's did exist and littered the atmosphere they wouldn't be seen. Another question the panel had was about Orson Welles' famous War of the Worlds broadcast of October 1938, which caused thousands of people to panic.
One man, who had been on Project Sign since it was organized back in 1947, was convinced that the UFO's were interplanetary spaceships. He had questioned the people in the control tower at Godman AFB when Captain Mantell was killed chasing the UFO, and he had spent hours talking to the crew of the DC-3 that was buzzed near Montgomery, Alabama, by a "cigar-shaped UFO that spouted blue flame."
Word Of The Day