Editing UFOs An International Scientific Problem (section)

=== Case 8. Corning, California, July 4, 1967 ===

At about 5:15 a.m., PDT, on the morning of July 4, 1967, at least five
witnesses (and reportedly others not yet locatable) saw an object of uncon-
ventional nature moving over Highway 5 on the edge of Corning, California.
Hearing of the event from NICAP, I began searching for the witnesses and
eventually telephone-interviewed four. Press accounts from the Corning Daily
Observer and Oakland Tribune afforded further corroboration.

Jay Munger, operator of an all-night bowling alley, was drinking coffee
with two police officers, James Overton of the Corning force and Frank Rakes
of the Orland force, when Munger suddenly spotted the object out the front
windows of his bowling alley. In a moment all three were outside observing
what they each described as a dark gray oval or disc-shaped object with a
bright light shining upwards on its top and a dimmer light shining downward
from the underside. A dark gray or black band encircled the mid-section of
the object. When first sighted, it lay almost due west, at a distance that
they estimated at a quarter of a mile (later substantiated by independent
witnesses viewing it at right angles to the line of sight of the trio at
the bowling alley). It was barely moving, and seemed to be only a few
hundred feet above terrain. The dawn light illuminated the object, but not
so brightly as to obscure the two lights on top and bottom, they stated.
Munger, thinking to get an independent observation from a different part
of Corning, returned almost immediately to telephone his wife; but she never
saw it for reasons of tree-obscuration. At my request, Munger re-enacted the
telephoning process to form a rough estimate of elapsed time. He obtained a
time of 1-1.5 minutes. This time is of interest because, when he completed 5
the call and rejoined Overton and Rakes, the object had still moved only a O
short distance south on Highway 5 (about a quarter of a mile perhaps), but o
then quickly accelerated and passed off to the south, going out of their g
sight in only about 10 seconds, far to their south.

Many skeptics reasonably enough ask why there are not many good photo-
graphs of UFOs. This is a difficult question to answer; certainly it is true O
that when hoax photos or dubious photos are excluded, one seems to have left 2
a dismayingly small number of good UFO photos after 20 years of UFO sightings.
A factor that may often be involved is that even those witnesses who do have
loaded cameras nearby may not recover from their surprise before the object is
gone. Officer Overton stated to me in my telephone interview that he had °
binoculars and a loaded camera in his patrol car, only a few tens of feet from'Q
the parking-lot spot where he stood gazing at the object, yet he was so 5
stunned by the unprecedented nature of what he was seeing that it never occur-
red to him to run for his camera. Munger's phoning-time check suggests that g
this failure to think of his camera lasted over an interval of about a minute
and a half.

Paul Heideman, of Fremont, California, was driving south on Highway 5 at
the time of the above sighting, along with a friend, Robert King. I located
Heideman and obtained from him an account of his observation made from a point
on the highway north of Corning. He saw the light from the object, and had
it in sight for an estimated three minutes, as it headed south, and then
veered east (a turn not seen from the more restricted viewing point of the
bowling-alley parking lot). Heideman said that, when first seen, it lay almost
straight down Highway 5, serving to check the estimate of the other observers
that the object lay only a few city blocks to their west.

The weather was clear, no haze, no wind, according to the witnesses.
Munger's concise comment was, "I've never seen anything like it before." He
estimated its "diameter" at perhaps 50-100 ft, and its vertical thickness as
perhaps 15-20 ft, with some kind of edge (band) perhaps 5-10 ft thick. No
sound was ever heard. Overton stated to me that he had no idea what it was,
but that "there was no doubt it was a craft of some sort."

Here one has a daylight sighting by at least five witnesses from two
viewing points, lasting for many tens of seconds. The object exhibits opacity
plus light-sources. Its motion varies from near-hovering to high speed. It
is seen over an azimuthal range of almost 90° by the three observers who got
the closest look, yet no wings or empennage is seen. What is it? Lack of
sound at as close a range as a quarter-mile and in the quiet of the early
morning in a small town rules out a helicopter; lack of wings rules out a
conventional aircraft. Balloons, meteors, meteorological-optical effects, and
the rest of the constellation of frequently-invoked explanations do not appear
to fit such a sighting. It appears necessary to describe the object as an
unconventional machine-1 ike diject - or reject the witness' testimony. The
scientifically embarrassing point here is that many other such hard-to-explain
observations of machine-like objects are now on record - and being ignored.