Editing UFOs An International Scientific Problem (section)

== Some Illustrative UFO Reports ==

One of the conclusions one must draw from studying UFO reports from all
parts of the world is that there is an essential similarity in the types of

unexplained phenomena reported from all parts of the globe. Discs and cigar-
shaped objects dominate; nighttime observations are most common; and highly

unconventional performance characteristics are described by observers in
widely varying geographical areas, and by observers of quite diverse cultural
backgrounds (primitive groups as well as more advanced groups). To bring out
certain of these points, a small number of specific cases will be briefly
summarized next.

=== Case 1. BOAC Stratocruiser, Seven Islands, Quebec, June 29, 1954 ===

A famous case in UFO annals that has an appropriately international
flavor occurred near sunset on June 29, 1954, over eastern Canada, when crew
and passengers of a British Overseas Airways Corp. Stratocruiser, outbound
from New York to London, observed, for a total period of 18 minutes (about
90 miles of flight path) one large object and five or six smaller objects
somewhat north of Seven Islands. The UFOs were sighted just aft of the port
wing, at a very roughly estimated distance of 5-6 miles, maneuvering in uncon-
ventional manner. Capt. James Howard, the pilot, stated, after landing in
London9, "...they were obviously not aircraft as we know them. All appeared
black and I will swear they were solid... There was a big central object that
appeared to keep changing shape...The six smaller objects dodged about either
in front or behind." When interviewed by USAF intelligence personnel at
Goose Bay, Labrador, it was established that all of the crew had participated
in the sighting, as did a number of passengers, a total of over 20 witnesses.
A fighter plane scrambled from Goose Bay at Howard's request. Just before it
reached their area, the UFOs rapidly moved out of sight towards the northwest.

The group of UFOs maintained relatively constant position, relative to
the airliner, until their departure, and lay approximately five degrees to
left of the just-setting sun. No meteorological-optical phenomenon(assuredly
not a sundog) could reasonably account for the reported phenomena. The Strato-
cruiser was cruising at about 240 knots at 19,000 ft on the southwest edge of
a high-pressure center over Labrador, scarcely meteorological conditions
favorable to ball lightning or any other electrical disturbances; and visi-
bility was described by Capt. Howard as "perfect." To suggest that a natural
plasmoid of any sort could keep pace with an aircraft at 240 kts for 18 minutes
and 90 miles seems entirely unreasonable on a number of grounds. The speed and
motions categorically rule out meteors. The peculiar maneuvering of the
smaller objects and the curious shape-changes of the larger object suggest no
conventional explanation. It was First Officer Lee Boyd's impression that the
smaller ones merged into the larger prior to departure, again defying obvious
explanation.

At that time, Howard had 7500 flying hours; he is still flying with BOAC.
In a recent interview, he corroborated details of the 1954 press accounts and
even added interesting additional points. The distance of the objects pre-
cluded seeing any structural details, if any had been present; it is the per-
formance characteristics and the pronounced shape-changes that mark this well-
authenticated sighting as a puzzling UFO case for which no adequate explanation
has ever been proposed, to my knowledge.

=== Case 2. Cressy, Tasmania, October 4, 1960 ===

A half-dozen years after Case 1, and halfway around the globe from Quebec,
a well-documented sighting bearing a certain resemblance to it (a number of
small objects around a larger one), was made by two reliable witnesses.
Rev. Lionel B. Browning, an Anglican clergyman, was admiring a rainbow as
he and his wife looked out a window of the Cressy, Tasmania, rectory. It
was 6:10 p.m., the sun was just setting in the west. A curtain of rain con-
cealed Ben Lomond ridge off to their east and extended through the southeast
and to their south. Mrs. Browning suddenly called Rev. Browning's attention
to what they both first interpreted as a large aircraft emerging from a rain-
curtain nearly due east. Although the Brownings never felt entirely sure of
the range of this object, they estimated it at perhaps 3 miles, since the
object seemed to be over an estate ’known to be at that distance. Their first
guess that it was an aircraft was next modified to an aircraft stalling, since
the speed of the object, crudely scaled from the subjective size-and-distance
estimates, seemed to be not much over 50-60 mph.

I had an opportunity to interview Rev. Browning last summer and verified
contemporary press accounts10. He and Mrs. Browning quickly noted that the
cigar-shaped object .seemed to lack wings, had several vertical bands or
ridges on its gray-colored surface, and some odd protuberance on its "forward"
end. They watched it glide northward for about a minute before it suddenly
stopped in mid-air and hovered over the ground at an altitude they very roughly
guessed at 400-500 feet. Then, from out of the rainclouds farther east, there
came about a half-dozen much smaller objects, of perceptibly discoid form, the

Brownings stated. These smaller discs moved much faster than the larger cigar-
shaped object, at speeds that Rev. Browning stated to me might have approached
jet-aircraft speed. He stressed that these smaller objects "skipped like
stones on water", a phraseology that I learned from associates of Rev. Browning
did not originate from any previous study of UFO reports, since, prior to that
October, 1960 sighting, Rev. Browning not only ignored UFO reports but took a
very negative view of the authenticity of most such reports.

The Brownings next saw the discs seem to take up a "formation" around the
cigar-shaped object, which had been hovering motionless during the approach
and formation of the smaller objects (whose diameter the Brownings guessed at
perhaps some tens of feet, in contrast to the perhaps tenfold larger length
of the cigar-shaped object). Then, the entire assemblage started moving
towards the south, back into the rainshower out of which the large object had
first been seen emerging, whence the group was lost from sight, terminating
the observation after a total elapsed time estimated by the witnesses as about
two minutes, perhaps as long as three minutes.

These objects were illuminated by the setting sun, and Rev. Browning
emphasized to me that there was a distinct difference in tone between the dull
gray of the larger object and the shiny, metallic luster of the smaller disc-
like objects.

The Brownings, after a brief discussion of this event (which by then they
construed as "some Russian devices"), called the nearby airdrome to report it,
which ultimately brought it to the attention of the RAAF. I have recently had
a letter from the RAAF officer who did the interrogation of the Brownings.

Wg. Cmdr. G. L. Waller states in his communication that the Brownings "im-
pressed me as being mature, stable, and mentally alert individuals who had no
cause or desire to see objects in the sky other than objects of definite form
and substance." That impression is attested to by many others who know the
Brownings personally, as I established by direct queries in Hobart and
Melbourne last year.

My questions as to the ultimate public explanation which the RAAF put on
the sighting elicited somewhat bitter comment from Rev. Browning, comment that
I later found elaborated in press clippings made available to me by the
officers of a very creditable private UFO group in Melbourne (Victorian
Flying Saucer Research Society). The Directorate of Air Force Intelligence,
RAAF, made official explanation early in 1961: "The phenomena was the result
of the moonrise associated with meteorological conditions at the time of the
sighting. On 4th October, 1960, moonrise (full quarter) at Cressy would have
been visible shortly after 1800 hours and in an ESE direction. The objects
apparently seen were near the sky-line in an easterly direction. The presence
of "scud" type clouds, moving in varying directions due to turbulence in and
around the rain squall near which the objects were sighted, and the position
of the moon or its reflections, produced the impression of flying objects."
Such an "explanation" has a curiously familiar ring to anyone who has
studied large numbers of USAF "explanations" of UFO sightings. One can
quickly establish that the moon was full on the date of the Cressy sighting
and that it would have risen not in the ESE but a few degrees north of east.
And, still worse for the official explanation, there was not only a dense
rain storm obscuring all the eastern sky as seen from the Cressy rectory,
but the highest mountain range of Tasmania lay behind those dense clouds to
further obscure the just-rising full moon. (Ben Lomond, summit 6160 ft,
lies to ENE of Cressy, and the ridges extend off to south and north from that
summit point.) From my own viewpoint, as one interested in atmospheric
optics and in unusual refractive and reflective anomalies, the official sug-
gestion that "scud" subject to turbulent motions could (had the moon not been
wholly obscured by rain and mountain) be optically distorted into anything
remotely resembling the phenomena reported by the Brownings seems entirely
out of question. (Because USAF explanations have many times asserted, as
has also [[D H Menzel|Dr. D. H. Menzel]] in his writings on UFOs11, that the sun and the moon
can be "reflected" off sides or tops of clouds, it may be well to state that nothing in decades of meteorological optical observations supports such a
notion, save for the phenomenon of the "undersun", which involves specular
reflection off tabular ice crystals falling in completely non-turbulent air,
and visible only from an aircraft or elevated vantage point. Sun and moon
do not yield anything like distinct images by reflection off the walls of
clouds; all UFO explanations invoking such optical absurdities are unreason-
able. It might be added that Menzel has repeatedly erred in referring to
sundogs, i.e., parhelia, as resulting from "reflection", since that familiar
optical effect is caused by ice-crystal refraction.) In asserting such a
meteorological explanation as was issued by the RAAF intelligence office,
little evidence of scientific knowledge was exhibited, unless that office
felt that the essential features of the Brownings' account had to be simply
disregarded as unreliable. Yet the interrogating RAAF officer, Wg . Cdr.
Waller, evidently had no such inclination to disregard these witnesses'
description of their observations, nor do I.

=== Case 3. Fukuoka, Japan, October 15, 1948 ===

From Air Force Project Bluebook files comes the material summarized here
for this officially UNIDENTIFIED case involving airborne-radar and air-visual
observation of an unconventional "bullet-shaped" object. At 11:05 p.m. LST,
a USAF F-61 Black Widow fighter, with crew of pilot and radar observer, fly-
inq near Fukuoka, obtained a radar pickup on an unknown target at an altitude
of around 6000 ft, and an initial range of about 10 miles. The total encounter,
occupying a period of about ten minutes, is too complex to describe in full
detail here. The Bluebook file on it, about a quarter-inch thick, contains a
number of different intelligence reports that are not mutually compatible on
certain quantitative details (closure distances, etc.). Briefly, a total of
six radar passes were made, and each time the F-61 closed to about 4000 yards,
whereupon the unknown accelerated suddenly from about 200 mph to an estimated
1200 mph. The original report from Far East Air Forces intelligence sources
states that the unknown "had a high rate of acceleration and could go almost
straight up or down out of radar elevation limits... There was sufficient moon-
light to permit a silhouette to be discerned although no details were
observed." The F-61 crew thought it possible that the six passes might have
been made on two separate unknowns, but this was inferential.

Another portion of the official file includes a FEAF followup report,
describing some other points: "When the F-61 approached within 12,000 ft the
target executed a 180° turn and dived under the F-61. The F-61 attempted to
dive with the target but was unable to keep pace...It is believed that the
object was not lost from the scope due to normal skip null-zones common to x
all radar equipment. The pilot and observer feel that it was the high rate
of speed of the object which enabled it to disappear so rapidly." And still O
another document in the Bluebook file on this UNIDENTIFIED describes the q
visual sighting made at one juncture: "At time of only visual sighting tar- 22
get was on a level with observing aircraft. Under night visibility all that
was visible was a silhouette. Type of tail stabilizers is unknown. General
classification - very short body giving a stubby appearance. Canopy, if g
present, was formed into aircraft body to give the object cleancut lines and
was not discernible." The estimated size was 20-30 feet, and an accompanying g
sketch shows it as having a sharply cut-off tail ("bullet-shaped"). No >
exhaust was seen. The moon was nearly full on that night, and the airmen saw q
the outline against a moonlit cloud, they stated in their report. USAF ground-mi
radar stations at Shigamo-Shima and Fukae-Shima had the F-61 on their scopes S
intermittently as it moved in and out of ground clutter, but at no times 6
obtained a radar-return from the unknown. CCD

Ruppelt (6) states that the Fukuoka sighting was one of the first UFO cases
where an UNIDENTIFIED was seen on a radarscope; but many have since attained
that distinction. Indeed, when one reads the full text of the 1953 Robertson
Panel, one of the arresting points is the evident concern with the large
number of "radar fast-tracks" already on record by that date. Despite the
existence in USAF records of a number of UNIDENTIFIEDS seen on radar (often
with both airborne and ground radar and sometimes also with ground- and air-
visual sightings in accord), members of a Congressional Armed Services Com-
mittee investigation, inquiring into the UFO problem after the 1966 Michigan
"swamp gas" episode, were told on April 5, 1966, by the USAF Bluebook officer,
"We have no radar cases which are unexplained", when Congressman Schweiker
raised that pertinent question. [[Allen Hynek|Dr. J. A. Hynek]], Air Force scientific con-
sultant for then 18 years, present in the hearing-room, did not correct this
misinformation given to concerned Congressional inquirers.

=== Case 4. Gulf of Mexico, December 6, 1952 ===

Just to cite briefly another example of a radar-visual sighting in the
official UNIDENTIFIED category, one might mention the December 6, 1952 air-
borne sighting by the crew of an Air Force B-29 flying over the Gulf of
Mexico at 18000 ft in bright moonlight. (See 7 for further details.) A
total of over a half-dozen separate unknowns, seen on the B-29 radarscopes
and by crewmen watching out side-blisters, passed at high speed (some speeds
roughly estimated at 5000 mph from blip displacements). Some of them were
seen below the flight altitude, and others maneuvered in most unconventional
patterns (sudden course-revers a Is) . No meteor explanation would fit the
visual sightings, and ground-return effects are essentially out of the ques-
tion by virtue of the high altitude and by the features of the atmospheric
lapse rate at the time and area of the unusual sighting. It remains an
UNIDENTIFIED in USAF files.

=== Case 5. Washington National Airport, July 19 and 26, 1952===

Many more Bluebook file reports that are in the "explained" category
also involve radar-tracking of intriguing nature, but have been tagged with
a variety of other identifications. One of the msot famous is the 1952 epi-
sode near Washington National Airport (July 19 and 26, 1952). I shall not
give an account of it here (see for example Hall or Ruppelt or Ref. 1), but
only remark that my own analysis of the radiosonde data for those two nights
leads me to diametrically opposite conclusions from those that have remained
the official views for fifteen years. There were only very weak inversions
and moisture gradients present on those nights, incapable of causing the
striking radar and visual effects reliably reported.I have recently inter- 3
viewed five of the CAA controllers and four pilots involved in that sighting 2
and can only say that it is a case of extremely great interest - fully deserv- O
ing the national-headline treatment it got in 1952.

Further measure of the limited knowledge of the actual history of UFO -<
investigations held by the USAF personnel charged with UFO responsibilities
can be found in the same April 5, 1966 testimony previously cited. (See O
H.D. 55, Hearing by Committee on Armed Services, HR, 89th Congress, 2d 2
Session, 4/5/66, p. 6075). Congressman Stratton asked Bluebook Officer
Quintanilla: "Was there not a sighting, back it seems to me in 1947, when
an object was observed on radar, either at National Airport or Bolling, both ft
coming in and going out? It seems to me there was also a visual sighting O
that went along with that...Is this in your records at all?" Now, almost q
anyone who had attempted a serious study of UFO history would immediately g
recognize that Mr. Stratton, albeit confused about his recollected details,
was asking of the famous Washington National sightings of July, 1952. Yet 5
the incumbent Bluebook officer replied, "I am sure that if the sighting was g
reported to the Air Force it is on record, but I am not aware of this parti-
cular one, sir." [[Allen Hynek|Dr. Hynek]] did not offer correction, if he was aware that
correction was needed.

Some months later, after I had been at Project Bluebook, studied their
file on this important case, recomputed the refractive-index gradients to
assess the Air Force claims that anomalous propagation effects caused the
radar returns (numerous objects moving with variable speeds, high acceler-
ations) and weighed official claims that optical refraction anomalies caused
the visual reports (mainly from pilots flying well above the weak ground-
inversion and sighting some of the objects maneuvering even above their
flight altitudes), I asked Air Force consultant Hynek how he could have per-
mitted those incorrect radar "explanations" to be passed on to press, public,
and Congress for all these years. His reply was in the form of a question:
"How could I set myself up against all those radar experts from Washington?"
This led me to comment that it should have taken him only about one or two
weeks of study of standard radar-propagation references to become fully con-
versant with all relevant radar details, and that homework ought to have been
done by him twenty years ago, in view of his UFO consulting obligations. It
is, I fear, such casual failure to really close with the puzzling nature of
the UFO problem that has left it in limbo for twenty years. And all of that
time, Pentagon press statements gave repeated assurances that real expertise
was at work proving the correctness of the Air Force position as to misiden-
tified natural phenomena. It is a very distressing and a very unbelievable
story, which is only faintly hinted by the brief remarks that can be made
here. But from the point of view of deserved international scientific atten-
tion to the UFO problem, candid criticisms of the USAF handling of this
problem seems necessary to make clear that there has never been any in-depth
UFO study within the U. S. Hence, I now wish to put myself on record once
again as characterizing most of the past 15 years of Bluebook work as
scientifically incompetent and superficial. Yet it has done the trick: it
has kept all of us unconcerned about the UFO problem.
Conspiracy? No, not as I see it. Foulup.

=== Case 6. Near Barcelona, Spain, September 10, 1967 ===

Over the past twenty years, airline pilots and flight crews have been
a continuing source of scientifically puzzling UFO reports. One of the
earliest, still carried by Bluebook as one of its UNIDENTIFIEDS, is a
July 4, 1947 UAL sighting near Boise2. When some months ago I interviewed
Capt. E. J. Smith, pilot of the DC-3 from which the sighting was made at

sunset, shortly after takeoff, his opinion that the two formations of disc-
like objects that he, his co-pilot, and a stewardess had seen 20 years

earlier were no conventional aircraft seemed as strong as it had been when
he was interviewed by reporters in 1947. From Capt. Smith's sighting down

to the present, the class of airline-pilot reports has remained a most impor-
tant class because of obvious observer-credibility factors. Let me recapitu-
late a much more recent one.

Just before sunset on September 10, 1967, four crew members of an Air
Ferry Ltd. DC-6, bound for England from Majorca, sighted an unconventional
airborne object about 60 miles NW of Barcelona, at 16,000 ft. A brief report
appeared in the Sept. 11 edition of the London Daily Express, independent
British investigators assembled further information, and one of the crew,
F/L Brian Dunlop, submitted a summary account to VFON headquarters (Volunteer

Flight Officers Network, a clearing-house in Denver for meteor, vehicle-
reentry, and other aerial-sighting reports).

When first sighted, according to Dunlop, the unknown was about 30° to
the left of their northbound flight path, heading towards the west at an
altitude slightly above theirs. Its initial estimated distance was put at
a number of tens of miles as it crossed to their right, turned towards them,
and then approached after an apparent deceleration and a descending motion.
The shape of the metallic-appearing object resembled an inverted ice cream
cone, with a rounded base and pointed top. Dunlop stated, "There was a
definite solid object the like of which none of the four crew that saw it had
ever seen before, and we had been quick enough we could have got a good photo
of it." Capt. F. E. C. Underhill stated in another interview that the UFO
"must have been under control...it definitely altered course substantially."
The course alteration brought it on a head-on approach, but it passed under
the DC-6's starboard wing and disappeared to their south. The crew did not
alert any of the 96 passengers aboard in the total viewing time of about
2-3 minutes, not wishing to alarm them. Estimated speed of the object was
600-700 knots, whereas the ambient wind at flight level was only 10 knots
from the north. A check with Barcelona flight controllers indicated there
were no known aircraft in the area, but reports do not indicate if radar cover-
age was available.

The shape, the veering path, the passage under the aircraft's flight level
all rule out meteoric phenomena. That it was not a balloon was indicated not
only by the shape, but its reported motions do not match balloon behavior in
any obvious way. It would seem to be one more airline-reported unidentified
flying object.

=== Case 7. Peruvian coast, December 30, 1966 ===

South America has been a source of extremely large numbers of UFO reports.
I have never been in a good position to evaluate the credibility and creden-
tials of witnesses in these reports and hence pass no present judgment on most
of them, but stress that they warrant searching study. One rather interesting
case that has been cross-checked sufficiently to appear well authenticated
involves observations by the 6-man flight-crew of a Canadian-Pacific Airlines
DC-8, who sighted an unconventionally behaving airborne object over the Peru-
vian coast as they headed northwest at 35,000 ft altitude on the indicated
date early in the morning (0300 LST). A report to VFON, and other reports in
the press and elsewhere, give salient features of the event.

Capt. Robert Millbank's report stated that the unknown was first spotted
70° to the left of their flight path, at an estimated elevation angle of about
10°. There was a clear sky, with stars visible. At first detection, the
unknown seemed to consist of a pair of lights of high luminosity, hovering for
perhaps a minute, and pulsating. It next moved down towards the plane, and
assumed a position off their left wing, seeming to pace the DC-8 for another
minute or two.

All six crewmen took turns looking at the unknown through various windows
to be positive that window-reflection effects were not involved. As the
unknown paced the aircraft, it appeared to be a pair of bright lights, sepa-
rated by 3-4°, and with some vaguely perceptible structure joining the lights,
according to some of the crew's accounts. Others felt that no interconnecting
structure was discernible, in the estimated 1-2 minutes that the object lay
off the port wing (at a distance that could not be reliably estimated, but was
felt to be of the order of perhaps a mile). A V-shaped pair of thin light
beams emanated from the object, pointing upwards initially, but downwards
later, according to Millbank's account. All passengers were asleep, and no
photographs were made.

Millbank stated that "in 26 years of flying I have never seen anything
like this before." Second Officer J. D. Dahl said, "...in my opinion, the
only answer to this sighting is a craft with speed and controllability unknown
to us." Other sighting details will be omitted here. After a few minutes of
pacing to the DC-8's port side, the object was seen to accelerate, pull away,
and climb rapidly out over the Pacific to the west, where it was lost in the
distance.

Here, as in such a disturbingly large number of commercial airline UFO
reports that have been ignored or explained away during the past two decades,
one is hard put to give any conventional explanation. Clearly, unless one
throws out most of the sighting details provided by the six crewmen, it will
be quite unreasonable to call this unknown an aircraft, a balloon, a meteor,
a plasmoid, an hallucination, or any of the other frequently-invoked mis-
identi fieds.

=== 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.

=== Case 9. Kansas City, Kansas, August 12, 1961 ===

Another such case, involving very much closer-range observation of a
craft-like object, is to be found in Bluebook files as an UNIDENTIFIED.
(USAF has repeatedly asserted, for 15 years, that in their unidentified
cases lies nothing that defies explanation "in terms of present-day science
and technology.” Not so, I am obliged to say. I am making a special study
of Air Force UNIDENTIFIEDS, and would stress that there is a very large body
of phenomenology in those UNIDENTIFIEDS that most certainly defies explana-
tion in terms of today's science or today's technology! Indeed, this is the
principal conclusion of the studies of all serious students of the UFO
problem.)

At about 9:00 p.m. on August 12, 1961, two college-age boys living in
Kansas City, Kansas, became involved in a close-range sighting of considerable
interest (12). I have recently interviewed both of these witnesses, T. A. Phipps
and J. B. Furkenhoff. They were driving towards Furkenhoff's home in Phipps'
open-top convertible near Old Mission High School on 50th Street. Furkenhoff
sighted the object first and had been watching it for some time before he
called it to Phipps' attention. It seemed to be hovering, by that time, at
perhaps 50-100 ft altitude over a point only a few city blocks away. It
appeared to have lights all around its lower edge, and made no sound then or
later.

They drove almost directly under it and looked up at its base, where it
hovered over houses whose residents were evidently unaware of the presence of
the object, since no other persons were seen out of doors by the two boys.
No wings, tail or propellers were visible, and no exhaust or noise was per-
ceptible. The lights around its underside were yellowish and had a neon-glow
character,according to Phipps. It was the complete lack of sound that even-
tually made them uneasy after a total viewing-time that they estimated at
several minutes. They did not get out of the convertible, from which they had
a quite adequate view. Phipps could not recall whether he stopped his engine.
The size was estimated at that of "a football field" when they were
interrogated by USAF personnel in 1961 (Bluebook file account), but when I
interviewed them in early 1968, they put it at more like 100 ft across. It
was opaque, solid, and obscured the sky above, which was cloudless according
to the Bluebook data. The Bluebook file report indicated that its shape was
compared to that of a "sled with running boards", yet neither witness, when
I questioned them, had the slightest idea how such a description was filed by
the interrogating personnel. Their recollections differed as to shape:
Phipps recalled it as disc-shaped, while Furkenhoff recalled it as a rounded
cylinder.

After about 3-4 minutes of observing the silently hovering object, their
uneasiness was broken by the sudden departure of the object. It accelerated
from a stationary position and climbed away out of sight in a time of only a
few seconds, each witness agreed. The precise climb-out path was recalled
somewhat differently by the two witnesses. The 1961 Air Force interview
recorded the climb-out as beginning with a directly vertical ascent followed
by an inclined departure path to the east.

They each told their parents, and Phipps' mother asked a friend who was on
active Air Force duty, a Maj. John Yancer, to phone the Richards-Gebaur AFB
near Kansas City. He was told that an unidentified had been seen on radar,
and so he urged that the boys be interviewed by USAF personnel. Telephone
interviews were accomplished the next day, but no further USAF interrogation
in the ensuing half-dozen years was ever carried out. This, despite the fact
that it was put in the UNIDENTIFIED category at Bluebook. Such lack of

followup of even the most intriguing UNIDENTIFIED cases is almost the rule,
Rot the exception; this systematic failure to pursue UFO reports is only one
of many disturbing facets of the USAF investigations since 1953.
The August 1961 sighting is not readily explained. Economy of expression
suggests calling the object an unconventional machine-like object exhibiting
performance characteristics well beyond the state of the art. I must say it
also seems to defy explanation in terms of present-day science and technology,
to use the Air Force's threadbare phraseology.

=== Case 10. Moe, Australia, February 15, 1963 ===

To maintain a certain international tone, in keeping with the title of my
remarks, I close with another interesting sighting made in a distant area.
With the aid of the Melbourne VFSRS group, I was able to interview Australian
farmer Charles Brew and his son Trevor last summer. They operate a small dair'
farm east of Melbourne, near Moe, Vic. My interview was carried out in the
milking shed where Brew and his son were working at about 7:00 a.m. on Feb. 15,
1963, when an unusual object swooped down nearby.

It was already light on this summer morning, although rainclouds lay over
head. Trevor was working in a part of the milking shed where his view of the
eastern sky was obscured and he did not see the object during its short-dura-
tion passage nearby. Charles Brew, however, was standing in an opening, with
a full view to the eastern sky when the object descended towards his shed and
cattle-pens at an angle that he put at about 45°. The object might be loosely
described as a domed disc, estimated by Brew at 25 ft in diameter, gray in
color except for a transparent dome on top. Around the circumference of the
object he saw an array of scoop-like or bucket-like vanes or protuberances.
As the object swooped down, almost as if to land on the hillside nearby,
the cattle and horses reacted in violent panic which Brew’described (in his
own terms) as unprecedented. It descended to an altitude that he judged to
be 75-100 feet, as estimated by the height of a tree near its point of minimal
altitude. Then, after seeming to hover near the tree for a few seconds, it
began a climb at roughly 45°, continuing on its westward course and passing up
into the cloud deck again.

The dome was not rotating, but the central section and bottom portion
appeared to be rotating at about once per second, Brew judged. The spinning
motion caused the protuberances (Brew thought) to generate the swishing noise,
somewhat like a turbine noise, that was clearly audible not only to Brew but
also to Trevor, located inside the shed and not far from a Diesel unit power-
ing the milking machines. The sound was even audible over the latter local
noise-sources, Trevor stated.

It took some time to recover the animals that had bolted, and those
already inside the fenced area were strongly disturbed for some time. Brew
stated to me that it was many days before any of his cattle would walk over
the part of the hillside pasture over which the object had momentarily
hovered. Brew himself reported an uncommon headache persisting for a number
of hours after the incident, but whether this was fortuitous cannot be con-
cluded .

Brew has been interviewed many times by Australian UFO investigators
without any reasons being found to discount his unusual sighting. My reaction
to Brew was similar. It is unfortunate that the son was not in position to
confirm the sighting, but he confirms the unusual sound ("like a diggerydoo",
as Brew put it). The object is similar in its general features and size to
that seen by a witness I interviewed in New Zealand, Mrs. Eileen Moreland.
Her July 13, 1959 observation, like Brew's, and like that of many other UFO
witnesses, is extremely difficult to explain in present-day scientific
or technological terms.

The foregoing constitute ten UFO cases from fairly widely ranging geo-
graphical areas, and spanning almost two decades of time. They are intended
to be illustrative but not "representative", since one of the baffling
features of UFO reports (easily scoffed out of court by the skeptic) is the
remarkable variety of shapes, sizes, and maneuvers reported. No mere sample
of ten cases can give any feeling for that puzzling range of UFO phenomenology.
Nor can a mere ten cases out of the thousands that now are on record in offi-
cial or unofficial files convince a properly skeptical scientist that we are
dealing here with extraterrestrial surveillance (the hypothesis that my 
studies suggest as most likely). One must carefully examine not tens but 
hundreds of such reports before the weight of evidence is seen in some per-
spective. The difficulty has been that very few scientists have carried out 
such examination to date, and hence the low a priori probability of extra-
terrestrial surveillance leads most scientists to discount such a possibility.
Hence, the above ten illustrative cases are only intended to convey a
general impression of the puzzlement that inheres in so many UFO reports, to
suggest that possibly we do have here a problem of considerable scientific
interest. In my own opinion, the UFO problem may be the greatest scientific
problem of our times; but I do not expect ten cases to convince doubters. I
was most certainly not convinced by the first ten good cases I had checked.
But I was quite intrigued, and hence kept' checking. Many more scientists must
do the same and add the weight of their opinion pro and con the extraterres-
trial hypothesis. - (23)