The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [36]
Arnold thought he saw a train of nine objects, one of which produced a ‘terrific blue flash’. He concluded they were a new kind of winged aircraft. Murrow summed up: ‘That was an historic misquote. While Mr Arnold’s original explanation has been forgotten, the term “flying saucer” has become a household word.’ Kenneth Arnold’s flying saucers looked and behaved quite differently from what in only a few years would be rigidly particularized in the public understanding of the term: something like a very large and highly manoeuverable frisbee.
Most people honestly reported what they saw, but what they saw were natural, if unfamiliar, phenomena. Some UFO sightings turned out to be unconventional aircraft, conventional aircraft with unusual lighting patterns, high-altitude balloons, luminescent insects, planets seen under unusual atmospheric conditions, optical mirages and looming, lenticular clouds, ball lightning, sun-dogs, meteors including green fireballs, and satellites, nosecones, and rocket boosters spectacularly re-entering the atmosphere.* Just conceivably, a few might be small comets dissipating in the upper air. At least some radar reports were due to ‘anomalous propagation’ – radio waves travelling curved paths due to atmospheric temperature inversions. Traditionally, they were also called radar ‘angels’ – something that seems to be there but isn’t. You could have simultaneous visual and radar sightings without there being any ‘there’ there.
[* There are so many artificial satellites up there that they’re always making garish displays somewhere in the world. Two or three decay every day in the Earth’s atmosphere, the flaming debris often visible to the naked eye.]
When we notice something strange in the sky, some of us become excitable and uncritical, bad witnesses. There was the suspicion that the field attracted rogues and charlatans. Many UFO photos turned out to be fakes – small models hanging by thin threads, often photographed in a double exposure. A UFO seen by thousands of people at a football game turned out to be a college fraternity prank – a piece of cardboard, some candles and a thin plastic bag that dry cleaning comes in, all cobbled together to make a rudimentary hot air balloon.
The original crashed saucer account (with the little alien men and their perfect teeth) turned out to be a straight hoax. Frank Scully, columnist for Variety, passed on a story told by an oilman friend; it played a central dramatic role in Scully’s best-selling 1950 book, Behind the Flying Saucers. Sixteen dead aliens from Venus, each three feet high, had been found in one of three crashed saucers. Booklets with alien pictograms had been recovered. The military was covering up. The implications were profound.
The hoaxers were Silas Newton, who said he used radio waves to prospect for gold and oil, and a mysterious ‘Dr Gee’ who turned out to be a Mr GeBauer. Newton produced a gear from the UFO machinery and flashed close-up saucer photos. But he did not allow close inspection. When a prepared sceptic, through sleight of hand, switched gears and sent the alien artefact away for analysis, it turned out to be made of kitchen-pot aluminium.
The crashed saucer scam was a small interlude in a quarter-century of frauds by Newton and GeBauer, chiefly selling worthless oil leases and prospecting machines. In 1952 they were arrested by the FBI, and the following year found guilty of conducting a confidence game. Their exploits, chronicled by the historian Curtis Peebles, ought to have made UFO enthusiasts cautious forever about crashed saucer stories from the American Southwest around 1950. No such luck.
On 4 October 1957, Sputnik 7, the first Earth-orbiting artificial