The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [41]
But what was in those files wasn’t worth much. For example, senior citizens reported lights hovering over their small New Hampshire town for more than an hour, and the case is explained as a wing of strategic bombers from a nearby Air Force base on a training exercise. Could the bombers take an hour to pass over the town? No. Did the bombers fly over at the time the UFOs were reported? No. Can you explain to us, Colonel, how strategic bombers can be described as ‘hovering’? No. The slipshod Blue-book investigations played little scientific role, but they did serve the important bureaucratic purpose of convincing much of the public that the Air Force was on the job; and that maybe there was nothing to UFO reports.
Of course, this doesn’t preclude the possibility that another, more serious, more scientific study of UFOs was going on somewhere else, headed, say, by a brigadier general rather than a lieutenant colonel. I think something like this is even likely, not because I believe we’re being visited by aliens, but because hiding in the UFO phenomena must be data once considered-of significant military interest. Certainly if UFOs are as reported - very fast, very manoeuvrable craft - there is a military duty to find out how they work. If UFOs were built by the Soviet Union it was the Air Force’s responsibility to protect us. Considering the remarkable performance characteristics reported, the strategic implications of Soviet UFOs flagrantly overflying American military and nuclear facilities were worrisome. If on the other hand the UFOs were built by extraterrestrials, we might copy the technology (if we could get our hands on just one saucer) and secure a huge advantage in the Cold War. And even if the military believed that UFOs were manufactured neither by Soviets nor by extraterrestrials, there was a good reason to follow the reports closely.
In the 1950s balloons were being extensively used by the Air Force - not just as weather measurement platforms, as prominently advertised, and radar reflectors, as acknowledged, but also, secretly, as robotic espionage craft, with high-resolution cameras and signal intelligence devices. While the balloons themselves were not very secret, the reconnaissance packages they carried were. High-altitude balloons can seem saucer-shaped when seen from the ground. If you misestimate how far away they are, you can easily imagine them going absurdly fast. Occasionally, propelled by a gust of wind, they make abrupt changes in direction, uncharacteristic of aircraft and in seeming defiance of the conservation of momentum - if you don’t realize they’re hollow and weigh almost nothing.
The most famous of these military balloon systems, widely tested over the United States in the early 1950s, was called ‘Skyhook’. Other balloon systems and projects were designated ‘Mogul’, ‘Moby Dick’, ‘Grandson’ and ‘Genetrix’. Urner Lidell, who had some responsibility for these missions at the Naval Research Laboratory, and who was later a NASA official, once told me he thought all UFO reports were due to military balloons. While ‘all’ is going too far, their role has, I think, been insufficiently appreciated. So far as I know there has never been a systematic and intentional control experiment, in which high-altitude balloons were secretly released and tracked, and UFO reports from visual and radar observers noted.
In 1956, overflights of the Soviet Union by US reconnaissance balloons began. At their peak there were dozens of balloon launches a day. Balloon overflights were then replaced by high-altitude aircraft, such as the U-2, which in turn were largely replaced by reconnaissance