Essay: A FRESH LOOK AT FLYING SAUCERS

IN an all-night restaurant in Corning, Calif., two police officers sat chatting over coffee near dawn on July 4.

Suddenly the proprietor noticed a strange glow over a nearby freeway. Rushing outside, the men saw a large, metallic, cigar-shaped object between 300 feet and 500 feet in the air. "It had a huge, white light on the top," says Officer Jim Overton. "Down at the bottom it had a smaller, not so bright light. Around the center of this object was a band, either paint or a different kind of metal. It suddenly began to move with the most terrific burst of speed I've ever seen."

When the mysterious object disappeared a few minutes later, the shaken men returned to the restaurant, where they drew rough sketches of what they had seen. "I was kind of skeptical about these flying saucers being real, but you couldn't convince me otherwise now," says Overton. "I know what I saw."

Officer Overton is not alone in his conviction. More than 5,000,000 Americans, according to a recent Gallup poll, are certain that they have seen flying saucers or other UFOs (unidentified flying objects). Furthermore, Gallup reports, 46% of American adults believe that UFOs are something real. Scores of flying-saucer clubs are operating across the nation. They include small groups of semireligious eccentrics who worship saucermen and claim to have met them. They also include retired Marine Major Donald Keyhoe's serious and influential National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), the source of some of the best-documented UFO sightings.

In recent months, a significant change has occurred: the subject has moved out of the realm of science fiction and crackpot claims. Discussions of UFOs have begun to appear in the pages of such respected journals as Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Science. A few responsible scientists now put their reputations on the line by suggesting that saucers may be vehicles from outer space. The vast majority of their colleagues still scoff at this notion, but even some of the skeptics concede that serious investigation is needed.

Beyond Buffoonery

During the U.S. saucer era, which began when Pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine disklike objects erratically moving through the air near Mount Rainier in 1947, an Air Force unit called Project Blue Book has logged and evaluated more than 11,000 sightings. In most cases, the investigators eventually identified the UFOs as aircraft, balloons, satellites, flocks of birds, light reflected off clouds or shiny surfaces, atmospheric phenomena, meteors, stars, planets and the aurora borealis. Only 6% of saucer reports are listed by Blue Book as "unidentified" or unexplained. But Blue Book staffers have often announced arbitrary—and incorrect—solutions to saucer mysteries. Sightings have been attributed to the Orion constellation when it was actually below the horizon and invisible, to advertising blimps or refueling military aircraft when none were in the vicinity. This reinforces the belief of saucer buffs that the Air Force has been guilty of not only negligence but even deliberate suppression of UFO information.