Essay: A FRESH LOOK AT FLYING SAUCERS

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Physicist Edward Condon, a highly respected former director of the National Bureau of Standards, agreed last October to head an Air Force—financed scientific team at the University of Colorado that will attempt to evaluate some of Project Blue Book's most intriguing unidentified cases. At the same time, Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, director of Northwestern University's Dearborn Observatory and the Air Force's longtime consultant on UFOs, wrote a significant letter to Science. (Had he spoken out earlier, Hynek says, "I would have been regarded as a nut.") In the letter, he took his fellow scientists to task for dismissing UFOs with "buffoonery and caustic banter" and rejecting the possibility that saucers are extraterrestrial. "As long as there are 'unidentifieds,' " he wrote, "the question must obviously remain open."

Meanwhile, James E. McDonald, a University of Arizona atmospheric physicist, studied the records of Project Blue Book, interviewed witnesses around the U.S. and in Australia. His conclusion places him farther out on the saucer's edge than any other U.S. scientist. "I think that UFOs are the No. 1 problem of world science," he says. "I'm afraid that the evidence points to no other acceptable hypothesis than the extraterrestrial. The amount of evidence is overwhelmingly real." Both Hynek and McDonald cite the example of earlier scientists who for years had little patience with recurring stories about stones that fell from the sky. Yet, in 1802, when churchmen, politicians and peasants witnessed an unusually heavy shower of fragments at L'Aigle, France, the French Academy of Sciences finally had to conclude that stones—actually meteorites—do indeed fall from the sky.

Other scientists who have reviewed UFO cases still agree with Astronomer Gerard Kuiper, a colleague of McDonald's at the University of Arizona, who insists that until better evidence is presented, the entire subject is "fanciful." Astronomer Carl Sagan of Harvard and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory says that "at the present time, there is no evidence that unambiguously connects the various flying-saucer sightings with extraterrestrial activity."

Substitute for God

Saucers are not a new phenomenon. French Astronomer Jacques Vallee has found evidence of hundreds of ancient sightings. Livy described the Roman equivalent of a UFO wave in 218 B.C. Several drawings show tubes and spheres seen over Nürnberg in 1561. Saucer advocates even read UFO sightings into Shakespeare's King Henry VI ("Dazzle mine eyes, or do I see three suns") and into the Bible, where Ezekiel describes a strange craft coming from the sky and landing close to the Chebar River in Chaldea. During World War II, Allied pilots had numerous encounters with "foo-fighters," mysterious luminous globs that flew alongside their airplanes. In 1946, there were thousands of sightings in Sweden of what were first thought to be secret Russian missiles. In recent years, UFO waves have occurred in France, Britain, Brazil, Spain, Italy, North Africa and Australia, and occasional UFOs have been seen over most other nations.