After Operation Blue Book and the Condon Commission report it is amusing to consider the disavowal that “air force personnel are not authorized to comment on unidentified flying objects.” Remember this if you ever have a question at an air show. An easy but slippery argument for the existence of UFOs is noting that unidentified flying objects exist if not all flying objects can be readily identified. Curiously arguments in behalf of UFOs often proceed as though we truly know what they are based on prevailing myths of the time. Reasons for lack of identification run a gamut of explanations: from poor viewing conditions, observer unawareness of certain aerial phenomena or flight vehicles – and in some cases, no conventional explanation that matches up with observational details or even physical evidence. So, for the last sixty or so years that UFOs have been associated with flying saucers or disks and their possible contents or occupants, perhaps UFO controversies have been based on attempts to identify phenomena rather than the contrary: identify as conventional and sundry or else as other-worldly. Curiously, for their own purposes, sometimes authorities change sides.
While UFOs have been chronicled throughout history, the current cultural phenomenon grew up with the commencement of the Cold War and nuclear weapons, experiencing some gestation events not only around snowy Mt. Rainier in 1947, but also nearby the home base of the bombers that dropped the atomic bombs during World War II. Strangely enough, the history of the 509th Bomb Group based at Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico is quite detailed surrounding August 1945 operations, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unit decisions related to weather and other technicalities actually determined the second target city. But there are sparse official records related to events in July of 1947 when there were claims of a crashed flying disk nearby, supposedly recovered at the base. Small wonder that a powerful myth has grown from this connection.
In the Moscow spring at the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, the once crusading magazine Ogonyok published a feature article for Cosmonautics Day (April 12th, the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first orbital flight). The topic was UFOs and the Soviet Union’s equivalent study to the American Blue Book. A sensational story impossible to verify, it purported that Stalin, concerned about reports coming from the US such as mentioned, had turned for answers to his rocket brain trust led by Sergei Korolev, the eventual Chief Designer of the launcher of Gagarin’s spacecraft and the first sputnik. Comrade Stalin ordered a white paper from Sergei Pavlovich as to whether flying saucers posed an obstacle “to the construction of socialism”. The article cited UFO incidents in the Soviet Union as well, especially on army bases and at missile sites. It also claimed that all US public libraries with July 1947 bound newspaper editions covering the Roswell story of a crashed flying disk had had the pages ripped out. It also mis-matched US cities with states as well as confused desert and forest climates.
Like UFO lore, there is a certain style to Stalin stories too. The Soviet defector writing under pseudonym Viktor Suvorov recounts what happened when several B-29s made forced landings in Siberia after conventional bombing raids on Japan during World War II. When the first aircraft was reported, Stalin ordered aircraft designer Tupolev and team to make a complete and exact copy of it, the Tu-4. Dealing with this modern Genghis Khan, there soon arose the issue of determining whether he wanted red or a white stars painted on the wings and tail , an identification issue for a flying object as well as an indication of how even small details of orders were issues of life and death. Gambling, the design team decided on red. As for the white paper, Korolev, who had already served in prison camps like Tupolev, avoided a return by reporting that he saw no direct opposition from UFOs to state political objectives. UFOs seemed more capricious than political.
Thereafter, it is possible that UFOs were enlisted to insure secrecy of more ordinary military activities. Chroniclers of Soviet space flight such as Jim Oberg note how the official press encouraged readers to think that sightings of missile tests were UFOs perhaps from outer space. Many rocket upper stages provided high altitude pinwheel or spiral fireworks; and even as recently as November 2009, an unsuccessful missile test over the Arctic generated UFO reports all over Scandinavia with such displays.
Correspondingly, on this side of the former Iron Curtain, my own informal logging of UFO reports sometimes encounters a similar phenomenon. In 1984 a co-worker related to me his experience in Arizona years earlier watching two or three F-15 fighters in pursuit of a UFO that looked like a flying arrow head. Several years later, witnessing an F-119 stealth fighter flying overhead at a nearby air show, I realized what he was talking about. In the early 1980s its existence had not been public knowledge. Such case files move from UFO to “identified” without much of a post mortem, but does that necessarily make all UFO incidents ripe for explanation by “Black Programs” going public years or decades later? I would say, no.
From my own canvassing of air crew veteran friends and acquaintances and review of professional engineering investigations such as the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, sometimes US military flights do in fact encounter UFO phenomena and the incidents are not easy to categorize summarily: luminescent formations of lights that approach and track aircraft for hours, geometric forms that behave similarly, and sometimes simply radar bogeys that are not sighted by crews. We provide on line references to a 1957 illustrative, yet not exceptional case involving an air force RB-47 reconnaissance aircraft followed by a luminous, highly maneuverable object over Texas and Louisiana for over an hour.
These cases can be distinguished from re-entering space objects, missiles spiraling out of control or cloud formations. Nothing in these varied encounters, however, provides solid evidence of extra-terrestrial origin (or terrestrial origin for that matter) or clearly distinguishes intelligent control from say that of a flock of birds. Perhaps some of these encounters are actually with ball lightning, which would make such sightings an atmospheric phenomenon, but one that is hardly better understood than the mystery it is supposed to solve.
Occasionally a UFO can stall out airport activity by landing on and blocking a r27unway. Events reported a continent away ( e.g., Siberia), and then resonating around the world, seldom provide additional information. Truly these are cases where you just had to have been there.
Private as opposed to government investigations of UFOs have provided case studies with some physical evidence on the ground: burned landing sites, reported injuries of witnesses such as the incident in east Texas in the early 1980s and damage to property or livestock. But just as many investigators have made counter claims of irregularities in the claims and especially the conclusions. If nothing else, if one considers all the sensational claims of sponsored UFO investigations, not all could be true if any are at all.
Sometimes even orthodox scientific explanations can be swept into this bin as well. About twenty years ago when “crop circles” became endemic in the English country-side, there were those who claimed that the phenomenon was related to messages from UFOs (not necessarily observed in proximity!) and then there was at least one group that suggested that battered down field crops were caused by an unusual meteorological “vorticity” phenomenon. While some science magazines preferred to promote the second explanation, eventually a group of pranksters came forward and explained how they did their art work with boards and ropes, drawing curves on a large scale. There should have been a lesson for both theoretical camps in that outcome.
Inherent in the debate about UFOs is the notion that the inexplicable in terms of natural phenomena are examples of visitation of the Earth by beings from other worlds. In the 1950s such speculation or assertions placed the visitors just beyond our door steps, probably with bases on the other side of the moon, resident under the clouds of Venus or surely on Mars. Beside those of us who were still children then, even adults could toy with such notions since all these regions were still areas that had not yet shed their veils.
But over the years they have. As the moon was examined closer and closer and astronauts footprints were contemplated in terms of how long they would stand as testimony, one could then infer that skid marks from alien spaceships should have criss-crossed the surface as well.
We are still searching for any artifact at all and we are also reminded of Enrico Fermi’s query in the 1940s before all the excitement started: “Where is everybody?”. Twenty years ago, the Long Duration Exposure Facility free flying satellite was brought back to Earth by a Space Shuttle recovery team. The surfaces exposed for several years recorded nicks from paint flecks and other debris of human spaceflight efforts as well as meteoritic dust, but nothing that could be identified as synthetic from extra-terrestrial sources. It was not that anyone knew what to look for exactly, but at least a researcher would be tipped off by samples with anomalous isotope ratios.
In the meantime though, we have a UFO logos overwhelmed by its attached mythos. Books and broadcasts recount and perhaps document our UFO history in a way that reflects grass root revolt against official explanations rather than a pervasive belief of the public. One suspects that in the case of the Roswell incident, people are reluctant to believe either in crash dummies and weather balloons or in little green or gray men. Where cable channel sponsored investigators explore other sites, the viewer is exposed to basic stories of the lore, but also becomes wary of water-treading exercises between commercial breaks. There is more air time than substantive dialog can fill.
In problem solving classes such as physics or math, there are days when students en masse head for the blackboard to display their homework results. With false modesty the best students preface their solutions to the toughest problems saying that, “Actually, it was a straight forward problem…” Sure, and maybe that’s what our problem is with UFO riddles: we still just don’t get the straight forward part about it. But unlike the class room problems, would we feel any better saying that we had them all solved?
References:
1. “RB-47 – Case Report for the AIAA”
Source: James E. McDonald, Ph. D., Astronautics & Aeronautics, July 1971
http://www.ufoevidence.org/Cases/CaseSubarticle.asp?ID=667
http://ufologie.net/htm/rb47.htm
