“You mean it was transparent? Sure, that would do it!”
“Let’s say the airfoil was a rotating plastic disk, absolutely transparent. The blurred, fuzzy look could have been caused by the whirling disk. Neither Gorman nor the C.A.A. men in the tower could possibly see the disk itself.”
“Paul, I think you’ve hit it,” I said. “I can see thc rest of it—the thing was under remote control, radio or radar. And from the way it flew rings around Gorman, whoever controlled it must have been able to see the F-51, either with a television ‘eye’ or by radar,”
“Or by some means we don’t understand,” said Redell. He went on carefully, “In all these saucer cases, keep this in mind: We may be dealing with some totally unknown principle—something completely beyond our comprehension.”
For a moment, I thought he was hunting at some radical discovery by Soviet—captured Nazi scientists. Then I realized what he meant.
“You think they’re interplanetary,” I murmured.
“Why not?” Redell looked surprised. “Isn’t that your idea? I got that impression.”
“Yes, but I didn’t think you believed it. When you said to check on our space plans, I thought you had some secret missile in mind.”
“No, I had another reason. I wanted you to see all the problems involved in space travel. If you accept the interplanetary answer, you have to accept this, too—whoever is looking us over has licked all those problems years ago. Technically, they’d be hundreds of years ahead of us—maybe thousands. It has a lot to do with what they’d be up to here.”
When I mentioned the old sighting reports, I found that Redell already knew about them. He was convinced that the earth had been under observation a long time, probably even before the first recorded sightings.