Reports of angel hair still come in occasionally to ATIC and, if the explanation is not immediately obvious, are investigated. On the afternoon of October 12, 1959, officials at Robins Air Force Base, Georgia, received a telephone call stating that unidentified substances were falling from unknown objects in the sky near the town of Washington. Two Air Force investigators arrived in the town before evening to interview the witnesses and examine the material.
The first sighting had occurred shortly before noon, when a farm woman noticed an object in the sky, traveling not particularly fast from southeast to west. A stream of peculiar-looking substance, broad as the vapor trail of a jet plane, was trailing behind and floating toward the earth. The object itself was “as large as a football,” brown or black in color, and maintained a perfectly straight, even course. A few hours later in a town a few miles northeast, a man mowing his lawn noticed on the grass two whitish-gray streaks about ten feet long and eight inches wide, extending from east to west. Deciding that the peculiar streaks were a fungus or a mold, he mowed across them; at once a gray dust rose about twenty inches into the air and then settled back to earth.
The Air Force investigators took samples of the dusty earth and grass for analysis. Chemical tests showed the presence of silver iodide. Finding silver in such an unlikely place posed a problem, but it also pointed the way to a solution. Silver iodide and other silver halides are used in cloud seeding to produce rain; long “plumes” of this material, ejected from planes, have been successfully tracked in mountainous country for distances of thirty-five miles downwind. A few questions in the right places produced the answer: research teams from the University of Georgia at Athens and from the Lockheed plant at Marietta had been in the air that day, carrying out experiments in cloud seeding. The angel hair was the silver iodide used in the experiment[[XI-10]].
Angel hair of less mysterious origin has now found its way into the culinary world. The restaurant of the Hotel Bristol in Córdoba, Argentina, offers “Angel-hair soup,” very fine threadlike spaghetti in chicken broth.
The Wisconsin Pancakes
Of the many substances offered the public as proof of extraterrestrial visitors, probably few have evoked more publicity than the Wisconsin pancakes. According to a plumber named Joe Simonton, of Eagle River, Wisconsin, a flying saucer with three peculiarly dressed occupants appeared in his yard on April 18, 1961, and hovered a few feet above the ground. When one of the saucermen indicated by sign language that he was thirsty and held out a two-handled jug, Simonton obligingly filled it with well water and handed it back. Looking through the open hatchway, he saw another spaceman cooking something on a kind of grill. When the spaceman noticed the terrestrial’s interest, he presented him with three “pancakes” from the grill—thin, oblong, greasy, rubbery pastries perforated by small round holes and smelling strongly of goose grease. The saucer then departed. Although Simonton’s curiosity apparently stopped short of tasting these gifts, he took them to a friend of his in Eagle River, a county judge and a member in good standing of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP)[[XI-12]].
Eager to learn whether the flapjacks came from this world or another, the judge promptly mailed one of them to NICAP headquarters in Washington, D.C., explained its history and requested an analysis. At the same time he gave the story, as far as it went, to the newspapers. After two weeks of anxious waiting, on May 7 he again wrote to NICAP, protesting their failure to acknowledge his parcel and demanding either an analysis or the pancake. This time he received a prompt reply: NICAP deplored the publicity involving the organization with such a fantastic-sounding claim, but agreed to send the stuff to a chemist.
Meanwhile time was passing and pancakes, at least terrestrial ones, don’t last forever. Without waiting for the report from the chemist the judge submitted one of the remaining pancakes to Air Force investigators of UFOs. On May 25—the cakes were now more than a month old—he wrote a third letter, excoriating NICAP for its lack of enthusiasm over the evidence, and sent a carbon copy to Ray Palmer, editor of Flying Saucers, who in the early days of UFOs had been their staunch proponent (see [Chapter II]). The magazine promptly published the letter, with comments, as well as an editorial that solemnly reproached NICAP for its attitude toward contactee stories in general[[XI-13]].
If the magazine and the judge had planned the entire episode deliberately to embarrass NICAP, they could not have timed it better. Busy trying to promote a Congressional hearing on flying saucers, NICAP apparently had no time, facilities, or inclination to investigate flapjacks of such dubious origin. Interrupted by phone calls, besieged by reporters, and generally harassed, NICAP mailed the cake to an Ohio physics professor, a member of the organization, in the hope that he could induce his colleague in the chemistry department to analyze the cake. Since the chemistry professor was ill, the physics professor returned the specimen to headquarters in Washington. Old and tired as it must have been by this time, the cake then was dispatched to New York to another NICAP member, a chemist, who began some preliminary tests.
Sometime during these weeks the Air Force announced the results of its analysis. The pancakes consisted of starch, fat, buckwheat hulls, soybean hulls, wheat bran, and other common substances; bacteriological and radiation readings were normal[[XI-14]]. Obviously the specimen had been an ordinary pancake fried on earth—or else the spacemen’s home planet produced grains that are indistinguishable from those flourishing on earth.