In UFO publications, any oddly shaped chunk of rock or metal is likely to be described as a fragment of an interplanetary craft. A six-inch meteorite that fell at Sylacauga, Alabama, ([Chapter V]) has been classified in one saucer book as an “unidentified crashed object.”[[XI-16]] By peculiar reverse logic, sometimes the absence of a solid fragment is adduced as equally valid evidence of flying saucers. The green fireballs of New Mexico ([Chapter V]) were identified as spacecraft partly because they did not leave material traces on the ground. Similarly, when a small object apparently struck and went through a metal signboard in New Haven, Connecticut, on August 19, 1953, the object itself could not be found. Nevertheless, from a study of the size and shape of the hole and the material around the hole, saucer investigators, with more than Sherlockian skill, concluded that the object must have been a missile from outer space.
To identify “pieces of saucers,” a new pseudoscience has now developed which we may call “xenochemistry,” the interpretation of substances allegedly from other planets. In xenochemistry, a full qualitative and quantitative analysis is usually not performed and exact results are not made public. From an identification and sometimes a quantitative estimate of one or two of the elements present in the specimen, the investigator infers the nature of the rest and treats the inference as proved fact. On the basis of this “analysis” he concludes that the object, before it entered our atmosphere, must have had a certain chemical composition that is unknown or impossible on earth and that the object therefore came from another planet.
Silver Rain in Brazil
One of the most publicized substances to be analyzed in this way was the “silver rain” that allegedly fell from an unidentified flying object in Brazil. The incident occurred on December 13, 1954, in the city of Campinas and the witness was a housewife but, as in many UFO sightings, exactly what happened is not easy to find out[XI-17]. UFO publications in England, New Zealand, and the United States reported that the sighting had occurred at night but, in spite of the darkness, the witness had observed the objects in detail. She described three gray-colored, circular flying saucers; each was made up of two sections or plates, one placed on top of the other; the top plate rotated continuously and sent out a strong light. Moving soundlessly and in close formation, the three saucers had performed fantastic acrobatics over the city, apparently unnoticed by the other residents. Suddenly one of them had peeled off and dived low over the roof of the woman’s house, lighting up the whole neighborhood with the brilliant glare of its rotating section; then, going into a high-speed climb, it dropped at her feet a liquid substance that fell “like silver rain.”
According to the more generally accepted and more probable version, the incident occurred in the morning in full daylight. The housewife was feeding her poultry when she heard a noise on the ground near her feet. Stooping down, she observed a pool of shiny liquid, like silver rain, which solidified within a few seconds. Looking up, she saw three large objects moving rapidly high in the sky and they looked to her like flying saucers.
A reporter on the Campinas Correio Popular, hearing rumors that a flying saucer had dropped strange material “something like lead,” interviewed the woman, collected some fragments that a neighbor had picked up, and took them to a local chemist for analysis. The newspaper then reported that the stuff was absolutely pure tin—that is, it was about 90 per cent pure tin and the rest was either oxidation or metal alloys that were unknown on earth[XI-17], [XI-18], [XI-19].
Understandably interested in this report, members of the Brazilian Air Force also interviewed the witness and collected some of the fragments she showed them, as well as other fragments that had fallen about the same time in other parts of the city. Laboratory analysis showed the material to be merely solder. Several large airports not far from Campinas might well have had large planes in the air; they could have dropped the solder. The Air Force obviously saw no need to invoke the presence of extraterrestrial vehicles to account for the incident and considered the problem solved, but Brazilian saucer enthusiasts refused to accept this explanation. In their opinion the Air Force had either gotten hold of the wrong material or was covering up the true facts.
Two years later, in the autumn of 1956, the reporter who had ordered the original analysis received another collection of fragments and turned them over to a group of civilian investigators of UFO phenomena. Although he did not know the full history of the new fragments (unfortunately he had forgotten the names of the persons who gave them to him), he himself was convinced that they were part of the original shower of silver rain. Accepting this theory, the civilians sent the fragments to the United States for analysis: one part to a sympathetic scientist at an Ohio college, who asked a chemist colleague to test the material, and another to a commercial chemist in New York. When the New York chemist, like the Brazilian Air Force in 1954, reported that the material was an ordinary tin solder, the UFO group concluded that the fragment sent him must have been spurious, and refused to accept his findings. The Ohio chemist reported that his specimen contained tin, did not contain antimony, and had a density of 10.3. Since the density of tin is 7.3, the sample obviously contained other elements in addition to tin.
With the reports in hand, the editor of the Brazilian UFO Critical Bulletin published the xenochemical conclusion under the headline, “Stuff Analyzed by American and Brazilian Scientists Proves the UFOs Are Non-Terrestrial Flying Machines.”[[XI-18]]
The full facts on which this conclusion rests should presumably be available for study, but they have never been published. The origin of the 1956 fragments is unknown; they may or may not have been part of the 1954 fall. But the 1954 incident at least offered an apparently ideal chance to establish beyond doubt the exact composition of a substance that fell from some object in the sky, and to determine whether it came from earth or from beyond. The material did not deliquesce or disappear, as gossamer and industrial waste may do, but remained available for analysis. Incredibly, this ideal chance was lost. Of the several chemists involved, none made a complete qualitative, quantitative, and spectroscopic analysis, and none published his complete data. The Ohio chemist, busy with ordinary duties, had time to make only a preliminary analysis of the 1956 fragment. He did not determine the amount of tin present and did not determine what elements other than tin were in the sample. The density of the 1954 sample is not known and the results of the complete qualitative, quantitative, and spectrographic tests, if performed, are not available.