[[XI-19]] UFO Critical Bulletin (March-April 1958).
[[XI-20]] News Release No. 98–60, Department of Defense, January 29, 1960.
[[XI-21]] Alamogordo (N. Mex.) Daily News, March 13, 1960.
[[XI-22]] Alamogordo (N. Mex.) Daily News, March 15, 1960.
[[XI-23]] Tacker, L. J. Flying Saucers and the U. S. Air Force. Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960.
Chapter XII
SPECIAL EFFECTS
Some flying-saucer reports, at first glance, do not seem to belong in any of the ordinary categories of sightings such as mistaken identification of air-borne objects or astronomical phenomena. Each of these atypical UFOs forms a class of its own and, when explained, proves to be the “special effect” of a unique situation. Many are misidentified lights or reflections, but since each one derives from a peculiar combination of circumstances that may not have occurred before and is not likely to occur again, accounting for them often requires a certain amount of luck as well as patient detective work.
Let us suppose, for example, that an Iowa farmer telephones the county sheriff one Tuesday afternoon to report that he has just seen a tiger running through his cornfield. When the sheriff arrives an hour later and can find no trace of a tiger, he is baffled; he knows the farmer is neither demented nor a hoaxer, and must have seen something remarkable—but what? The mystery remains unsolved until the sheriff learns from a feature story in Sunday’s paper that on the preceding Tuesday afternoon a trailer truck, carrying a shipment of animals for the Des Moines zoo, had a flat tire while traveling on Highway X near the junction with Route Y. During the stop to repair the tire, a giant eland had escaped from its cage in the trailer; it had been recaptured and the truck had then continued its journey and delivered its cargo intact.
The sheriff can now reconstruct the peculiar combination of events that produced the “tiger” theory. He knows that the section of Highway X where the truck stopped runs parallel to the far side of the farmer’s cornfield. The newspaper account tells him that a giant eland is a large antelope with short, twisted horns and a tawny-colored coat with dark stripes. He concludes that the farmer, having only a few seconds’ glimpse of a strange animal among the corn, had observed the eland’s stripes but had failed to notice its horns, and had therefore mistaken it for a tiger.