The Role of Unusual Coincidence
Analogous unlikely coincidences account for many flying-saucer reports. The factors that encourage the misinterpretation may be the particular time or place at which the phenomenon appears, the kind of weather, the experience, physical state, or mood of the observer, his unawareness of a certain fact, or any combination of these and other relevant circumstances.
A fairly simple case of this type was the reported landing of a spacecraft near an Army barracks (often referred to in saucer publications as the “Nike site”) in a rural area of Maryland, shortly before dawn on the morning of September 29, 1958. The sergeant on duty that morning left the orderly room at 4:25 A.M. and started to the barracks to waken the troops. The sky was clear, with bright moonlight. Hearing a whirring sound like a pitched baseball with a loose cover, he looked up toward the west to see a brilliant round white object soaring through the sky from north to south, and breaking up into smaller pieces as it traveled. It disappeared behind the roof of the mess hall, directly to the west, after being in view about two seconds. Hurrying around the south side of the mess hall to search the western horizon, he observed a very bright white, pulsating light at ground level, apparently in a wooded area some four or five miles west of the battery site, as though the glowing object had landed there. He reported the incident to an officer, who measured the azimuth position of the unknown. The glow remained in one place but diminished with increasing daylight until it was no longer visible.
Air Force investigators arrived that afternoon. They had already received many reports that a brilliant fireball had flashed through the sky at 4:25 A.M., the time in question, and had been observed by many witnesses in the area between Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but no fireball could account for the ground light. The next morning at 5:15 A.M. an intensely white, fluctuating light was observed at the same place and was studied through binoculars until daylight made it invisible; it could be seen only from the west side of the mess hall, and one step to the right or left would hide it from the observer. Traveling toward the position of the unknown, investigators found a dairy barn three miles away, and on a direct line of sight from the place the UFO had been observed. On one end of the barn was a 200-watt floodlight with a white reflector, still burning. On questioning the farmer, they learned that until recently the light had been burned out and had not been in use. The early hour of sunrise during the summer had provided all the light he needed to milk his cows. With the shorter days of autumn, however, he had needed the light and had replaced the bulb only a few days before. On the morning of the sighting, he had turned on the light a few minutes before the sergeant had noticed it[XII-1].
Thus several unrelated factors had combined to produce the illusion of a landed space vehicle: 1) only a week earlier, newspapers had publicized the alleged landing of a flying saucer in Sheffield Lake, Ohio (see [Chapter XIII]); 2) a brilliant fireball had appeared; 3) a farmer had turned on a floodlight, previously out of use for several months; 4) the meteor had disappeared and the floodlight had appeared in roughly the same position as viewed by the observer.
The Problem of Unknown Lights
At night, when an observer notices a light appearing out of the darkness, he usually cannot see the object that produces or carries the light. Under familiar conditions on the ground or in the air he usually interprets the light correctly, by a kind of informed guesswork, as that of an automobile, an advertising sign, an airport beacon, a plane, a star, etc. But if it appears under unfamiliar conditions or in unexpected circumstances, he has to make an uninformed guess based on largely unconscious estimates of its size, distance, height, color, and rate of movement. To the driver of a car on a dark country road, a single light suddenly appearing ahead may indicate a plane or a star low in the sky or something on the road itself—a motorcycle, a car with only one headlight working, a workman’s lantern, a pedestrian carrying a flashlight, or something else. A double light may mean another automobile, two motorcycles traveling parallel, an animal whose eyes shine in the approaching headlight, or something else. The driver cannot be sure he interprets the light correctly until he passes it and can see the object itself or until he can identify it in some other way.
Michigan’s Flying Bird Cage
A UFO sighting based on mistaken identification of strange lights occurred in the early morning hours of March 22, 1959, near Ann Arbor, Michigan. The night was clear, the moon was nearly full, and visibility was unusually good. At about 1:30 A.M. a man and his wife driving on a country road suddenly noticed a strange object hovering in the sky south of the road. According to their report to the Air Force, the UFO was an elongated oval with a dome on top, something like a bird cage, and brilliantly illuminated by two shafts of intense pale-yellow light that sprang from the bottom and converged over the top. Frightened at this apparition, the witnesses could provide only uncertain estimates of distance and size. The object seemed to be twenty to thirty feet in diameter, was at an altitude of about 200 feet when first seen, and was hovering about two miles away. As they drove on, the object seemed to move and travel parallel with the car for about a mile. Then the yellow lights dimmed and a circle of eight or ten red lights suddenly appeared on the underside, the UFO rose vertically, very rapidly, and vanished in a few seconds. It had been in view for a period of five to ten minutes.
Checking the most probable explanations first, ATIC officials found that the nearby Willow Run Airport had had no aircraft in the vicinity at the time and that no star or planet seemed to be involved. Further investigation showed that the flying bird cage was actually the radio telescope of the University of Michigan. The telescope was installed on the top of Peach Mountain and was clearly visible from the road on which the witnesses were traveling. On the underside of the eighty-five-foot “dish” was a wire-mesh structure that suggested the bird cage. At the time of the sighting the dish was facing in the direction of the witnesses and was illuminated by a floodlight as well as by the bright moonlight. It had seemed to be following the car only because the car itself was moving. The astronomers operating the telescope were rotating the dish from the horizon to the zenith, and the yellow lights dimmed because the witnesses were seeing less and less of the surface. The “circle” of red lights was the red aircraft-warning lights on the WUOM radio tower, which lay in a direct line between the telescope and the witnesses. When the dish reached the zenith and was pointed to the sky overhead, the operating crew turned off the floodlights. The dish was no longer visible to the witnesses, who interpreted the sudden disappearance as a sudden vertical ascent into the sky[XII-1].