As complicating factors, certain heavenly bodies made their own contribution to the excitement. Most of the objects observed late at night and watched for periods of one to three hours were refracted images of the stars Capella or Aldebaran or the planet Mars.
Some of the most spectacular sightings were those reported from Red Bluff on the night of August 13–14. Two highway patrolmen were chasing a speeding motorcycle when, at about 11:50 P.M. P.D.S.T., they saw what they at first supposed to be a brilliantly lighted aircraft falling directly toward them. Jumping out of their car, they watched the object as it apparently reversed its course, shot upward, and began to perform fantastic maneuvers in the eastern sky. The performance continued for more than two hours. Before it ended, a second UFO had joined in the celestial dance, which was observed by dozens of excited witnesses in the Red Bluff area.
Air Force bases in the neighborhood were notified, and ATIC investigators gathered and studied the evidence. There was no real mystery[XII-1]. The UFO first noticed by the patrolmen was probably the star Capella, which at Red Bluff is circumpolar; it rose at 10:50 P.M. and at the time of the sighting was about 4.7 degrees above the northeast horizon. About an hour later (12:48 A.M.) Mars rose, also in the northeast; and close behind it (1:15 A.M.) came the bright star Aldebaran, which made a striking pair with Mars. With three brilliant heavenly bodies just above the horizon, on a night of fantastic multiple inversions of temperature and humidity, the only surprising fact is that the number of UFOs reported was not larger.
A person who has never been lucky enough to see a good mirage may feel skeptical about the phenomenon. But those who have encountered a first-rate specimen—for example, the Chicago skyline suspended upside down in mid-air above Lake Michigan—know how startlingly real it can seem. When the source of the mirage is not apparent, the displaced image can seem mysterious and even frightening, as do many UFOs.
One such phenomenon, which might easily have been interpreted as a flying saucer, appeared shortly after dark one evening in mid-July, 1954, and was described by Dr. Menzel in a letter to a friend:
“My wife and I were driving to Alamosa, Colorado, on one of the longest, straightest stretches of highway in the United States, commonly referred to as the ‘gun-barrel highway.’ I had turned over the wheel to her and was settling back for a rest, after a long turn at driving over the mountains, when I became aware of unusual driving behavior on her part. First she would step on the gas, then on the brake, then on the gas again. ‘What is the matter? What are you trying to do?’ I asked. ‘See that truck ahead?’ she replied. ‘Every time I try to pass it, it speeds up, and then it slows down when I try to give it a chance to get ahead of me. It’s making me nervous.’
“I peered ahead through the darkness and there, sure enough, about three hundred feet ahead of us was a truck, its dark body brilliantly outlined with red and white lights. I studied the situation and glanced at the speedometer, which read forty miles per hour. ‘Well,’ I advised her, ‘you certainly ought to be able to pass that, dear, the way you usually drive.’ And this time she really stepped on the gas, pushing the speed up to sixty, seventy, eighty, and finally eighty-five. And would you believe it, that truck took right out ahead, still holding its estimated three hundred feet clearance, and matched us for every mile of that speed. By this time I was beginning to get an idea. ‘Slow down,’ I said. My wife obliged me by coming to a dead stop, brakes squealing.
“‘Now see there,’ she said, ‘I just escaped running into that truck.’ And the truck had stopped, still 300 feet ahead. At this point I ventured my conclusion. ‘That isn’t a truck,’ I explained. ‘It’s a flying saucer.’ ‘You have flying saucers on the brain,’ she said. Well, to shorten the story, she started the car again and the ‘truck’ moved off. And we chased it in that fashion for about fifty miles. On rare occasions, as we dipped slightly in a hollow, the truck would seem to dash ahead at speeds close to 1000 miles an hour. Or sometimes it would jump straight up, momentarily vanish, and then drop back into the road.
“The explanation was quite simple. The hot day had warmed the air close to the pavement, but the cooling of the surface at the onset of darkness had caused a layer of warm air to be sandwiched in between the cold air close to the road surface and the cold air above. This acted like a lens which produced an out-of-focus image of a bright tavern sign more than fifty miles away, a real mirage. There were few cars on the road, but as we met them the effect was most startling because some of them were so enlarged by the lens effect that a car five miles away seemed to be rushing directly at us only a block or two ahead. Sometimes these cars would appear to come to a sharp stop, reverse their course and disappear in the distance. At other times they would appear to be rushing on us upside down, with part of the road itself in the sky. Altogether it was a weird experience, but not in any sense supernatural. Lenses of air, either close to the ground or in the sky, can produce strange illusions.”
In this case, as in many UFO puzzles, the solution depended on a knowledge of the weather conditions and of the facts of local geography. If the pursuing car had turned off the road or stopped for the night before reaching the tavern, the specific cause of the phenomenon might still be a mystery.