In the Norfolk sighting, unfortunately, the witnesses could not easily have remained in one place to watch for a possible reappearance of the UFOs. If they had circled and flown back, and had been able to find the exact location, they might have seen the disks again.
The Tombaugh Rectangles
A remarkable phenomenon observed in New Mexico in the summer of 1949 has remained among the most puzzling of the Unknowns. As in the Chesapeake Bay case, the facts are not in dispute. The witness was an astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh, at that time in charge of the optical instrumentation of the rocket-firing program at the White Sands Missile Range. He had had thousands of hours of experience in observing the night sky and when still a student had gained fame, after months of patient searching of photographic plates, by locating the image of the planet Pluto near the position long predicted for it by Lowell and Pickering.
On the night of August 20 Tombaugh was sitting with his wife and his mother-in-law in the yard of his home in Las Cruces, watching the stars. There was no moon, and the transparency of the sky was extraordinary, so that even the stars of sixth magnitude, usually barely detectable by the naked eye, were clearly visible. About 10:45 P.M. a geometrically spaced group of six to eight rectangles of light appeared almost directly overhead. Of low luminosity, they were “windowlike” in appearance and yellowish-green in color. The individual rectangles were quite small, not wider than four or five minutes of arc, and the entire group covered a span of about 1 degree (about twice that of the full moon). As they moved noiselessly in a vertical circle path toward the south-southeast, the individual rectangles became foreshortened, the span of the group became smaller, the lights turned brownish and faded from view when 35 to 40 degrees above the horizon. They had been in sight for about three seconds. Mrs. Tombaugh, who did not see the lights until they had moved some distance from the zenith, observed them for only about 1½ seconds before they disappeared. To her they seemed a diffuse greenish glow, interconnecting a span of greenish spots of light. Her eyesight had always been less acute than that of her husband, and they attributed the difference in their descriptions to this difference in vision.
Although Tombaugh had been too startled to count the number of rectangles or to note some other features he wondered about later, he immediately recorded the facts of the observation, sketched the pattern of the formation, and noted his impression that the lights had been part of a rigid structure. He added, “I have done thousands of hours of night sky watching, but never saw a sight so strange as this.” A report of this sighting was forwarded to Air Force officials, who could find no explanation. UFO enthusiasts unhesitatingly pronounced the phenomenon a huge flying saucer—an interpretation that the witness himself never made.
The accounts given to the public unfortunately suffer from various distortions of fact. In its Cassandra-like warning of possible visitors from other planets, Life magazine included the Tombaugh sighting as one of the key cases and in a ten-sentence description managed to include at least six misstatements, some of which added to the “uncanny” nature of the incident. According to this summary[[XII-11]] the year was 1948 (it was 1949); the time was about 11:00 P.M. (it was 10:45 P.M.); the lights were traveling south to north (they were moving northwest to southeast); the object had an oval shape (Tombaugh did not specify a shape); the lights exhibited a glare (they were of low luminosity); their speed was too fast for a plane, too slow for a meteor (no estimate of speed was given). On a nationwide TV show broadcast in 1958 one of the speakers stated specifically that Tombaugh had observed a cigar-shaped object with lighted portholes[[XII-12]]. An “artist’s conception” of the UFO in one publication[[XII-13]] depicts a long, tapered ship with a line of lighted windows, wholly unrelated to Tombaugh’s own sketch, which shows no unifying structure, merely six small rectangles arranged as though each one were at the corner of a hexagon (see [Figure 20]).
Figure 20. Tombaugh’s rectangles. Top, when first seen at zenith; bottom, a few seconds later at 50° above horizon. (Based on sketch by C. W. Tombaugh.)
While keeping an open mind on the possibility of interplanetary travel, Tombaugh himself has never supported the spaceship interpretation so often attributed to him in print but has considered various possible explanations—insects or birds illuminated by ground lights, or reflections of ground lights against the boundary of an inversion layer in the air. Of these, the inversion theory seems the most probable. The layer in such a case must have been extremely thin or extremely weak, otherwise it would have dimmed the brightness of the faint stars he was observing. As in the Chesapeake Bay case, the mysterious rectangles were undoubtedly the special effect of some unique combination of circumstances, unlikely to be repeated. Conditions were ideal for the formation of small sharply localized inversions: the weather was clear, the day had been hot. A small temperature inversion existing at a relatively low elevation and smoke, haze, or dust collecting in a very thin layer at a relatively low altitude were the prerequisites that almost certainly existed. Some unknown cause—in the vicinity of an airfield there are many possibilities—could have produced a ripple in the thin haze layer. This ripple, tipping the haze layer at a slight angle, could have reflected the lighted windows of a house; as the ripple progressed in a wavelike motion along the layer, the reflection would have moved as did the rectangles of light. Conditions of refraction at the interface would have reflected the wave upward.
Tombaugh has recently summarized his convictions on the entire UFO phenomenon as well as on his own sighting: