Chapter IV
THE SPANGLED HEAV’NS: STARS AND PLANETS
Shortly before dawn on March 3, 1955, a spectacular flying saucer appeared over Alaska. The witness, a civilian scientist with the rank of Commander in the United States Navy, was returning from the North Pole on the daily Air Force Ptarmigan weather flight; his mission had been to study the effect of the aurora on radio propagation, for the Department of Defense. He described his experience as follows:
A Mirage of Sirius
“We were flying southwest of Point Barrow, Alaska, not far from Bering Strait, en route to Eielson Air Force Base in Fairbanks, and our course was roughly southeast. The night was clear and the stars shone brilliantly. I was looking out of the western bomb blister when suddenly I saw a bright object shoot in at tremendous speed from the horizon, directly toward the plane. At first I thought it was a meteor or a fireball and I instinctively ducked, but the object came to a sudden skidding stop about 300 feet away, thereafter riding along with our plane and keeping pace with our speed. I could scarcely believe my eyes. The thing possessed green and red signal lights that flashed back and forth, and something that looked like a lighted propeller on the top. Beyond question, it was a flying saucer.
“I wondered if the thing might be a hallucination, brought on by fatigue. After all, we had been in the air almost seventeen hours. I cleaned my spectacles and rubbed my eyes, but the Saucer was still there, pacing the plane and bobbing up and down as the plane itself occasionally wove or dipped. My next thought was to eliminate all possible chance that the thing was an internal reflection. I pulled my fur parka up over my head and put my face smack against the bulging surface of the blister that formed the window. Thus shielded from all internal illumination, I could still see the glowing object. I next drew a pencil from my pocket and held it out at arm’s length, and was surprised to find that the glowing disk was somewhat smaller than the eraser. I made a rapid calculation and concluded that if the sphere was actually 300 feet away, as it seemed, then it was only a foot or two in diameter, not much larger than a basketball. My next thought was whether one of the radio parachutes had somehow or other got attached to the plane by the string. These objects, brilliantly lit by an electric light, can be quite startling. But it had been nearly half an hour since the last parachute release and the meteorologists were just getting ready to lower another through the trap. I decided to call the meteorologist to look at the thing. But before I could call out, as if it had read my mind the object suddenly took off at top speed and disappeared. Now I was really concerned. In less than two seconds the UFO had vanished over the coast of Siberia, some 200 miles away. It must have been traveling at the fantastic speed of more than 100 miles a second. The Korean War was over but our relations with the Soviet Union were still tense, and I wondered if the object might be a secret Russian missile on reconnaissance. I kept my eyes glued to the point where the saucer had disappeared and suddenly, a couple of minutes later, it shot back toward the plane, more brilliant and spectacular than the first time.
“You can perhaps imagine my relief when I suddenly realized what the object was, and at the same time realized that I had hit on the answer to a great many flying-saucer reports of a similar nature. Only someone familiar with the constellations could have identified the object. It was a mirage of Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens. Actually Sirius was slightly below the horizon at this time, but the bending of the light had raised the image above the horizon and had diffused the beam into the saucerlike form. The flashing red and green lights were common phenomena associated with star twinkling, and the apparent structure, including the whirling propeller, resulted from distortion by the earth’s atmosphere.
“But why had the image taken off the way it did, and then rushed back? The moving plane of course was continually changing position relative to the ground features. A mountain peak on the distant horizon had briefly come between the plane and the star, obscuring the light. The light was not cut off all at once, however. Thus as the image dimmed it seemed to shrink, as though it were racing away. This temporary barrier also explained the sudden stops and starts and the tremendous instantaneous acceleration the object seemed to make at the instant it appeared. The large atmospheric lens was simply focusing the light of the star in the general direction of the plane and thus it was centered with my eye. That is why the object seemed to duplicate the motion of the plane.
“I watched the object for several minutes after its return. I was able to get full confirmation of this identification when the star rose over the western horizon; it rose in the west because the southward motion of the plane more than compensated for the westward rotation of the star. And as Sirius came up from the horizon, the ‘flying saucer’ sank back into the brilliant hemisphere of stars, where it belonged.” (The witness in this case was the senior author of this book.)
Sirius has inspired many UFO reports. On December 10, 1952, at 7:15 P.M. P.S.T., the pilot and radar observer of an F-94 on routine patrol duty were over the town of Odessa, Washington, at about 26,000 feet when they saw a large white light in the east[IV-1]. Dim reddish-white lights seemed to be coming from “windows,” and no trail or exhaust was visible. The pilot attempted to intercept but the object performed amazing feats—did a chandelle in front of the plane, rushed away, stopped, and then made straight for the aircraft on a collision course at incredible speed. The pilot banked away to avoid collision, and afterward was not able to locate the object. The radar man then got a brief return but soon lost contact. Although the visual and radar contacts had not coincided, both men assumed that they referred to the same object[[IV-2], p. 65].
Investigators suggested at first that the object might have been one of the Telemuk balloons, but this idea had to be discarded and the sighting was listed as Unknown. A review of the evidence by the present authors suggests a highly probable explanation. Above the low cloud cover at 3000 feet the night was clear and moonless. In the east, Sirius was just rising over the horizon at the exact bearing of the unknown object. Atmospheric refraction would have produced exactly the phenomenon described. The same atmospheric conditions that caused the mirage of the star would have caused anomalous radar returns (see [Chapter VIII]).