Normally the air is warmest at the surface of the earth and steadily gets colder at greater and greater heights. Sometimes this condition is reversed, particularly in the broad deserts and prairies of the Southwest, where the changes between the day’s heat and the night’s cold may be sudden and extreme. The ground cools off rapidly during the night and imparts this coldness to the layer of air immediately above. Thus the air may be warmer some distance above the ground. When such a “temperature inversion” occurs, light going through the air bends in a peculiar way (see [Figure 7]), so that the image is displaced far more than normally. The inversion may produce fuzzy or greatly distorted images, and when there are several layers of alternating hot and cold air, the effects may be spectacular. At the boundaries between the layers the distortion and displacement increase greatly. A star or a planet seen through such an atmosphere may display apparently violent motions, peculiar shapes, and fantastic color changes; light clouds drifting over the bright stars may increase this illusion of motion[[IV-3]]. The rising or setting sun, although actually below the horizon, may project upward several images of itself, one on the top of another, to form a kind of Chinese pagoda, or a “bell pepper.” And the twinkling top rung of the pagoda may simulate a whirling propeller.
The “Whipping Girl” of Saucerdom
The planets are wanderers. Each day they move to a new position among the constellations. Astronomers and navigators have learned the paths of the planets and the positions of the brightest fixed stars, but most of us, when we look up at the night sky and see a brilliant stranger among the familiar star groups, must cudgel our brains to account for it. According to our dispositions, we may consult a newspaper or telephone an observatory to find out the name of the intruder, or we may conclude that the unknown is an alien spacecraft.
The planet Venus has been chased at least once by patrolmen in a squad car, has several times caused the scrambling of jet interceptors, and has been named the culprit in so many UFO mysteries that saucer enthusiasts somewhat cynically refer to it as “the whipping girl” of saucerdom.
The brightest of the planets and the closest to earth, Venus never moves more than 45 degrees from the sun and thus is most often visible in our skies near sunrise or sunset, preceding or following the sun. The apparent size of the planet varies according to its distance from the earth and its phase. When it is farthest from the earth, the disk has a diameter of ten seconds; at its closest, the diameter has grown sixfold, to sixty-four seconds. The human eye and the ordinary camera see it as a brilliant white star. Being nearer the sun, Venus receives almost twice as much light from the sun as does the earth, and when at greatest brilliance, can be seen in the daytime sky. Viewed momentarily through rapidly moving cirrus clouds, it may seem to be racing across the sky like a flying saucer, but a longer look will reveal that the object is actually making very slow progress, like a planet[[IV-4]].
To the airman in the cockpit of a plane, the planet in the dawn sky can be a breathtaking sight. As one veteran pilot has described the experience, “Venus rose to signal me from the eastern horizon, so brilliant and inconsistent in color, changing at once from yellow to green to purple and then reversing the show, that I thought for a time it was another aircraft equipped with special lighting devices. But Venus steadied in time, proving its identity.”[[IV-5]]
During the spring of 1956 Venus stimulated an unusual amount of flying-saucer excitement. About 9:00 E.S.T. on the nights of March 20, 21, and 22, dozens of persons in Cincinnati, Ohio, telephoned the newspapers and the local headquarters of Civilian Research Interplanetary Flying Objects (CRIFO), to report an unidentified flying object that was burning “like a beacon” in the western sky. A reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer stated: “To the naked eye, the object appeared to be an extraordinarily intense bluish white light ... through binoculars, the object appeared to be a compact galaxy of lights, changing form as they revolved slowly. At one point, with binoculars set slightly out of focus, it assumed the appearance of a diamond brooch ringed with emeralds turning lazily on an eccentric axis.” The object was visible for nearly an hour, moved slowly to the northwest, and disappeared.
Astronomers quickly identified the unknown as Venus. To the saucer enthusiasts, however, it appeared as a low-flying luminous object with swept-back wings, hovering in the west, making no sound, and displaying colors that changed from red to white. While admitting that some of the reported sightings might have been Venus, the editor of Orbit (the official publication of CRIFO) argued that an object that changed shape and sparkled like diamonds and emeralds could not possibly be Venus. He stated “that the public should know that out of seventeen UFO reports received for a three day period, ten were explainable as Venus but six were not! These stubborn six defied all conventional explanation.”[[IV-6]]
While the fate of the seventeenth UFO may require further explanation, the flying saucer reports did not offer a real puzzle. The time, the position, the colors, and the apparent motions of the object were entirely consistent with those expected for the planet under the prevailing atmospheric conditions. Dr. Paul Herget of the Cincinnati Observatory had easily identified the “mysterious” object. He added that Venus would continue to get brighter and brighter until the middle of May, and that the number of UFOs sighted would probably increase correspondingly.
He was right. Less than three weeks after the excitement in Cincinnati, Venus inspired one of the most notorious “Unknowns” in the history of saucerdom, one that evoked charges of fraud, falsehood, and conspiracy on a grand scale.