Many persons concluded that the unknowns must be interplanetary in origin because, as Life magazine commented, no natural object hurtling at such a speed could execute a right-angled turn, and no known machine could fly so fast without making a sound or leaving a trail. No one could quarrel with this statement, but it has no obvious relation to the incident in question. Technical writers are not necessarily trained observers, and these witnesses had no way to make a reliable estimate of the height of the objects. Without an accurate estimate of at least one quantity—true altitude, true size, or true speed—the others are meaningless. The unknowns were probably birds, but they could equally well have been butterflies, bits of paper, or merely ashes blowing over the two-story building.
Winged creatures sometimes avoid the interplanetary label only by staying in sight long enough to be examined. About sundown on May 19, 1955, switchboards at police stations in the Los Angeles area were swamped by telephone calls reporting a fleet of silvery flying saucers, changing formation with incredible speeds “as if playing tag in the sky.” One witness, however, had the presence of mind to get out his binoculars and look at the objects; they were birds with dark wing tips. Thinking they might be geese, he called the State Division of Fish and Game, which identified the “saucers” as a flock of Pelicanus erythrorhynchos, an inland species of pelican that float on the prevailing wind currents[[VI-12]].
Sometimes an observer identifies such objects correctly, but later begins to doubt his own judgment. About 7:30 in the evening of August 26, 1956, a man driving along a highway in California noticed a flock of about nine small birds flying northward, dark against the blue sky. In a random group, they moved freely among themselves as birds do but continued in a northern direction. The witness watched the birds as carefully as possible, but the intermittent glimpses possible when a man is driving a car did not allow him to make good estimates of their size or height. Nevertheless, he guessed at their distance and calculated that they covered an arc of 60 degrees in five seconds, which would mean a speed of about 1000 miles an hour.
Instead of questioning the accuracy of his estimate, for some reason he doubted his first identification. If the objects could fly 1000 miles an hour, he reasoned, then they were not birds after all, and must be flying saucers![[VI-13]]
The Tremonton Movies
One of the most famous controversies resulting from a flight of birds centered on the Tremonton, Utah, films of UFOs.
On the morning of July 2, 1952, a Navy photographer and his family were on their way to California, driving near the town of Tremonton, Utah, not far from the Great Salt Lake. At about 11:10 A.M. the man’s wife noticed something unusual in the sky. Stopping the car, the man observed about a dozen shiny, disklike objects “milling around the sky in a rough formation.” Getting out his movie camera, a Bell and Howell 16-mm. equipped with a 3-inch telephoto lens, he started photographing the group. Just before it disappeared toward the west, one object left the main group and headed east. The photographer obtained about forty feet of film before the objects vanished. After developing the film, he sent it to the Air Force for evaluation, together with his opinion that the objects had been huge and had traveled at very high altitude at supersonic speeds. This was only an impression, however, for as he told investigators from ATIC: “There was no reference point in the sky and it was impossible for me to make any estimate of speed, size, altitude, or distance.”[[VI-8]] The pictures are of such poor quality and show so little that even the most enthusiastic home-movie fan today would hesitate to show them to his friends. Only a stimulated imagination could suggest that the moving objects are anything but very badly photographed birds.
The movies show nothing that can be recognized—merely bright blurs of light moving at random. Their luminosity is not constant, and the spots fade out and then become bright again. The frames include no clouds, no trees, no house, no hill—no known reference point by which to calculate the altitude, size, or distance of the moving lights. After exhaustive study the photographic experts concluded that the negatives had not been tampered with and that, unlike the Lubbock stills, the pictures had been made exactly as described. But pictures of what? The objects were not balloons and not planes. At the time, the experts also rejected the theory that they might be birds because, in their [mistaken] opinion, birds could not produce such bright reflections.
If the Tremonton movies contained no proof that the objects were birds, still less did they contain proof that they were round machines from outer space, and ATIC finally classified the sighting as “Unknown.” Later, however, Captain Ruppelt noted the strong resemblance to sea gulls he observed “riding a thermal” in the sky above San Francisco. They were “so high that you couldn’t see them until they banked just a certain way; then they appeared to be a bright white flash, much larger than one would expect from sea gulls.” [[VI-10], p. 290]
Air Force investigators later concluded that the famous Tremonton movies show merely the large white gulls that soar near Utah’s Great Salt Lake. The objects were photographed shortly before noon on a hot summer’s day, against a deep-blue sky without any clouds to obscure the high sun. The fading and brightening of the lights, their individual motion within the group, and the one object that suddenly left the group, all are consistent with the behavior of a flock of birds, probably gulls, whose plumage is reflecting the sun. The glossy feathers of these birds can flash as brilliantly as a satiny metal surface as they circle and change position with respect to the sun. The birds can be dazzling against the clear, dark-blue sky of the western states. So brilliant is the flash that it wholly obscures the object that is reflecting the light.