Government officials, uncertain of the facts, were reluctant to decide or to state whether there was or was not convincing evidence of extraterrestrial surveillance.
To clear up the potentially explosive atmosphere, the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI), under the Central Intelligence Agency, decided to consult outstanding civilian experts and invited certain eminent scientists to study and evaluate the evidence. For this purpose Air Force investigators assembled the complete data on the cases they considered most significant. They also prepared, on their own initiative, an unofficial report setting forth the evidence which, in the opinion of several investigators, proved conclusively that UFOs were interplanetary objects operating under intelligent control.
After a preliminary meeting late in November 1952, the panel met on January 12, 1953, to begin their study. The chairman was the late Dr. H. P. Robertson, mathematician and physicist, of the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena. The other members were Dr. Luis W. Alvarez, physicist, of the University of California at Berkeley; Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner, an expert on radio propagation; Dr. Samuel A. Goudsmit, physicist, of Brookhaven National Laboratory; and Dr. Thornton W. Page, astronomer, of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Also present were several officers of the OSI. To avoid possible bias, Air Force officers who had actively worked on UFO cases and civilians who were closely identified with such studies were not asked to attend. The cases studied included all the “classics,” such as the Tremonton and other movies, the Mantell and Gorman affairs, the radar sightings at Washington, D.C., as well as other less well-known reports.
One incident that particularly engaged the attention of the panel, and would probably have become a famous classic except that Air Force investigators had kept it a strict secret, was the sighting at Presque Isle Air Force Base in northern Maine. On October 10, 1952, at about 10 P.M. E.S.T., a group of weather observers had noticed a bright-orange object hovering low on the eastern horizon and had set up a theodolite to measure its altitude and bearing. As the glowing unknown slowly rose higher above the horizon and seemed to come closer, it appeared through the telescope of the theodolite as a circular disk accompanied by four flickering green lights, two on each side. Alarmed by this spectacular phenomenon, the observers called the Air Force Base at Limestone, some twenty miles north and east, to ask whether the object was visible there. It was. Setting up a theodolite, the Limestone observers measured the height and bearing, and both groups of observers sent the recorded data to ATIC.
Figure 12a. The Presque Isle sighting from two stations; the erroneous determination of North at Limestone seems to indicate a nearby UFO.
Here was the kind of situation the investigators had been hoping for: simultaneous observations of a single object, made from two different stations a known distance apart. Calculations based on the altitudes and bearings reported by the two stations yielded fantastic results. In a plot of the data (shown schematically in [Figure 12a]) the prolonged lines intersected, indicating a group of unknowns hovering 100 miles above the earth and more than 50 miles off the Maine coast, of tremendous size and moving at high speed. Concluding that the objects must have come from outer space, or were possibly a new type of orbiting vehicle of Russian origin, the Air Force had promptly clamped down the security lid. When ATIC’s science consultant, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, looked at the data, he just as promptly disagreed with these ideas and clearly identified the unknown as the planet Jupiter, which had risen at 6:03 P.M. E.S.T. and at 10:00 was the brightest object in the eastern sky. The believers in the extraterrestrial theory were then in the majority at ATIC, however. They had refused to accept the identification, and submitted the Presque Isle sighting to the panel as a prize example of UFO surveillance.
Figure 12b. The Presque Isle sighting from two stations; the corrected determination of North indicates Jupiter at infinity.
The panel members quickly disposed of the case. The measurements reported from Presque Isle obviously pointed directly to the planet Jupiter, not a mere 100 but millions of miles beyond the earth. If a constant correction was applied to the bearings from Limestone, they also agreed with Jupiter’s position. Careless use of the theodolite had produced an error in the data. To measure the angle of an object above the horizon, the observer has only to make sure that the theodolite is level, but to measure the bearing he must align it with true north, a direction that cannot be determined by guesswork. The Limestone observers had made a mistake in determining true north and had thus obtained a wrong bearing for the unknown. When the corrected data were plotted (shown schematically in [Figure 12b]) the prolonged lines were parallel, and both pointed squarely to the planet Jupiter at infinity.