The next UFOs reported in this series belonged to the old-fashioned, non-E-M variety. From White Sands Proving Grounds near Alamogordo, New Mexico, came a report that military police, while patrolling the up-range in a jeep about 2:30 Sunday morning (a few hours after the Saucedo incident), had seen a brilliant reddish-orange light, shaped like an egg, hovering in the sky. From its apparent distance (two to three miles away) and apparent size (as large as a grapefruit held at arm’s length), the men deduced that it was a huge object, 75 to 100 yards in diameter[[IX-2]]. After remaining motionless for about three minutes, it descended toward the ground and disappeared. (According to some versions, it later rose into the sky and then disappeared.) Members of another jeep patrol soon matched this tale with the report that on Sunday night about eight o’clock they had seen a bright, glowing object hovering in the sky but, instead of landing, it suddenly climbed until it got so far up it looked like a star. Both jeeps, it should be noted, continued to function normally.
Officials at White Sands soon dampened the excitement. The description of the light that appeared at 2:30 A.M. included certain doubtful factors. The night had been overcast and so dark that the stars were not visible, although the cloud cover was broken at intervals. Since the sighting had not included any object of known distance or known size for comparison, the estimates of the UFO’s distance and size were of no value. The light might have been small and close; it might equally well have been huge and far away. Under the circumstances, the most probable explanation was that the men had glimpsed the moon (then roughly half full) through broken clouds, and that the apparent movement was an illusion produced by the moving clouds. The Sunday evening UFO was unquestionably the planet Venus. Then nearly at maximum brilliance, it was a conspicuous object in the western sky after sunset and inspired many saucer reports during this week of anxiety.
The White Sands incidents had reached the papers, however, and contributed to the general hysteria. By Monday afternoon, flying eggs were allegedly stopping automobiles as far north as Canada, but the Southwest continued to hold the center of the UFO stage against all competition.
On Monday night, November 4, the Alamogordo, New Mexico, radio station broadcast a dramatic interview with an engineer from Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico, describing his sighting of an E-M-radiating UFO at least 500 feet long. About one o’clock on Monday afternoon, Mr. X stated, he was returning to base after a weekend in El Paso[[IX-4]]. While driving along a desert stretch of U. S. Highway 54 near the town of Orogrande, he noticed a group of cars stopped ahead of him, their passengers standing in the road, pointing at the sky. Looking up, he saw an iridescent egg-shaped object at least 500 feet long—more than twice the size of the UFOs reported in the preceding two days. As it approached, the flying egg exerted a force that killed the engine of his car, generated a wave of heat that gave him a bad burn, and demonstrated a startling new characteristic: it silenced the radio in his car. (During the next few days, reports of similar encounters usually included a jammed radio.) When the UFO took off toward the mountains and disappeared, Mr. X started his car again and drove on into Alamogordo to the home of a friend, Mrs. Coral Lorenzen.
One of the most zealous amateur investigators of UFO reports, Mrs. Lorenzen had founded the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) (see [Chapter XIII]) in January 1952, and from 1954 to 1956 had been employed at Holloman Air Force Base. After listening to Mr. X’s story and examining the notes he had scribbled during the sighting (unfortunately they proved to be illegible, but for some reason no one has ever suggested that the pen or pencil was also hexed by the UFO), she hurried him down to the local radio station where he made the taped interview that was broadcast later that evening.
A daylight visit by an E-M flying egg 500 feet in length would supposedly have attracted the attention of many witnesses. Air Force investigators could find only one: Mr. X. According to his testimony, the passengers of several automobiles (his estimate of the number of cars varied from time to time but he eventually settled on ten) had stood in the road watching the unknown object. A persistent search by Air Force officials failed to locate any one of these persons. The witness showed no sign of the burns he allegedly suffered. In short, the only evidence to support his story was Mr. X’s own and the authorities sensibly concluded that the incident was either a hoax or a hallucination, inspired by newspaper publicity about Levelland’s flying eggs.
Tuesday morning’s chief contribution to the UFO epidemic was not to be laughed off so easily, for it was made by trained military personnel. At 5:10 A.M. on November 5, the Coast Guard cutter Sebago, traveling north in the Gulf of Mexico, detected an erratically maneuvering UFO on the radarscope. The swiftly moving object would race across and off the scope, only to reappear almost immediately from another direction and position and again move off the scope at incredible speed. After ten minutes the radar target vanished, but watchers on the deck glimpsed a glowing object, brilliant as a planet; it streaked across the sky just above the northwest horizon and vanished. The unknown radar targets then returned and continued to fill the scope with their incredible movements until 5:37, when they finally disappeared and did not return.
This mystery, too, yielded to orderly investigation. Air Force radar experts made a detailed analysis of the data and positively identified the mysterious returns. They had not come from the complex air traffic overhead, as had first been suggested, nor from a fantastically maneuverable spaceship. They were merely false targets produced by the weather conditions (see [Chapter VIII]). The brilliant light that flashed across the sky was not reported by the radarscope and had no relation to the radar returns. In view for a few seconds at most, brilliant in the morning twilight (the sun rose some fifty minutes later), the flash of light was probably a distant meteor—November is rich in meteor displays.
The Saturnian Visitors
Tuesday evening while the nation was still wondering about the flying eggs in New Mexico and the invisible UFOs that buzzed the Sebago, welcome comic relief appeared. A man named Schmidt, a grain buyer, announced that during the afternoon he had visited with the crew of a flying saucer that had landed to make repairs. While driving in the country near Kearney, Nebraska, he said, he had noticed a bright flash about a quarter of a mile away. Going closer to investigate, he perceived a huge silvery ship a hundred feet long, thirty feet wide, and fourteen feet high, which had landed in a dry river bed. The motor of his car then died. He got out and was walking toward the ship when a light shot out and paralyzed him. The ship opened and two men emerged. After searching him for concealed weapons, they released him from paralysis and invited him into the ship, where he spent half an hour chatting with these strangers and their female companions, mostly in High German and English. (He knew that they came from outer space but not until some weeks later, when they paid him a second visit, did he discover that they were natives of the planet Saturn.)[[IX-14]] After he left the ship it rose straight up into the sky and disappeared, while he hurried back to town to report to the sheriff, to broadcast an account of his experience over the local radio, and to give his story to the newspapers.