It is perhaps a measure of the panic level that week that local officials actually examined the ground at the “landing” site, looking for evidence. They found none. The four “hydraulic rams” that allegedly supported the huge machine had left no imprint on the sand of the dry river bed. Traces of oil found on the ground were tested chemically and proved to be the same brand that the witness carried in the trunk of his car.
Gaining national notoriety from this incident, Schmidt soon became a popular lecturer at flying-saucer clubs, thrilling the audience with tales of later visits from the Saturnians and his journeys in their spaceship to the Arctic Circle, through the waters under the North Pole, and even into outer space. A year or so later his extraterrestrial friends allegedly tipped him off to the location of certain valuable minerals on earth, including veins of quartz that had the desirable property of curing cancer. To mine this quartz and thus make it available to humanity, he enlisted the sympathy and financial aid of a number of lonely, wealthy widows. Some of these ladies eventually came to believe that they had been the victims of fraud and, in 1961, a California jury agreed with them. The Saturnians apparently have not yet reappeared to help their friend out of his difficulties.
Surveillance by Flying Eggs
Wednesday November 6 was relatively calm on the UFO front, although automobile engines died, radios malfunctioned, and TV screens blurred at about the time that lights were reported in the sky in Texas, New Mexico, Illinois, and Canada. Accounts received later by saucer organizations stated that on Tuesday (or Wednesday) night an orange-colored, whistling, E-M type of UFO had hovered near Fort Itaipu in Brazil, caused a temporary failure of the electric lights, and then knocked out the generating plant for several moments. Since the alleged visitation occurred in a foreign country it was not, of course, open to study by the United States Air Force. In any case investigation would have been difficult, since the report failed to include such facts as the exact time of appearance, position, and direction of movement of the UFO. The witnesses, whose names were not given, apparently related the incident under pledge of secrecy to other persons who insisted on remaining anonymous, who passed the story on to still others who refused to be named, who in turn gave the news to reporters, who signed only their initials[[IX-15]]. So insubstantial a tale obviously does not merit serious investigation. The dimming of electric lights and the capricious behavior of a generating system are not extraordinary phenomena and no UFO is required to account for them.
The next incident to gain publicity in this amazing week occurred on Thursday (or Wednesday) evening when a UFO allegedly landed in Ohio and then vanished. Driving home in the early evening along a country road, a Mr. Olden Moore saw a glowing UFO in the sky. At first it looked small, like a star, but it rapidly increased in size and split apart in the air as it descended and apparently landed in a nearby field. Moore stopped his car, intending to investigate, but for some reason he changed his mind and instead drove on home to get his wife. When they returned and searched the field they found nothing. Nevertheless, they reported the incident to the authorities and next day a Civilian Defense official, arriving to check the ground where the UFO supposedly had landed, reported the level of radioactivity “far above normal.”
A woman living half a mile away from the field in question reported that, although she herself had not seen a UFO, her TV set had blurred at about the time of the sighting, and on the following day she found that her car, parked near the house, was pockmarked. Applying his Geiger counter to the car, the Civilian Defense official pronounced it radioactive[[IX-16]]. This UFO apparently possessed highly selective E-M powers: it did not stop the engine of Mr. Moore’s car but did interfere with the operation of a TV set half a mile away!
Air Force investigators patiently collected and sifted the facts. The supposed landing site showed nothing abnormal—the grass was not burned, the earth was not disturbed, no foreign material could be found. The normal radioactivity of the ground in the area measured .18 milliroentgens; at the supposed landing site the measure had been .20 milliroentgens. This difference of .02 is not “far above normal” but well within the probable error in the calibration of the instruments.
Interviews with other Ohioans who had also seen the glowing unknown provided the answer: the UFO was a large meteor, conspicuous in the dusk of early evening. Traveling directly toward the witness, it had looked like a glowing sphere suspended in the air and rapidly increasing in brightness. Near the end of its flight it split into two or more pieces and fell silently to the earth, not “in the next field” but perhaps many miles away. The blurring of the TV set may have been mere coincidence or, if the meteor had actually passed close by, may have resulted from the ionized trail of the meteor (see [Chapter V]).
Saucerdom’s Miraculous Electromagnetic Force
Most of us remember the nursery tale of Chicken-Little, who started a panic in the barnyard kingdom with her eyewitness report that the sky was falling: “I saw it with my eyes, I heard it with my ears, and a piece of it fell on my tail.” Calm was restored in the kingdom, after a time, when the prosaic truth came to light: a falling acorn, not a piece of the sky, had grazed the credulous chick.