In somewhat similar fashion, the hysteria caused by the car-stalling flying eggs subsided. As the Russian satellites gliding across the night sky proved more interesting to the public than hypothetical spaceships, flying-saucer stories occupied less and less space in the daily papers and the number of UFO reports dwindled. Air Force investigators worked hard at the job of separating facts from fantasy and by Saturday November 9, 1957, the end of a wild week, the panic was over. During the two years following, 1958 and 1959, fewer than a dozen E-M-equipped UFOs were reported over the entire American continent.

The civilian flying-saucer groups, however, rejected the normal explanations of the November reports except that of the Schmidt-Saturnian meeting, which all but the cultists indignantly denounced as a hoax publicized to embarrass sincere students of UFOs. Dissatisfied with the solutions found by the Air Force, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) carried out an independent study (see [Chapter XIII]) of the November sightings, and in June 1960 issued a booklet entitled “Electro-Magnetic Effects Associated With Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO’s).” After examining many reports of E-M phenomena and rejecting an unspecified number as unreliable, members of the investigating committee studied the evidence in a series of eighty-one incidents occurring over a period of fifteen years, roughly a third of which were reported during the week of the Levelland panic[[IX-17]].

The cases include instances in which, allegedly, electrical appliances failed to function, at the same time and the same place in which a witness observed a UFO. In some cases a witness observed electromagnetic effects but did not see a UFO, at the same time that a neighboring witness saw a UFO but did not observe electromagnetic effects. The effects in question include the stopping, missing, sputtering, and near-quitting of automobile motors; the dimming or flickering of automobile headlights; static, roar, or fading of car radios; the dimming and brightening of house lights; the dimming and brightening of cabin lights in airplanes; the blurring of TV screens; the temporary loss of picture and/or sound in a TV set; the stopping of watches and clocks; and odd noises over a telephone wire.

This list may astonish the average citizen who has often endured similar annoyances and never thought of blaming UFOs for his troubles. Most householders know that watches run down, that houselights dim and brighten with the changing demands made on the city electrical system, and that a plane flying over a house can blur the image on a TV screen. There can be few readers of this book who have not at some time experienced such brief frustrations with automobiles, radios, TV sets, and timepieces—the ordinary troubles that keep our repairmen in business without assistance from UFOs.

To the heterogeneous data provided by these eighty-one cases, the committee attempted to apply the precise tools of logic and mathematics in order to establish a correlation between UFOs and electromagnetic effects, and concluded that a cause-and-effect relationship probably did exist.

With suitable material, statistical methods can suggest a correlation between any two sets of facts and can estimate the probability that the correlation is significant and not due to chance. No competent statistician, however, would try to apply the methods to such amorphous and uncertain data as those used by the committee. More than a third of the incidents cited come from newspaper accounts or the private files of saucer organizations in foreign countries. All leave many unanswered questions. At least two involve fully identified objects: the great fireball of September 18, 1954 ([p. 92]), and the three fireballs of April 6, 1955, may well have caused some radio interference but they were not UFOs. Even with the well-reported cases, a conscientious historian would find it nearly impossible to determine precisely what the witnesses saw, what they heard, what they did, and what they said.

The various printed accounts of the Levelland incidents, for example, vary in many details. The events took place in an atmosphere of excitement and the stories inevitably changed slightly with each retelling. The reports of Air Force investigators, records in the files of civilian saucer organizations, statements in newspapers, magazines, and books—no two give exactly the same version of any given incident. Although the points of disagreement are often trivial, they are sometimes vital to finding the correct explanation.

Even if, for the sake of argument, a statistician were willing to accept the evidence of the eighty-one cases at face value, he would still not attempt to establish a correlation between UFOs and E-M effects. The probability that a (postulated) UFO will appear at a given time or place is unknown; the probability that an electrical appliance will fail to work at a given time or place is equally unknown. Hence the probability that the two phenomena will occur together at a given time and place is a concept that has no meaning.

Effects and Causes

Asked to explain what caused the failures of engines, radios, watches, etc. reported during the week of the Levelland sightings, any high school physics student who answered, “Some new kind of electromagnetic force” would properly receive a grade of zero. Admittedly there are physical phenomena that the scientist does not yet understand, but he does know that electrical and magnetic forces do not and can not perform all the feats attributed to them by saucer enthusiasts.