The electrical failures ascribed to E-M forces undoubtedly had a variety of causes. Automobile engines can stall for many reasons. Rain seeping under the hood of a car can soak the ignition and temporarily interfere with smooth operation. Sand or dust or a vapor lock in the fuel line can do the same. The body of an automobile is metal and completely encloses the ignition system and the motor. The engine stops if it is deprived of gasoline or oxygen, but it does not stop if lightning strikes the car. The metal body acts as a shield that electrical forces cannot penetrate.
Every driver knows that the reception on a car radio normally varies from poor to fair; it rarely remains constant. While moving beneath a power line, a car may receive no radio signals at all. A high-tension line can be surrounded by an electrical field that makes a radio set hum or buzz raucously and completely jams the reception. Static or a powerful interfering signal can easily jam a car’s radio, but no electrical field, static or oscillating, can kill a car’s motor or shut off its lights or stop the dashboard clock; it could not stop the driver’s wrist watch, and it could not stop a man’s watch without seriously injuring the wearer, even if he were standing in an open field.
Radio and TV sets may function badly for one of many reasons. They may simply need a good repairman! A passing plane, a more powerful transmitting station on the air, auroral activity, stormy weather, ultraviolet radiation, or clouds of ejected atoms from the sun—any of these can disrupt radio or TV communication, but they do not interfere with the operation of gasoline engines.
All meteors bright enough to be seen can cause some radio and TV interference—and in the first week of November the Taurid shower is approaching its maximum. Although meteors do not, by themselves, emit any appreciable amount of radio energy, the friction between the swiftly moving meteoric body and the atmosphere produces a train of hot gases that can momentarily reflect radio waves. The brightest meteors leave behind them a persistent cloud of luminous, electrified gas that can absorb radio waves and thus blanket incoming signals for several minutes after the meteor has passed. A spectacular fireball observed about 8:30 P.M. M.S.T. on April 18, 1962, momentarily turned off the street lights in the town of Eureka, Utah; it was so bright that it triggered the photoelectric control, just as daybreak does[[IX-17a]].
No imaginable single force—electric, magnetic, or gravitational—could possibly have caused all the effects attributed to saucerdom’s miraculous electromagnetic force. An E-M field with the postulated powers is as improbable as a force that would lift fallen apples from the ground and draw them up to reunite with the branches of their parent tree.
Let us suppose for a moment, however, that the incidents in the Levelland epidemic might have occurred just as they are described by the NICAP committee. If UFOs had been visiting the earth that week, projecting a force field that performed as claimed, certain other events should also have occurred.
Thousands of automobiles should have been, but were not, temporarily disabled in the neighborhood of every car-stopping UFO. Fantastic traffic jams have sometimes been caused by torrid weather and consequent vapor locks in the fuel lines of automobile engines. In June 1961, for example, a sudden heat wave in Boston caused a vapor-lock epidemic that tied up traffic on the main highways for three hours. On some stretches of road so many cars were immobilized that, with their hoods up to cool off, they looked “like a convention of pelicans.” No such traffic jams were reported in connection with the 1957 UFOs. In South Springfield, Ohio, a car and a taxicab stalled but the vehicles around them experienced no trouble. One car stalled in Houston and another in Santa Fe, but the traffic around them proceeded as usual.
Hundreds of TV sets should have blurred, but did not, in the neighborhood of every TV-blurring UFO.
Equally surprising, no one complained of UFO interference with hi-fi sets, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines, irons, freezers, or electric razors. No airplane, helicopter, motorcycle, or ocean liner reported engine trouble.
At least two landings were reported, in New Mexico and Ohio. No physical evidence of landing could be found—shrubs were not crushed, grass was not scorched, ground was not disturbed.