Idle UFO Musings Two: J. Allen Hynek, Accidental Hero.

Ah, Allen. A good man. A good-not-great scientist. A paradoxical timid but avid explorer of the Unknown. We were lucky to have you, "warts and all".

Allen Hynek is the second most significant positive element [speaking of human beings] in UFO history [next to Donald Keyhoe without whose superhuman tenacity there probably would have been no UFOlogy at all]. But not many people following the UFO mystery from 1952 through 1970 liked or trusted him --- and given the strange dramatic role he assumed, it is understandable why not.

Hynek was an obscure astronomy professor at Ohio State University in 1948 when the Project SIGN people at Wright-Patterson wanted an astronomy consultant [mainly for their "final report" to the Pentagon, which became the "Grudge Report"]. Dayton-based Wright-Pat had called upon University of Cincinnati professor Dr. Paul Herget for ad hoc advice, but he wanted no permanent duties. Instead he recommended that they look into Lincoln LaPaz or maybe this fellow Hynek. When asked, LaPaz also recommended Hynek. Since Allen had worked on an important Top Secret project during WWII [the development of the Proximity Fuse to allow bombs to explode before burying themselves in the Earth --- maximum damage is done by blowing the bomb slightly above the target], Hynek was A-OK on those grounds. He was hired. The drive from Columbus to Dayton was fairly short, so he could mosey over there get case files and analyze them from an astronomical perspective.

Allen said that he was totally naive about UFOs and assumed that they were just bunkum. He might have added that he was also totally naive about military intelligence matters and their attitudes towards science. He interpreted his charge as attempting to explain away as many cases as he could, EVEN IF THE EXPLANATION WAS A STRETCH. In later years he would say: "Maybe I reached too far". His appendix to the Grudge Report is almost totally negative about UFOs, but he does often say: "this case has no astronomical explanation", while giving the reader the impression that it can however be explained otherwise. Hynek presumably picked up his added pay at the end of 1948 and went back home to Columbus through with UFOs for good, he thought.

But that wasn't true for long. When the wide-open year of 1952 arrived with all its liberal Pentagon thinking about UFOs, Ed Ruppelt and the new Project Blue Book wanted a "permanent" external astronomy consultant, and they wanted the local guy, Hynek, back.

And back he came... a little more intrigued now, a little more wondering if there might be some new natural phenomena buried in the more mysterious sightings, but no more "hip" to what was actually going on around him.

As this year proceeded, he became convinced that there WAS "something" in this, but not extraterrestrials. ET just couldn't get here. [An absolute dataless dogma of the Academic Tribe]. Hynek never really got over this hang-up. But he DID think that there was reality and that it was a very old reality, mentioned in the Books of Charles Fort [that he was reading Fort shows the quietly renegade adventurer down inside him]. He soon spoke to a major science society about his belief that the UFO phenomenon pointed to a not-yet-described type of atmospheric "X" which he called "The Nocturnal Meandering Light". To Allen he was on to something which could even make him a famous discoverer. Who knows what his colleagues thought.

When Ruppelt and the positive elements of USAF attitudes towards honestly researching UFOs evaporated, Hynek found himself embedded in a Project bent on waving away UFO incidents no matter how mindlessly and savagely opposed to case details the "explanations" might be. Once again, Hynek was naive. He'd present his stretched astronomical possibility with very cautionary language only to find out later that his idea was written into the case file as absolutely the explanation. Rather than complain, he tucked his tail and shut-up. It was these bogus explanations that drove Jim McDonald  around the bend and almost made him come to blows with Hynek in a confrontation in the late 1960s in Hynek's office. McDonald was a science idealist and a fiery man. Hynek was an idealist hiding in a mouse's body, too scared of the bosses for too long, too ignorant and too trusting of what was going on, and subconsciously realizing that he was screwing this mystery up.

In the mid/late 1950s Allen at least woke up to the fact that he wasn't seeing the best cases. Either the Air Force [due to its public attitude] wasn't even getting them [True] or the Air Force were shunting some kinds of cases away from Wright-Pat and into some other intelligence pathway at Air Defense Command [Probably also true]. In desperation, Hynek reached out to certain civilians to try to get better reports. He actually took a trip to France with the famous astronomer Gerard de Vaucouleurs to visit Aime Michel and look at Michel's case files of the 1954 wave. He also reached out to the little-known-today powerhouse triad of NYC researchers, CSI-NY [Isabel Davis, Lex Mebane, Ted Bloecher]. People like Dick Hall and Ted Bloecher have said that Isabel Davis was perhaps the clearest mind thinking about UFOs in their lives. Hynek secretly arranged to meet with the Terrific Trio in NYC at, I believe, Isabel's home [and more than once --- Hynek would ask them if they could get him Broadway tickets so as to double his pleasure from the trips]. He actually would show up at their place almost in disguise --- another testament to his timidity. Hynek would share USAF information [doubtless against his security oath] and they would share case information back. Isabel saw right through Hynek and gave him a blistering letter reminding him of what science was and his duty to a higher purpose. Poor old Allen.

When Sputnik went up Allen got a job at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Laboratory as assistant to Harvard's Fred Whipple to make plots of satellites in their new orbits. They were assisted by ground observers all across the country in what was called Project Moonwatch. These observers were of course set up to catch fast-moving high-altitude aerial objects --- uh oh --- and they did. There was a great debate about whether the Moonwatchers should send in reports on the mysterious lights which were NOT satellites. In some places direct orders went out NOT to send them. Allen, of course, wanted them and many came through. Once again he blew it, as when asked by the press whether there were ever any Moonwatch reports which could be classified as UFOs, he said "never a UFO from Moonwatch". He later in life claimed that he had not yet seen one, but upon returning "to the office" shortly thereafter "I had spoken too soon". Even if he's not telling a fib here, he never [to my knowledge] went to the press to correct his false statement. Allen, no wonder Mac wanted to punch you!

Finally he and the Air Force got on one another's nerves so badly that Hector Quintanilla [last chief of Blue Book] wanted to punch him too. Hynek was straying more from USAF influence, buying the reality of UFOs as far beyond meandering lights, and feeling that he was clearly the expert on these things and Quintanilla was not. Suffice it to say that by the time Swamp Gas came along [early 1966], Hynek and Quintanilla hated one another's guts. The embarrassment of the Swamp Gas fiasco tore everything apart: Hynek's last shred of faith in the Air Force project, Hynek's last shred of credibility in the civilian research community, and the Air Force project itself. In came Colorado. Out went Hynek and Blue Book.

So, how in the world did Allen Hynek get to the point where he was actually doing any service for UFOlogy? I'll continue this riveting masterpiece of [as Frank Mannor would say during a Swamp Gas interview] HULLABILLUSION in the next post, which I hope I'm up to soon.

Till then: Peace.

Idle UFO Musings: J.Allen Hynek, Part Two.

In the run-up years to the Colorado Project and Hynek's distancing from Project Blue Book, from across the Great Waters came Jacques Vallee. Vallee was a very bright young Frenchman with all sorts of training in astronomy and mathematics, and an intense desire to research the UFO Mystery. This had been inoculated into him by personal experiences with members of the French astronomy community and in talks with Aime Michel [which would probably have inspired about anybody]. He came to Northwestern University to study with Hynek, now head of the astronomy department there. This relationship became more Colleague-to-colleague than Student-to teacher rather quickly from what I've been able to determine.

Jacques used Hynek's contacts to create a database for statistical analysis [very crudely at first, but interesting nevertheless] which with his own contacts abroad allowed him to write the twin classics, Anatomy of a Phenomenon and Challenge to Science. These books put Vallee on the UFO map, and in at least this way he owes Hynek a great deal. With Hynek's knowledge and prestige coupling with Vallee's books and statistical ideas, they made a formidable pair as the Colorado Project was formed. Colorado refused to take them on as staff, but they did invite them in to consult. Vallee's approach hit David Saunders right in the sweet-spot, and Saunders decided to attempt to prove the reality not only of UFOs but that they were intelligently driven extraterrestrial technology using statistical data and Vallee's French mentor, Aime Michel's , concept of UFO waves in orthogonal [artificially straight and patterned] lines of occurrence. In doing so, Saunders abandoned larger duties on the Project and the future of UFOlogy suffered due to that abandonment. [Plus the Orthoteny theory failed anyway, so it was a complete bust]. One can't blame Jacques or Allen for this, but they played a role.

Another oddity of this period was Allen Hynek's evolution towards parapsychology. Rather than blaming Jacques for this, it at least as possible that the influence went the other way. Hynek was getting himself into a real mental bind. He KNEW that UFO experiences were real and that they were not just odd lights. But their manifestations had become stranger and stranger across the 1960s. A REAL robust phenomenon with real credible witnesses and real mind-boggling strangeness. Since Allen's astronomer's hang-up about ETs not being able to cross interstellar space still dominated his prejudices, he didn't have many options. Hynek was also in no way conventionally religious, so angels and devils were out as well. He was running out of theoretical options. Allen began turning to the paranormal. He didn't know HOW that realm might answer his questions, but it seemed that it might just be "big" enough to handle them. As I say, I believe that this influenced Jacques as well, as pretty soon Vallee was abandoning his view that science could handle this problem, left the US and went back to France to contemplate other answers, possibly occult ones.

Colorado came to its infamous close, and Project Blue Book to its unceremonial one. Hynek went on with what had by now become an obsession. Back in Evanston, and thankfully for the future of UFO research, carrying loads of "stolen" Blue Book files, he contemplated how to go on. He began thinking about a civilian organization, maybe even without a physical focus: the "invisible college". This group would stay in touch with each other and the phenomenon, some members maintaining anonymity to the outside world so as not to damage their working relations, and plan ways to push research forward. He began to coerce several old buddies into coming in with him on this, even enlisting former Robertson Panel member Thornton Page as an initial name on the brainpower list. But going it alone was going to be tough.

Coincidentally, an old NICAP hand in Chicago, Sherm Larson, was trying to rescue the invaluable NICAP files literally from the trash dumpster. With great energy he managed to almost completely pull this off, as perhaps two-thirds of the files safely transited to Chicago. [Most of the rest blundered about in DC, ending up with Dick Hall --- the story of their ultimate disposition is a tragedy which will not be gone into here]. The Chicago story is pleasanter. Larson convinced Hynek to join him in a new organization led by Hynek, and founded upon the combined resources of the NICAP and Hynek's own personal files. Here then was another formidable source of information. And it was called The Center for UFO Studies.

Now with persons already around Larson and new additions by Hynek or others volunteering themselves, Hynek was no longer alone to try to get things done entirely on his own. Hynek and Larson shot high: a sort-of membership concept, a pretty good newsletter, ultimately a darned good "magazine" [The International UFO Reporter], a couple of academic-style conferences, and ultimately a try at an academic journal. In the meantime he also wrote his book trying to define the field as an academic area of research. None of this was easy, but all of it had some success. And CUFOS got a reputation as the place to come to see the master [Hynek] and get the best information. NICAP had collapsed; APRO was doing so, MUFON was still in "club" status, but CUFOS had Hynek and the NICAP files and the "invisible college". Hynek went from maligned swampgasser to pop cult hero in a few years.

This sounds rosy, but it was very much like every UFO organizational experience in several ways. It still had no secure base of funding and inordinate amounts of time had to be wasted trying to live day-to-day. Also, the supporting troops were nice and helpful in some ways, but in the end it was Hynek himself that everyone wanted to see. Allen, to the outside world, rightly or wrongly, WAS UFOlogy by the mid-1970s. And Allen had not suddenly become a bean-counting administrator. Allen still loved the adventure of the Hunt. He didn't want to just sit in Evanston or Chicago while others had all the fun; he wanted to be out there himself [if the case was right]. Above, there he is with the young Ted Phillips investigating a trace case literally "in the field".

Some of that adventuring he probably should have passed up no matter how tempting. Particularly things like going to Hessdalen, Norway in winter to try to catch the Hessdalen lights with Erling Strand couldn't possibly done his old body's health any good.

But some of these trips were important. On some of them he inspired researchers in foreign countries to organize more seriously and cooperatively. Hynek was attempting to build a UFOlogy community which would separate itself finally from the Uforiacs. Astronomy had separated from astrology and until it pulled that off it had no chance of getting any respect. But that took astronomy many centuries of eroding unhelpful cultural elements. Victories in this quest were small and of course insufficient. Still, three cheers for Allen.

Other sorts of important trips were like his surprising foray to Australia and on to Boianai, New Guinea to interview the local residents who had seen the case usually known as The Father Gill case. As great a witness as Father Gill was [and he was one of the best ever], this case would not have become the number one case of all UFOlogy [my ranking, not, I realize, yours] without a true effort to interview the other 30+ witnesses. Allen didn't get to them all, of course, but he saw plenty. The interviews [on invaluable cassettes in the CUFOS collection] are a real pleasure and even a Hoot on occasion. Language was an issue, but the locals were very intelligent and seemed to "get" Hynek just fine. Hynek however took forever to "get" them. All this was "The great Cultural Divide" and Allen was no anthropologist. Sometimes when he asked a primary witness if she had actually seen the object, she might say "no", totally blowing Allen's mind. What he didn't realize is that she was telling him that she didn't see any object from where they were standing at the time. Upon getting to the exact scene, then yes, the object was right up there.

There were other goofs and howlers like this. Allen tried to get a couple of men to do his "if you use your finger to point to the spot of the UFO, how did it move across the sky?" ... he was trying to count the seconds that a westerner would make his finger move to gauge the subjective speed. Hah! Good luck with That!. The locals just whisked their hands across the sky to show the direction of motion and never the pace. Hynek never could get his thought through to them, and gave up on that one. Despite these [actually funny] "difficulties", Hynek's not-so-brilliant interviews established the vital foundational fact: it wasn't just Bill Gill who saw something astonishing [or made it up], it was many persons, most of whom were about as unpolluted with western hang-ups as you could find on this planet. Hynek helped place the Credibility Index for this case through the roof. Also, the descriptions of the craft and the actions matched up in the end. HIGH STRANGENESS. = UFO.

Allen accomplished quite a lot for one guy, but he was in analogy the equivalent of the young man who is interested in so much that he can't focus. After he wrote The Hynek UFO Report, he wrote no more books [the sit-down semi-BS session volume with Jacques doesn't count, and neither does his tag-along presence on the Hudson Valley Boomerangs book]. We could have used some more. He also didn't really write much of significance at all. Allen was becoming an old man, who was looking for more spontaneous and less grinding "projects". Still, it is very hard to complain about how much he DID do. And probably too base of us to complain about his mistakes.

As Allen became infirm, he gradually left the "business" of CUFOS in others' hands, whether he was relaxed about that or not. When he fully retired to Arizona, he left behind a different CUFOS than the fully academic and field research organization that it never was and only occasionally resembled. But it was a CUFOS which carried much of his finer ideals and his standards of excellence. I'll say something about that in the next post.

I have a couple of busy practical days ahead here in Wheeling. Next post might be a few days from now. See you then, and blessings.

Sacred Object: CSI-NY Tells Hynek About UFOs.

This post arises from a stumbling-upon accident which happens quite frequently if you are privileged to be able to mess about in original UFO files. Turning over a page in a NICAP pile, the next item turned out to be a letter from Alexander [Lex] Mebane to Allen Hynek. This was not your usual letter. Lex was part of the "trinity" of great UFO researchers of CSI-NY [alongside Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher--Lex is upper left in the photo montage, Isabel is upper right, and Ted is lower right---the other guy is our young and naive Air Force consultant, Allen Hynek]. The letter is from 1956. Hynek, as consultant to the Air Force on a classified project should have no business communicating "on the quiet" with the leading pro-UFO researchers in the country, but here he is. What was this about? -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hynek, a slow learner on this stuff, had a thought dawning on him that was hard to shake: the Air Force was doing a lousy job researching UFOs. Not only that, because of this lousy job, he and Blue Book weren't getting the best cases. Who would want to talk to people who were going to criticize what you saw if not your honesty or sanity itself? But, Hynek was learning, there are people out there who seem to be both intelligent and rational, who are pursuing UFO research with vigor and are collecting good case material from all over--including the 1954 wave from which Hynek was almost completely shut out. So he took a risk. He made contact with CSI-NY and began a careful correspondence. This contact led to a face-to-face meeting in New York, and the exchange [mutually] of a lot of information. This letter, this "Sacred Object", is before the face-to-face and is a lead-up to it---Hynek was denied by the Air Force to give public talks of any kind. In it, Lex tries to teach the slowly opening mind of Hynek how to really think like a scientist--rather amusing in most ways. Our young chemist has obviously not been polluted by over-restrictive "tribal" thought, and he is challenging the [somewhat] older astronomer to get his act together...in very civilized terms. I'll let you read the whole letter, appended below. Holding it in my hand, there is a mysterious "comfort" about it--our history is real, and it is honorable, and it is powerful. Such an object is, indeed, sacred. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------What we learn from this is that Hynek, admittedly the tortoise in the race, was learning. And he was seeing that the Air Force was wrong--at least in terms of its hostility that was being publicly expressed towards the reality of the objects. He knew that much more was "out there" in terms of data, and he was growing nervous about the likelihood that there were living beings attached to the mystery. From this point forward, he was a closet UFOlogist rather than a debunker, although he still couldn't bring himself to confront his military employers. From here on, Hynek sensed the bigness of this mystery, and didn't want to be left out. Lex, and Ted and Isabel were far more "in" than he.

A Subtle Thumbprint Of The UFOs ?

As we've seen earlier in this blog, whoever is the major agency behind the UFO phenomenon has taken great pains over 60 years NOT to give us anything easy on which to base a "science" of UFOs, and therefore a path to acceptance of their existence by the consensus-reality makers of our culture. This cleverness on "their" part extends to apparently deliberate variation in UFO appearances, the lack of substantial "leavings", and a refusal of "predictability". This makes life tough for the hopeful UFOlogist, wishing to at least have the general culture not call him a fool. Jacques Vallee, always a quick study in these matters, concluded over 30 years ago that the UFO "problem" could not be solved by scientific approaches, and so began to attempt other ways of doing so. Poher's statistical work on the length of time that a real UFO manifested [vs a false one] was a statistical pattern--not enough to convince the National Academy of Sciences, but pretty good evidence for us. Colorado felt early in the game that UFO reality was a no-brainer "yes", but the next step, was it physically/externally present as an "objective" reality, was not as easy to simply admit. This blog is about a wonderful start on a research project that might be a strong indicator of both external/physical objectivity and perhaps even more. For it, we owe an old Allen Hynek associate: Fred Merritt.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have no photo of Fred Merritt or I'd honor him "personally". All I can do is tell you a little of who he was when this work was done. Most folks don't know that when Allen Hynek left USAF consultancy with the cancellation of Blue Book, it was not at all obvious that he could start up a civilian UFO organization. Fortunately in Chicago was an energetic man named Sherm Larsen, who had begun a NICAP affiliate. Sherm argued, successfully, that with the impending dissolution of the parent organization the valuable NICAP files should be brought to Chicago, where they'd serve as the basis of a new research group. [most of these files DID make it to what became CUFOS, thankfully ]. Getting together with Allen Hynek about a new synthesis ultimately got Hynek to agree to a merger of Larsen's group and Hynek's files and contacts under the description of a new more science-oriented operation. One of Sherm's colleagues was Fred Merritt, a Chicago businessman and an unusually science-interested "amateur". Before even meeting Hynek or Vallee, Merritt was trying to do statistical work on the case pile. He reasoned that the "landing trace" cases were the best chance one had of finding the elusive objective reality. For whatever reason he concentrated on those cases where the object seen was undebatably a structured object [to all appearances]. These were the cases where the object had extended "landing pods" rather than just rested on the ground. He began to plot these cases by various size-related properties. And he began to notice a pattern hidden in his pile. That pattern is in the graph above. [I colored the chart to make it stand out. The color labels for the "domains" are also, obviously, mine, but I don't think I'm misleading you there. Those labels are taken directly from Merritt's own descriptions of the case types. This is even true of my word "trickster", as Merritt defines these cases as associated with entities that he describes as the "Mob from Magonia" who play pranks on people.] Before getting further into this, we need to be honest and admit that the case numbers are few. But the pattern he saw is extremely interesting anyway. Notice that the domains, the case clusters, do not intersect. I find that VERY interesting. If I was dealing with an "unreal" phenomenon pushed up by human errors and stupidities, I'd insist on this graph smearing together with much more randomness. This graph, if true, is characteristic not of randomness but of several distinct "behaviors" of things going on in nature--whether artificial or "merely" some nature-produced physical manifestation. In fact, it looks to me like several sorts of UFOs. [but not an "infinite" variety of them]. The disks are a surprisingly tight domain. And, they have [when associated with Merritt's tripod landing traces] significant size [the leg patterns themselves are about 15 to 25 feet in diameter] which could allow "occupants" of a size something like ourselves. Merritt said that these disks averaged about 35 feet in diameter and, when associated with occupants, those occupants were "normal" height. Keep remembering what he is doing: only tripod cases--not everything. If you have enough type cases, though, ALL such graphs should be smeary--not separable into tight domains. If Merritt is correct, and this pattern holds [at least through the times that he did it--remember we have deliberate Confusers at work here too, so they could have later cleaned up this mistake] then he may have found that we have not only physically real presence [rather than only a variety of force projections] but possibly something even more interesting to me. Among the UFOnauts he may have found the "tricksters", the "Mob from Magonia". That green domain is significantly separate from the disks. Merritt was amused by them. He said that the occupants were small pranksters, and often "flew" in "aerodynamically-absurd" shapes. I can't help being a bit thrilled by Merritt's try here. I can't tell you if his pattern plays out either longer or stronger with more data. Ted Phillips' catalogue of traces is a wonderful thing, but doesn't contain the type of detail to test this further. I do have a rare copy of Fred Merritt's original catalogue but it's on loan to friends and I can't tell you if there is more there--probably not as the sheets I have look like summary graphs from that exact data. Maybe someone of you can either find that someone has already advanced this, or will do it yourself. The only time that I ever had a personal conversation with Ted Phillips, he told me, without going into it, that once he heard the witness' description of the object involved in a trace, he knew exactly what the trace would look like before he arrived on the scene. Maybe something like what Fred Merritt found was part of what Ted knew.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To wrap up the day with a little light fun, let's just tell a few UFO landing pod case stories. I just picked a few of the better ones out of the file cabinets--my opinion, so don't take them overly seriously. Case 1: early May 1971; near Kocevje, then Yugoslavia. A young woman [17] was riding home on her bicycle slightly after 8pm. Off the road was a reddish glow accompanied by a buzzing sound. There was a slight hollow area in the field, and the red object seemed nestled down in there. She showed remarkable courage and stopped to explore closer. The thing was a giant red glowing "egg" standing on three short legs. She watched for a time, but the uncanniness of the thing ultimately unnerved her and she retreated to her bike and rode away. She kept looking back all the way home and finally saw it take off, landing legs now pulled up, and ascending in a spiraling flight. When she got home, she found that her mother had also seen the object from that distance. Later a neighbor reported seeing the thing as well. They were all ridiculed by the local police. The next day, the witnesses went to the site and found traces which were not well described by the UFO investigator. [some 'holes' were described but you can't tell if he means pod traces or something more like soil-sampling holes]. Regardless, here we have a multi-witnessed three pod disk of a size that would have fit Merritt's pattern. Case 2: August 16, 1974; Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. Three young boys were walking in the woods near their homes at about 8pm. Their cat began acting very strangely and they saw above the trees a metal disk flashing colored lights and making a loud noise. The cat ran to its owner and jumped into his arms. The disk moved away slowly and seemed to land in a nearby sandpit. Just before landing it extended three landing pods and emitted a blast of hot air so strong that the resultant sand dust covered the boys, standing 150 feet away. Two boys immediately ran home, but one hung around a moment longer. He said that the disk was bigger than his father's car and had a box-like structure on top. Then he too ran away. Only one neighbor took them seriously, and she went to the site the next day. There she found three indentations from the gear, and a circular spot surrounding them where "carbonized deposits" remained. She collected samples from this area and [coincidentally?] developed a numbness in her fingers, which lasted for a week [this same sort of effect occurred at the Delphos landing trace when the mother of the witness handled the whitish material of the mark]. She called the RCMP. They refused to investigate, but a college prof did and found no radioactivity. Her soil samples were sent to a university lab for analysis. The lab was "baffled" by the carbonization. "A high degree of heat would be required to produce such results, but even simulated conditions would not extend so far into the sandy soil." [translation: he subjected the sandy soil to great heat and still couldn't get the effect to occur below the surface, although the UFO was able to do so]. This is a nice case, not because of the credibility of the young witnesses, but because it has scientific testing with puzzling results.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Case 3: February 5, 1971; near Kinnula, Finland. This case depends only on the witness testimony as researchers weren't informed about it until it was too late to see a physical trace. Also, since this was at an isolated logging camp, there was no chance for an independent witness. But, there are two witnesses and good field workers to do the interview, so what the heck. The encounter took place at about 3pm. The witnesses were near the end of their work day and had just turned off the saws. A domed disk then showed up over the trees, metal-colored and having four landing legs. It was 15 -16 feet in diameter. It settled down only about 30 feet away. An opening appeared in its underbelly an a little being floated out. It was less than three feet tall and clad in a green diver's suit type covering. The thing approached one of the men, gliding rather than sinking into the snow. The man being approached was a high risk kind of guy, and moved towards the "robot" to engage it. The green thing then turned to retreat to the craft. In the windows of the domed disk, other creatures were seeable with humanoid forms but no details discernible. Uncaring about extraterrestrial relations, the guy made to grab and hold the "green man", but as he grabbed its foot, it, which had mysteriously floated off the ground, forcefully moved to the craft--its assailant yelping due to a hand burnt by the heat that was apparently projected right through the boot. The resultant burn scars were still visible when the researchers finally got to interview these fellows two months later. Once the green man was inside, the craft picked up with a slight humming sound, closed the hatch opening, and rapidly sailed away. The forest workers felt "stiff" after their encounter, but nothing else other than the burns. They walked to the landing site and saw the four pod marks with round plates at their ends in a square 2 meters on a side. Earlier that day, someone had seen a ball-of-light-type UFO in Kinnula, but that is the closest thing we have to confirmation. The workers' productivity immediately dropped off as they were constantly distracted over the next weeks, wondering if the thing would return.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I should tell more, but my one-typing finger probably feels like that guy's hand in the last one. So, just one more. Case 4: June 26, 1972; Fort Beaufort, South Africa. --[notice how important it is to pay attention to non-US cases]. There were a bunch of people over the years who investigated and talked about this incident, and someone who wanted to do a comprehensive search on this could do better than I. This took place in farming country at about 8am. [some say 9am]. One of the workers came running to the farm owner to report "an ugly thing" which was present near the farm's reservoir. This "thing" was emitting smoke and fire. The owner left and saw a fiery ball [initially red but later changing colors]. It seemed at about tree-top level. It was less than a meter across. The laborer shouted and the thing immediately moved sideways almost 300 yards and seemed to hide behind a bush. Then it reappeared and continually changed colors from red to green to yellow-white. The owner decided that the only thing to do was shoot it. [ah, the greatness of humanity]. He went back to get his gun and called the police. Police showed and everyone went out to confront the whatever-it-was. The owner then unloaded 8 shots at the thing, feeling that he had heard a palpable hit on the eighth. The police joined the fun with a few shots of their own. Then a round black yet shiny object of the same size appeared. More shots were fired but with no effect. Seeming to appear and disappear without an understandable method of doing so, the thing entered thick bush areas and was heard crashing about in them. The witnesses to this whacko experience were the trigger-happy farm owner, two happy-to-go-along policemen, and four farm laborers. Later, search of the area revealed 9 places where the thing had apparently touched down. The marks in question have been poorly described both by location/proximity to each other and to shape. There's been a suggestion that they came in threes. If so, this is tripod like despite the rest of the weirdness--it would fit Merritt's Mob from Magonia. The pod marks seem to have shown a structure to their flat surface, as if the pods twisted into the wet clay on settling down. All very intriguing and bizarre--quite in line with a trickster. I'll let it go with a quote from the Natal Mercury newspaper: "Incredible isn't it, that policemen and a farmer could have tried to shoot out of the sky in broad daylight what might have been a spacecraft from a friendly planet?...If it was a vehicle from outer space, manned by intelligent beings, do you suppose they now regard the inhabitants of Earth as hostile? Belligerent? Aggressive? Or just plain stupid?" Hmmm...tough multiple choice.

Mixed Menangerie {just to keep an oar in the water}.

I've been back home for a rare week: two doctor's appointments, an ecovillage meeting, a Cursillo meeting, an all-day UFO "fest" with my four buddies, some serious shopping for Mom's "entertainment" later in WVA, some semi-serious lawn care after a month away, etc. That translated to no free time, and not even a glance towards the blog. Finally, on my last day here with the resource library, I get a brief chance to turn a few pages. Too late for anything profound, but at least I can shuffle through the stack of unsorted documents which someday will be filed, and tell a couple of tales. Maybe it will interest you a little. If something which makes sense happens to come out of this unfocussed spontaneity, well, that's a surprising bonus. So, let's muse a little on the mysteries of the disorderly stacks.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here's [to the left] an interesting [to me] slip of paper from the Project Blue Book files in late 1952. This is months after the twin hullabaloos of saucers all over the skies of Washington DC in July. The guys at Washington National control tower and the other related radar professionals were still seething about the USAF "explanations" of their radar observations of those two evenings, and had said as plainly as possible that they knew exactly what they were looking at [Hard Targets] and they were not "weather phenomena" of any sort. One can imagine elite professionals like Harry Barnes responding to Air Force allusions that he didn't know how to interpret a radar signal. Well, here they are again in late November of the year and they've got more anomalies at Washington National. Barnes, or whoever spoke with the Air Force on this one, made it perfectly clear: "1. No temperature inversions present. Adiabatic charts coming from Maj. Fournet. 2. Source states blips very similar to Wash. radar sighting from Control Center on 19 Jul and 26 Jul 52." So there!!! Back at you, USAF!!! Over the next couple of years there was a study of some of these sorts of sightings in the DC area, where the military scientist concluded that they could not possibly have been due to inversions and related ducting or illusory signals. Menzelian radar debunking took a big, but unpaid-attention-to, hit that day. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here's a strange thing [hope you can read at least some of it on the left]. [the blocky letters on the page are mine, as well as the script at the bottom; the script at the top is Hynek's]. This is a 1952 military case over Arizona. The pilots began observing "puffs of black smoke" appearing in the vicinity of their plane, with no other objects in view. They assumed that the puffs must be from someone launching some sort of ordnance from the ground. This had to be serious ordnance as they were flying at 10,000 feet. Various bursts and various changes of course to attempt to investigate took place over twenty minutes. The smoke puffs were uniform in size [20 feet diameter] and color [yellow] and created rough disturbed air. To explain this as a "normal" sort of phenomenon, one needs to imagine some one or some organization on the ground capable of firing high altitude smokebombs at military planes and doing so using up a lot of arsenal [to no obvious end] and time/effort. All this without warning the air force pilots that such a thing was going to happen. This dud bombardment continued over a 25 mile range. Well, I guess that's possible but it doesn't seem very convincing to me. But if not that: what??-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The thing on the left is just a mystery from Allen Hynek's personal files. Stuffed inside his Moonwatch file folders was this [apparent] "photo case". It consists of three strips of paper: two are parts of a film strip [duplicates] of ten frames each, and one is a blow-up of one area of that. On the back of the blow-up are a few scribbled notes, unfortunately not sufficiently enlightening. These notes are similar enough that they could be in Hynek's own hand. They indicate that the film was of an event of September 8, 1953. They refer to a camera on a telescope, which could mean a Phototheodolite. if so, that could also mean the White Sands area or places like Edwards AFB. He says that the object was not noticed visually at the time. The fact that the bottom comments are jocular in nature also leads me to believe that this could be Hynek writing [and particularly in his 1950s mode]. What's interesting to me is that he placed this thing in his Moonwatch files of the 1960s. By that time he was convinced that anomalous observations of similar things through Moonwatch cameras, and occasionally photographed as well, were real and quite unexplained. One can see Hynek in the 1960s at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Headquarters of Moonwatch, scratching his beard and saying, "stuff like this has been reported to me for a long time. " ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some of that same "stuff" was the pile of Moonwatch reports from the official Moonwatchers but also coming out in the papers. One of those was the Grumman report that we recently saw in this blog, but others were just everyday Joe and Jolenes who had their cameras at the ready. One of those several news reports, with the photo, is at the left. These are unusual in UFO photo history in that they are of a different sort than the majority of things which turn out [with far too great a frequency] to be hoaxes. These are almost all genuine to my reading. They are distant lights, yes, but they have the attraction of having been seen by many independent people, and having remained unexplained. Hynek thought this material, as he gathered it [somewhat surreptitiously] alongside the Moonwatch work, was priceless, and very close to incontrovertible evidence of a UFO phenomenon. Well, I'm with you on that old man. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Something that popped up in the pile which had a coincidental nature to it, so I thought I'd pass it along, was this page from the old and valuable Australian Flying Saucer Review. As it has to do with the Reverend Browning Cressy event that we've just seen featured in the 1961 volume of FSR. it seemed worthy to show. I'm doing that because you can see illustrated a recreation of Lionel Browning as he saw the "mothership and babies" that evening. Hopefully you can also read these early remarks on the case. On the second page of the AFSR article [not reproduced here] Browning mentions that the disks "came towards the ship [i.e. the mothership] like flat stones skipping along water". Shades of Kenneth Arnold, eh? A comment on the second page also emphasized that Browning and his wife were not the only witnesses. A Mrs. Doris Bransden of Cressy said: "It was a fantastic sight--like a lot of little ships flocking around a bigger one." Apparently, there were several other witnesses as well. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There were quite a few more really interesting bits of data of our subject [i.e. wilder and woolier encounters] but I'm being pretty conservative today it seems, so here's something else in that vein. {funny, isn't it, that I can be "conservative" by "only" giving powerful evidence that the UFO phenomenon is real?}. The document at the left is another Project Blue Book report from Hynek's personal files. It tells of a July 1952 military incident wherein three observers, in the company of five civilians, saw a round rotating object move in and hover directly overhead of the group. [this sort of behavior always clinches the non-accidental "agenda" of whatever these things are doing, in my mind]. The thing covered a large apparent swath of sky ["eight inches", apparently meaning arm's length]. It was metal-colored and glowed lightly. No noise was mentioned, and we can assume that despite hovering overhead the large thing was silent. It "turned on its side and formed a long circular tube". Maybe this just means seeing it edge-on, maybe it means something weirder than that. Then it flipped back to "round", and "immediately disappeared". Hynek writes "INTERESTING" on the page. Well, uhh, yeh. He then asks Mark Chesney [showing that these scribblings were in the seventies at the early CUFOS] to write the case up and show him the "abstract". ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Instant disappearance---I noticed about a dozen cases of this type as I paged through the pile. It's a form of high strangeness that not a lot is made of in our business. That's probably because it's hard to distinguish between something which instantly disappears "in place", and something that whisks away so rapidly that the eye cannot take pictures fast enough to see it do so. My intuition is that both things happen: i.e. some encounters end with a very rapid moving away [you get reports where the observer notes great speed of departure at the near limit of what they can follow, so why not assume that some leave a little faster still?], and some just "wink out" right where they are. That second type is harder to defend, but this case smacks of that sort of thing. A crowd of people staring right at the thing, and big, and it's just no longer there. If we had cases like the Cheshire Cat of Alice-in-Wonderland, that would be solved: part disappearing while the rest remained in place would be pretty good evidence of such tomfoolery. But despite often hearing comments to the contrary, it is my experience that few to none UFO cases [which are credible] have Cheshire Cat exits involved with them [sometimes there's a leftover glow but not part of the device]. So, who knows about "instant disappearance?" Maybe so, maybe not. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
But we can all take heart that with a species as brilliant as we are, the solution to all this is just around the corner. Yep. I believe that. Yep. No doubt. Anytime now.

THE SPACE GEOMETRICIANS

Suppose a very credible witness came to us and reported that a light-in-the-sky was seen behaving most peculiarly. This light at one time moved a great deal of distance, but then stopped and with sharp motions "drew" a perfectly square "flight pattern" in the air. What would a honest person think?

Perhaps the witness was screwed up in some way. But the witness was a very credible person; no hoax, no lies, no drugs likely. What explains this LITS behavior? A plane? No. There are almost no planes anywhere which could even approximate that. A balloon? The flight was so "crisp" though, and the simpler part and the geometric part so unlike. Some real fine control had to be involved. Balloon-in-the-wind is very difficult to believe, even if the balloon could somehow be controlled. Atmospheric refraction tricks Donald Menzel would say: THAT at least we KNOW is complete poppycock for a case like this, if the linear distances are significant. Menzel would keep hollering it, but that is what lunatics do. Ah, it must be Ball Lightning. Disregard the fact that it neither looks nor behaves like any reported ball lightning; somehow, despite the 4-directions geometry of the flight, this must be it. How about luminous birds? The only thing stupider that these sorts of ideas is, obviously, the person who feels that it is sensible to make a sentence incorporating them. The BEST we could do is say, we have a mystery for which it is very difficult to say anything about. Fortunately, there is no such UFO case.

But of course, there is. In fact, there ARE. Above are most of the cases in my personal files for which the title SPACE GEOMETRICIANS could be utilized. There are a few more, but that's close to the lot. If one decided to loosen up a bit on criteria for putting cases in this category, there could be many more even in my pathetically small listings here in Kalamazoo.

What does that little list above indicate? It's saying, to me anyway, that sometimes a UFO will "park" itself in midair and do something quite unexpected. It will "draw" a square in the sky, or a triangle, or a cross. It will pick something and play "ring-around-the-rosy" with it. It will make angular moves when normal flying would have smooth curves which were quite efficient for getting from one spot to the next. It would perform in linear back-and-forth bursts right before our eyes.

"Right before our eyes".......................................................

If one looks carefully at what some of the UFO case witnesses are saying, even on "uninteresting" LITS cases, peculiar elements sometimes arise. Hynek got letters like the one above, describing a 1961 incident in Millville, NJ [note that I didn't even include it in the list above], where the witness is saying stunning things in a very measured way. He seems to be describing an object which moved "normally" for a while, then went bananas: it had nearly instant acceleration bursts, seemingly right angle flightpaths, exact reversal of course, coming "to a star" [apparent line-of-sight] and drawing a right-angled "box path" around it so as to not [in apparent vision] pass over it.

As John Lennon would say: "Most peculiar, Momma". I don't believe that Allen paid too much attention at all. He DID read the report though, and included the case in The UFO Experience as a type case for "nocturnal lights". Weirdly, in his book, he cut out all the strangest motions from the witness testimony.

Hynek was aware of odd doings in the sky of this nature though. He very much liked the Deadwood, SD 1966 "Box Drawer". It too was featured in the famous book. Strangely Hynek butchers the report there. He confuses it with the Bangor, ME case of 1970, and this causes him to make a foolish statement about the case being too late for the Colorado Project, when in fact it should have been right on time. The commentary by Hynek is mixed up enough that one suspects a colossal editorial blunder of some kind --- and for this reason, the only source which is close to primary is the description in the Page/Sagan book, UFOs: A Scientific Debate where Thornton Page gives good condensed versions of cases [probably recommended to him by Hynek].

The case reports two policemen witnessing high-strangeness "flight characteristics" of three objects, the larger of which at one point draws a square in the sky. The credibility of the witnesses was considered top notch, and the report finely detailed. It was a good Sky Geometrician. .... and you can see from the diagrams from the list above that there are at least a handful+ more. John Timmerman got two of these in his "Grass Roots" years, and another comes from Amish country in NEOhio. John also got a triangle drawer, but I have fewer of the other geometric forms than I do square-makers. Cross-drawers are also a reasonable bunch, including two by John and another from Amish country. The early cases from Belgium [1931 & 1949] add another odd element, but my file on those is marginal.

Angular Flight: Many of our UFOs seem to "like" to make angular flight moves rather than just cruise along normally. Oftimes these strange moves are just one "instant darting away" or one "right angled turn", but some UFO operators seem more high-on-life and just like the Geometric Jig. In the upper witness drawing, the UFO makes at least ten moves that could be called right-angled turns, where so far as we can tell, a nice straight line would suffice. [This case is the "Ottawa River, Ontario 1960 incident" for those who have Time Travel facilities and wish to see for themselves]. This case was reported to Blue Book by two members of the Canadian military establishment.

The middle case is from Butler, PA 1953. [I've redrawn it here from the witness' black and white line drawing.] The witness was a WWII veteran. This object, which the witness felt to be only a sharply defined ball of blue-green "fire", made several stops, shifts, stops, jumps as he watched. It, unusually, also made a noise, which the witness compared to a diesel train.

The third drawing is from the report by an ex-Marine, which occurred at Camp Pendleton, CA in 1957 [this one isn't in the "master list" either]. The marine, in the company of several others, witnessed a light go across the sky in darts and stops, the stops seemingly selected to "accompany" [in apparent line of sight] any handy bright star along the way. The Marine apologized to CUFOS for not having a better sighting, like a close encounter. Hah! A UFO which "stops" at each star in its flightpath isn't interesting enough, eh? Well, I guess I'm looking at this like a neanderthal, but this sort of thing says more to me than the majority of case reports.

Do We Really Have To Hit You Right In The Face With This?: The agency behind the phenomenon must lead the Universe in face-palming frustration, or raucous mockery. Almost no strange flight characteristic is missing from the UFO case files. We have objects which individually or in groups will dance a ring around a central point or central object, will come together from disparate locations to form a geometric figure, will make rapid linear left/right sweeps right in front of a plane, will jump up and down and then pendulum swing several times, fly in show-off geometry changing formations [just as Dewey Fournet knew they did way back in 1952, but couldn't get the Robertson Panel to even discuss his findings honestly]. And.... you name it. I'll bet it's there.

The above is Dewey's "handout" that he used at the Robertson Panel to support his view that high-credibility cases describing firmly geometric flight formations and behaviors were a strong indicator of human-level intelligence [or, of course, higher]. Hurrah, Dewey!! Smart, insightful man.

And we have seen all this sort of thing before, haven't we?? We've seen what are for me the stunning astro-alignments, ... the cases which demonstrate that who/what is operating the UFO flights knows EXACTLY where the observer is in order to create a privileged viewing-point display. "They Know Where We Live" --- not necessarily the most relaxing thought.

I want to add one further thought about the space geometricians: sometimes, in their high flying, they seem to .... what to say? .... "follow" something about the space, which .... hmmmm, this is hard to phrase "softly" enough .... we cannot see, but they possibly "use" in their movement. { If so, I think that it would be something that they, or their "drive" does to normal space, and which without the presence of their influence is not "naturally" there. Maybe it even involves some dimensional mixing together to produce a "half-here/ half not here" situation in their flight. This is raw BS but the aspects that I'll mention below have some feel of this }.

There are at least a handful of cases in my files wherein the UFO not only makes a right-angled turn but shortly disappears entirely. The Ayr case on the list does this, as does [more elaborately] the Lorain case. There are others I've seen, but the one which stuck with me was a case from John Timmerman. {This is VERY POORLY drawn by me as the Torpo case on the list}. Here were two LITS moving in the same straight line across the sky for some distance. They were separated by a significant gap, but one was definitely following the leader's path. Then, the leader hit a point in the sky and its motion went right angled with no slowing. The trailer did not flinch but continued its original path UNTIL IT HIT THE SAME POINT. Then it too was suddenly moving at the same right angle following the leader. The leader went on until it hit another point, whereupon it vanished. The trailer kept coming on until it hit the same point whereupon it too vanished.

Could it be that something about how these things "fly" creates a geometry in the sky? A geometry which facilitates an unexpected least path of resistance? .... Yeh, Out Proctor definitely..... but as long as you know how Out Proctor it is, there is no harm in mentioning it. In the Nash-Fortenberry case, the train of UFOs stopped and reversed as if hitting some spot in space and "bouncing" directly away. A case called "Nahant Coast Guard Station, MA 1952" has the same characteristic.

What the aggregate of these cases show me with no remaining doubt is that the UFO phenomenon is unexplainable by mundane current-knowledge AND that the agency behind it is highly intelligent and aware of its surroundings [including we the observers].

... AND they're definitely mathematicians.

ET or Little People?? I doubt that The Magonians want to bother learning math, so my All-The-Way-Fool guess is with the guys from Tau Ceti.

Pythagoras: It's all in the Triangles.

Blessings and Peace, folks.

DATA-NET: Uglies.

This entry looks very briefly at two controversial incidents. They are particularly controversial as they purport to involve serious damages caused by the unidentified "flying" agency. Neither of these cases may be part of the core UFO phenomenon, but let's put them out there and chew on it.

Case one came up in DATA-NET and is what inspired this posting. It is the Anolaima, Colombia July 4, 1969 incident, called by many UFOlogists simply the "Bermudez Incident". You can read DATA-NET's coverage of this above. It is as good as any, as it combines the newspaper story with the APRO follow-up.

As you see, Arcesi [Arcesio] Bermudez, along with many other witnesses, saw a yellow-orange, perhaps elliptical, object land near the house. It was encircled by a band of light, and seemed to rest on two "luminous legs", blue-colored with greenish tips. Bermudez alone walked up to the thing. [The drawing at the left and that below are part of a 2002 presentation of the case with new information given by Alan Murdie in Fortean Times].

Within a week, Bermudez grew deathly ill [vomiting] and later died. Apparently APRO received the medical report, and their MD consultant stated that he did not see anything to indicate that Bermudez did not die of natural causes. As APRO is hardly skeptical on most things, this opinion should be given at least some weight.

As time has gone on, this case grew in lore and acquired the addition of Bermudez firing a gun at the thing. No proper investigation of the case says that. Bermudez seems to have had a flashlight which he shown on the thing. It is also said that Bermudez said that there was "a Martian" inside the light. Murdie's later investigation indicated that Bermudez said he'd seen something like a "cartoon image of an astronaut" inside. Bermudez WAS apparently immediately ill, and his condition required hospitalization. His major odd symptom was extreme hypothermia.

Was this an unfortunate accident of getting too close to alien technology as it took off, emitting intense radiation?? Was it a large mysterious natural plasma phenomenon?? I'm not a great fan of such explanations usually, but the predominant "lightball"-like structure with surrounding light phenomena and spectral colored spikes below are somewhat leading in that direction. Or was this, as the locals thought, a case of a folkloric "spirit lightball" --- a premonitionary entity --- as Murdie offers in his article. Allegedly this lightball phenomenon frequented this area at other times.

The above are apparently original APRO drawings of the thing as reported by Bermudez.

The Bermudez case led me to another "ugly" UFO damage-maker, which was not in DATA-NET, but is often talked about in UFO articles alongside the Colombian case [although they are quite different]. This is the case marked Saladare, Ethiopia [village near Asmara], August 7th, 1970.

I believe that the entirety of information about this case comes from a letter received by Allen Hynek from a UN medical doctor who wrote the details to him. Hynek had the actual letter in his hand when he and Vallee were being "interviewed" for the text of their "fireside chat" book, The Edge of Reality, in 1974. I have never seen the original letter, but Hynek must have received this report soon after the event happened, or at least soon enough that the report information was fresh. All the pictures here and on the internet illustrating this case come from the book as well. For some reason there is chatter about the internet concerning the source of the case, when the answer is dead simple. And, because Hynek used this thing in the book, he obviously trusted the source. All we know is that this person was a medical doctor.

The event speaks of a daytime red glowing ball which swept through the village, destroying houses, uprooting trees, and burning grass. It melted asphalt, and broke stone in a bridge. It travelled 150 meters, paused, hovering, and reversed its course [not exactly precisely but close], returning to destroy more houses and leave as it came. The linear distance viewable for the thing's flight was three kilometers. The total flight time was ten minutes. Fifty buildings were damaged; eight people injured; a child died.

Astoundingly, even laughably, some persons have tried to write this off as warring forces in Ethiopia shooting missiles or mortars at each other. To be able to see a destructive "red ball" take 5 minutes to travel 3 kilometers, pause, and return for another five minute screaming path of destruction ... yeh, missiles. You wonder if anyone remembers that when missiles "destroy" things, they "stop" at the point of destroying them, not continue to happily cruise on another three kilometers?? And, the fact that the doctor and his colleagues found no metallic "leavings" by these destroyed war technologies --- well, that is a detail conveniently forgotten.

The issues here are as they always are: a). credibility --- did Hynek know the doctor, or have other means of knowing his bona fides?? All we can say is that he trusted the report. And b). strangeness --- if accurate, the thing is plenty strange. That leaves us with: but is it UFOlogy??

This is one of those "outlier" things which sound like either a random exotic natural accident to me --- something of the vast array of non-understood plasma-like outbursts, or even a "rent" in spacetime spitting something mindless but dangerous into our locale, or a bonehead blunder by some ET agency, maybe not even very close by. Think of ET-technofreaks trying something out regarding space-jumping, and blowing it briefly. ET#1: GAWD!! What just happened?? ET#2: Calm down. It's stabilized. Just don't put this in the log!

Why would "it" show up here?? Why not?? We're probably one of the places they're trying to get to.

Happy thoughts. Let's hope the ET garage inventors have limited power to play with. I don't want Wheeling or Kalamazoo to look like Saladare.