Flying Saucer Review November 1978 [antikvár]

ARE THERE UFOs THAT MIMIC?Part 1Ann Dmffe/Our contributor from California, a frequent and welcome reporter in ^he Pa8"of ^ff Saucer Review, is a researcher and writer for MUFON, and a member of the Center for UFO Studies.A NY UFO researcher worth his salt has come acrossparticularly puzzling cases, in which credible witnesses will report close encounters with UFOs of odd design and precise structural detail, performing impossible manoeuvres. These will seem at first to be first-class reports deserving of careful follow-up.Checking out standard sources during the subsequent investigations, these puzzling sightings fall apart in the researcher's hands. An ordinary man-made object - a blimp, an advertising plane, etc. will be proved to have been in the vicinity of the sighting at the time stated. The witnesses must have been mistaken; subconsciously they must have embeUished details and invented manoeuvres that their "UFO" was supposed to have performed.Go back to these witnesses, however, and present the evidence uncovered. Try to interpret what has happened. The witnesses continue to contend that "they have seen what they have seen."Cases such as these occur from time to time in Southern California skies and have caused the author and other local researchers much puzzlement. Invariably, the sightings have been classified as IFOs or stuck out of sight into bulging files. No real use has been made of them over the years.To illustrate briefly the kind of case which is the specific subject of this column, let us consider the Santa Ana, California, sighting of January 2, 1973. On this smogless evening, the visibility was fifteen miles on the ground, sixty miles one thousand feet above the earth. Unusually pure air imparted a brilliance and clarity to lights and objects rarely experienced in this polluted basin.Between 6.30 and 7.00 p.m., seven witnesses in four different sections of the city viewed a startling, vividly lighted metallic c/aft. The domed vehicle was complete with jaunty antennae and a lighted door.' The author was, unfortunately, the investigator on this proinising case. It was a dismal task indeed to have to inform the awed and frightened witnesses thst they had mistaken the Goodyear blimp for a craft from another world.The Goodyear blimp was cruising Orange Gounty, including Santa Ana, that evening between 6.00 and 8.00 p.m. Three years before, it had been outfitted by its enterprising owners with 7,560 coloured light bulbs. Flashing in varied thirty-second patterns of green, red, yellow and blue, they called the world's attention to the next breathtaking advertisement which followed on words outlined with ordinary white lights.The brilliant colours and oval shape reported by the witnesses conformed closely to those of the blimp. The light patterns in most cases also were similar. But the structured details, antennae, door, dome, a sound "like an electric generator" - did not conform. Above all, the meteoric speeds, rapid decelerations, immense apparent size, and angled flight paths reported were not compatible with the clumsy airship, whose cruising speed is thirty-five mph, and which was carefully ambling along at minimum 1000-foot altitude. Perhaps the most eloquent statement regarding the Santa Ana misidentifications came from the blimp's pilot himself. "How could they mistake it?" he asked. "It has GOODYEAR written all over it, and anyone within a mile of it can read the ads unless they are blind or can't read!"Sine functions and ratios applied to the apparent sizes and angles of sight showed impossible correlation, in most cases, with what the blimp should present at normal cruising height.For the sake of objectivity, however, it was decided that all the witnesses were wrong. In spite of our tactful efforts, seven puzzled, angry witnesses were left stoutly maintaining that the object was not, and never could be, the blimp.3The same thing happened three months later in Tarzana, California on April 10, 1973. In that San Fernando Valley community, not one but three startling craft whose colours and shape roughly resembled the blimp manoeuvred together before departing at a speed considerably above the blimp's best efforts. But the blimp was cruising the valley that night. Again, for the sake of objectivity, the case was put down as "misidentification of conventional object." But by this time the author had begun to wonder.4Three years passed, during which whirling, lighted discs which circled larger lighted discs were identified tentatively as a new type of advertising helicopter. The witnesses were as puzzled as the investigator when she tried to tell them what they had seen.On February 1, 1977, a sighting occurred which, lightly speaking, was the straw which broke the ufologist's back. On that evening at 8.40 p.m. above Glendale, California, two young professional men (RQ and RD) flying southbound in a helicopter at 1100 feet saw a bright yellowish light passing them, going northbound at an estimated 100 mph. It was about a thousand feet to their left and two hundred feet lower in altitude. Thinking that it was a fixed-