Thursday, January 17, 2019

Things That Go Bump In The Night


















This morning, I woke up to the good news that an "IMPENDING GALACTIC CRASH COULD RIP OPEN THE BLACK HOLE AT THE MILKY WAY'S CENTER!"  Oh, great.  I suppose that means the Red Sox game will get cancelled that day. This important information arrived unsolicited on my iPad courtesy of Live Science, which could either be a panel of top scientists operating out of a superlab in Vienna or some disturbed lunatic shuffling around a goat farm in Bangladesh.  The Internet is notorious for letting people into the pressbox without credentials.  Either way, I give the prediction about a .0001 percent chance of being right.  Alleged authorities have to pipe up about some crackpot dilemma every so often to keep the funding train on the tracks.  Anyway, this critical event is scheduled for two billion years from now so I’m not sure there will be anyone except Keith Richards around to care.

 When we were kids, we didn’t have to worry about any of this stuff.  All we had was The Bogeyman, Dracula, the Werewolf, a few mummies and Frankenstein, and we could outrun those last two.  We were a lot more concerned with The Devil, a devious character the nuns claimed was always nipping at our heels.  The Devil ran an amusement park called Hell, rife with fire and brimstone, as illustrated by the sadistic artists who compiled the Catholic catechisms.  (I always thought I could tolerate Hell if they would just let me have shoes.)  The Catholic kids spent much of their time trying to figure out how to have a good time in this life without winding up in Satan’s oven.  If any of my departed friends escaped, they haven’t let me know yet.

Then, in 1951 when I was ten years old, a movie called The Thing came out.  I went to see it with my friend Paul Carroll, who was eight and so scared he stayed under his seat for the last third of the movie.  The thing about The Thing was they would never let you see him, merely lead you time and again to the precipice.  And the locale for the film was an isolated research facility at the North Pole, where it was always dark.
The Thing arrived on Earth via a spaceship which crashed near the research station ages ago and was buried under tons of ice and snow before being somehow discovered by one of the scientists.  The crew from the facility moseyed out, peered through the ice and decided to stand at the perimeter of the buried spaceship, eventually forming a gigantic circle.  Voila!---the first flying saucer in our experience.  We had heard vague tales of the critters but The Thing made them real.  We began looking around wide-eyed after that.




Unidentified Flying Objects

Young boys of that era may not have been inclined to do research on the locations of our nation’s state capitols or the main battles of the War of 1812 but they were oddly curious to discover how many home runs Al Zarilla Williams hit in 1949 (10), whether Superman ever used his X-Ray Vision to look through Lois Lane’s underwear (wouldn’t you?) and what was up with those flying saucers.

We didn’t know it at the time, but on June 24, 1947 a man named Kenneth Arnold was merrily piloting his private plane through the skies of Washington state when what to his wondering eyes should appear but a string of nine shiny objects flying past Mount Ranier at speeds of roughly 1200 miles per hour.  This sort of thing didn’t happen every day so Kenneth perked up at the extravagance of it all and reported in to whomever you tell about these things.  This was the first significant UFO sighting in the United States, but far from the last.

For three weeks after Arnold’s experience, the American press was full of saucer sightings.  In 1948, the U.S. Air Force began an investigation of UFO sightings called Project Sign, which was succeeded by the aptly named Project Grudge and finally by the famous Project Blue Book in 1952.  Blue Book, based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio carried on from ‘52 to 1969, compiling reports of more than 12,000 sightings or events, each of which was ultimately classified as (1) “identified”---with a known astronomical, atmospheric or artificial phenomenon, or (2) “unidentified”---a mere 6% of the total, cases for which there was insufficient information to make a determination.  Some of the Air Force explanations were hilarious…weather balloons travelling at 800 mph, the planet Venus making abrupt right-angle turns.  Apparently, it was easier for the AF to merely dismiss UFOs than to actually deal with them.  The adults in the room pooh-poohed flying saucers but us kids were outraged.  How could these boneheads spit in the face of such overwhelming evidence?  For some of us, it was the first time we wondered about the inclinations of authority.  We read mountains of books on the subject and talked of joining the no-nonsense National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena, a sober forum for UFO reporting, inquiry, investigation and speculation.  Trouble was, we had no physical evidence, no smoking gun, no DNA.  Or did we?




Roswell And Beyond 

On July 7, 1947, about 75 miles north of the town of Roswell, New Mexico, ranch worker William Brazel ran across some odd debris.  He gathered up some of the stuff and took it to Sheriff George Wilcox in town.  The sheriff immediately reported the find to the nearby USAAF base at Roswell, which dispatched agents to the location of the debris.  On July 8, the Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release stating that a “flying disk” had crashed on a ranch near Roswell during a powerful storm.  Later that day, as government scientists began arriving in the area, the story began to change.  Reporters were told that one of those ubiquitous weather balloons had crashed again.  The Air Force trotted out “debris from the crash area,” which included mere aluminum foil, rubber and wood.  Us kids knew better.  Another coverup, we smirked.  Won’t this gullible public ever learn?

In 1989, former Roswell mortician Glenn Dennis claimed that a friend who had worked as a nurse at the Roswell Army Air Field had accidentally walked into an examination room where doctors were bent over the bodies of three odd creatures resembling humans but with smaller bodies, spindly arms and very large bald heads.  Doggone it, if Glenn’s friend just had an iPhone we’d be sitting pretty right
now.

Roswell, itself, was the ultimate beneficiary, of course.  The town has become general headquarters for UFO enthusiasts, conspiracy theory buffs and, alas, general wackos.  Two years ago, to mark the 70th birthday of the event, 38,000 people turned up from all over the world.  A few of them went out to William Brazel’s old ranch to sniff around, probably ex-kids like us from back in the day, still hoping.

On August 25, 1951, three science professors from Texas Tech were cruising around Lubbock when they were stunned to see a semicircle of lights flying above them at a high speed.  They weren’t the only ones.  For the next few days, dozens of reports poured in from all over town.  Tech freshman Carl Hart Jr. managed to get a few pictures of the so-called Lubbock Lights, which were published in newspapers across the country as well as LIFE magazine.  Project Blue Book, ever at the ready, charged into town, investigated the events and decided the lights were birds reflecting the luminescence from the town’s new street lights.  Citizens who had seen the phenomena doubled over in laughter at this conclusion.  “Fastest damn birds in the universe!” one of them guffawed.

In the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, one of the preeminent scenes features a UFO disrupting the electronics of a car, the inspiration for which came from a 1957 incident in Levelland, Texas, where dozens of people experienced the same problem.  They all attributed the shenanigans to “a rocket” or “strange lights in the sky.”  The local police saw the same lights as they investigated the reports.  “Au contraire!” said those killjoys from Project Blue Book, who called the episode “an electrical storm with ball lightning.”  Levelland meteorologists insisted there were no thunderstorms on the night in question.





Maybe They Were Looking For Bruce

Take it from us, motorists on the New Jersey Turnpike will not slow down for anything short of a bridge washout, but there they were on July 14, 2001, pulling off to the side of the road to look at the sky.  For around 15 minutes just after midnight, an array of lights flying in V-formation soared over the Arthur Kill Waterway between Staten Island, New York and Carteret, New Jersey.  Lt. Daniel Tarrant of the Carteret Police Department was one of the witnesses, as were other metro-area residents on the Throg's Neck Bridge on Long Island to Fort Lee, N.J. near the George Washington Bridge.  Local air-traffic controllers claimed there were no passenger airplanes, military jets or space flights which could have caused the mysterious lights.

On November 14, 2004, the aircraft carrier USS Princeton noted an unknown craft on radar 100 miles off the coast of San Diego.  For two weeks, the crew tracked unknown objects which appeared at 80,000 feet and then plummeted to hover right above the Pacific Ocean.  When two FA-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz arrived in the area, they first saw what appeared to be churning, boiling water in an oval shape underneath the surface.  A few moments later, a white Tic Tac-shaped object appeared above the water.  It had no visible markings to indicate an engine and no wings or windows.  Infrared monitors revealed no exhaust.  Commander David Fravor and Lt. Commander Jim Slaight of Strike Fighter Squadron 41 attempted to intercept the craft but it zipped away, suddenly appearing on radar 60 miles in the distance.  It moved at three times the speed of sound and twice the speed of the fighter jets.



Or Hef….

On November 7, 2006, Flight 446 was getting ready to fly to North Carolina from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport when a United Airlines employee on the tarmac noticed a dark grey metallic craft hovering over gate C17.  Twelve other United employees and several witnesses outside the airport saw the same thing around 4:15 in the afternoon.  Witnesses said it hovered for about five minutes before shooting upward, breaking a hole in the clouds large enough for pilots and mechanics to see blue sky.  The news report became the most-read story on the Chicago Tribune’s website to that date and made international news.  The FAA called it a “weather phenomenon” and declined to investigate.

In 2008, dozens of residents of Stephenville, Texas, 100 miles southwest of Dallas, viewed white lights above Highway 67, first in a single horizontal arc and then in parallel vertical lines.  Local pilot Steve Allen estimated that these “strobe lights” spanned about a mile long and a half-mile wide while traveling about 3,000 miles per hour.  This incident was reminiscent of the famous Phoenix Lights sighting of 1997, which was never resolved.

Leaked in 2017 along with the news of the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program was a video that revealed a rare encounter between an F/A-18 Super Hornet and a UFO.  Seen along the East Coast on a Raytheon Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared Pod, the craft was similar to one spotted off San Diego in 2004, a fast-moving white oval about 45-feet long without wings or exhaust plume.  The pilots tracked the object at 25,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean as it flew away and simultaneously rotated on its axis just for fun.  Nobody tried to explain this one.




The Return Of Project Blue Book 

Anyone who deigns to think all those kids of yesteryear have lost their fascination with Unidentifiable Flying Objects might want to take a look at the viewer totals for Robert Zemeckis’ new Project Blue Book on the History Channel.  The program drew 35 million viewers for its series premiere, making it the most-watched series premiere of the 2018/19 season to date.  Over all airings, the first PBB episode gathered in 5.2 million total viewers, and that’s on the History Channel folks, not ABC-TV.

The series is based on the true, top-secret Blue Book UFO investigations and related phenomena conducted by the U.S. Air Force from 1952 to 1969.  Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a brilliant astronomer and college professor, was recruited as lead apologist/explainer by the Air Force and did his job as well as could be expected in the face of overwhelming evidence that UFOs were more than weather balloons, flocks of birds or the popular planet Venus.  Eventually, Hynek suspected the truth: the government, totally at sea about the saucers, was trying to dupe the public, and he defected to the other side.

Hynek conducted an informal poll of his astronomer colleagues, not people easily confused by heavenly goings-on.  Of 44 astronomers, five had actually seen aerial objects which they could not account for with established mainstream science.  Most of these astronomers had not shared their accounts for fear of ridicule or damage to their reputations or careers, although one of them, Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of the dwarf planet Pluto, openly discussed his own UFO sightings.

In 1953, J. Allen Hynek wrote an article for the April issue of the Journal of the Optical Society of America titled “Unusual Aerial Phenomena,” which illustrated his shifting opinions.  In it, he said: “Ridicule is not part of the scientific method, and people should not be taught that it is.  The steady flow of reports, often made in concert by reliable observers, raises questions of scientific obligation and responsibility.  Is there…any residue that is worthy of scientific attention?  Or, if there isn’t, does not an obligation exist to say so to the public---not in words of open ridicule but seriously, to keep faith with the trust the public places in science and scientists?”






 Look To The Skies

When we were kids, way before we worried about hipness and sophistication, we made our decisions based on common sense, the preponderance of the evidence.  We loved Ted Williams but it was possible Joe DiMaggio was slightly better.  We’d rather spend our time elsewhere but it was obvious the smarter people finished school.  If you wanted a girl to like you, the best course of action was not to dip her braids in an inkwell.  And if thousands of dependable citizens had personally eyeballed flying saucers, they probably existed.

As time goes by, of course, and nothing untoward happens, the existence of UFOs becomes moot.  If they mind their Ps and Qs and go about their own business like, say, the residents of Hungary, why worry?  And what harm could thay actually do to us that we’re not already doing to ourselves?  Are the flying saucers from another planet?  Probably not.  Do they soar up from under the seas?  That’s a stretch.  Is it possible they come from another dimension?  Maybe, but why visit Montana in the winter?  The best advice we can offer is not to give away all your earthlies and emigrate to a mountaintop waiting for saucery extraterrestrials to take you away from it all.  If you do, that’s where you’ll really find The Truth.




That’s all, folks….