<>#8THE ELUSIVE VISITORS @1The December night was chilly and damp, and the two middle-aged women turned up the car heater as they drove along the deserted Texas road. It was soon after Christmas, 1980. The women and the small boy with them had traveled to a town about fifteen miles from Houston for dinner; now, as they made their way home, the child noticed something strange in the sky. A blazing light was gliding toward them over the pines. As it approached, the light resolved itself into a brilliant, diamond- shaped object. Flames shot out from its underside. In her fifty-one years, Betty Cash, the driver, had never seen anything like it. Nor had Vickie Landrum, age fifty-seven, who pulled her seven-year-old grandson, Colby, close to her as the object slowed and then hovered over the roadway as if preparing to land. Betty Cash stopped the car, and the three of them watched, dumb struck. The bizarre craft continued to hover about sixty-five yards away, emitting a beeping noise. Curiosity overcoming their fear, they stepped out of the car for a better view, although the terrified boy soon persuaded his grandmother to return to the vehicle. Intense heat pulsed from the object, forcing Betty Cash, as she came back to the car, to wrap her hand in her coat before grasping the searing metal of the door handle. Eventually the craft began moving up and away. As it did so, an even stranger thing happened. A squadron of helicopters - more than twenty in all, many of them big, double-rotor machines like those used for carrying military cargo - appeared and attempted, in a welter of noise, to surround it. When the object sped away, accompanied by the swarming helicopters, the three tried to follow in the car. From a different angle, the phantom ship became cigar- shaped, a bright, oblong cylinder of light. Then it vanished, along with the helicopters, in the distance. Betty Cash dropped her passengers off at their home and returned to hers. By this time she was feeling ill. Over the next few hours, all three witnesses developed sunburnlike blisters, nausea, and diarrhea. Betty Cash's symptoms were the worst, presumably because she had exposed herself the longest to the object's radiant heat. Sick and frightened, she sought medical treatment and was hospitalized for two weeks as a burn victim. But several days passed before doctors heard, from Colby, about the incident that preceded the group's injuries. Investigators studied the case for several years without coming close to identifying the fiery craft or even tracking down the more mundane helicopters. Although other witnesses in the area reported that they too had seen a dazzling light and double- rotor helicopters that night - identifying the larger choppers from photographs as CH-47 Chinooks - local military bases all denied having had such aircraft in the region on that December night. The U.S. government disclaimed ownership of the glowing apparition. Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum, and her grandson were left with only their lingering injuries and an unfinished story. In its elusiveness, the so-called Cash-Landrum incident - just one of many such events recorded each year - is typical of reports of mysterious objects flashing across the sky and, sometimes, touching down on the surface of the earth. Indeed, the very term used to describe such phenomena, unidentified flying objects, or UFOs - coined by a U.S. Air Force officer in 1951 - shows how little is known about these sightings. David Jacobs, an American expert in the field, defines a UFO as "the report of an extraordinary airborne or landed object, or related experience, that remains anomalous after proper scientific analysis." The term is clearly not equivalent to the popular "flying saucer," although it can, in theory, include spaceships piloted by alien creatures. Using this definition, which encompasses any number of disparate sightings, few people would dispute the existence of UFOs. Disputes do arise, however, when investigators seek to determine exactly what a given UFO was. On those rare occasions when physical evidence is at hand - when the object has been retrieved, for instance, and shown to be part of a disintergrating satellite - the mystery can be considered solved. But most sightings of unidentified flying objects yield no tangible clues, only eyewitness accounts. In these cases, two complicating factors come into play. The first is witness reliability. Even when those claiming to have seen UFOs are regarded as credible, it may be difficult or impossible to reconstruct exactly what it was that they saw. The objective, physical act of seeing can be vastly different from the subjective act of interpreting what is seen. The viewer forms judgements even in the act of observation; these judgements then become further altered over time as they pass through the distorting filter of memory. The second complication in UFO cases is the bias of the investigator. Hard-core skeptics and ardent believers will inevitably reach different conclusions about an ambiguous case - and, indeed, many UFO cases are ambiguous. Even so, an astonishingly high number of Americans believe in UFOs. And, if pressed, many will admit to having seen them. (Fear of ridicule seems to prevent most witnesses from rushing out to report their sightings.) A 1987 Gallup poll showed that 49 percent of Americans aware of UFOs were convinced of their existence, 30 percent thought they were imaginary, and 21 percent were unsure. An earlier survey indicated that as many as one adult American in eleven - a projected thirteen million people - have actually seen a UFO. Skeptics frequently seek to portray UFO believers as fringe personalities and occultists who are unable to accept modern society. But surveys show that believers are, in fact no more interested in the occult and no less satisfied with life than anyone else is. The one characteristic that UFO witnesses have in common, according to one study, is that they are more inclined to accept the notion of extraterrestrial life. A sizable number of people today envision UFOs exactly as the vehicles are portrayed in most science-fiction films and books - as spacecraft carry extraterrestrial beings from technologically advanced worlds. This is, of course, a relatively recent conception that has been stimulated, perhaps, by our expanding knowledge of outer space as well as by the pervasive images of fiction and motion pictures. But strange sights appeared in the skies long before space flight - or manned flight of any kind - was possible. And in each century these visions took on identities that tell much about the world view of those who saw them. In antiquity, for example, people discerned angelic messengers; in the nineteenth century, they saw dirigibles. Today, awed observers look skyward and see glowing envoys from other worlds. And yet, a common theme seems to link such sightings from earliest history through today. Gravity-bound humans, gazing at the endless sky, seem always to have felt that there is more to existence than can be seen on the earth's surface, that life might come in more shapes than those we know, that we are not alone among the myriad stars sparkling in the boundless cosmos. The record of mysterious aerial sightings reaches back to the dawn of written history. Seen in the light of modern knowledge and theories, however, accounts of such incidents are far from conclusive. Clearly, if the modern and presumably scientific world has been unable to establish the nature of recent reports of unidentified flying objects, the conjectures that are based on ancient records can hardly be more conclusive. Even so, ancient and medieval chronicles of UFO-like sightings are fascinating and suggestive, and they often sound surprisingly like today's descriptions. The oldest accounts, say UFO researchers - or ufologists, as they are often called - come to us as legends. For instance, a venerable Chinese tale speaks of a far-off "land of flying carts" inhabited by one-armed, three-eyed people riding winged chariots with gilded wheels. The Drona Parva, a Sanskrit text, describes aerial dogfights among gods piloting flying machines called vimanas. During the battles, according to one translation, a "blazing missile possessed of the radiance of smokeless fire was discharged." Such reports are not confined to Eastern lore, however. Some students of UFO history, such as it is, claim that the most impressive UFO stories are found in the Bible - called by one writer "the greatest flying saucer book of them all." The Old Testament prophet Elijah, for example, ascended into the sky on a "chariot of fire" caught in a whirlwind. Jacob's vision, recorded in Genesis, of angels climbing a ladder into heaven has also been interpreted as a UFO event. The Book of Exodos also provides intriguing possibilities for UFOs. The account of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt and across Sinai to the Promised Land states: "The Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, that they might travel by day and night." According to biblical scholar and Presbyterian minister Barry H. Downing, the so-called pillars of cloud and fire could have been a UFO, whose exhaust may also have parted the Red Sea. Downing's other spacecraft candidates include angels carrying messages from God and the cloud on which Christ ascended into heaven. The most vivid and elaborate of the Bible's possible UFO sightings comes from the prophet Ezekiel, a priest in one of Babylon's captive Jewish settlements. When he was thirty years old, in about 593 B.C., he had an extraordinary vision: "As I looked, behold, a stormy wind came out of the north, and a great cloud, with brightness round about it, and fire flashing forth continually, and in the midst of the fire, as it were gleaming bronze. And from the midst of it came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: they had the form of men, but each had four faces, and each of them had four wings." Ezekiel's description, which appears at the opening of the Old Testament book that bears his name, continues at some length. The living creatures moved about together, and from their centre came "something that looked like burning coals of fire, like torches moving to and fro." The creatures themselves, it seems, were part of a larger structure comprising four sets of sparkling rings, each set a wheel within a wheel. Above the figures, Ezekiel saw a kind of burning godhead, "like glowing metal, as if full of fire," cloaked in a brilliant light. Ezekiel interpreted this sight as "the likeness of the glory of the Lord." But some UFO enthusiasts have seized on the vision as describing the arrival of an extraterrestrial spaceship. When the controversial Swiss author Erich von Daniken - who has been accused of everything from slip-shod research to outright fraud - proposed this idea in his book Chariots of the Gods?, published in 1968, he aroused at least one reader to action. Josef F. Blumrich, an engineer with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, scoffed at von Daniken's idea of spaceship design. A native Austrian involved in the design of aircraft and rockets since 1934, Blumrich had played a role in building NASA's huge Saturn V rocket, which took astronauts to the moon. If any body knew about spacecraft design, he did. Blumrich was convinced that Ezekiel's wheel would fall apart under a rocket engineer's rigorous examination. But to his utter surprise, he found that the description could be adapted into a practical design for a landing launched from a mother spaceship (in the prophet's vision, the glowing metal godhead). Blumrich worked out the design in detail and published an account of it in a 1973 book titled The Spaceships of Ezekiel. "Seldom," he wrote, "has a total defeat been so rewarding, so fascinating, and so delightful!" According to Blumrich, the four "living creatures" could have been four sets of landing gear, each with a wheel for maneuvering over the ground. The "wings" would have been helicopter blades used for final positioning prior to touchdown, while a rocket engine in the craft's conical body supplied main propulsion. The notion that Ezekiel saw a spacecraft was by no means universally accepted, of course. Havard University astronomer Donald H. Menzel countered that Ezekiel was taken in by an optical illusion. Menzel argued that the prophet us "singularly accurate descriptions, albeit in symbolic and picturesque language," of a rare and complex meteorlogical phenomenon known as a parhelion. Formed by sunlight refracting through ice crystals, a full parhelion may consist of two concentric rings surrounding the sun and crossed with spokelike vertical and horizontal streaks of light. Two or even four of these sun dogs or mock suns may also appear on either side of and above and below the real sun. Finally, an inverted arc of light may sit on top of the outer ring. According to Menzel, with a little imagination the effect is that of a huge, shimmering chariot moving with the sun. Menzel also offered natural explanations for other alleged biblical sightings of UFOs. Jacob perhaps saw not a ladder but the aurora borealis - a display of gases glowing in the upper atmosphere. And the sea that parted for Moses might have been a vast mirage, a mirrorlike layer of hot air above the desert floor. Such a mirage, said Menzel, will seem to part, then close back on itself as a person moves through it. Those who reject legends or the Bible as valid UFO sources can still find possibilities in historical records. Chroniclers of Alexander the Great, for instance, report that his army was harassed by a pair of flying objects in 329 B.C. And according to some imaginative ufologists, the French cleric Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, was writing of possible spaceship visitations when he observed in the ninth century that members of his flock maintained their region was plagued by "aerial sailors" who arrived on ships in the clouds and depredated orchards and wheat fields. Agobard dismissed believers in such tales as "folk blinded by deep stupidity" but related an incident illustrating just how strongly the belief was held. One, he wrote, he saw four people - three men and a woman - displayed in chains; they had been accused of being passengers who had fallen from the intrusive aerial vessels. So angered were the assembled citizens of Lyons that they stoned the four to death as punishment for their supposed misdeeds. Apparently, though, the accusers later recanted their charges. A somewhat similar tale has it that in the thirteenth century an aerial craft snagged its anchor on a pile of stones in an English city; a crewman who slid down the rope to free the anchor was surrounded by a crowd of curious earthlings and asphyxiated. Other alleged sightings in the distant past include a spectacular event over the German city of Nuremberg in April 1561, when spheres and disks appeared in the sky and engaged in an aerial ballet. Residents of Basel, Switzerland, witnessed a similar display five years later. According to contemporary accounts, the sky was suddenly dotted with large black spheres that were zooming toward the sun or maneuvering about each other. Then, as quickly and mysteriously as they had appeared, they turned a fiery red and vanished. The great British astronomer Edmond Halley of comet fame also spied a series of unexplained aerial objects in March of the year 1716. One of them lit up the sky for more than two hours and was so brilliant that Halley could read a printed text by its light. As described by the astronomer, the glow finally began to wane and then suddenly flared up again "as if new fuel (had) been cast on a fire." These early accounts are suggestive at best; whether they describe true UFOs is a matter of interpretation. Researchers have a hard enough time simply verifying the authenticity of documents containing such tales. Inevitably, this has led some enterprising enthusiasts to manufacture their own "ancient" texts. The false story then spreads when one writer accepts it as genuine and uses it in a book, which becomes a source for others. In a U.S. government study of unidentified flying objects published in 1969, author Samuel Rosenberg examines three such spurious cases. The first is a purported ancient Indian chronicle from the so-called Book of Dyzan, containing a remarkable account of what sounds like a failed attempt by extraterrestrials to colonize the earth. According to the story, alien colonists arrived in a metal craft that circled the earth several times before landing to establish a settlement. Dissension in the group eventually led to civil war, with one side launching "a great shining lance that rode on a beam of light" and exploded in a huge fireball on the enemy's city. The Dyzan tale, which has been quoted at length in a number of pro-UFO books, would be an outstanding candidate for a UFO landing. Unfortunately, when Rosenberg traced the story to its source, he found that it stemmed wholly from the imagination of the nineteenth-century occultist Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who included it in her monumental tome The Secret Doctrine, which was published in 1886. Rosenberg's second case involves an account that was supposedly translated from a crumbling papyrus among the Vatican's Egyptian holdings. The tale, said to have come from the collection of a certain Professor Tulli and to have been translated by a Prince de Rachelwitz, tells of a fleet of unidentified flying objects that descended on Egypt 3,500 years ago during the reign of Pharaoh Thutmose III. However, Rosenberg's attempts to trace this papyrus in 1968 proved fruitless. The Vatican said it had no record of it; Tulli was dead and his papers were dispersed. Further, the Vatican reported that neither Tulli nor Rachelwitz was an expert; the Vatican's current Egyptologist suggest that Tulli had been deceived by a bogus papyrus. Rosenberg asserts that a close reading of the UFO account shows that it almost certainly dates from recent times and is derived from the biblical story of Ezekiel. Rosenberg had similar results when he traced the origins of an alleged sighting at Byland Abbey in Yorkshire, England. The story, which is presented in at least six books about UFOs, describes the extraordinary appearance, in the year A.D. 1290, of a UFO that coasted over the abbey as the monks were sitting down to dinner. Supposedly, a medieval chronicler noted that "when Henry the Abbot was about to say grace, John, one of the brethren, came in and said there was a great potent outside. Then they all went and LO! a large round silver thing like a disk flew slowly over them, and excited the greatest terror." Again, the incident is a wonderfully vivid account that does not stand up to examination. Rosenberg's sleuthing uncovered the story's much more recent origins: It was concocted in the early 1950s by a pair of high- school prankersters who fobbed it off on the public in a letter published in the London Times. Rosenberg does not dismiss the possibility of UFOs visiting earth in times long past but offers the Dyzan, Tulli, and Byland Abbey accounts as cautionary. "My conclusion: all accounts of 'UFO-like sightings handed down through the ages' are doubtful - until verified." To be sure, well-attested reports of strange aerial objects continued into the scientific and industrial age. By the 1800s such sightings had become increasingly well documented in newspapers and the scientific press. The English Journal of National History and Philosophy and Chemistry, for example, published the experience of an observer at Hatton Garden, London, in 1809. The gentlemen in question was astonished by the sight of "many meteors" darting around a black cloud during a thunderstorm. "They were like dazzling specks of light, dancing and traipsing thro' the clouds. One increased in size till it became of the brilliancy and magnitude of Venus, on a clear evening. But I could see no body in the light. It moved with great rapidity." Astronomers peering through telescopes frequently noted mysterious shapes passing in front of the sun and moon. Ocean sightings were also common. In May 1879, a passenger aboard a ship in the Persian Gulf watched in amazement as two giant, luminous wheels spun slowly toward the ocean; a similar phenomenon was reported to have taken place in the same area about a year later. In June 1881, two sons of the Prince of Wales - one of them the future King George V - were steaming off the coast of Australia when they and others aboard saw something like an airborne, fully illuminated ship. Some accounts have it that the mystery vessel was the ghostly Flying Dutchman; others maintain that it was a UFO. Perhaps the most remarkable observations occurred in the United States toward the end of the nineteenth century. Between November 1896 and April 1897, the country reeled under an extraordinary series of sightings that started in the state of California and spread eastward. The wavelike nature of the phenomenon - beginning with a few observations, swelling to a peak, and then eventually subsiding - was to become a regular characteristic of modern UFO sightings. It all began on the stormy afternoon of November 17, 1896, in Sacramento, the California capital, some fifty miles northeast of San Francisco. A trolleyman named Charles Lusk was standing outside his house and looking up at the roiling sky when to his immense surprise he saw a bright light cruising perhaps 1,000 feet overhead. A faint shape seemed to be moving along right behind it. Others, at the nearby capitol building, glimpsed the "wandering apparition," as one newspaper called it, and climbed up to the top of the rotunda for a better view. Another resident claimed to have seen not only the object - which was described as cigar-shaped, with an underslung gondola and a pair of side wheels like an old riverboat - but also two men aboard it, peddling furiously on something like a bicycle frame; one of them was overheard saying to the other, "We will get to San Francisco about half past twelve." Later that evening, in fact, a similar apparition was seen gliding majestically over San Francisco, flashing a searchlight on the city and sending the local seals scurrying off their rocks into the protective waters of the Golden Gate. Over the next two weeks, West Coast newspapers played the story of the mysterious flying machine for all it was worth. Where it might pop up next was anyone's guess. On November 24, witnesses reported it over San Jose as well as 750 miles north at Tacoma, Washington. The next day it was spied over Oakland and Los Angeles, 400 miles to the south. The press was inclined to be skeptical, however. A headline in William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner dismissed the sightings as "probably due to liquor," while the rival Chronicle suggested caustically that what people were actually seeing was the ghost of Diogenes, the figure from Greek legend who wandered the world with lamp in hand, seeking an honest man. Most people, however, seemed to accept the reality of the enigmatic vehicle and believed it to be an airship launched by an anonymous inventor. And considering the temper of the times, this seemed a reasonable enough assumption. The United States was experiencing the first bloom of a great technological era, when anything seemed possible. The electric light, the telephone, phonograph, and other recent inventions were transforming American life. Although it would be another seven years before the Wright brother's flight at Kitty Hawk, the inevitability of passenger-carrying airships was widely accepted. A dirigible-like balloon (with a rigid steel frame and driven by an engine) had flown over Paris as early as 1852. American inventor Solomon Andrews went aloft in a similar craft near New York City in 1865, and four years later in San Francisco an expatriate Englishman named Fred Marriot piloted a cigar-shaped balloon with two wings and steam- driven propellers. By the 1890s, Americans and Europeans were conducting well-publicized experiments with manned gliders, and the U.S. Patent Office was flooded with designs for flying machines of both the dirigible and the heavier- than-air types. Technology's shining promise was also reflected in the new literary genre of science fiction, whose master, the Frenchman Jules Venre, enjoyed an enormous following in America. Verne's Robur the Conqueror, published in the United States in 1887, concerned a globe-girdling airship called the Albatross. A popular and prolific American writer named Luis Philip Senareus (his total output had been estimated at 40 million words) produced three stories in the 1880s built around airships. America's first full-time science- fiction writer was an alcoholic Californian named Robert Duncan Milne; his stories, which often featured airships, were frequently published in San Francisco papers in the years before the 1896-97 wave. Other ideas taking root in the public imagination included antigravity machines and the possible habitation of Mars by an advanced civilization - a proposal made by none other than Percival Lowell, the country's leading astronomer. In short, by 1896 the American imagination could comfortably accommodate not only airships but even spaceships crossing the interplanetary void. In this climate of invention and creativity, the airship theory that unfolded in that winter of 1896 did not seem too farfetched. As the sightings accumulated, a lawyer known forever after as Airship Collins announced that he represented a wealthy but unnamed inventor who had assembled the craft in the hills north of Sacramento. A rival attorney soon stepped up to claim that he was the agent for the unknown inventor, who had actually built two airships - one in California, the other in New Jersey. The Spanish-American War was brewing, and the rival lawyer asserted that his client planned to use the marvelous flying machine to bomb Havana. After a month as front-page news, the airship story began to subside on the West Coast. The wave was far from spent, however. In February the craft surfaced again, this time in the Midwest. The first sightings came out of Nebraska near the towns of Hastings and Invale, where witnesses described the vessel as having "a conical shape, perhaps thirty to forty feet in length," with a bright headlight and six smaller running lights, wings, and a large fan-shaped rudder. Skeptics had laughed off the first accounts as the inebriated visions of saloon patrons. The Omaha Bee, however, took the story seriously and stressed that later sightings came from upstanding church folk. Over the next two months, the phantom ship appeared over other towns and cities in Nebraska, and in Iowa, Kansas, Arkansas, Texas, and Tennessee as well. This epidemic of reports included several cases of reputed face-to-face meetings with a vessel's occupants. A Chattanooga resident told of finding an airship on the spur of a mountain outside the city; a certain Professor Charles Davidson and his crew were making repairs to the craft and told of having sailed east from Sacramento aboard it a month before. A citizen of Harrisburg, Arkansas, also met the crew, which was made up of a woman, two young men, and a patriarchal inventor-captain with piercing black eyes and whiskers down to his belly. The old man, he said, had discovered the secret of anigravity and planned to display the machine in public after flying it to Mars. In Missouri, one man swore he had met a "short two-legged creature" who used hypnosis to hold him prisoner aboard the aircraft for three weeks. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch titillated its readers with the tale of Mr. W. H. Hopkins, who came upon a gleaming metal craft and its Olympian crew: a bearded man "of noble proportions and majestic countenance" and a beautiful naked woman ("dressed in nature's garb," as the paper discreetly put it) with golden hair flowing to her waist. Reports continued to pour in. In April, a newspaper vendor in the Chicago suburb of Rogers Park took what may have been history's first UFO photograph, which one newspaper used as the basis for a pen-and-ink sketch. Alas, the photograph itself - which rival papers examined and pronounced a fake - soon disappeared forever. In the wake of the mystery airship, people began to find letters reputedly dropped by its crew. One was discovered tied to a reed near Astoria, Illinois, and addressed to none other than inventor Thomas A. Edison. The Wizard of Menio Park dismissed the message, written to him in code and signed "C. L. Harris, electrician Airship N.3," as "a pure fake" without bothering to decipher it. He went on to declare that although airships might be possible some day, they would never be more than toys. Another letter was found attached to an iron rod stuck in the ground at a Wisconsin farm, datelined "Aboard the airship Pegasus." The missive claimed that "application for the patents for a parallel plane airship will be filed simultaneously at Washington and the European capitals. It is propelled by steam and is lighted by electricity, and has a carrying power of 1,000 pounds. Sightings petered out toward the end of April. As one of the oddest episodes in American history came to an end, people were just as mystified about its true nature as they had been at the beginning. For some, however, the airship stories were clearly more enjoyable as fiction than as fact. Despite their growing technological sophistication, turn-of-the-century Americans remained a simple people in many ways. The United States was, to a considerable extent, still a rural society, close to its frontier roots and possessing a knee-slapping sense of humour as broad as the prairie sky. The tall tale - told with an absolutely straight face - was a staple in American humour, and preposterous stories had long proliferated, not only around the cracker barrels of country stories but also in the columns of both small-town and big-city newspapers. As early as 1844, for example, poet and free-lance journalist Edgar Allan Poe had penned for the Baltimore Sun a so-called factual account of a transatlantic balloon flight - a feat not really accomplished until 1978. So if a few people caught up in the airship craziness felt like stretching the truth, they were just part of a venerable tradition. Apparently nobody practiced this time-honored art better than did one Alexander Hamilton, a farmer who told a reporter of a colossal 300-foot- long airship descending on his spread near the town of Yates Genter, Kansas, on April 23, 1897. When Hamilton and two others rushed to investigate, he said, they noticed inside the craft's glass compartment "six of the strangest beings I ever saw. They were jabbering together but we could not understand a word they said." Then the ship took off, carrying with it one of Hamilton's heifers. It hovered over the farm for a time before disappearing into the sky. The next day, a farmer some distance away recovered the hide, legs and head of the purloined cow. Hamiltons amazing tale concludes: "After identifying the hide by my brand, I went home. But every time I would drop to sleep I would see the cursed thing, with its big lights and hideous people. I don't know whether they are devils or angels or what; but we all saw them, and my whole family saw the ship, and I don't want anymore to do with them." It was a sensational story, even by the standards of airship accounts. Moreover, Hamilton was a rock-solid citizen and former state senator whose tale was accompanied by an affidavit, signed by twelve community leaders, attesting to his reputation for veracity. More than sixty years later, some ufologists would rediscover the story and tout it as testimony that could not easily be explained away. Subsequent detective work by UFO researcher Jerome Clark, however, deflated these fantastic events. Clark's investigation showed conclusively that the entire episode was a tongue-in-cheek hoax perpetrated by Hamilton and the signers of the affidavit - all members of the local liars club. Tall tales and hoaxers could hardly explain the extraordinary event that occurred in Russia about a decade later. On the morning of June 30, 1908, something huge and terrifying hurtled out of the sky and exploded over a region called Tunguska in remote Siberia. One witness reported that the sky was split in two by the tremendous blast. Another saw an elongated flaming object trailing dust. The cataclysm shattered windowpanes, shook the ground, and propelled a searing wind across the desolate landscape, felling trees as if they were matchsticks and igniting 1,200 square miles of forest. Scientists would later estimate the power of the blast to have been equivalent to that of a twenty- megaton nuclear bomb. The Tunguska explosion has remained a mystery, fueling a number of competing explanations. Among the more imaginative are the antimatter and the black hole collision theories: If antimater - which is made up of particles with abnormally reversed electrical charges - was to leak from an alternative universe into ours, it would explode spectacularly upon contact with normal matter. Similarly, even the tiniest black hole (an invisible, ultra-dense celestial phenomenon) would wreak havoc if it collided with the earth. The existence of miniature black holes has not been proven, however. All black holes known to astronomers are so massive that they would most assuredly destroy the earth. Not surprisingly, some students of the explosion suggested that it resulted from a UFO disintegrating in the atmosphere. Several Soviet scientists claim to have found unusually high radioactivity in the Tunguska soil and assert that it came from the spaceship's nuclear engine. Their calculations of the object's trajectory also led them to believe that the visitor decelerated upon entering the atmosphere. Some ufologists are convinced therefore that the occupants of a crashing spaceship deliberately changed course to avoid hitting an inhabited area. Other scientists have found no evidence for either the radioactivity or changed trajectory, however. The weight of evidence now points to a collision between the earth and a comet, or perhaps an asteroid, as the explanation for the Tunguska blast. Calculations show the object, whatever it might have been, was probably 100 yards across, weighed a million tons, and plunged at a speed of 70,000 miles per hour to a flaming death by atmospheric friction. One year after the Tunguska incident, the world experienced its second major wave of UFO sightings. This time the scope of the phenomenon was international, as reports came in from Europe, North America, South Africa, Japan, New Zealand, and other parts of the globe between the years 1909 and 1913. It began in southwestern England as witnesses told of seeing a large oblong object with a powerful light cruising high above them at night. Included among the testimony was at least one encounter with the occupants of a mystery craft. An elderly Welshman hiking one day in the mountains said he came upon a huge cigar-shaped machine on the ground next to two crewmen. Dressed in fur caps and coats, the men "jabbered furiously to each other in a strange lingo," according to the startled witness, then took off in their noisy machine at his approach. Speculation centred on possible secret test flights of the new zepplins, a type of large dirigible the Germans were known to be developing. Similar sightings occurred again in England in early 1913 and were also attributed to the Germans, who just eighteen months later would be at war with Great Britain. However, no documentation has ever been found to prove the zeppelin hypothesis. On the other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, Americans had their own UFO experiences to ponder. In December 1909, a Worcester, Massachusetts policeman walking his predawn beat was puzzled by a fiery light moving overhead. During the next several days, the same light - or something very much like it - was seen by residents of two other towns, and on December 23 it made an appearance over Boston. Some sharp- eyed New Englanders swore that a dark shape, like that of an airship, accompanied the light. To the delight of children who assumed that the craft must be Santa Claus, the UFO visited Boston again on Christmas Eve, and then reappeared the next day more than a hundred miles to the southwest over New Haven, Connecticut. Suspicion focused on a Worcester manufacturer of heating equipment named Wallace E. Tillinghast. Early in December, Tillinghast had proclaimed to the press that he had built a new type of airplane and had test-flown it on at least twenty occasions, all at night. Fear of someone stealing his idea, he said, prevented him from showing his marvelous machine to the public. If his claims are true, such an invention would be the logical candidate for New England's mysterious visitor. However, the inscrutable Tillinghast kept coy about any responsibility he may have had for the bizarre events. Later investigations indicated he may actually have built a flying machine, but if so it almost certainly never left the ground. The entire episode remains another of the many enigmas in the history of UFO sightings. If the 1909 reports seem like a replay of California airship flap, the next series of sightings appears to be a vision of a jet-powered future. In February 1913, citizens of both Canada and the United States witnessed a squadron of moving lights arcing through the night sky from Saskatchewan , across Minnesota, Michigan, New York, and New Zealand, and out over the Atlantic Ocean. A sound like that of distant thunder accompanied the lights, which seemed to fly in precise formation. Scientists who looked into the sightings hypothesized that the observers had seen a group of meteors plummeting through the earth's atmosphere. Later, however, UFO enthusiasts would maintain that the baffling lights could have been interstellar spacecraft; meteors, they observed, do not usually fly in formation. The case remains unresolved. One other event from this era took place before what may have been the largest crowd ever to witness a UFO - if indeed it was a UFO. In 1917, on the rainy afternoon of October 13, a crowd of 50,000 people in Fatima, Portugal, watched in amazement as the clouds parted to reveal a huge silver disk spinning like a windmill and dancing about the sky. The object gave off heat, and some of the witnesses would later state that their rain-soaked clothes had dried in minutes from exposure to it. After plunging toward the earth, the disk climbed back into the sky and disappeared into the sun. This extraordinary spectacle fulfilled the prophecy of three young peasant girls who claimed to have spoken to the Virgin Mary. She told them, they said, that on October 13 she would reveal herself, "so that everyone would have to believe." The Catholic Church declared it a miracle, but ufologists point to the striking similarities between this event and many reports of alleged UFOs. Such reports were sporadic for the quarter century following the occurrence at Fatima. By the 1940s, Europe, Asia, and North America were caught up in World War II, a conflict that, more than any previous war, fueled the engine of technological advancement. Out of World War II came radar, jet airplanes, supersonic rockets, and the apocalyptic might of the atomic bomb. All were developed in secret. It is not surprising, then, that whenever something strange was seen in the sky, the witnesses' first impulse was to attribute it to some new weapon in the enemy's arsenal. This was exactly the response American commanders had to bewildering reports flooded in from air force pilots in the autumn of 1944. The sightings began over the Rhine River; eerie, luminous balls, the pilots said, were appearing out of nowhere and chasing their planes. The fiery disks, some red, some orange or white, seemed to be toying with the aircraft, diving and darting through the sky in madcap maneuvers, occasionally blinking on and off like Christmas-tree lights. As many as ten might track a plane. The airmen called them "foo fighters," a named derived from a nonsense line in the popular "Smokey Stover" comic strip: "Where there's foo, there's fire." (The cartoonist apparently took the word from the French feu, meaning fire.) The Germans were down to their last, desperate defense by this time, and the bizarre foo fighters - or "kraut balls," as they were also known - seemed right in character with the presumed cleverness of German technology. But the notion that these fireballs might be secret weapons soon faded, since none had ever harmed an Allied plane. Also, as Americans learned after the war, German pilots saw them, too - and assumed they were Allied secret weapons. Bomber crews over the Pacific and pilots who were flying in the Korean and Vietnam wars would also report having seen foo-like phenomena, leading some ufologists to suggest that the glowing objects were extraterrestrials who had come to spy on earthly military operations. Skeptics, on the other hand, provided more down-to-earth explanations, such as static electricity, ball lightning, or reflections from ice crystals that had formed in cockpit- window imperfections. The mystery has yet to be solved. By 1946 the world war had ended but the cold war was just beginning. Contributing to the mounting suspicion between the United States and the Soviet Union was a wave of mysterious sightings over the Baltic Sea and Scandinavia. The peculiar activity started in late May, when residents of northern Sweden began to see strange rocketlike shapes careening overhead. These curious reports came from remote areas and were largely ignored until a few weeks later on June 9, when the citizens of Helsinki, Finland, were flabbergasted by an object that cut across the pale night sky, trailing smoke and leaving a phantom afterglow in its wake. As additional sightings came in from other parts of northern Europe, reports of the "ghost rockets" and "spook bombs" dominated the newspapers. Accounts of the unidentified objects' shape and behavior varied. While most witnesses described what they had seen as missiles, others believed they saw gray spheres or fireballs or even pinwheel-like affairs spraying out sparks. To some they looked like cigars or footballs, and one witness described them as "seagulls without heads." They flew straight, some said; no, claimed others - they climbed, dived, even rolled and reversed direction. Some flashed across the sky like meteors. Others hardly moved. Eventually, well over 1,000 sightings would be reported over seven months in Sweden alone; similar reports flowed in from as far afield as Portugal, North Africa, Italy, Greece, and India. In northern Europe, suspicions turned immediately to the Soviets, who just a year before had captured the German V-2 rocket base at Peenemunde on the Baltic Sea. The V-2, which terrorized London and other Allied cities in the closing year of the war, was an awesome supersonic weapon - essentially the first ballistic missile. Was it possible that the Russians had developed something similar and were test-firing it over the Baltic? The Kremlin denied this was the case, but the possibility made officials in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark skittish enough to impose a news blackout on all UFO sightings. Swedish military forces went on the alert, and the United States sent the retired air force general Jimmy Doolittle to assist them in their investigation. Ultimately, the Swedish Defense Ministry would determine that 80 percent of the sightings could be explained as conventional aircraft or such natural events as meteors, stars, planets, and clouds. Nevertheless, at least 200 of the reported sightings, the Swedes said, "cannot be the phenomena of nature or products of the imagination." It would not be the last time that investigators would reach a "tantalizing inconclusiveness" - the felicitous phrase used in a United States government study twenty years later - as they probed the mystery of unidentified flying objects. At the same time, the scientific leaps resulting from World War II made the notion of extraterrestrial visitors, once the fancy of science-fiction writers, seem more realistic. As investigators would soon find out, foo fighters and ghost rockets were just the beginning. end.