◆ SpookStack

—S—— fore “ts... off,” he s: aid, § have nothing to do saucers; I'll swear te wae 08 stack of Bibles, if you like. { t have any secret ne ircraft that could have star tion. Third, nobody spotted space ships planet. Fourth, ev gators lear ned has to the public.” Russians so-called * investi- vailable mt occurred 24, 1947, a business firm that makes t, was flying his aehalis, Washing- ington. The re- lash on one wing le turned and, at a was about twenty took to be nine tail- toward Mount e their outlines quite he snow,” Air Force igence quoted him as_ saying. “They flew very close to the mountain- tops, directly south to southeast, down the hog’s-back of the range, flying like geese, in a diagonal, chainlike line, as if they were linked together . . . a chain of saucerlike things at least five miles long, swerving in and out of the high mountain peaks, They were flat... and so shiny that they reflected the sun like a mirror.” Ar- nold said he watched the saucers for three minutes and estimated their speed at about twelve hundred miles an hour. Air Force technicians, consulted by newspaper- rmen, said that any object moving that fast would be invisible to the naked eye at Arnold’s estimated distance. The press scoffed at Ar- nold’s story, and he was re- sentful. “Even if I see a ten-story building — flying through the air, I won’t say a word about it,” he de- clared, and when he got back to Boise he wrote a series of ar- ticles about his experience for a mag- azine called Fate. No sooner were the skeptical news- paper accounts printed than dozens of people turned up with similar re- ports. Another resident of Boise spotted a disc over that city, “a half circle in shape, clinging to a cloud and just as bright and silvery-looking as a mirror caught in the rays of the sun.” Lieu- HE first sa distance miles, sa less airck Rainier tenant Governor Donale of Idaho, disclosed that had seen a comet-shaped objece _ over the western part of the s finally dipped below the horiz said. (Later on, the personnel of Proj- ect Saucer decided that the Lieutenant Governor had been looking at either Saturn or Mercury.) Four cops in Port- land, Oregon, saw a group of discs “wobbling, disappearing, and reappear- ing.” Reports of other phenomena having been seen in the skies appeared in the papers almost daily. Two Army officers at Fort Richardson, Alaska, reported seeing a spherical object flying through the air at incredible speed and leav- ing no vapor trail; some fishermen off Newfoundland saw a series of aerial flashes, silver to reddish in color; a lady in Oregon watched a group of saucers spell out “‘P-E-P-S-I,” and alerted her neighbors to the presence of foreign agents practicing a secret code in our skies; an Oklahoma City man saw a saucer “the bulk of six B-29s;” and a prospector in the Cascade Moun- tains of Oregon saw six saucers in a group, banking in the sun— ‘round, silent, and not flyi ing in formation.” On the Fourth of July, there were twelve reports of saucers in widely separated parts of the United States. One of these saucers, sighted at Trenton, New Jersey, was traced to a fireworks display. Dr. Paul Fitts, an Ohio State Uni- versity psychologist who was for a time attached to Project Saucer, considered this crowded condition in the holiday skies the result of mass suggestibility, the same jumpy trait that caused Americans to see Zeppelins overhead during and after the First World War. “Our graphs show that saucer incidents al- ways increase dramatically after publicity,” he has since told me. “The sky, you know, has been a source of exciting visions from time immemorial, and its attrac- tion is particularly strong in our jittery moments.” ROM the beginning, the officers in charge of Project Saucer recognized a peculiar difficulty in their assignment. “If you look out the window and see something, how can I prove or disprove what it was if I didn’t see it and you can’t tell me much about what you