◆ SpookStack

* had behaved like a norgal’ aircraft in the way it disapps d 1 the line of sight, Here, the experts professed to hope, was something Project Saucer could get its teeth into. The whole flying-saucer mystery might be explained. The first Step was to determine whether the ob- ject was an aircraft that had been par- tially obscured by a cloud or whose appearance had been distorted by a rain- storm. Two hundred and twenty-five civilian and military flight schedules were analyzed, and it was found that one other plane, an Air Force C-47, had been near the Eastern airliner at the time the mysterious object was sighted, Conjecture about the C-47 began to appear irrelevant, however, when the Macon ground crews agreed with Chiles and Whitted that the thing they had seen was going much faster than two hundred miles an hour, and So,. unless it dawdled around some- where, wouldn’t have taken anything like an hour to get from Macon to Montgomery, Astronomers went to work on the problem. Dr. Hynek considered the possibility that a brilliant, slow-moving meteor might be the explanation. Vari- ous bits of the apparition’s description encouraged this notion—“orange-red flame,” ~ Cigar-shaped,” “a tremendous burst of flame.” Unfortunately, the flight schedules of meteors are not avail- able, and Dr. Hynek had no means of testing his hypothesis. “Tt will have to be left to the psychologists to tell us whether the immediate trai] of a bright meteor could produce the subjective im- pression of a ship with lighted win- dows,” he y rote in a report on_ his findings. The psychologists expressed the opinion that a meteor could indeed be mistaken for a space ship. Dr, Fitts, the Ohio State psychologist, observed that both Chiles and Whitted were human and therefore as likely to be victims of mass suggestibility as any- one else. Dr. Fitts told me during a talk I had with him that Psychologists are used to the fact that even people of high mental calibre often make mis- takes about what they see, “Also, I would like to make the point that pilots are trained to instruments,” he said, “They grow very dependent on those “struments, and I don’t know whether re necessarily superior observers ut them. I do know that during “© war, when I was in the Air Force, pilots fre quently gave some pretty odd reports of what they’d seen while fly- ing their missions.” Chiles and Whitted re adil} agreed that their report might oS Lee An utterly new carpet creating an unusual textu Extremely smart . . . for one Chosen by leading ded in carpet fashion and luxur And, of course, Nye-Wait advantages of being mothpr for lasting fit to withstan¢ will outwear conventi Write Nye-Wait for the Nye- 295 Fifth New Yor Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, D * Illustrated is NYE-WAIT’S COR visible depth, translucent color and a ‘ree: