◆ SpookStack

% had behaved like a‘ nores 1 aircraft in the way it disappy 1 the line of sight, Here, the experts professed to hope, Was something Project Saucer could get its teeth into. The whole flyin: “Saucer mystery might be explained. The first step was to determine whether the ob- ject was an aircraft that had been pa tially obscured by cloud or whose appearance had been distorted by a rain- storm. T'wo hundred and twenty-fiv 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 3ome- 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 a ail- able, and Dr, Hynek had no means of testing his hypothesis. “It will have to be left to the psychologists to tell us whether the immediate trail of a bright meteor could produce the subjective im- Pression of a ship with lighted win. dows,” he wrote 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 mice takes about what they see. “Alo, J 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 Te necessarily superior observers ut them. I do know that during ‘¢ war, when I was in the Air Force, pilots frequently gave some pretty odd reports of what they’d seen while fly. ing their missions,” Chiles and Whitted readily agreed that their report might An utterly new carpet: creating an unusual textu: E in carpet fashion and luxur And, of course, Nye-Wait advantages of being mothpr for lasting fit to withstand will outwear conventi Write Nye-Wait for the Nye- 295 Fifth New Yor Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, * Illustrated is NYE. WAIT’S COR visible depth, translucent color and x Se