Belated Explanation

In the 3 1/2 years since flying saucers first came flipping and flashing across Page One, the wilder stories about tiny men from Mars and interplanetary craft that dissolved in the earth's atmosphere had been pretty well exposed as hoaxes or hallucinations. But most people were still sure that some kind of unidentified flying object did exist, and they wanted some sense-making explanation. Last week they got the best one yet. It came from Dr. Urner Liddel, chief nuclear physicist for the Office of Naval Research.

The flying saucers, said Physicist Liddel, were actually giant plastic balloons called Skyhooks, which the Navy has been sending aloft since 1947 with electronic instruments to record cosmic rays. As the 100-ft. balloons soar higher & higher (maximum height: 19 miles) they expand, and are often pushed along by high-altitude winds at speeds up to 200 m.p.h. When seen from below, particularly when reflecting light rays from its underside, a Skyhook looks exactly like a big saucer.

It was a Skyhook, said Liddell, that an Air Force pilot was pursuing when he was killed over Kentucky in 1948. "When this project first began it was kept secret," he explained. "Now, there is no longer any need to keep the public in the dark."

The truth was that the public had never really been kept in the dark about Skyhooks. Reporting in April 1949, after a two-year investigation of flying-saucer stories, the Air Force had suggested clusters of Skyhooks as one source of the saucer rumors. But for some reason, known only to Naval bureaucracy, no one had ever before given a full explanation of how they looked at high altitudes, or furnished photographic evidence.

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