Space Fiction by U. P.

Three days after the Associated Press's manned missile landed in oblivion, the United Press staged its own excursion into the wild blue yonder. Panted a U.P. bulletin from Helsinki: "The state radio here picked up signals early today which indicate Russia may have launched a moon rocket." European radio stations, said U.P., had picked up a "mysterious beep-beep-beep" which lasted three times as long as the signal from an orbiting Sputnik and "suggested the Doppler effect* that would be produced by a transmitter speeding away from the earth."

The space-singed A.P. waited 42 minutes, then filed a carefully sublunar story reporting that a ham operator near Columbus. Ohio, had now picked up the beep. "He suggested," said the A.P., "that it might be a signal from some kind of space vehicle." In A.P.'s second story British Broadcasting Corp. engineers pronounced that the signal was probably earthbound. The A.P. finally traced the beep to the "electronic groan" of an idling Russian teleprinter on the 20-megacycle band used by the Sputniks. (The teleprinter was on 20.025 mc.; the Sputnik frequency is 20.005 mc.)

The rocket-to-the-moon got a big early-morning play on radio newscasts, but its short life began after U.S. morning newspapers had gone to press, ended before afternoon papers started rolling. More than seven hours after its first moon-rocket bulletin, the U.P. mentioned the teleprinter theory among others, concluded later: "It was anybody's guess." Said a British engineer quoted by the A.P.: "We get strange noises constantly. A noise might be a hair dryer in Cornwall."

* According to the scientific principle named for Austrian Physicist Christian Johann Doppler (1803-53), the speed of an object moving toward or away from the observer can be accurately measured by changes in the length of the radio waves it transmits.

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