Saucers' End

The 1,465-page report was the product of a two-year, $500,000 investigation sponsored by the Air Force and conducted by a team of University of Colorado scientists led by respected Physicist Edward Condon. It had been thoroughly reviewed and then approved by the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. Thus, when the Scientific-Study of Unidentified Flying Objects was finally made public last week, it spoke with authority. Its conclusions all but demolished the idea that earth has been visited by creatures from oth er planets. Despite a few remaining puzzles, there is no evidence, said the report, that UFOs are spaceships from extraterrestrial civilizations and no scientific justification at this time for any further extensive saucer investigations.

The still loyal legions of flying-saucer believers protested indignantly. In Washington, the National Investigations Committee for Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) called a press conference to charge that the study ignored "the vast majority of reliable, unexplained UFO sighting cases." Physicist James McDonald, one of the few reputable scientists who side with the saucer buffs, insisted that the Condon group "wasted an unprecedented opportunity" to make a scientific study of the UFO problem. In UFOs? Yes!, a rambling book published to coincide with the release of the Condon report, a psychologist* who was fired from the Colorado team bitterly attacked his former colleagues, their motives and their methods.

Article of Faith. Saucer buffs had good reason to be annoyed. The Colorado investigation destroyed some of their favorite theories with simple, rational explanations for several classic UFO sightings and incidents. Some believers, for example, are certain that saucers come from a planet named Clarion that is always on the opposite side of the sun from the earth and always hidden from terrestrial viewers. With calculations made by U.S. Naval Observatory scientists, the Condon group was able to show that variations in the orbital path of Clarion would soon make it visible from earth. Besides, Clarion's gravity would affect the motion of Venus. Since Clarion has not been seen, and the orbit of Venus shows no signs of mysterious perturbations, the scientists concluded that Clarion does not exist.

A fragment of metal that reportedly fell to earth in 1957 when a UFO exploded in the air above the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil, was sent to a Washington laboratory for analysis. It had been an article of faith among many saucer believers that the fragment consisted of magnesium more pure than any ever made by man. The lab tests, said the report, suggested an earthly origin; the fragment contained more impurities than commercially produced magnesium.

Another UFO landmark, a "claw-shaped" marking on the dry sand of a beach that was pictured in a special Look issue on flying saucers, turned out to be merely urine-soaked sand. "Some person or animal," the Condon report solemnly states, "had performed an act of micturition there."

Ford Motor Co. scientists were called in to study a saucer-based theory that the powerful magnetic field generated around a UFO stalls nearby cars by disrupting their electrical systems. Researchers had previously found that an extremely strong magnetic field imposed upon an ignition coil would indeed stall a car; but the Ford experts pointed out that the field would also permanently change the normal magnetic pattern in the metal of the auto body. When they compared a car reportedly immobilized by a saucer with identical models that were nowhere near the site of the incident, the Ford men found that its magnetic pattern was no different from the others. Their conclusion: the stalled car had never been subjected to an intense magnetic field--from a UFO or anything else.

The Condon forces also launched an attack on some of the most cherished UFO photographs. Traveling to Fort Belvoir, Va., where an Army private had photographed a ringlike UFO in 1957, investigators showed the picture to Army technicians. The technicians immediately identified the UFO as a vortex ring formed when diesel oil, gasoline and white phosphorus was exploded by TNT to simulate atomic-bomb explosions during demonstrations.

With the assistance of a photo analyst from the Raytheon Co., the Condon group found discrepancies in a pair of saucer photographs taken in 1966 by a barber in his front yard in Roseville, Ohio. Although the barber insisted that he had shot the pictures less than two minutes apart, the analyst surveyed the yard and determined from the position and length of shadows in the pictures that they could only have been taken more than an hour apart--and in the reverse order from that claimed by the barber.

Despite careful examination, the report admits, the Colorado team was unable to explain satisfactorily either the saucer photographs taken in 1950 by a McMinnville, Ore., farmer or those shot from a truck by a California traffic investigator in 1965. The scientists were particularly impressed by the analysis of the McMinnville pictures, "in which all factors investigated appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary object flew within sight of two witnesses." The report nonetheless does not rule out the possibility of a hoax. "The fact that the object appears beneath the same part of the overhead wire in both photos," the report cautions, "can be used as an argument favoring a suspended model."

Hot-Air Balloon. Scientists from the Stanford Research Institute were also pressed into service by Condon and were able to attribute many radar UFO sightings to atmospheric aberrations. But no one could explain a radar blip that overtook and passed a Braniff airliner as it descended toward the Colorado Springs airport in May, 1967. Says the report: "This must remain as one of the most puzzling radar cases on record, and no conclusion is possible at this time."

Other episodes have proved considerably less mysterious. In January 1968, near Castle Rock, Colo., some 30 witnesses reported night-flying UFOs with flashing lights, fantastic maneuverability and occupants that were presumed to be from outer space. "Two days later," the study says, "it was more modestly reported that two high school boys had launched a polyethylene, candle-heated hot-air balloon."

Fed up with hoaxes and saturated by worthless reports from well-meaning witnesses, the scientists recommended that the Air Force's Project Blue Book (the information-gathering and investigating office on UFO reports) be shut down and that no additional federal funds be spent at this time on the major new saucer agency now being advocated by many UFO believers. "Our general conclusion," said the investigators, "is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge."

* After leaking the contents of a private memo to outsiders.

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