e called for a good
panning technique.
The photographs didn't tally with the description of the lights that
the professors had seen; in fact, they were firmly convinced that
they were of "home manufacture." The professors had reported soft,
glowing lights yet the photos showed what should have been extremely
bright lights. Hart reported a perfect formation while the
professors, except for the first flight, reported an unorderly group.
There was no way to explain this disagreement in the arrangement of
the lights. Of course, it wasn't impossible that on the night that
Hart saw the lights they were flying in a V formation. The first time
the professors saw them they were flying in a semicircle.
The intensity of the lights was difficult to explain. Again I went
to the people in the Photo Reconnaissance Laboratory. I asked them if
there was any possible situation that could cause this. They said
yes. An intensely bright light source which had a color far over in
the red end of the spectrum, bordering on infrared, could do it. The
eye is not sensitive to such a light, it could appear dim to the eye
yet be "bright" to the film. I asked them what kind of a light source
would cause this. There were several things, if you want to
speculate, they said, extremely high temperatures for one. But this
was as far as they would go. We have nothing in this world that flies
that appears dim to the eye yet will show bright on film, they said.
This ended the investigation of the photographs, and the
investigation ended at a blank wall. My official conclusion, which
was later given to the press, was that "The photos were never proven
to be a hoax but neither were they proven to be genuine." There is no
definite answer.
The emphasis of the investigation was now switched to the
professors' sighting. The meager amount of data that they had
gathered seemed to be accurate but it was inconclusive as far as
getting a definite answer was concerned. They had measured two
things, how much of the sky the objects had crossed in a certain time
and the angle from one side of the formation to the other. These
figures didn't mean a great deal, however, since the altitude at
which the formation of lights was flying was unknown. If you assumed
that the objects were flying at an altitude of 10,000 feet you could
easily compute that they were traveling about 3,600 miles per hour,
or five to six times the speed of sound. The formation would have
been
|