AN ASTRONOMER'S EXPLANATION
ARE flying saucers real? "Certainly," says Dr. Donald H. Menzel, Harvard professor of astrophysics. "They are as real as rainbows. No one should be ashamed of seeing them and reporting them. I have seen them myself."
On the other hand, says Menzel, seeing flying saucers is not the same thing as believing that they are space ships manned by intelligent beings from another planet. This science-fiction approach is like "explaining" lightning by calling it a weapon of Zeus: it merely supplants one mystery by another mystery. Calling the saucers space ships explains them, after a fashion, but it summons up the greater mystery of a godlike super-race living on Mars or Venus. "How simple is this sort of science," says Menzel, "and how wrong."
Plain Reasoning. Some saucer reports are hoaxes; some are products of imagination. Others have come from glimpses of such ordinary objects as weather balloons, aircraft and even sheets of newspaper carried aloft by the wind. But Menzel became convinced that, in spite of such false alarms, competent and honest observers had been seeing unusual sights that needed explaining. He determined to find out by plain scientific reasoning what it was they saw.
The saucers vary widely. Some are hazy globes; some are bright lights. Some are cigar-shaped, wingless "airplanes"; others are spinning disks. Some of the saucers fly singly; others in formation. They fly both by day and by night; they zigzag abruptly. It is obvious, concluded Menzel, that no single type of object, such as a novel aircraft, can be behind all the stories.
Most striking things about the saucers are 1) their silence, 2) their habit of darting in violent zigzags and 3) their apparent high speed. Dr. Menzel does not take the reported speed at its face value. "Unless you know the size of an unfamiliar object," he says, "you cannot judge its distance, and unless you know its distance, you cannot judge its speed."
The speed of the saucers (apparent or real) is the principal prop of the spaceship theory. No man-made structural material, say the spaceship enthusiasts, could move through air at several thousand m.p.h. without being melted by the heat of friction. No style of aircraft known to man could move so fast in complete silence. No human crew could make the sudden stops and turns without being killed by "G-forces." Therefore, argue the space-shippers, the saucers must come from another planet where aeronautical technology is more advanced than on earth.
"How much simpler," reasoned Menzel, "to suppose that the saucers are not material at all. Then they need not obey the rules & regulations that govern material objects."
But what nonmaterial, saucerlike object can move quickly, silently, and in violent zigzags? One such thing is a spot of light. It is easy to swing the beam of a searchlight (across high clouds, for instance) and make its bright spot seem to travel at many thousand m.p.h. The spot of light moves silently and it can change direction as abruptly as any saucer.