© The New York Times, December 16, 1954

Frontpage

President Discounts ‘Saucer’ From Space

By ANTHONY LEVIERO
Special to The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Dec.15-
President Eisenower said to-
day an Air Force official had
assured him that flying saucers
were not invading the earth
from outer space.

That left the inference that if
flying saucers were real they
were terrestrial. But nobody at
his news conference asked the
President where they did come
from.

All the news on the subject
from the Air Force today was
reassuring, however. In fact if
the Air Force were not tactful
it might scoff at the whole busi-
ness publicly. Some of its spokes
-men just scoffed in private.

Air Force officials imply that
for a number of reasons they
cannot deprecate saucers too
freely (though they wish they
could). First somebody, some...

Continued on Page 26, Column 3

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PRESIDENT BRINGS
SAUCERS TO EARTH

Continued From Page 1

day, is apt to come along with
a jet airplane resembling a
saucer and then the flying saucer
advocates will say “we told you
so.”

The Air Force also receives a
great deal of mail on the subject.
Some of the writers are well-
meaning persons and get indig-
nant if officials suggest doubt
that they actually saw an object
in the sky. Then a lot of mail is
considered in the “crackpot”
class and the Air Force does not
want to get any more of this
than it has to.

And finally, there is a com-
paratively small group – but the
most troublesome – the writers on
the subject. Some of them have
been making a good thing of the
flying saucer interest and a few
have been challenging the Air
Force to state categorically that
flying saucers do not exist.

The Air Force maintains a
serious and continuing study of
flying saucers because of “a very
definite obligation to identify and
analyze things that happen in
the air that may have in them
menace to the United States.”
This study is called the “Uniden-
tified Flying Object Program.”

“Flying saucers” have been in-
triguing some Europeans, and the
Air Force has received a photo-
graph of some Sicilians gazing
at two disks in the air over
Taorima, Sicily. The Air Force
did not comment directly on this
photograph but noted that still
pictures in general were ”worth-
less as evidence.”

A spokesman said today that
10 per cent of the sightings could
not be evaluated because of in-
sufficient data. The other 90 per
cent, he said, could be explained
on one scientific basis or another.

Recently, when it reported 254
sightings in the first nine months
of this year, the Air Force had
placed at 20 per cent the number
that could not be evaluated.

If somebody reports a sighting
And wishes to help, he is sent a
Form to fill out. It requests data
On date, time, size, shape, com-
position, speed, altitude, direc-
tion of travel, maneuver pattern,
color, sound, length of time ob-
served, sky conditions, visibility,
ground direction of wind, name,
age, and mailing address of the
observer, and any other remarks
the observer wishes to make.

In the last year the Air Force
has sent out about 1,500 of these
questionnaires and the results
have done no more than confirm
the situation – that 90 per cent
of the sightings can be explained
as not saucers and the other 10
per cent lack the data for proper
evaluation.

Two years ago scientists of the
Civil Aeronautics Administration
turned in a report of research de-
molishing flying saucers, so far
as they were concerned, as opti-
cal illusions caused by “tempera-
ture inversions” - one of the ex-
planations also offered by the
Air Force today.

The Beam Bounces

A layer of cold air gets sand-
wiched between layers of hot air.
Cold air is denser than the hot,
and therefore breaks through the
hot layer in odd-shaped frag-
ments. That is temeperature in-
version. These fragments are not
visible to the naked eye but can
be seen on radar screens.

Radar sends out a beam that
bounces back from tangible ob-
jects, showing their shapes on
the radar scopes. Cold air is
sufficiently dense to bounce the
beam to the ground. The beam
bounces back to the sky and is
then strong enough to reflect
the fragmented cold areas, mov-
ing with the wind.

On the radar screen these
swiftly moving fragments
look like saucers.