CBS Reports: “UFO: Friend, Foe or Fantasy?” (Walter Cronkite, 10 May 1966)

0:00 This is not a crater on the moon. This is an IFO, identified flying object. A man, not Superman, jetting in a Bell Aerosystems rocket belt. This is a UFO, unidentified flying object, popularly called a flying saucer. To responsible scientists and photoanalysts, they are ventricular clouds, sun dogs, planets, balloons, or mirages. First of all, the objects are not unidentified. We know what they are. Second, in many cases, in most cases, they're not flying. And finally, in many cases, they are not even material objects.

1:00 A real flying saucer looks like this. An Avrocar, manufactured in Canada, being test-flown in 1961. Or like this free-flying air-cushioned vehicle being flown by its inventor, Professor Paul Moeller, in 1965. But UFO sightings persist, and skeptics often become confirmed believers. I've slowly come to the conclusion that there are such things as interplanetary spaceships. I'll have to stick my neck out and say that because I believe it at long last. Psychiatrists often call these reported UFO sightings illusions, hallucinations, self-delusions. I'm not saying that there aren't things in the sky that we don't know about. What I am saying is that when there's anything that one doesn't know about, then the mind fills it with a great mass of fantasy. And that most of what we're dealing with in these reports is almost certainly fantasy.

2:03 Fact or fiction, myth, menace, or marsh gas? This is an age when scientific and technological developments are rapidly making yesterday's fiction fat. How much do we know, and how we know what we know, is what tonight's CBS reports is all about. CBS reports, UFO, friend, foe, or fantasy. Reported by CBS News correspondent, Walter Cronkite. Good evening. Reports of flying saucers are nothing new. From the beginning of recorded time, men have been seeing unexplainable things in the sky. And there's no reason to doubt they saw something. The question is, was what they saw really there? And what was it they really saw? The great flying saucer mystery of 1966

3:05 began here, near Dexter, Michigan, late in March. And before the month was out, flying saucers were being reported from New Jersey to California, from Colorado to Long Island, from Ohio to Georgia. Invariably, the first reports were brought in by quiet and sober citizens like Frank Manor, father of ten children, a country man, a hunting man, a man used to wooded swamplands by night. Well, the first beginning, we were watching television. And we have six dogs here. And they started raising a fuss in which they never do much. So I went outside and give a yell at them. And as I turned around to come back on the porch, I looked to the north of me. And there were -- looked like a fallen star meter. It was red and kind of coming down and on a 40, about a 45. And so then I watched it and I was going to see if it landed and then maybe go down and see what it was. And when it got to the top of the trees, it

4:06 stopped. And a blue and a white light come on it. And I looked at it and I thought I was seeing things. Frank Manor's UFO remained over his swamp more than four hours. His children saw it. His in-laws saw it. Residents of the area saw it. The police saw it. No one photographed it. But Sergeant Newell Schneider of the Sheriff's Office remembered it well enough to draw it. No, it moved very rapidly at any speed or rather any direction it wanted to go. Why it could change and go to the right or the left or go crossways without hesitating a bit. What do you think it was? Well, if they call it a flying saucer, that's what it is. Forty miles away, another swampland and another UFO sighting. This is Hillsdale and the girls at Hillsdale College had a night to remember. Well when I was looking out the window with the binoculars, I guess it was about twelve. I saw it and I saw two red lights and I saw

5:07 what looked to be shaped like a pie. I could just see the front of it and I just saw the round front and I could see the lights on either side. And then the red light was sort of casting a glow over the whole thing. So it looked like a round disc. At first when I'd heard the other girls talk about it, I didn't really, I believed them. Yet I couldn't really make myself comprehend it because I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. But then when I saw it, I just was fascinated. I wasn't afraid. I just wanted to stay there and keep my eyes glued to it. I couldn't leave. I know I saw it. But, and I, I mean, I know myself I saw it, but I don't, I believe I saw it, but I can't fathom it because it seems so unreal. William Van Horn, Hillsdale's undertaker and civil defense director, also spotted the UFO and was out with his Geiger counter next day, checking a mysterious, perfect circle where the UFO had been seen. Van Horn did not find any radioactivity here. But this did not shake his certainty that he

6:08 had seen a hovering vehicle with two lights. Many people ask him why he did not go right up to the UFO in the dark. I'd, uh, much rather be a live coward than a dead hero. And, uh, with the area of uncertainty that we have here, uh, how do I know about what, uh, maybe, uh, maybe there's a current. Uh, an electrical charge which is being, uh, radiated by one of these vehicles which would, uh, uh, electrocute you if you got within a certain area of it. There was no sound whatsoever. I could not hear a, uh, a bit of sound. The Air Force sent its chief scientific consultant on UFOs, Professor J. Allen Hynek, to check the Michigan sightings. Dr. Hynek agreed that the good citizens of Michigan had seen something in the marshlands. He thought they had seen marsh gas. I've had many, many letters pointing out that, um, they, as children on the farm, had, had many experiences with swamp lights. And that this was obviously the thing that

7:09 it was. And they couldn't understand why the people in Michigan got so excited over swamp lights. And the illusion of motion frequently is given by the fact that a little bit of swamp light appears here. It goes out. Another one appears over here. That goes out then. But the illusion, as viewed from a distance, is that the objects have moved back and forth. And sometimes, this gas will gather into a ball and actually float away. In Washington, a private, unofficial group known as NICAP, National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, called a news conference, dismissed the swamp gas theory, and reopened an old argument with the Air Force. NICAP's director, Major Donald E. Kehoe, a retired Marine Corps officer, insisted that the Air Force knew more than it was telling. We are being observed by some type of device which is ahead of us, far ahead of us, and is probably controlled by a highly advanced, superior civilization.

8:10 Now, this is a conclusion which I personally have stated and is shared by some members of our Board of Governors and advisors, not all of them. Now, it has reached to the point where many people in the Air Force have the same conclusion. In fact, the Air Force at one time had a top-secret estimate that these things were interplanetary spaceships. So you will see that this, instead of being a subject for ridicule and a big joke, actually is a serious matter which could affect the lives of all of us. And for the umpteenth time in as many years, the Air Force, called before a congressional committee, said it was hiding nothing. Air Force Secretary Harold Brown. We have not been hiding anything. The investigations have been made public. The explanations of those where there is a clear explanation have been made public. The hearing this morning was public for just that reason. In those cases where, for lack of data or

9:11 lack of a convincing hypothesis, the sighting has been kept in the unidentified category, we've been perfectly willing to say that, too. But if the Air Force had nothing to hide, Frank Manor, the Michigan farmer who had brought in the first report, was caught in the middle. He was mad. Well, you can look at here. Look, beer bottles thrown. Look at my windshield. What would you think if somebody was throwing beer bottles at your house, standing out in the middle of the road screaming, you're nut, you're phantatic and all that? What would you think? Are you sorry now that you did tell people what you saw? Yes, I am. I am sorry. Because it's not the truth, but it's just the idea of the reaction of the people. They think you're a nut, to tell you the truth. That's just what they figure you are. And I'm not going to take it no more. I don't want nobody down in here. Just leave me alone. And if the thing lands right there by that pump, I'd never say a word. And he got out and talked to me. I wouldn't tell nobody. That's just the way I feel.

10:12 I'm bitter and disgusted in the whole matter. And if people's going to act like that, I hope one lands right in Ann Arbor, right in the middle of Detroit. If flying saucers had become a painfully closed subject to Frank Manor, they nevertheless remained an intriguing open subject to millions of his countrymen. UFOs had been popularized here and abroad for almost 20 years, ever since a pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing some disks and said they looked to him the way saucers would if you skimmed them across water. As for the latest rash of UFO reports, a pioneer in rocketry and an early popularizer of interplanetary space travel, Dr. Willie Lay thought he detected a reason. Well, it is very typical that it is a rash because if you get one report, you get a clutch of other reports following it. It feeds on itself and the main problem there is that the term flying saucer, or to

11:12 go official about it, UFO, has produced a label. In the past, if somebody saw a streak of light in the sky, which he couldn't understand and which didn't interest him very much, well, he might have told his wife that he saw a streak of light, most likely he didn't. But now that he has a label to put to it, he comes home and tells his wife, his children, his neighbors, the policemen on duty and a few other people that he saw a flying saucer. In the days to come, many more people will sight many more flying saucers. To some, these UFOs will be miracles. To others, real but unexplainable. To most scientists, natural phenomena. Some people will be fooled. Others will try to fool the rest. But a few will be expert observers. And their sightings will keep the controversy churning over whether vehicles from outer space are possible and whether indeed these vehicles already have arrived here. We turn to that part of the UFO story in a

12:13 moment. Here again is CBS News correspondent, Walter Cronkite. There are more things in heaven and earth, says Shakespeare's Hamlet, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. On the other hand, there may be less there than often meets the eye. The oceanographer and meteorologist, Appelstan Spielhaus. In the very early times, people didn't understand the majestic kind of catastrophes of nature. If a volcano blew its head and destroyed a village, primitive people used to think of it as some enlarged monster. Some enlargement of a thing that was familiar to them like a wild animal or something. In other words, they interpreted this un-understandable, rather fearsome thing in terms of their present knowledge, primitive as it was. From there you get into medieval times with a sort of resurgence of mysticism and religious fervor.

13:14 And I suppose if people saw unexplained things in the sky in those days, they explained them as miracles. Well then you get to today and we are on the brink of interplanetary travel. And so we begin to see things in the sky again that we can't understand or can't explain immediately. So we explain them again with this sort of colossal egotism of man at his present time. We explain them in terms of our latest ability, namely on the brink of space travel these must be spaceships. But then only a few years ago this would have been called an optical illusion. Or it might have been called a miracle. But a man being powered through the air without benefit of plane or balloon is today a reality. Tomorrow he may even be a traffic problem.

14:15 There are jets that can rise straight up and then hover like this British Hawker P-1127. The French also have experimented in this field. This is the Balzac, not a UFO. The Germans also are doing it. This is the EWR. Here it comes in for a landing. EWR, not UFO. The American XV-5A, built by Ryan, not only flies straight up and down, it also flies sideways and backwards. Northrop's wingless M2-F2, otherwise known as the Flying Bathtub, is NASA's lifting re-entry body. Half plane, half spacecraft, landing like a conventional jet without power. Another wingless piece of airborne hardware is this lunar landing research vehicle at NASA's research center. Looking more like a giant flying ant that

15:15 might have come out of a Martian comic book. It will be used when we get to the moon. Small wonder that laymen seeing such things in newspapers, aviation and trade journals, as well as in newsreels and on television, are ever more ready to believe anything. Where these are real, then others, more incredible, are most probably being tested in secret. However, all these vehicles operate within the laws of physics and aerodynamics, even though they may give the appearance of operating outside the laws of nature. But ufologists still insist there is more to it than this. And so there is. At England's Victoria and Albert Museum, CBS correspondent Frank Kern spoke to aeronautical historian Charles Harvard Gibbs Smith. My position now, I think, is that I believe that about 5% of these things are interplanetary. That is, they come to us from a world outside our planetary system. And that some of them are, in fact,

16:17 inhabited by intelligent beings of some kind. And some look as if they are remotely controlled. After all, who really do we think we are? We are a fifth-rate, miserable, measly little system, out on the edge of the Milky Way, fooling around the universe with four or five thousand years of so-called civilization behind us. We think we are the cat's whiskers, and we are not. We are a potty, second-rate lot. Fifth-rate lot. Conceited, apes, all of us. And here we go, and the moment anybody suggests that something should come in outside, from outside, we think, "Oh, no, no, no, it can't be that, it can't be that, it's quite out, you know, these things can't happen." And I think we're all, I do it myself, we're all thinking medievally. What convinces you more than anything else? The evidence of the men that have seen them, and primarily the behaviour and descriptions of the objects themselves, which do not fit really any other explanation. And the old field sighting, this thing which

17:18 will become very famous, where a couple who live in a cottage outside Manchester, took their first airline journey, and they head aboard a little film, a little cine camera, and they take pictures down the fields as a couple would, the first time they've ever been in an aeroplane, and she takes what she thinks is an aeroplane coming up from behind them, and then it goes out of vision in about twelve seconds or thereabouts, and she goes on taking a few more bits of the distant clouds and puts it back. And when they get, what's this thing? I mean, it's, it's, it's inexplicable by any, unless it's a straight fake. And to fake, uh, to fake an eight millimetre film in colour, wants a lot of equipment. Uh, and who on earth are these, this charming couple, what, what would they be doing, uh, lending themselves to faking these? It is nothing airborne we have ever seen. I mean, this is basically sausage shaped with two dorsal and two ventral fins.

18:20 And as you look at this film, it turns away on its vertical axis from you and goes, disappears out that way. Well, I mean, you can argue until I'm blue in the face. What is it except something that, uh, is airborne by a force, probably electro-gravitic force of some kind that we know nothing whatever about. Uh, it is nothing conventional, it is nothing unconventional aerodynamic. There's no single piece of earth-born equipment of any kind that can look and behave like that. The old fields indeed had not faked anything, but the UFO in their film soon proved explainable. A few days later, an enterprising BBC cameraman took a similar camera, sat in the same seat, and filmed the same English countryside. The same UFO hovered into view, went through the same maneuvers, and disappeared into itself the same way. The UFO turned out to be the reflection of the tail section of the plane itself.

19:21 The refraction of light in the earth's atmosphere is capable of fooling both the human eye and the camera lens. And that thin, life-giving envelope of atmosphere sets apart the spaceship Earth from its sister planets as it spins about the sun at 66,000 miles per hour. One of the problems connected with man's flight through this environment derives from the law of physics governing objects moving at high speeds through the ocean of air. Aircraft moving at high speeds pierced the air compressed before the plane's wing. A shockwave results. It's become known as a sonic boom. And even today's comparatively slow-flying military jets alarm some citizens and run up bills for the Defense Department each year from the effect of these shockwaves on populated areas. Question. Why have no UFOs ever created an identical phenomenon? When they're reported moving at speeds far

20:22 in excess of jet planes. As this film, made by Mrs. Madeline Rodifer in 1965, purports to show. Further, if the laws of nature prevent jet aircraft from abruptly changing direction without breaking up aircraft and passengers, why would a UFO be exempt from the same effect at greater speeds? The answer of most scientists is that we are not dealing with material objects from outer space at all, but with lights, reflections, and natural phenomena. Many people looking up into the sky can see a bright object on the horizon. They think that this object is a UFO, when actually, as we scientists know, it can be an effect of the Earth's atmosphere. But, through a layer of hot air that is entrapped above a layer of cold air near the ground, we get an effect which we call a mirage.

21:26 Now, to demonstrate this, I have a sort of Earth's atmosphere in this jar. This is a layer of benzene, which is a very high index of refraction, and it acts like a layer of cold air. And I am now putting on top of it, floating on it, a layer of acetone, which is a layer of liquid of lesser refractive index. It acts like a layer of hot air. On the screen, we will see a bright light that's being projected from the ground level here, and passing through the acetone on the benzene. And now we will turn out the lights, and you see on the screen that the bright spot of light that was originally traversing this artificial atmosphere, and appeared at the top of the screen, gradually dims. And a line of colored light streams out down below this spot. And finally, the spot near the top of the screen disappears, and we see instead a

22:28 beautifully colored and rapidly moving spot. The colors are due to refraction. The red color sometimes is attributed to the presence of a rapidly moving jet. The blue color is sometimes interpreted as motion toward the observer. It's all an effect of a mirage. And yet, this has been reported again and again by experienced pilots, who have thought that they were being attacked by a UFO from outer space. This is a type of sun dog. Ice crystals in an otherwise transparent atmosphere reflect light from the sun, and it produces a saucer-shaped body that can maneuver, rush in toward the plane, or sometimes move rapidly away as the density of ice crystals thins out. There are brilliant meteors, the shooting stars that flash through the sky. There are many cases on record where a pilot and a co-pilot have seen the identical flyer

23:30 in front of their plane, and one of them has pulled up the plane abruptly in an attempt to maneuver to miss it, when actually the other pilot claimed that it was an object 70 or 100 miles away, which actually it was. In addition to mirages in the atmosphere, many physical objects in the air have been taken for saucers, like this translucent balloon that can carry instruments up to 100,000 feet. Birds, kites, pieces of paper, and the planets have often been claimed as UFOs. But a little bit of logic goes a long way for those who wish to be persuaded, as we shall see in a moment. Here again is CBS reports, UFO, friend, foe, or fantasy. Saucer fans are often devoted readers of science fiction. Much of it is written by highly respected scientists. On an even more popular level, the comic book adventures of Flash Gordon confirm saucer buffs in the plausibility of

24:31 their beliefs. But all is not peaceful on the planet Earth, because the saucer addicts are divided into cults, groups, and sects that range from the skeptical sighters who hope there is a logical answer to the true believers who feel sure the answer is being covered up by the military establishment. Perhaps the farthest out group is made up of the contactees. They have met, talked to, or even ridden with visitors from outer space. Here at Giant Rock in California's high desert country, one of the pioneer contactees, George Van Tassel, talked to CBS News correspondent Bill Stout. We're riding on an electrostatic magnetic ship right now on the Earth, doing 66,000 miles an hour right now in an orbit around the sun, and we're all astronauts in that respect. Have you ever gone up close enough to touch one to see what was inside? Bill, in August the 24th of 1953, I went aboard one for about 20 minutes. What was it like? What happened?

25:33 Well, the interior walls were what looked like a mother-of-pearl plastic like we put on toilet seats for decoration. The light inside seemed to come from everywhere. The instrument panel wasn't like anything I'd ever seen before in all of my years since 1927 in the air game. And they had a compartment in the wall which both cleans and deodorizes their clothes by some light process, which required no water or soap or detergents or a washing machine. giant rock for the last ten years has been the Plymouth rock of the saucer age. Saucer conventions were meeting here as far back as the pre-astronaut era of black and white television. But the contactees' storyline was the same, then as now. Howard, would you tell us in your own words about your trip to Venus, how it started? Well, as I say, it started first with a very decided tingling all over my body.

26:33 This tingling finally extended to the mind area, and there was a clarification of mind such as it's hard to believe. I seem to become one with the entire universe. In the Valhalla of interplanetary contactees, the late George Adamski is regarded by his followers as something of a Christopher Columbus among outer space voyagers. And you talk to him, you ask him? I have, more or less, on gestures and mental telepti as it is known, talk transfer. He does not speak? He didn't at the time, but I have met him since, and he does speak very well English as well as in the other language. George Adamski was successful in attracting many disciples with film like this. He called it a spaceship from Venus. His critics call it a crude hoax. This film was obtained from one of Adamski's disciples, Mrs. Madeline Rodifer, who has made her own UFO film and who credits Adamski with an assist in her first contact with Venusians. Some of them have even been to our home.

27:33 And the day that the one came into the yard, which I filmed on the camera, there were three inside the ship. Major Kehoe and his NICAP organization have little regard for the likes of contactees, Rodifer and Adamski. They lean heavily on the testimony of professionals. According to the United States Air Force, in following a policy which is set probably fairly high in the Pentagon, there are about 250 or 300 extremely incompetent airline and military pilots in this country. They're carrying passengers. They fly across the oceans. And they seem to be quite safe. The airlines let them continue to fly even though they have reported UFOs. Now, this is not an attack on the Air Force spokesman or the project spokesman. They are simply following orders to explain away all UFO sightings as quickly as

28:33 possible when they become public and deny that UFOs really exist. The official Air Force reply has long been that there is no cover up and there are no flying saucers from outer space. The Air Force position was detailed in this book by Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence Tacker, who for many years was connected with the UFO project. We're kind of in the position of the man who's asked, have you stopped beating your wife? This has been going on for 19 years. The charges are absolutely untrue. You could characterize them as being senseless and vicious. Our critics continually charge that the United States Air Force is withholding information from the general public on this subject. This is absolutely untrue. We are not hiding anything. We have nothing to hide. There is nothing in Air Force files, in either the classified files or the unclassified files,

29:34 that come to a conclusion that spaceships have visited the Earth. The Air Force Investigative Unit is known as Project Blue Book. UFO reports, hoax or serious sightings, wind up here at Wright-Patterson Airfield in Dayton, Ohio. It has studied over 10,000 UFO sightings and found explanations for most of them. But about 650 remain unidentified. Not enough information to explain them. The hoaxes, however, are easy to explain. A rocket nose cone turns out to be a magnesium anode used by water companies to protect their pipes. A rock from outer space, actually fused by a high-tension line which shorted out. The finders said this was food from outer space. The Food and Drug Administration analyzed it as old-fashioned buckwheat cakes. Hoaxes are easy to discount. But the Air Force insists it treats serious reports seriously.

30:35 Chief Scientific Consultant of Project Blue Book is Professor J. Allen Hynek, head of the Dearborn Observatory at Northwestern University. He took on the assignment 18 years ago. He talked with Joseph Worshba of CBS Reports. Is it in the realm of possibility that there are spaceships someplace in this universe? Well, if you put it in the word, use the word possibility and not probability, then I would have to say, I think as any scientist would have to say, it is certainly possible, yes. But I think we must always distinguish between the two terms possible and probable. A thing may be scientifically possible, but the probability of its occurring may be extremely small, you see. To this time there is no proof that I would consider valid scientific proof that we have been visited by spaceships. I would say the great majority are balloons, meteors, satellites, aircraft seen with the

31:36 sun glinting off of them, and birds. And then you get into a host of minor things, but in general you can say that the IFOs, the identified ones, have turned out to be generally quite usual things seen under unusual circumstances or surprising circumstances. It's a global thing. What it is, please don't ask me. I'm still puzzled. This might, you might call me a study in puzzlement. But that among the tremendous noise or static or crud or whatever you want to call it, of a tremendous number of unreliable reports that are easily explained, there is this residue of most interesting cases that intrigue me in the same way that a good mystery story intrigues me. And I'd like to get the solution. I don't think it is space people, although I would be delighted if it turned out that way. Because as an astronomer, I think it would

32:37 make astronomy even more interesting than it is. And as far as the Air Force is concerned, I can't speak for them, of course, but I should imagine that if the existence of spacecraft were really established, it would really increase the appropriations of the Air Force. But how do you answer the people who are pretty competent, careful, cautious, probing people, pilots, radar trackers? Those are particularly the people that I like to talk to because they have, they understand what angular rates are. They understand scientific terminology. I can ask them, what was the altitude and azimuth when you first saw it? What was its azimuth and altitude when it disappeared? What was its angular acceleration? They can give you an intelligent answer to things like that. What is your answer to the people who are sure there are spaceships and they say that you and the Air Force are in cahoots? Well, first of all, this business about being in cahoots is just simply a downright falsehood. And if they insist that space vehicles exist,

33:39 I say, oh, fine, the burden of proof is on you. How thin is the dividing line between science and science fiction? What do we know of outer space? Is there anyone out there? And are they headed our way? That part of the story in a moment. CBS reports, UFO, friend, foe, or fantasy, continues with Walter Cronkite. Much of science, when we look at it close up, looks like fiction. Those who charge a conspiracy is being carried on by scientists and the military to cover up visitations from outer space. Use that charge to explain why no UFOs have been reported by our space defense system. Well, this is a dangerous game, like yelling fire in a crowded theater. For in this hydrogen bomb and missile age, the Air Force has the job of turning the unidentified into identified objects in a matter of moments. There's no time for theory and conjecture, because any unidentified object would sound

34:40 warning klaxons around the world. Thousands of people would have to know about it instantly. It's literally true that what we don't know could kill us. CBS News correspondent Bill Stout reports from Colorado Springs. This is where they watch everything that flies over or close to North America. The combat operations center for NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command. Thousands of items of information pour in here from radar stations, outposts, ships, and aircraft scattered all across the hemisphere. Data that's sorted and displayed on this screen. All routine flights, commercial and private, are filtered out. Those of special interest to air defense are shown as arrows. Yellow is the Strategic Air Command. Green is for special interest flights, such as President Johnson's plane. Orange is unknown. After they're identified, that color is changed. Red is hostile, a color used so far only in practice.

35:41 All this and much more goes into the decisions that are made right here in this room. A 24-hour watch kept by men of the Air Force, Army, Navy, and Canada. They see everything that's in the sky. They have to. And one of them is Captain Gary Reese, an Air Force radar officer with the Air Defense Command. Is that right, Captain? You see everything that's up there? Yes, that's right, Bill. With the characteristics of our present radar system, any object which has reflective surfaces and which stays within our radar coverage, which is virtually every square foot of the United States, will be painted on our radar screens. But how good are you, Captain? How large an object can you see? If it is reflective, and let's say larger than a watermelon as a crude example, and within our radar coverage, we should paint it. You talk about the reflective properties of an object in the sky. Is it possible, Captain, that there are things up there made of material your radar

36:42 will not pick up? So far as we know, all flying objects are composed of materials which are aerodynamic and which do have a reflective surface upon which radar waves can be bounced. It's possible that there are other types of material. However, I doubt it. Has there ever been a report of a flying saucer, Captain, that was translated into hard information right here? A plot on the board in this room. I don't think so, Bill. For the reason that these sightings have never been substantiated and could not be translated into hard radar return figures. There have been sightings then, but they turned out to be other things, airplanes or balloons. But never a saucer. You see everything up to roughly 100,000 feet? Yes, that's right. Up to approximately 100,000 feet, at which point the space tracking network takes over. The space tracking network, also in Colorado Springs, is charged with tracking and

37:43 logging every object that moves in space around the Earth from 100,000 feet to 2,000 miles. Bill Stout asked Major Albert Morse just how good the surveillance is. As an example of some of our precision, we have here a photo of an object re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. Through our programs, we were able to predict a precise time that this was going to happen and notified a particular agency who then went out with a camera and was able to obtain this photograph. What altitude? This is just entering the Earth's atmosphere somewhere around 400,000 feet. In keeping track on this board, you follow not only ours, but Russian, Canadian, French? Yes, sir. Everything that has been launched so far. Could there be objects in the heavens that you cannot see? Yes, sir. There possibly could be. However, if they do have a reflectivity to a

38:43 radar and obey the physical properties, these can be tracked by our system. How far out can you see and how small an object could you see? Well, our general limits are a one square meter target at approximately 2,000 nautical miles. If radar has picked up any UFOs, what then of the argument that they are not made of earthly material sensitive to radar reflections? Well, most saucer sightings report bright lights, which should be picked up by cameras and light-sensitive film. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory has a network of 16 automatic camera stations in the Midwestern United States that covers approximately 300,000 square miles of sky. We asked Dr. Robert McCroskey, director of SAO's Prairie Meteorite Network, to show us how it works. This is a 1/6th model. The actual building is 6 feet by 6 feet. It has in it four cameras, which appear

39:44 through the windows in the roof. These are aerial mapping cameras. They have 45 degrees from center to corner. Between the four cameras, they cover essentially the entire sky above 10 degrees elevation. The station is operated automatically. It is turned on at nightfall by these light sensors and turned off again shortly before dawn. And during this time, it photographs continuously. The cameras hold about six weeks' supply of film. It's recovered each week and returned to us. The exposed portion is returned each week to us. We have a photograph here of an extremely bright object that occurred last November. You see the meteor stretched along a straight line. It is broken every 20th of a second by a shutter. The shutter breaks permit us to determine the velocity and then the orbit of the body.

40:46 In the past 15 months, working during the nighttime, during clear nights, we have not photographed anything with cameras that cover essentially the entire sky that we did not understand. Dr. McCroskey, does the Smithsonian have other networks that feed information into the whole system? Yes, we have the satellite tracking network, which is 12 stations about the world. At each of these stations, we have a large, specialized camera for tracking satellites. This is a model of one of them here. In size, it's about 10 feet high. The aperture is 20 inches. It's f.8. This camera is built so that it is possible for it to track along the trajectory of a satellite and can, in fact, photograph a six-inch shiny sphere at the distance of the moon.

41:46 At the distance of the moon? Yes. Could you show me a picture of something that's come from that kind of camera? Yes, not a meteor photograph, but one of a satellite, in fact, two satellites. This is the Gemini rendezvous when the two Gemini capsules were within about three miles of each other. But in all of the pictures that you've ever seen also from this type of device, again, nothing has ever shown up in any of them that somebody would call an unidentified flying object. It's not that we would call an unidentified flying object, no. Since there are no bogeys on radar that can remain unknown for long, and there is no photographic evidence, let's go farther out. The expanding knowledge of what lies beyond our planet has made it respectable to speculate about the possibility of life elsewhere. But that knowledge also makes it more difficult to conceive of interstellar space vehicles. Instrumented space probes like Mariner,

42:49 flying by Venus and taking pictures of the surface of Mars, radar signals from Earth bounced off planetary surfaces and monitored on giant antennae like these, have thus far tended to confirm that if there is life there at all, it is in elementary form, not the sort to construct UFOs for exploration of Earth. As for what lies beyond our planetary system, it's well to remember that our sun is a tiny star placed near the edge of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Each of these nebulae are composed of millions of suns which might have their own planetary systems where life at various stages of development might exist. But the nearest star, like our sun, is Proxima Centauri. It is a million times farther away from Earth than the nearest planet. If it had planets around it and was inhabited by intelligent beings capable of travel through the galaxy, they would have to construct spaceships that traveled at 670 million miles per hour, the

43:52 speed of light. A round trip from the vicinity of Proxima Centauri to Earth would take more than eight and a half years of Earth time. So those scientists who are inclined to think the universe may abound in intelligent life tend to believe that God's quarantine, as some of them call the distance which separates us, will make radio signals the ultimate form of communication, not spaceships. Great electronic ears have enabled man to listen for electromagnetic signals from the farthest objects in the universe that have so far been detected. This one, 1,000 feet in diameter, in Arecibo in Puerto Rico, is operated by Cornell University for the Advanced Research Projects Agency and is engaged in a number of deep space and planetary projects. If we are not alone in the universe, instruments like this, pursuing carefully programmed listening exercises, may one day bring us a fateful message. The astronomers have long been the leading

44:52 theorists on the possibility of life in outer space. Astronomer Carl Sagan is consultant to a current Air Force scientific panel. Astronomer Thornton Page was on a CIA committee that investigated UFO reports in 1952. Its conclusion? No evidence of UFOs. Our panel was expected to be, and I think was, objective in its approach and tried to evaluate all the reports without saying they're ridiculous in advance. That has been repeated quite recently, and that is a good reason for talking with Carl Sagan here, because he's in the same position that I was, being the only astronomer in a similar panel. There is not a single verified or checked out report which is at all connectable with the possibility of extraterrestrial life. It doesn't say that I think extraterrestrial life is impossible. Quite the contrary.

45:54 I think that many of the stars in the sky have planetary systems. We know enough now about the origin of life to make it appear likely that life arises naturally on the vast bulk of these planets. It's possible, but by no means certain, that life on many of these planets evolves into beings which are as advanced as we, or more advanced. And I don't see any reason why we can't imagine that there are civilizations thousands or millions of years in advance of ourselves capable of technical feats that we can hardly imagine. If you would believe, as the flying saucer cultists would have us believe, that the majority of the saucer reports are due to visitations, then you have a very strange situation. That means several spaceships are coming to the Earth over interstellar distances every day, as if all the anthropologists in the world were to converge on one of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean because they just invented the fishnet there or something.

46:54 I think it's much more reasonable, if you want to speculate on the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence, that there are very rare visits from extraterrestrials to the Earth. There's no evidence for this. I just say that's not implausible. But to have several visits a day, I think, is straining credulity. I think a key to what's behind the real belief in flying saucers is most easily obtained if you look at the contact myths. There are several hundred people in the United States who claim to have had personal contact with the inhabitants of flying saucers who have landed. And if you examine these myths, you find that there are some peculiar regularities. The inhabitants of saucers are benevolent. I mean, they're really concerned for our well-being. They're omnipotent, extremely powerful, omniscient, extremely knowledgeable, and they often wear long white robes. Now, this combination is something I've heard in another context.

47:54 This isn't science. This is religion. And what I suspect is happening is this: we live in very unsettled times. It used to be possible to believe in a personal, benevolent, powerful, all-knowing God who cared about individuals who you could pray to. But now there's very few people who really believe that, I think. Science, for good or for ill, has destroyed a lot of the traditional theologies. And yet people have the same needs to believe that they always did, perhaps more so because of the times we live in. Well, the flying saucer myths are a really clever compromise. It's a way of having beings that come from the sky, that are worried about us, that are powerful. That are going to step in and prevent us from destroying ourselves, as we very well might. And yet have it in the cloak of science, so that no one can say, "Nonsense, that doesn't match science." It's all very pseudo-scientific.

48:55 I would think that, at least for the contact myths and probably for a lot of the events of people who just see things and understand flying overhead, that what's involved psychology and theology are not so much the physical sciences. So, as we have seen, scientists think the evidence is mounting that life in some form exists elsewhere in the universe. But almost unanimously, they find no evidence that anything out there has come here. One thing is clear: you could not keep a spaceship a secret. Too many professionals with too many powerful instruments are probing the skies these days. And too many journalists could not be restrained from trumpeting one of the greatest news stories of all time. It also seems clear that since the security of our world is involved in converting all UFOs immediately into IFOs. Perhaps these phenomena are properly the responsibility of scientists and the

49:56 military, with periodic reports to the public on what they have found, if anything. The rest of us can emulate the scientists by keeping an open mind, since yesterday's fantasy sometimes turns into tomorrow's reality. But we might remember, too, that while fantasy improves science fiction, science is more often served by facts. This is Walter Grongite for CBS Reports. Good night. CBS Reports: UFO, Friend, Foe, or Fantasy, has been brought to you by International Business Machines, IBM. was filmed and edited by the staff of CBS Reports under the supervision and control of CBS News. The End

51:01 Telescopic Film of the Galaxies, courtesy of California Institute of Technology and Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C. The End Telescopic Film of the Galaxies, courtesy of California Institute of Technology and Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C. The End