Word: menzel
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...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...
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...
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...
...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...
Saucers reported by competent observers could not be explained by searchlight spots, but the beam-of-light analogy gave Menzel something to work with. He looked around for other tricks of nonmaterial light which might convince an observer that he had seen a material object zipping through the air at unearthly speed...