Word: menzel
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...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...
...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...
Millions of miles away in space, says Harvard's Astronomer Donald H. Menzel, the sun revolves like a tremendous lawn sprinkler. From its seething corona dense clouds of hydrogen squirt out at speeds up to 600 miles a second. Every so often one of those clouds hits the earth and bathes the planet in a shower of solar gas. But earthlings are protected by bumpers of magnetic force-invisible bars that stretch from pole to pole...
Much of the world's weather is manufactured in those frigid air masses where the aurora brightens the long polar nights. Dr. Menzel believes that as much energy goes into the display as the earth normally absorbs from the heat and light of a day in the sun. If further observations prove him correct, even meteorologists in latitudes far from the pole will be checking on the faraway fireworks of the aurora borealis before they make their forecasts...
During the last thirty odd years under Shapley's administration, the Observatory has made its greatest strides forward. It was he who established the Agassiz Station at Harvard, the transfer of the southern station from Peru to South Africa, and with the collaboration of Menzel, the installation at Climax, Colorado. The new headquarters building in Cambridge was built under his direction, and provides fireproof housing for the nearly half million plates which contain Harvard's history of the sky for the past sixty years...