Word: moons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Moon Disks. Menzel is convinced that rarer types of mirages explain most flying saucers. Part of his conviction comes from something he saw while driving across New Mexico from Holloman Air Force Base to Alamogordo. It was a clear, cool night and a full moon had risen. Menzel noticed near the moon two bright objects which he took at first for the stars Castor and Pollux. His astronomer's knowledge told him that Castor and Pollux would not be visible at that season, so he lowered the car window to get a better look. The stars turned into fuzzy...
Menzel wrote a report on this "sighting" and sent it to the Air Force. He never thought his disks were flying saucers; they were close to the moon and obviously associated with it. But they puzzled him for a long time. Now he believes they were caused by the motion of the car distorting a layer of warm air just above its roof and forming two displaced images of the rising moon. A more ignorant man might well have reported them as flying objects. At any rate, they led Menzel to his present theory about the saucers...
...produce other kinds of saucers. Sometimes a warm layer hangs several thousand feet up (see diagram). Often the layer contains dust, which increases its power to divert light. If an airplane is flying just above this layer, the pilot may see the dim displaced image of the sun, the moon or a high, brightly lighted cloud. The image will appear below him; it may be distorted, magnified, or in rapid motion. If the inversion has waves in its surface (common near mountain ridge's), the pilot may see a line of bright objects in rapid motion. Menzel believes that...
...Fighters. Another saucerlike object is the "foo-fighter": a bright spot of light which seemed to chase night-flying airplanes during World War II. Menzel believes that foo-fighters are really light (from the moon, from a plane's exhaust or from some other source) that is turned into the pilot's eye by strong eddies of air near a damaged wing. The moon disks that he saw himself were probably a sort of foo-nghter...
...after the Nazis failed to persuade him to divorce his non-Aryan wife, Actress Else Schiff, Basserman at 72 fled with her to Switzerland and the U.S., started life all over again in Hollywood, acted with memorable brilliance in such movies as Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, The Moon and Sixpence, Rhapsody in Blue...