Word: phenomena
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...that UFOs are something real. Scores of flying-saucer clubs are operating across the nation. They include small groups of semireligious eccentrics who worship saucermen and claim to have met them. They also include retired Marine Major Donald Keyhoe's serious and influential National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), the source of some of the best-documented UFO sightings...
...through the air near Mount Rainier in 1947, an Air Force unit called Project Blue Book has logged and evaluated more than 11,000 sightings. In most cases, the investigators eventually identified the UFOs as aircraft, balloons, satellites, flocks of birds, light reflected off clouds or shiny surfaces, atmospheric phenomena, meteors, stars, planets and the aurora borealis. Only 6% of saucer reports are listed by Blue Book as "unidentified" or unexplained. But Blue Book staffers have often announced arbitrary-and incorrect-solutions to saucer mysteries. Sightings have been attributed to the Orion constellation when it was actually below the horizon...
...addition to the known natural phenomena mentioned by the Air Force to explain sightings, scientists suggest that there are probably still unknown or unverified atmospheric effects that could account for most of the unidentified apparitions. Astronomer Donald Menzel, former director of the Harvard College Observatory, believes that atmospheric refractions sometimes both magnify and bend the light from bright stars, causing them to resemble large and erratically moving disks. Electrical Engineer Philip Klass, an editor of Aviation Week & Space Technology, speculates that many UFOs may be a form of ball lightning generated by an electric corona that sometimes occurs on high...
...scientists hope that a gradual buildup of information about the earth's crust and interior will someday enable them to create a computerized earthquake-warning system. But that day is far off. For now, says Dr. Clarence R. Allen, former director of Caltech's seismological laboratory, "these phenomena cannot be predicted-and there is no assurance that they ever will...
...Wolfgang Köhler, 80, one of the prime developers of Gestalt psychology, an Estonian-born scientist who spent eight years in the Canary Islands (1913-21) studying the behavior of chimpanzees, made important findings bolstering the Gestalt theory (that physiological impulses should not be treated as isolated phenomena but as interdependent parts of a complex system with properties of its own), wrote the classic statement of this theory (Gestalt Psychology 1929), then emigrated from Germany to the U.S. in 1935 to continue research as a professor at Swarthmore and later Dartmouth; of a heart attack; in Enfield...