Word: saucers
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Meanwhile, James E. McDonald, a University of Arizona atmospheric physicist, studied the records of Project Blue Book, interviewed witnesses around the U.S. and in Australia. His conclusion places him farther out on the saucer's edge than any other U.S. scientist. "I think that UFOs are the No. 1 problem of world science," he says. "I'm afraid that the evidence points to no other acceptable hypothesis than the extraterrestrial. The amount of evidence is overwhelmingly real." Both Hynek and McDonald cite the example of earlier scientists who for years had little patience with recurring stories about stones...
During the U.S. saucer era, which began when Pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine disklike objects erratically moving 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...
...colleague of McDonald's at the University of Arizona, who insists that until better evidence is presented, the entire subject is "fanciful." Astronomer Carl Sagan of Harvard and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory says that "at the present time, there is no evidence that unambiguously connects the various flying-saucer sightings with extraterrestrial activity...
...Saucers are not a new phenomenon. French Astronomer Jacques Vallee has found evidence of hundreds of ancient sightings. Livy described the Roman equivalent of a UFO wave in 218 B.C. Several drawings show tubes and spheres seen over Nürnberg in 1561. Saucer advocates even read UFO sightings into Shakespeare's King Henry VI ("Dazzle mine eyes, or do I see three suns") and into the Bible, where Ezekiel describes a strange craft coming from the sky and landing close to the Chebar River in Chaldea. During World War II, Allied pilots had numerous encounters with "foo-fighters...
...persuasive theory about saucers is that they are real only in the mind and that they correspond to a deep human need. Contemporary saucer sightings, wrote Carl Gustav Jung in a book published before his death in 1961, are an outgrowth of the troubled international situation and gradual erosion among Christians of belief in a God who can intervene to save man from his own folly. Hoping for some redeeming, supernatural event, said Jung, man may have turned to a God image: the UFO. The substitution, Jung suggested, is not difficult to understand. "God in his omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence...