Page 47 of Flying Saucers Magazine - May 1959

-- What It Means

By CORAL E. LORENZEN

AT APPROXIMATELY 3 a.m. on the morning of 21 September, 1958, Mrs. William Fitzgerald of 934 East Drive, Sheffield Lake, Ohio, was preparing for bed after watching the late show on television. Suddenly her bedroom was flooded with light. When she went to the window to investigate the light source, she saw a small (approximately 22 feet in diameter) object outside her window.

When the first newspaper report arrived at APRO headquarters, I felt sure it would be either inferred or labelled as an hallucination. The consequent publication of an excellent report and analysis of the incident by the UFO Research Committee of Akron, Ohio, and forwarded to APRO by Member Fred Kirsch, bore this theory out. The manner in which this incident was investigated by Air Force investigators and eventually misconstrued, is to me the most important and intriguing part of the Fitzgerald story. But first, here are the facts.

The thing Mrs. Fitzgerald saw was disc-shaped with a hump on the upper part. It was of a dull aluminum color with no light source, no seams, rivets or markings. Mrs. Fitzgerald's line of sight was approximately 6 feet 10 inches from the ground. The object was directly in front of her, above her driveway and moving north. It continued to move, losing altitude, until it was 50 feet from where she stood, and one foot above the ground in a neighbor's yard. It hovered motionless for a few seconds, then started billowing smoke from two apertures at the rim. These apertures appeared to contain several small "jets" or pipes, but the pinkish-gray luminescent smoke seemed to issue from the aperture around the nozzles, not the nozzles themselves. F u r t h e r description: Clearly defined edges and no apparent external light until the smoke illuminated the object.

After hovering over the neighbor's yard, the object moved back to Mrs. Fitzgerald's yard, elevated itself to about 5 feet above the ground and 25 feet from the observer, made two fast clockwise turns and shot up out of sight.

Mrs. Fitzgerald attempted to wake her husband to tell him about it, but with no success; but the next day she found out that her 10-year-old son had also seen it. Subsequent investigation by the UFORC showed that an unidentified light had been seen at approximately the same time by others in the vicinity. The information, evidence and logical analysis supplied by the UFORC and APRO members, including George Popowitch, indicate that Mrs. Fitzgerald saw an apparently intelligently controlled metallic object about 22 feet in diameter by 6 feet thick.

The UFORC report furnished other information, however, which was actually more informative than the detailed physical characteristics of the object itself. A UFORC committee member was present when two

Air Force Investigators of NCO rank questioned Mrs. Fitzgerald and her son. They asked five questions. One pertained to the weather, one to the possible fluorescent nature of the object's smoke, one as to whether the light dimmed out or blinked out quickly, one about how fast the object left the vicinity, and the last question asked if Mrs. Fitzgerald had been under medical care recently. They asked the boy one question: whether or not it (the object) appeared to be aluminum.

Despite the brevity of this interview, the sergeants did thoroughly check local train schedules and boat activity on the nearby lake. The results of this phase of the investigation became apparent in the text of an Air Force letter to the Honorable A. D. Baumhart, Jr., of the House of Representatives, in answer to his inquiry into the Air Force results. The letter, signed by Major General W. P. Fisher of the Legislative Liaison Office, inferred that Mrs. Fitzgerald experienced an illusion brought about by the rotating light of a train (which, the letter said, passed on a track at "approximately the same hour" of the sighting) and/or the spotlight of a boat on the lake.

The purpose of the letter is obvious-to disqualify Mrs. Fitzgerald's observation. The questions asked by the Air Force investigators were meaningless. Their efforts were concentrated on the possible conventional explanation - thus exhaustive attempts to find a light source to account for the sighting were necessary.

The UFORC showed, through their own investigations, that neither the boats nor the train's lights would be visible to Mrs. Fitzgerald where she had stood.

These facts are not, in themselves, too important. But - taken in a group, along with the fact that a diagram of an object in Air Force Special Report No. 14, labelled Case No. 8, is almost an exact duplicate of what Mrs. Fitzgerald and her son saw, including dimensions, they are almost ominous.

The UFORC, in their analysis, called the investigation by the Air Force sloppy and/or incompetent. To me it was both and more. I believe there was no necessity for a careful investigation of this incident which, to the Air Force was a sighting of an object about which they already knew much. So much publicity had been given the incident locally that they felt a token investigation had to be made so that they could devise a way to disqualify an apparently capable observer, and explain away the incident in conventional terms. They were not concerned primarily with public opinion, but they were very concerned with inquiries made by a duly qualified legislative representative. Their efforts, therefore, were directed primarily toward Mr. Baumhart.

The question about Mrs. Fitzgerald's medical status was probably calculated to frighten Mrs. Fitzgerald at the possibility of having her observation blamed on a physical defect if any existed. The lack of queries about the object itself indicates a lack of interest in this particular type of object-probably because it is no longer one of concern -obviously one of the small observer units seen so often in the past and no doubt well documented in Air Force UFO files.

This apparent lack of interest by Air Force investigators reminded me of the "wringing out" and subsequent attempted brain-washing of observers a year ago when the huge luminous traffic-stopping flying eggs came upon the scene. These were a new innovation in UFO annals - and a thorough investigation (one might even say a strenuous one) was undertaken.

When the "flying eggs" came to public attention in November, 1957, researchers looked for a common denominator. This they had in descriptions of the objects and their effect on ground traffic. There were no orthotenic lines-no correlation of sighting locations indicating a pattern. It was this lack of a pattern that concerned me until I found an uncommon denominator which is as important as a common one and which actually indicates a pattern of sorts.

In the late evening hours of 2 November and the early morning hours of 3 November 1957, a glowing eggshaped object squatted on roads near Levelland, Texas, And stopped traffic Most sightings were within an approximate 4 mile radius of the town; once the object was seen in a cotton field. About an hour later the last sighting at Levelland, an object of the same description visited the ABomb site on the White Sands Proving Ground-Holloman Air Force Missile Development Range in New Mexico. That night at about 8 p.m. it was again in the same vicinity. Whether or not automotive electrical systems were affected we do not know of a certainty-the full reports are in Air Force files. The most complete public record of these two visitations at the A-Bomb site was contained in the pages of the Alamogordo Daily News, wherein the official release stated that the jeep patrols reported no engine difficulty as other reports from elsewhere stated.

On the 4th of November (Monday) the famous (or infamous) Stokes case took place-this time in broad daylight on a public highway between the White Sands Proving Ground - Fort Bliss Range and the McGregor test range. Stokes was extensively questioned (see my article, "The Psychology of UFO Secrecy in "Flying Saucers" for October, 1958) and his sighting was labelled a hoax.

As these sightings were aired over national TV and radio news programs and duly logged in front-page newspaper articles, other U.S. reports of similar sightings prior to the launching of Sputnik II were coming to light. Mrs. Robert Moudy of Covington, Indiana revealed that on 15 October an object, looking like a "fried egg-sunny side down" came down over a field and that the engine of her husband's combine stopped. This at 7 p.m. - and Moudy also noticed two autos stopped on a nearby road.

On the 4th of November at 3:12 a.m., just a few hours before Stokes' experience, police and firemen watched a glowing object which hovered over a cemetery in Elmwood Park, Illinois. The spotlight on the patrol car dimmed as the police approached the object.

A carload of women and students were startled to see a lighted object pacing their automobile at 7:20 p.m., 9 November, while travelling on a lonely mountain road near White Oaks, New Mexico. Their lights flickered and went out and their engine missed. They stopped the car to watch and the object headed into the north and disappeared.

On the 14th, at Tamaroa, Illinois, a moon-shaped object accompanied by 5 or 6 loud booms and three bril liant flashes of light, was sighted above the trees bordering U.S. High way 51, by the wife of the local Jus tice of the Peace. After the flashes and the booms, her house lights went out. Power failure was reported be tween Tamaroa and nearby Dubois -and H. D. Heath, District Manager of the Illinois Power Company said that he could find nothing tech nically wrong.

This is a sampling of reports. Glowing objects in the daytime and at night; objects on much-traveled highways and on lonely roads; in populated areas-in a town-on a missile range - in a field - where there were ground vehicles operating. Objects which interferred with the electrical systems of trucks, cars and a grain combine. There are too many to list all of them, but similar incidents took place outside the U.S. - especially in South America in the months preceding the U.S. "flap" and for a few days afterward. What were they and what were they doing? No common denominator-but an uncommon one which draws a picture. A weapon being tested on various types of ground vehicles at different times. of the day, under various weather conditions. The indications are, because of time elements involved, that only one object was seen by all. A new type and thus the great interest exhibited by official investigative agencies.

In preceding years there had been no indication that the objects interfered with electrical systems - thus ruling out the possibility that this interference was an accidental byproduct of the UAO propulsion systems. The traffic-stopping incidents in the U.S. came on the heels of the launching of Sputnik I and II. Incidentally, reports of UAO interest in dogs came to light after Sputnik II's launching (it contained the famous Russian space dog Laika).

This weapon hypothesis was hinted by Dr. Olavo Fontes, APROs Brazilian representative. Mr. Lorenzen had hestitatingly suggested it shortly after the November "flap" but it wasn't a popular theory-for obvious reasons. Fontes backed it up with well-documented sightings both in the U.S. and his own country. Although a comparative newcomer in UAO research, Dr. Fontes has proven himself to be the most valuable single researcher today. His efforts have been unceasing and thorough despite a heavy medical schedule. He has thoroughly investigated hundreds of sightings-military and civilian. His latest, made by a Rio de Janeiro engineer in 1956, includes a color slide of a UAO over Guanabara Bay. The full account of the picture and the sighting was contained in the January 1959 issue of the APRO Bulletin.

In January of this year, APRO entered its 8th year of activity in the UAO research field. We expect that the near future may bring more glowing eggs - possibly capable of knocking out electrical power at its source - the power plants themselves. These sightings will be fully investigated by the Air Force Aerial Phenomena Research Division, but it is not likely that the public will hear much if anything about the sightings or the results of the investigations. Researchers will have to be more alert than ever if the facts are to be made known.