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colleague and announced that “‘it must have been less than the size of a football.” Although many of the witnesses claimed it moved slowly across the sky—slow enough so that photographers were able to snap pictures of it—one scientist estimated that it was traveling at thirty-five miles per second. It disappeared over the Atlantic after coursing across the Caroli- Nas. Thousands of miles away, in the far-off Soviet state of Tashkent, a Soviet scientist named Galina Lazarenko was awakened at 5:23 A.M. on April 26, 1966, by a brilliant flash of light. “The courtyard and my room were brightly lighted up,”’ she said later. “It was so bright that I could clearly see all the objects in my room.” Simultaneously, an engineer named Alexei Melnichuk was walking down a Tashkent street when he heard a loud mmble followed by a blinding flash. “I seemed to be bathed in white light that extended as far as I could see,’’ he recalled. “‘I was forced to shield my face with my hands. After a few seconds, I took my hands away from my face, and the light was nanan 99 gone.” Moments later the great Tashkent earth fault shuddered and buckled, and a tremendous earthquake struck, killing ten and leaving 200,000 people homeless. As the dazed and terrified residents staggered into the rubble-strewn streets, they saw strange ‘‘glowing spheres floating through the air like lighted balloons.’’ There is a nine-hour time difference between our Atlantic seaboard and Tashkent. Furthermore, Tashkent is at exactly the same latitude and longitude as the northeastern United States, precisely on the opposite side of the earth. We were watching that ‘“meteor’’ cruising overhead at exactly the same time that a brilliant and inexplicable flash of light was announcing the impending disaster in Tashkent. These correlations are exact. Our ‘“‘meteor’’ and the Tashkent earthquake occurred simultane- Ree nlia vee! mene nthe intima! Dalim on dil ously on opposite sides of the earth! What kind of coincidence was this? An hour before the Tashkent quake, a schoolteacher living near the fault said that her dog began to howl, and that when the quake began, the dog ran to the door before each shock struck. Scientists have long been puzzled by the apparent ability of animals—particularly dogs and horses—to sense impending disasters. Is it possible that unidentified flying objects may have some tenuous relationship to natural disasters? Many baffling cases seem to point to such Charting the Enigma / 131