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the object all the way across the United States and added, ‘‘A meteor can’t be tracked on radar—but this thing was!” What are these “‘things,”’ and why don’t we know more about them? The real problem lies in the scientific attitude. Because the objects do resemble meteors in appearance, astronomers have automatically dis- missed them as such and apparently have never made a concerted effort to study these piles of reports filled with embarrassing contradictions. If the ‘‘thing”’ passes over at a high altitude, glows and hauls a tail, then it must be a meteor, according to their reasoning. Biologist Ivan T. Sanderson went through the trouble of collecting and analyzing the many reports of another ‘‘meteor’’ in 1965. Late on the afternoon of December 9 (Thursday) of that year, sirens screamed and lines of police cars, jeeps and army trucks converged on a thickly forested area about thirty miles south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Cordons were set up as teams of men from an unidentified military unit plunged into the woods with Geiger counters and other instruments. “We don’t know what we have here,” an Army spokesman told the gathering cluster of reporters and curiosity seekers. ‘‘But it looks as if there’s an unidentified flying object in these woods.” That was the first, last and only official statement issued on the luminous blob which had sailed silently over several states, executed a deft 25-degree turn over Ohio, and then plummeted or crashed into a forest outside of Pittsburgh. It first appeared over Michigan and was apparently high enough to be seen in Indiana, then it scooted across Lake Erie, passing over the tip of Ontario, Canada, and seemed to alter its course in the Ohio sector, shifting toward Pittsburgh. Sanderson estimated that it was traveling about 1,425 miles an hour and that it was less than 50 miles high. The slowest speed ever recorded for a genuine meteor was 27,000 miles an hour. Most of the numerous witnesses scattered in the flight path of this one described it as a brilliant orange sphere. Not only do our ‘‘meteors’’ refuse to obey the laws and regulations set down for them by our learned astronomers, but they also have an unnerving habit of traveling in formations with a military-like precision. Northern Texas had its first big UFO flap in 1897, and the darned things have been hanging around the Panhandle State ever since. During the summer of 1951, the citizens of Lubbock, Texas, were enthralled by the aerial lights that were visiting their city night after night. These glowing somethings flew in perfect V formations and were photographed Charting the Enigma / 135 excited newsmen that night. He admitted that NORAD’s radar had tracked abe -Lin ns 71 ab --2-. 2 nen nn sb Tend Oana 2a 2 AAA OA Wn ne 22s