Page Content (OCR)
Survey, Washington, D.C. 20242. If you have been collecting UFO Teports in your home state, you will probably find that many of those reports are concentrated in areas where magnetic faults or deviations exist. UFOs seem to congregate above the highest available hills in these window areas. They become visible in these centers and then radiate outward, traveling sometimes 100-200 miles before disappearing again. So if you are eager to see a genuine example of our phenomenon, pick a good Wednesday or Saturday evening, visit the highest ground in the area closest to you that has a magnetic fault, and watch the sky around 10 P.M. The best times are the last two weeks in March and the first two weeks in April, all of July-August, the last two weeks in October, and the first weeks in November and December. After having reached a series of conclusions and theories in 1966-67, I was naturally obliged to test them out and determine their validity. So a good part of my research in 1968 was devoted to such experimentation. There was no national UFO furor in 1968. In fact, public interest in the subject declined sharply. The decline of UFO publicity in 1968 did not mark a decline in sighting reports, however. On the night of March 3-4, 1968, thousands of people in more than twenty states watched weird lights in the sky from 8 P.M. to 4 A.M. One group of men working on the Ohio River near Ravenswood, West Virginia, reported to me that they watched a series of large, luminous globes circle and go through the familiar falling-leaf motions for two hours that morning between 2 and 4 A.M. People driving north on the New Jersey Turnpike from Washington to New York told me that they observed a formation of unusual aerial lights continuously for more than an hour. Innumerable other sightings on that date trickled in from all over the country for months afterward. The Colorado University report devotes several pages to this minor March flap. Project Blue Book received a total of seventy- eight reports for that night and explained them as being the disintegration of a Soviet satellite—Zond IV—re-entering the atmosphere. Dr. William K. Hart- man of Colorado University noted that this alleged rocket re-entry occurred in an area inhabited by 23,000,000 people, so those seventy- eight reports represented a microscopic percentage of the total number of probable observers. Only thirty of those reports were deemed detailed enough for study and analysis, meaning, no doubt, that they occurred Charting the Enigma / 141 Explanations and Contradictions