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Until the last few years no real effort was made to dig out and examine the many published accounts of those 1897 ‘‘airships.”” And even now the work is being done by a small, dedicated band of ufologists. There are great lessons to be learned from those early incidents, and many interest- ing clues scattered among the accounts. Ufology is just now beginning to come into being as an inexact science, and the field is a disorganized bedlam of egos and controversies and divergent opinions. The most popular theory is that the flying saucers are born and bred on some other planet and that they visit us occasionally to drink our water and bask in our sun. But all of the available evidence and all of the patterns indicated in the now-massive sighting data tend to negate this charming theory. When a bolt of lightning lashes across the sky, it exists for only a fraction of a second, but it is often followed by a deep rumble that can persist for several seconds. We know that the lightning produced the thunder, and we do not separate the two. However, during the nearly fifty years of the UFO controversy there has been a tendency to pay more attention to the thunder than to the sightings that precipitated the noise. In a way, the thunder has drowned out and obscured the cause. For years scientists and skeptics questioned the reliability of the witnesses, forcing the UFO researchers to expend inordinate effort trying to prove that the witnesses did, indeed, see something instead of trying to ascertain exactly what it was that was seen. The problem was escalated by the fact that the witnesses to seemingly solid (“‘hard”) objects rarely produced details which could be matched with other “hard” sightings. Thus the basic data—the descriptions of the objects seen—were filled with puzzling contradictions that weakened rather than supported the popular explanations and hypotheses. But there are actually definite hidden correlations within those contradictions, and we will be dealing with them at length in future chapters. In Chapter 1 we outlined twenty-two typical reports. Most of these were of luminous objects that behaved in peculiar, unnatural ways. The great majority of all sightings throughout history have been of ‘‘soft” luminous objects, or objects that were transparent, translucent, changed size and shape, or appeared and disappeared suddenly. Sightings of seemingly solid metallic objects have always been quite rare. The ‘‘soft”’ sightings, being more numerous, comprise the real phenomenon and deserve the most study. The scope, frequency and distribution of the To Hell with the Answer! / 31 The Lightning and the Thunder