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impossible. What happens when you take a fast turn in your auto, or the airplane you are flying in suddenly banks? You are thrown sideways in your seat. Similarly, if you stop your auto too quickly or push down the accelerator, you are either thrown forward in your seat or forced back against it. Now multiply these effects many times. The pilots of a so-called UFO would certainly be mashed to a pulp by the maneuvers reported for their alleged craft. They would be squashed against the inside of the vehicle or torn to pieces by their restraining equipment - seat belts, for example. The material of the objects themselves, no matter what alloy it might be, would be torn to pieces by such violent maneuvers. No molecular binding forces known in nature could hold together, no crystal structure could stand such strains. Inertia implies an ultimate limit to the speed of travel within the Earth's atmosphere, and to changes of direction at high speeds anywhere in the universe." This is conventional theory. It is right as far as it goes. Everything that our imaginary physicist has said is true, given his assumptions. Yet there is an enormous body of evidence that machines with just the performance characteristics held to be impossible in theory may exist in fact The task for physics set by the extraterrestrials - to discover the secret of their remarkable craft - may not be impossibly hard. Already two theories have been put forward which attempt to explain the mystery. Both of them have certain difficulties, and both have certain advantages. In a sense they are competing theories. If one is wrong, the other is right. Which is which the public does not yet know, though secret government science may already have the answer. The first theory was offered by a certain Lt. Plantier of the French Air Force; it was published in a French military journal in September 1953 and was later enlarged in book form. A similar theory was also offered in the early 1950s by Hermann Oberth, one of the founders of astronautics. Oberth's version, presented in lecture form, has not yet been adequately developed in detail, though a book that he is writing may well contain a definitive statement of it. As it is somewhat more straightforward than Plantier's, I will use it here instead of the Frenchman's. Both Plantier and Oberth postulate an artificial field which simulates gravity. Oberth's theory has been nicknamed the "G-Field." It suggests creation of artificial gravity, not, strictly speaking, anti-gravity. The distinction is important. According to Oberth, extraterrestrials generate a gravitational field similar to that of the Earth or any celestial body. They have accomplished this by some as yet unspecified method. A mechanism is able to produce a gravitational potential both within and without the saucer which is purely artificial and, presumably, not associated with the natural gravitational field of the Earth. The effect of this artificial gravity is to pull everything in the vicinity of* the saucer, as well as the structure and contents of the vehicle, toward an artificial center of gravity. As the field affects surrounding molecules of air, it will cause compression of the ambient atmosphere. This will lessen with distance turns without any observable reduction of speed. The laws of inertia tell us that all of this is simply from the center of gravity.