AMERICANA: Dinner Time

It was, naturally, the season for strange visions—and Sputniks 1 and 11 made them more natural. From virtually every region in the U.S. last week poured frantic reports of U.F.O.s—unidentified flying objects. This time, as the U.S. Air Defense Command tabulated reports (no fewer than 128), the sightings from preachers, military personnel, engineers and just plain folks were not restricted simply to flying saucers. The pronouncements seemed to shape into a sort of celestial dinner pail: the objects resembled eggs, meat platters, pears—and, for dessert, ice cream cones and cigars. ¶In the Levelland area of Texas, at least seven people sighted what may have been the same “Whatnik,” a bright, egg-shaped thing that sped near by, landed, and, according to some, caused their automobile engines and lights to fade.

¶ At White Sands Proving Ground, N. Mex., two separate details of soldiers said that they saw a brilliant, egg-shaped object, hovering a short distance away.

¶ In El Paso, somebody reported a “wondrous white craft with forward and aft searchlights, a pair of propellers and a cigar-shaped body with giant wings.” ¶ In Atlanta, a man and his wife saw a “high object with about eight lights on it”; a hunter reported a great horizontal beam; a woman saw a red, egg-shaped thing; a housewife thought it was a cigar; three truck drivers said it was a red, egg-shaped ball.

¶ In New Mexico James Stokes told of an egg-shaped U.F.O. that sped overhead leaving “a kind of heat wave like radiation from a giant sun lamp.” ¶ In Chicago, two cops and a fireman chased a ball of light in a squad car.

¶ In the Gulf of Mexico, Coast Guard crewmen saw—and tracked on radar—a U.F.O. that sped across the sky. A few of the sightings were accompanied by fascinating detail. From Reinhold Schmidt, a 48-year-old grain buyer who was driving through Nebraska, came the claim that he approached a cigar-shaped object that had landed. A ray of light froze him in his tracks, he said, and two spacemen dressed in American business suits searched him, then invited him aboard. They spoke High German, Schmidt insisted, and told him that “you’ll know in the near future what this is all about.” Two days later Reinhold Schmidt was in a Nebraska mental hospital: if his experience was a hallucination, experts agreed, he needed the care; if indeed he saw it all—alas, nobody would believe him anyway, in which case he might as well be institutionalized.

As usual, investigators were quick to point out that there were many other reasonable explanations for the phenomena: ball lightning, the brilliance of Venus, now entering its brightest period, the breathtaking vision of the northern lights, and, with Sputniks 1 and 11 spinning aloft, the tendency of some imaginative people to go the Russians one better. Sighed the Air Force last week: in ten years, investigators have tabulated about 5,700 “sightings,” accounted for all but 2% as being strictly natural, in an earthling sense.