Word: phenomena
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Visitors are not the Clinic's only problem. It also has to deal with all the crackpot mail that comes into the University. A couple of years ago an excited gentleman wrote in to report the discovery of 'the greatest psychological phenomena extant." He had discovered, he said, that he was being pursued by a group of tormentors with the "astounding, unheard of, utterly unbelievable occult powers" of projecting their voices like radio transmitters. It was quite a discovery, but the Clinic reaped the reward. That gentleman's case history is now required reading in a large psychology course...
After some months of buildup, the portents had become so numerous and alarming that the Air Force began gathering all the data it could find on each report of "unidentified aerial phenomena" such as flying discs, space ships from Mars and things that go whiz in the air. Last week the National Military Establishment issued a statement on Project Saucer. Spinners of yarns about flying saucers, including a score or so of Air Force pilots, stuck stoutly to their stories. But the Air Force's scientists found no convincing evidence that mysterious aircraft (from Mars, or even from...
Balloon & Star. Project Saucer sifted more than 240 reports in the" U.S. and 30 in foreign parts. About 30% of the "unidentified aerial phenomena," it decided, were due to astronomical objects, such as meteors, bright stars or planets. Other flying discs turned out to be weather balloons, some of them carrying lights, or the big plastic balloons that scientists send up to study cosmic rays. Some of the mysterious lights were probably reflections on an airplane's windshield...
...Many phenomena were hoaxes by practical jokers. A woman in Seattle reported excitedly that a flaming disc had landed on her roof. When examined by federal agents and Navy bomb experts, it turned out to be a 28-in. disc of plywood with two radio tubes and a quart oilcan mounted on pieces of plastic. Painted on the wood were a hammer & sickle and the letters, U.S.S.R. Another "flaming saucer" that spun down from overhead gave Shreveport, La. a good scare, turned out to be a joke by a local prankster who wanted to frighten his boss...
Some of the phenomena have not been fully explained, and reports still come in at the rate of about twelve a month; but the National Military Establishment is not worried. Group suggestibility and "vertigo" and the difficulty of judging the speed and distance of an airborne object give plenty of material for the human imagination to work on. In the case of flying saucers, it appears to have worked hard. Since no single bolt or rivet of a mysterious aircraft has yet been found, there is no reason to believe that either Russians or Martians have been tearing...