Tass reported early in the week that
21, 1973
'It is not precluded
that they may he sent
by a technically devel-
oped extraterrestrial
civilization'
Soviet news asfncv
By AL ROSSITER
(UPI)
WASHINGTON people
driving into Dawson, Ga. reported
sighting two strange, lights
in the sky. A policeman with a had not reported their frequency and
background in military intelligence saw
the same phenomena and the current
rash of unidentified flying objects began.
"They were sort of shaped like a foot-
ball, about the size of a car," officer
Gary Ellington said in describing the
Aug. 30 incident. "The lights kept chang-
ing colors. They
several hundred yards from us, then
back off and fade out. I know I saw it."
;Ten days later, Kess Clinton said he
saw a golden object descend d
near Griffin, Ga., burn a hole in the
ground and disappear in a cloud of
steam. A state chemist investigated
hours later and found the soil tem-
perature close to the boiling point of
water.
".On Oct. 3, Thomas E. Westmoreland, a
National Park Service ranger, said he
saw a saucer-shape- craft with red,
d
green and yellow blinking lights hovering
north of Tupelo, Miss. "I know this
sounds strange," he said, "But I can
assure you I'm sober."
r3"he mushrooming number of UFO
sightings phenomena have been
reported from at least half the 50 states
were reminiscent of those of the '50s
and the '60s.
. Stuart Nixon, executive director of the
Then came the astounding report Oct.
--
11 by two shipyard workers from
Gautier, Miss,, who said two creatures
carried them into a spaceship emitting a
Huish haze, scanned them with an eye-
like device and released them.
'Police and scientists using hypnosis
vere unable to break their story. Dr.
Alien Hynek, chairman of
Northwestern University astronomy
department and a UFO
investigator, said "Their emotions and
very strong feelings of terror are im-
possible to fake under hypnosis."
In addition, the Soviet news agency
'The Rock opens aoors to pu lie
By JACK SCHREIBMAN
FRANCISCO (AP)
SAN The first
public tours of Alcatraz, once the most
notorious federal prison in U.S. history,
begin this week with regular ferry ser-
vice to the infamous "Rock" in San
Francisco Bay.
Alcatraz, l'j miles off the city's
waterfront, has been closed to the public
since it was ceded to this country by
Mexico in 1R48. It was closed in 1902 af-
ter 29 years as a maximum security U.S.
prison.
Starting Friday, boats operated by a
concessionaire will leave Fisherman's
Wharf every 30 minutes with up to 50
persons for guided tours to America's
chilling synonym for violence.
Alcatraz is now part of the 34,000-acr- e
Golden Gate National Recreation Area,
including the shorelands at both ends of
the Golden Gate Bridge. Last April the
General Services Administration yielded
control of Alcatraz to the National Park
Service.
William J. Whalen, superintendent of
the. recreation area, said his guides
would give "interpretive" tours of the
j
'h a'V-r.-- ;
'-
i-- 1
-rf
f if , I
When the job is done
This piece of harvest equipment, abandoned in a field near Grafton, Ohio, rests qttletly, silhouetted by autumn clouds and a late afternoon sun.
(CCC) B-- 2 THE
Russian radio observatories had picked
up a pattern of radio sipals of a type
never before heard.
"It is not precluded that they may be
sent by a technically developed ex-
traterrestrial civilization," the Russian
report said.
The possibility that intelligent life may
exist elsewhere is not taken lightly by
the scientific community. Many scien-
tists believe the odds are great, een
overwhelming, that life of some kind
exists in some other star system in our
galaxy and beyond.
Both the United States and Russia are
actively listening for radio signals from
an intelligent civilization trying to make
contact from some body light years
away. But Dr. William Howard, assistant
-F- our director of the National Radio Astro-
nomical Observatory, said the U.S. had
oval-shape- d
heard no such signals and that Russia
position in the sky.
"If it were that important, I would
suspect we would have some indication
from these people so we could
look," he said.
would come in
Dr. Carl Sagan, noted astronomer
from Cornell University which operates
the world's largest radio observatory in
Puerto Rico, said the reports of the
signals from space should not be linked
with the rash of UFO sightings.
"I don't think the probable invalidity
2
of the one (UFOs) ought to make us
ignore what evolves in the other," he
said.
"There are hundreds of people who
reliably are seeing lights in the sky,
That's OK. So there are lights in the sky.
There are lots of explanations for lights
in the sky. So I'm perfectly willing to
believe the governor of Ohio that he saw
something that was in the sky and he
didn't know what it was. That's the de-
finition of an unidentified flying object.
But that's very different from saying it
has anything to do with being visited by
spaceships from elsewhere."
private National Investigations Commit-
tee on Aerial Phenomena, said the
danger in dealing with UFO reports is
that something important may be
dismissed among the large number of
explainable sightings.
"This used to be typical strategy of the
Air Force, saying if you can shoot down
eight or nine, you can shoot down the
the
tenth. I'm not at all sure this is the case.
long-tim- e
"A majority are going to turn out to
have very conventional explanations," he
said. "We've got to be honest about
that."
Astronomers say the source of many,
island, including the reception area,
main prison, cellblocks and outbuildings.
- The tours will be "strictly" controlled.
Visitors will be warned to stay with their
group. The buildings, guntowers and ac-
cessory structures on Alcatraz are in
rusting, crumbling condition.
In another phase of A c a t r a z ' s
1
checkered history, a band of Indians
from 31) tribes seized the island in 1909.
They claimed the rock under a Sioux
treaty of 18fiS. After an occupation
marked by an assortment of incidents
and occasional uproars, the last of the
Indians were removed from the island in
June 1971.
What will visitors see of the arid,
mouldering relic where the likes of
Chicago crime czar "Scarface" Al Ca-po-
and another 1,575 of America's
meanest convicts spent their years?
In a ride, they'll approach
Alcatraz from the west, 2 miles from
the Golden Gate Bridge. They'll see swift
currents eddying around outlying rocks,
generating powerful surges on the
island's entire shoreline deterrents to
escape.
v '5?f fiM' - jS
i:
3f o
' .
:
. V
Sun., Oct.
me
Tea'
UFO
my st ery
if not most, of the reports probably are
the planets Mars and Venus. Balloons,
stars, planes, birds, radar quirks, optical
illusions and clouds also explained many
UFO sightings in the past.
Arthur Purscll, president of the Tulare
(Calif.) Astronomical Association sug-
gested that an exploding meteor called a
bolide which scatters fiery debris in the
atmosphere may have been responsible
for some of the reports.
Dr. William Dember, chairman of the
University of Cincinnati Psychology De-
partment, predicted the siege of UFO
sightings will end next week.
After the tour boat docks, line handlers
will strain to keep the boat quiet in the
surge to allow visitors to get off. A chilly
west wind likely will be kicking up
decades of debris around the lonely
reception area. Dominating the scene, a
rusting tower once bristling with guns.
Aloft, most of the windows are broken
out. Broken lengths of railing stick out.
The island's main road angles up
sharply through a tunnel that leads to
service buildings, long reamed of
anything useable and strewn with every
type of trash.
The island is nearly choked with wild
growths of flowers, shrubs, grasses and
trees planted over the years by the Ar-
my, which
controlled the prison from
1858 until 1933, and later the families of
prison guards.
A tiny, glasspaned greenhouse sits on
a southwest-facin- cliff overgrown with
g
weeds. It offers a million-dolla- r view
from the Golden Gate to San Francisco's
Ferry Building, now dwarfed in. a forest
of skyscrapers.
Farther up the road, at the fortress-lik- e
prison, bullet holes
terproof glass on a pair of slits in steel
v
"sX-r-. ,
ii,';
-
,,,
"Fads like this have very short cycles
just a matter of weeks," he said.
"That's because there's got to be
absolute validity of what is sighted for
the interest in it to continue.
"There wouldn't be the wave of UFO
sightings in the news media didn't play
them up," he said. "But the public has
accepted it because in times of anxiety
people like lo latch onto something and
use it as a substitute for something har-
der to grasp. It's certainly easier to
think about UFOs than the Mideast
war."
entry doors, possible souvenirs of the
three-da-
y
battle that ripped the Rock in
May 1946, leaving five killed and 15
wounded. Footsteps echo eerily as the
visitors march into the harsh, beetling
prison, and finally enter the cellblocks.
This was the great "slammer" the
bars, locks, steel doors, cells,
and the corridors where once strode the
elite of American crime: Capone; Basil
"The Owl" Banghart, who was Roger
"The Terrible" Touhy's triggerman, and
uunman Creepy Karpis, graduate of Ma
Barker's gang.
Visitors will see the prison library and
the chow hall, and perhaps hear of the
"silent years" of Alcatraz, at; first, when
a convict wasn't permitted to breathe too
heavily lest he draw down the wrath of
his keepers.
They'll see the oppressive solitary
confinement section where Robert
Stroud, "The Birdman of Alcatraz,"
spent 17 years.
The hour's tour will end back at the
reception area. Like everyone else who
comes to the grim former penitentiary,
pock shat- the visitors will be relieved to board
their boats and get away from the place.
-
--
c si
:
Ap wirsphoto
By WALTER SULLIVAN
Nt Yortc Timn Srvie
NEW YORK Rarely, if ever, since
Kenneth Arnold reported in 1947 seeing
what came to be known as "flying
saucers" during a flight near Mount
Rainier have there been such widespread
reports of unidentified flying objects, or
UFOs, as in recent days.
They ranged from Rochester, New
York, where a flying V formation of
lights was reported, to Gulf port. Miss.,
where a press account told of "strange
creatures with weirdly shaped heads"
stopping cars on lioute 90 "and
scratching at the windows." Two men in
Pascagoula, Miss., even said they had
been taken aboard a UFO by creatures
with crab-cla- hands.
Relatively well documented was
evidence that two objects
aircraft or meteorites
supersonic speed across the northeastern
United States. Tremors characteristics of
a sonic boom were recorded by earth-
quake detectors at Pennsylvania State
University, in University Park, at 8:53
p.m. on Oct. 11 and 1:26 p.m. on Oct. 17.
One or both of these booms were
recorded by similar instruments at the
State University of New York in
Binghamton, at Virginia Polytechnic
Institute in Blacksburg and on an air
pressure recorder in Michigan.
In the vicinity of Dover, Del., three
women last Sunday night told state
policy they had been watching a brilliant
light in the sky for 45 minutes. A police
helicopter was sent to investigate and,
according to a spokesman at Dover Air
Force Base, the police and a man in the
air base control tower saw the light too,
but the helicopter was unable to over-
take it or determine its distance.
In Louisiana, sheriff's deputies
reported chasing five orange-re- lights
for 12 miles through the piney woods. An
Indiana man said a night-tim- UFO
"followed me home" and elsewhere
police said they had been "buzzed" by a
swooping UFO while on patrol.
Yet the Federal Aviation Adminis-
tration, which is responsible for air
traffic control over the United States,
said at the week's end that its radar
network had seen nothing unusual. Its 90
radars and 130 airport radars
long-rang- e
cover about 90 per cent of American air
space above 24,000 feet and lesser
amounts at lower levels.
The F.A.A. added that no reports of
special significance had been submitted
by airline pilots, although it was noted
that in recent years pilots had tended to
refrain from making such reports
so much paperwork was involved.
An airline source said that pilots in
recent years have reported UFO's at a
rate of about two per month. These
reports are channeled to the center for
short-live- phenomena of the Smithso-
d A similar hoax while the investigation
nian Astrophysical Observatory in Cam-
bridge, Mass. However, it was reported
that there has been no marked increase
in such reports during recent weeks.
A spokesman for the North American
Air Defense Command denied that any
UFO had been detected in the past three
weeks. The command, known
NORAD, operates a space tracking
a s
system that monitors earth satellites and
watches for incoming missiles.
A number of last week's reports
originated in Ohio near
Air Force Base which, for many years,
was the headouarters for Air Force
cataloguing of UFO reports. In 1966 the
Air Force asked the University of Co-
lorado to conduct an
investigation of such reports to assess
their significance.
The $540,000 r study was
two-yea-
directed by Dr. Edward U. Condon, an
internationally known physicist and for-
mer head of the National Bureau of
Standards. Condon's salty comments
soon antagonized those inclined to take
seriously the possibility that UFO's are
visitations from other worlds.
"If you define a UFO as a visitor from
outer
space," he recently told United
Press International, "There's
n o
evidence they exist. I've never seen one.
I think further study of UFOs would be
scientifically useless. I think my own
study of UFOs was a waste of govern-
ment money."
A contrary view has been maintained
by Dr. J. Allen
Hynek, head of the
Dearborn Observatory of Northwestern
University. Hynek was consultant to the
Air Force UFO project, which was ter-
minated after the Condon Report had
downgraded the value of such investiga-
tions.
Hynek and a few others have fought a
relatively lonely battle for renewed ef-
forts to investigate the possibility that
some phenomenon of
4
Ail amber light
at tree top level'
COLUMBUS (UPI) Forty-tw- sight-
ings of unidentified flying objects were
reported Friday night to the Central
Ohio Investigative Committee on UFOs,
and for the second time in a week a
Columbus newspaperman photographed
what he said was a UFO.
The committee said it regards only 17
of the sightings valuable, the rest
believed to be planets, airplanes or
prank phone calls. The 17 valuable
reports came between 9:30 and 10 p.m.
Friday from north and northeastern
Franklin County.
The 17 reports included descriptions of
an amber light hovering at tree-to-
level. Some persons said they saw red
and green lights flanking the amber
light. Almost all said they heard a low
:
think further study
of UFOs tvould he sci-
entifically useless. I
think my oivn study of
UFOs was a waste of
government money'
Dr. Edward Condon
physicist
possibly behind the numerous and varied reports.
flew at
"The UFO business has been going on
for a quarter century," Hynek said. "We
should cut the nonsense and get down to
study."
One explanation for many UFO reports
is the "chasing" phenomenon ex-
perienced by motorists, particularly
when bright planets are visible on clear
nights, such as those of recent days.
Four planets are exceptionally bright at
this time:
Venus is in the western sky shortly
after sunset. Jupiter is higher in the
evening sky. Mars, lo the east in the
early evening, is reddish and excep-
tionally bright, having made a close ap-
proach to the earth this past week.
Saturn, which rises later, is also excep-
tionally near the earth.
The "chasing" effect, which has in-
duced panic in many drivers since
"flying saucers" first were publicized,
occurs when one sees a planet or very
bright star from a moving car. Every
d time the car turns, speeds up or slows
down, the planet appears to do the same,
e in contrast to nearby landscape features
that move past the observer in the ex-
pected fashion.
The planets, at their brightest, change
color as their light is modified by at-
mospheric conditions, particularly near
the horizon. Such color changes are often
a feature of UFO's.
A flurry of UFO reports not only
breeds more reports but also gives birth
to a variety of pranks. In Shreveport,
La., where 5,000 had gathered Wednes-
day night for a UFO "fly-in,- " according
to the Associated Press, they were
rewarded by the startling sight of a
large red object passing overhead. It
proved to be a balloon released as a
joke.
Respondinglo a rash of UFO reports
in Indiana, police intercepted three
plastic garbage bags that had been made
into .'rlowins r ballons by suspend-
hot-ai-
ing candles beneath them.
was being conducted at the University of
Colorado in Boulder sent flickerins
UFO's across the town. However, it led
to a police warning that such pranks
could be incendiary.
In Greenwood, Del., the United Tress
reported, a traffic jam developed as
drivers stared at a saucer-shape- circled
of lights which proved to have been
erected by volunteer firemen, using their
emergency generator as a power source.
Five of them were charged with disor-
derly conduct.
Wright-Patterso- n Another circle of 92 flashing lights,
was set up in Texas to entice a UFO
within photographic , range. A single
powerful lieht emitted three short and
one long flash and the "whole system"
independent was designed to symbolize the hydrogen
atom, indicating a knowledge of science
by the inhabitants of earth.
Preparations to receive a UFO were
also made at Palacios, a small town in
the Texas coast. The mayor, W. C.
Jackson, said according to the UPI, "It
just occurred to me that no one has ever
made those little fellas welcome." Hence
the town council issued a welcoming
proclamation.
'The UFO business has
been going on for a
quarter century. We
sh on Id cu t the n on-
sense and get down lo
study'
Dr. Allen Hynek
significance lies
INortliM extern
Universilv
--
- o hum accompanying
mittee spokesman said.
the lights, a com-
A Columbus Dispatch photographer
Friday night took a series of pictures of
a pulsating, erratically moving, slightly
colored bright light over the far west
side of Columbus.
The object was reported to be about
six or eight feet in diameter with nar-
row, almost straight beams of light pro-
truding from one side. The beams were
not visible to the naked eye. At high
altitudes, the object constantly changed
size, shape, color, brightness and posi-
p tion.
The photographer took pictures of ob-
jects flying in formation near Columbus
Wednesday night.