15
|
Circled radar return on Photograph indicates a large passenger transport aircraft, identified and observed from the ground. This photograph was taken on a clear day. Arrows indicate Angels.
Official Photograph. Arrows indicate four RADAR ANGELS pictured on the radar screen on a clear day. Altitude between 1000 and 2000 feet above sea level. speed approxaimately ?0 miles an hour. Heading 180 degrees. Objects crossed path [?] way directly over radar station. Nothing was sighted visibly by operators outside of the radar trailer - even with the aid of high-powered optical instruments. On many occasions RADAR ANGELS have come from what can be assumed as a complete halt as viewed from the radar screen. A single ANGEL will divide itself into two targets of about one-half the intensity of the original targets of about one-half the intensity of the original target travelling in opposite directions, then paralleling each other on the 180 degrees heading continuing on in the atmosphere for three or six miles, often times merging back to one ANGEL and continuing on its original course.
Kenneth Elhers, scientist discoverer of the RADAR ANGELS, has on repeated occasions placed known aircraft on direct collision courses with these strange objects.
Nothing was perceptible to the normal senses to the personel of the aircraft or the aircraft's instruments or attitude in flight.
IT WAS publicly mentioned only briefly March 6, 1948, in the Saturday Evening Post, the recording of unidentified entites as viewed by radar returns from the lower atmosphere but was brought to more direct attention when a bradcast of Kenneth Ehlers as interviewed by Kenneth Arnold was put over the air by Mutual Network's radio station KFXD on April 24, 1950. the followinf clipping is a most interesting disclosure to this writer.
Arcata Landing Aids Unit Ordered Closed
BROOKINGS, April 28. -- Definite orders have been received that the huge landing aids experiment station at Arcata, Cal., must be entirely closed out by June 20, 1950, William Lewings, general manager for the civil aeronautics administration, reports.
The station has been used for nearly five years for this development of aircraft landing methods in all kind of weather, especiall fog, and has been the scene of perfecting the most accurate systems yet devised. According to Lewings, the staff will be dispersed and have to seek other employments. Breaking up of this group of scientists has been protested, Lweings say, but to no
Arnold had been told by Kenneth Ehlers, the head of the Landing Aids Experimental Station at Arcata, California, that he had tracked "radar angels" in the sky above the station but was never able to see anything visually. The objects would sometimes split in two, travel side by side and later join back together. Ehlers had often sent pilots to fly into the area where radar indicated the echoes were, but the pilots never saw any objects. The "radar angels" seldom moved faster than 25 to 30 an hour.
Later, the cause of such "radar angels" became understood: "Dry roll convection in the atmospheric boundary layer in clear-air condition is named as dot angel echo, or Bragg scattering. Sharp inhomogenities in the refractive index of the atmosphere, such as occur, for example, at air mass boundaries, can result in the backscatter of radar power."
In many "radar UFO" cases, the radar angels phenomenon was used, rightly or wrongly, to explain the reported echo of one or more UFO on radar sets. Radar angels are later referred to as "Anomalous propagation" or "AP".
Needless to say, radar angels cannot be seen with the human eye. Radar angel must be discarded when the unidentified echo is located at the same spot simultaneously by radar sets located at different stations. Radar angels do not perform any possible type of maneuvers at any possible speeds either.
