The article below was published in the daily newspaper The Green Bay Press-Gazette, Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA, pages 1 and 2, on July 8, 1947.
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From AP and UP Dispatches
America's 'flying saucer' jag reeled on today. Stiff necks and goggle eyes were the order of the day, and sky watching was a new profession.
Theories what the objects were became almost as numerous as the reports from 43 states that the mysterious disks had been sighted under varying conditions and circumstances. Canada, Mexico City and far-off Australia joined the list of localities where the whirling disks had supposedly been seen. A boast from Kansas that none had been sighted there - implying that it was because Kansas was a dirty state - were followed by a later report of a Kansas resident who claimed to have seen a group of them. Only Nevada, North Dakota, Mississippi, New Hampshire and Rhode Island had had no stories of the disks.
Kyle Walker, a toy manufacturer in Roanoke, Va., asserted today that the mysterious flying saucers are a new type flying toy manufactured in his plant.
Rewards of $1,000 each were posted by groups in Chicago, Los Angeles and Spokane, Wash., for a genuine flying saucer, but there were no takers. The Montana pilot whose story of knocking down a small, clam-shaped airplane made headlines Monday said that he and some friends made up the story while sitting around a hangar.
In Milwaukee, Lt. Col. Harry W. Schaefer of the Wisconsin Civil Air patrol announced that his group was planning a series of mass flights in search of the saucers after reports by two experienced pilots - Kenneth Jones, a flight instructor at Elkhorn, Wis., and Capt. R. J. Southey of Burlington - that they had seen the disks. The CAP will discuss the plans at a meeting in Marshfield Saturday.
Jones said he was practicing take-offs and landings with a student at Elkhorn Monday when he saw a "white ball" traveling at a high speed. He said his plane had climbed to about 400 feet when he first noticed the object, and he estimated its altitude at about 3,000 or 4,000 feet.
"The ball seemed to come straight down out of the clouds, and then stopped for a few seconds," Jones said. "Then it proceeded east on a horizontal course for several seconds before stopping. When it moved again, it seemed to turn to the left and then disappeared," he added.
Southey said when he heard of
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Jones' experience, he decided to "go up and look around."
He said his plane was up about 3,600 feet when he and Clem Hackworthy, Wauwatosa, spotted a fast moving "silver thing" over Eagle, Wis. He turned the controls over to Hackworthy and tried to get a picture, but it disappeared, only to reappear about six seconds later and 10 miles away from his plane.
The much-discussed "aerial crockery" may be pilot or wind balloons sent up daily by the U. S. weather bureau stations around the country Dr. Joseph O. Hirschfelder, University of Wisconsin physicist, ballistics authority and professor of chemistry, declared today.
Dr. Hirschfelder, who made advance calculations of A-bomb performance and was on the U. S. S. McKinley during "Operations Crossroads" in the Pacific last August, also pointed out that the disc may be model experimental airplanes.
The balloons, he said, are about 42 inches in diameter and are of gold, red, yellow, green and orange.
"They rise to a height of 40,000 feet and travel great distances," Dr. Hirschfelder said. "At night the balloons have small lanterns attached to them, so observers can follow the course."
The story took on an international flavor when Russian Vice Consul Eugene Tunantzev in Los Angeles scoffed at suggestions the saucers might be from Russia. "Russia respects the sovereignty of all governments and by no stretch of the imagination would it use another country for a proving ground," he declared.
F. S. Cotton, a psychology professor in Australia confronted with 'saucer' reports from 22 of his students, told them they had merely seen red corpuscles moving across the retinas of their eyes.
A dress designer in San Francisco produced a woman's hat from a flying saucer he said he saw in a nightmare.
More seriously, the Civil Aeronautics board said that it was reluctant to start an investigation but might be compelled to if the disks start flying in commercial airplanes or crash into aircraft. One airline pilot has already reported chasing a disk about 45 miles.
The Army Air forces had already begun an investigation, and a spokesman announced that the saucers were not secret bacteriological weapons, new type army rockets, or space ships. But the AAF did not announce what the objects were - officially the army is keeping an "open mind."
Among the witnesses was a guided missiles expert-Dr C. J. Zohn - who said he and two fellow-scientists had seen a silvery disk June 29 near White Sands, N. Mex.
An expert on psychic phenomena, R. Dewitt Miller, author of "Forgotten Mysteries," cited thousands of reliable reports going back 150 years of strange things seen in the sky, although none of the reports had ever been as wide-spread and uniform as the current puzzle.
An enterprising reporter interviewed Orson Welles, who startled the nation in 1938 with his Martian invasion broadcast, and got a declaration from Welles that he "had nothing to do with it."
