The article below was published in the newspaper The Vidette Messenger, Valparaiso, Indiana, USA, on page 2, on July 8, 1947.
|
By Claire COX
(United Press Staff Correspondent)
CHICAGO, July 7. -- (UP) -- R. L. Farnsworth said today the "flying saucers" reportedly racing through U. S. skies aren't anything to get up in the air about.
"People have been seeing things in the sky for years," he said.
Farnsworth said he could speak as someone of an authority on the spots people are seeing before their eyes in skies from coast to coast.
He's a member of the Fortean Society, a club for experts on the unusual things - on land and in the air - people have seen and thought they have seen through the centuries. The club was founded in honor of Charles Fort, a diligent man who devoted his life to collecting four volumes od off happenings.
"This isn't the first time people have seen legitimate spots in the sky," Farnsworth said. "It happened at least three times in the last century, and plenty of other times too. Nobody ever found out what any of the objects were:
He said the Rev. W. Read, an amateur astronomer, saw a "host of self luminous bodies" pass through the field of his telescope in England at 9:30 a. m., Sept. 4, 1851.
Read created quite a stir with his report on the 1851 version of today's saucers in the monthly notice of the Royal Astronomical Society of Great Britain. He claimed he saw bodies moving both fast and slow in every direction for six hours.
Then, in 1863, Farnsworth said, Henry Waldner, a Swiss, informed an astronomer at an observatory at Zurich, Switzerland, that he'd been seeing a lot of small, shining bodies whooshing through the skies.
The astronomer wrote back that he's been seeing the same things - and so had star gazer Sig Capocci at Naples, Italy, observatory. They agreed that the "things" were an insoluble mystery.
Nothing much worth noticing in the way of discs appeared in the sky again, Farnworth said, until March 22, 1880. Just a half-hour before sunrise, residents of Katenau, Germany, said they saw an enormous number of luminous bodies rise from the horizon and careen across the sky.
"These and other unusual occurrences have been well documented, but not one ever has been explained," Farnsworth said. "Scientists agree that they weren't astronomical bodies."
Farnsworth said he wouldn't be surprised at anything the alleged saucers turned out to be. He's president of a U. S. Rocket Society and is planning a trip to the moon some day.
"Nothing surprises me," he said. "I wouldn't even be surprised if the flying saucers were remote-control electronics eyes from Mars."
To: Kenneth Arnold or Newspapers 1940-1949.
