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This article was published in the daily newspaper the Daily Tribune of Royal Oak, Michigan, USA, March 23, 1966.
Also check other files on the Michigan 1966 swamp gas story.
Close-mouthed officials at the Selfridge Air Force Base Information Center had little to say today about continued, widespread reports of unidentified flying objects.
A spokesman at the base said all statements would have to come from J. Allen Hynek, Air Force UFO expert, who arrived Tuesday to head an investigation.
Selfridge officials denied any knowledge of Hynek's plans. "We're here to work with him if he needs us, but he's conducting the investigation. We're not even sure where he is this morning only that it is somewhere in the vicinity of Ann Arbor," the public information officer said.
He added that Hynek will not make any statements until he has completed his probe, but suggested the astrophysicist from Northwestern University may call a press conference in two or three days.
Tuesday, Hynek and a group of Air Force officials trudged through swampy fields near Ann Arbor, quizzing dozens of eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen eerie, flying objects in the sky on three separate occasions in the past week.
He talked at length with Frank Mannor and his son-in-law at their nearby Dexter farm. The UFO expert studied and searched the marshy, grassland area there, where a spacecraft was reported by Mannor to have landed briefly Sunday night.
The Air Force said it had no knowledge of Hynek's findings, if any, or his future plans.
His investigation may go 65 miles southwest, to Hillsdale, where 87 coeds at Hillsdale College, the county civil defense director and others claimed to have watched UFOs for several hours Monday night. Again the 'glowing objects' were reportedly seen in a desolate, swampy area.
Other reports have come from Royal Oak, Clinton Township (east of Detroit), Jackson - and as far away as Washington, D.C., and Reidsville, N.C.
A retired Air Force colonel reported sighting two strange objects flying near the nations capital Saturday night.
In a copyright story in the January, 1966 Popular Science magazine carried the account of a UFO sighting by McKinlay Kantor, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and assistant to Gen. Curtis LeMay while the general was writing his autobiography.
Mr. Kantor sighted the object on a beach about five miles from Sarasota, Fla. Jan 4, 1954.
He describes the UFO thusly.
"It looked like the top third of an apricot. The sun had fallen below the horizon a few minutes before, and earth and Gulf (of Mexico) were now in shadow. But that object in the sky still gleamed brightly. I assumed that the orange coloration came from the sun's reflection on a curved surface of metal or some similar substance, rather than from any light radiating from the critter's interior. Also, there seemed to be some sort of rim around the bottom.
"It was too great a distance: I couldn't tell whether there were any windows or ports. And, both on the right and left sides of the curved body, dark shadows came up to claim the surface and accentuate a brilliant sheen on that portion of the curve nearest me."
The October 2, 1965 issue of Saturday Review also carries accounts of a UFO sighting.
And True magazine has had two stories concerning UFOs. One in the October, 1965 issue and another in the January, 1966 issue, both copyrighted stories [1]).
The one in the 1965 edition is written by Jacques Vallee, a French astronomer who said written reports are available dating back to 1878, when a farmer in Denison, Texas reported seeing a flying object which traveled "at a wonderful speed" and referred to the object as a "saucer".
Mr. Vallee says a professor with the University of Peking has discovered drawings in a mountain cave on an island in Lake Tungting which could have been made in 45,000 B.C.
He goes on to say that reports of flying objects have been reported for thousands of years and that scientists have speculated that some of the brilliant lights described in Biblical passages could possibly have been in this same category.
However, Mr. Vallee says after 1880 scientific accounts of flying objects became so numerous that a researcher need not concern himself with popular literature onthe subject. There is enough scientific writing to keep a researcher busy.
In the January, 1966 issue of True Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe, a USMC (Ret.) advances a theory on how UFOs might be powered.
He says they are propelled by anti-gravity: "artificial gravity fields and control of gravity power."
The World Book encyclopedia says Donald H. Menzel, professor of astrophysics at Harvard University has advanced the theory that flying saucers are actually mirages.
He says these are called temperature inversions: layers of warm air above a layer of cool air cause mirages at night that appear to be lighted objects in the sky.
