Army pilots were ready today for another air search for the mysterious "Flying Saucers" now reported seen in the 31 states and parts of Canada as practical jokesters added to the confusion.
Equipped with telescopic cameras, 11 Army planes searched the Pacific Northwest yesterday without finding any trace of the flying discs which had been re-ported over scores of communities the preceding two days. At Sioux Falls, S.D., a Coast Guard plane already in the air was ordered to investigate a silver disc with a short tail which Gregory Zimmer said he saw shoot across the heavens. The pilot found nothing but empty sky.
The Army "camera patrol" over the Cascade mountains yesterday included eight P-51 pursuit ships and three A-26 bombers.
There was growing belief that the concentrated aerial search would show the saucers to be optical illusions or the work of practical jokesters magnified by aroused imaginations.
The Rev. Joseph Brasky, a Catholic priest of Grafton, Wis. reported that a metal disc 18 inches in diameter with "gadgets and wires" around the hole in the center crashed into his yard with a mild explosion. He announced that he was holding it for the FBI, but after close examination found the lettering "...steel, high carbon 100 per cent steel," and decided that it was a circular saw blade.
A number of "discs" whirled over rooftops in East St. Louis, Ill., yesterday. J.T. Hartley, a locomotive engineer, gathered some of them up and found they were made of pressed white paper, 11 inches in diameter and with a two inch hole in the center. Railroad workers said they lookedlike locomotive packing washers.
A radio announcement that discs were flying over Lewiston, Ida., yesterday sent hundreds into their yards for a look. Weatherman Louis Krezak said the objects were moving eastward with the prevailing wind and probably were weed seeds. Three air transport pilots agreed.
A Birmingham radio station was deluged with more than 400 calls in one hour by persons who said they saw fluorescent balls circling over the city and clearly outlined against nearby mountains. A carnival at Alabaster, Ala., was playing searchlights on cloud wisps.
An argument raged at Lodi, Cal., over the cause of a spectacular glow in the sky and a roar shortly before electrical power went off. Mrs. W.C. Smith said she heard a noise "like four motored bomber" [sic] just before the lights went off at dawn. Erving Newcomb of the Pacific Gas and Electric Co., offered the explanation that a low-flying crop dusting plane probably struck a powerline and burned out a transformer. However, no planes were reported damaged and no one could explain what a crop-dusting plane was doing in the air at dawn on Sunday. It was the first time any noise had been attributed to flying saucers.
Skeptical scientists recalled the mysterious "rockets" seen over Sweden last year. Eighty percent of the "ghost rockets" proved to be meteors, and Swedish officials said the other 20 per cent could be discounted as pure imagination.
A London dispatch described the saucers as "America's answer to the Loch Ness monster"--the legendary sea serpent which is reported seen at intervals in a lake in Scotland.
Scientists asserted that the objects in order to be seen clearly at 10,000 feet--the level at which most of the saucers have been reported--would have to be 20 feet in diameter, would be more conspicuous at night and would be seen by a far greater number of persons.
Dr. J.S. Nassau, director of the Warner and Swasey observatory at the Case Institute of Technology at Cleveland, said he was inclined to "think the reports are fancies."
Capt. Tom Brown, Army Air Force spokesman at Washington, said the Army was trying to run the reports to ground.
"We're not dismissing the possibility that there's something to it," he said, "and we're not dismissing the possibility that it's all a hoax."