Even some scientists can't yet make up their minds about flying saucers. Are they...
MARS
Staff correspondent
ARCHED on a wooden step in an Auckland garden I manoeuvred a telescope and stared one-eyed at Mars. The red planet glared back. Then, like a Cyclops turning, it glided slowly from right to left, out of sight... Yes, Mars has had us wondering ever since it was discovered. Centuries of argument have made it the best-known twinkle in the sky.
It has been a made-to-measure heaven for the science fiction writers, for it seems certain there is life of some sort on Mars. Where scientists leave off with vague talk of rare atmosphere, lichens and mosses, the continent pen of fiction goes gaily on.
Now Mars is in vogue with a vengeance as one mystery is added to another. Mars, say some, may be the home of that Will O’ the Wisp of the universe, the flying saucer. That was why I arrived at 8.30 on a winter evening to see magnified 200 times—a fiery red ball in the black of the night. I have never seen a flying saucer—but at least I have seen Mars!
Now the first hysteria is over and people paint spots on their spectacles or stars in their eyes know them for what they are. It may be worth looking at the conclusions reached on flying saucers by reliable interests.
Can't be wiped off
MAN whose words carry weight is Professor Harry Messel, 32-year-old bearded academic in the chair of physics at Sydney University, an acknowledged world authority on cosmic ray research. He says:
“The whole subject of flying saucers just can’t be ailly wiped off or scoffed at. An officially-sponsored research group in Canada, for example, is making a very active and thorough study of saucer reports in that country. Put it this way. If saucer reports were the result of hallucination, strange atmospheric optical effects, or even of unscheduled sightings of devices which could be defence secrets in one country or another, things would have sorted themselves out long ago, and investigation programmes would have been washed up. Evidently they’re not.
“I have an open mind, with no great feeling one way or the other. It’s possible, of course, that the facts about saucers were long ago tracked down and the results have long been known in top secret defence circles of more countries than one. It may be regarded as advisable to give people at large no clue after their brief life in space, in conditions which saucer men would have to face, the fruit flies were radically changed. “There have been some peculiar looking offspring,” said the professor. “Big heads, little heads, two heads, one head with two noses, extra legs. And the peculiarities seem to increase and carry on through the descendants.”
He said it was possible that the grandchildren of present day jet pilots would develop physical peculiarities, such as big heads on little bodies, and some might even have two
Mars... a fiery red ball in the black of the night.
There is a belief that the first nation to design and build a successful flying saucer will have immediate air supremacy. “Give us three years,” say the Americans, “and we will have a saucer that can do 2000 m.p.h., with power to take off vertically, hover, fly sideways and backwards.”
Claims almost as fantastic have been made in the past—and sceptics have seen them come true. What are we to think at the moment? Do flying saucers exist? Are they man-made, or from another world? Hoax or hallucination? Until the last five per cent of saucer sightings are successfully written off, the case cannot be closed. And meantime, perhaps we’d better keep one eye on Mars—one never knows!
*Illustration: “Muskit allman” seen by technicians when*