Flying ice crystals

Press, 20 January 1979, Page 15

Flying ice crystals

Closer to home, there was the 1965 radar-visual U.F.O. over the Tasman Sea observed from an Auckland to Sydney Electra. Seven returns moving east in V formation at 45,000 feet were said by the R.N.Z.A.F. to be ice crystals in high cirrus cloud but the R.A.A.F. declared the U.F.O. were “aircraft capable of high speeds and long-range performance.” A few days

later an unnamed Dunedin Magistrate’s Court officer saw a V-formation of discs flash Over head and a Christchurch man claimed to have seen a “flying saucer” rise from a New Brighton beach. Some ice crystals if those South Island reports were genuine. It seems unlikely that the latest New Zealand reports will be added to the

files of true U.F.O. There may be a genuine U.F.O. somewhere in the tangled, emotional hub-bub created by the Kaikoura incidents but it is now lost to us. It too has become a quicksand victim. No matter how much we might like to think it, this is not the great age of scientific reason. Euphologists fond of quoting Gallup polls from America in which 56 per

cent of people believe U.F.O. exist and have some extra-terrestrial origin ignore the Devil’s statistics from the same surveys. These indicate that 48 per cent of people believe in the existence of Satan. We can of course marry these facts, as a Bristol vicar has done, and declare that U.F.O. are demons preparing the way for the Devil’s takeover.

Obviously these professed beliefs are influenced by “The Exorcist,” “Close Encounters” and lhe pseudo-science of Erich von Daniken and his discip 1 e s-imitators which flourishes in this Space Age. Carl Sagan, professor of astronomy and space sciences at Cornell University, comments that “writing as careless as von Daniken’s, whose principal thesis is that our

ancestors were dummies, should be so popular is a sober Commentary on the credulousness and despair ot our times.” Dr Sagan and his fellow scientists must take some of the blame. The gap between the scientific world and that of the interested layman is filled with the works of pseudo-scientists and very few by learned men and women for what

our Prune Minister loves to call “the ordinary bloke.” Ronald Story's excellent critique of von Daniken’s nonsense and Dr Hynek’s sane studies of the U.F.O. mystery are notable exceptions. Dr Hyneck, risking charges of commercialism, was moved to write his U.F.O. books in an attempt to counteract the mass of junk books on the market. A cynic once told me that euphology was on a par with phrenology (character reading by the shape of one’s head) and about as profitable. A Euphologist hotly decried my statement that a lot of people make money from U.F.O.s. Both of course are wrong; the cynic cannot see beyond the vast mass of speculation and pure drivel written about U.F.O.s, the believer cannot see the money made by writers, film makers and TV channels for his “faith” in benevolent, superior aliens is above such grubby material things. A study of the U.F.O. phenomena is both fascinating and profitable, in more than pecuniary ways. The diligent student will learn a great deal about astronomy, psychology, meteorology and other interesting subjects. You should, however, be wary of the bogs of pseudo-science and mystical mumbo-jumbo, but most of all vou should beware ot emotional quicksand.