“Baily said afterwards: ‘I heard it hooting before it attacked. The suit is luminous so that motorists can see me, but if it attracts owls like this I’d rather take a chance with the traffic.’”[VI-5] _Sea Gulls as UFOs_ Early in the afternoon of December 10, 1941, three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a research technician standing at the fourth-floor window of a laboratory in Boston saw a number of bright objects maneuvering high in the sky and slowly descending over the city. Making a quick guess at their distance, size, and speed, he concluded that the objects were parachutes, the first of a Japanese invasion. Only after they had dropped to the level of a nearby church spire was he able to gain the right perspective, correct his estimates, and identify the objects as sea gulls drifting down with the winds. A decade later, the public was no longer worried about danger from Japan but was concerned about possible invasion from outer space. Sea gulls flashing in the sun were interpreted not as parachutes but as flying saucers. Many luminous UFOs have in fact been ordinary living creatures, normal inhabitants of the earth--owls that had acquired a temporary luminosity, sea gulls reflecting the sunlight, flights of birds reflecting the lights of a town. But in trying to identify them, the witness is influenced by the pattern of his time. In 1897 and 1907 the world seemed reasonably secure. Observers of mysterious lights made fairly accurate estimates of their distance and size and compared them to familiar, everyday things--an insect and a carriage lamp. In 1941, three days after Pearl Harbor, the world was at war and the observer’s imagination, stimulated by a hundred rumors of imminent Japanese invasion, transformed cruising sea gulls into parachutes. By 1950, when space travel had become at least a theoretical possibility and scientists were discussing ways to reach the moon, uneasy persons fantastically overestimated the height and size of mysterious lights in the sky and sometimes saw birds as spaceships from another planet. A well-publicized incident took place on the morning of July 16, 1952, when a Coast Guard photographer at Salem, Massachusetts, happened to glance out of a window and see four bright, egg-shaped objects moving in the sky. Grabbing his camera, he managed to take a picture before the objects were lost from view. According to some saucer enthusiasts, certain reproductions of the photograph show typical UFOs shaped like two saucers arranged face to face, as though joined by a ring at the mid-line[VI-6]. The official Coast Guard photograph however, shows merely four bright, fuzzy-edged blurs arranged in a rough V formation. Only imagination could convert these spots of light into spaceships. Many readers of this book have probably seen similar objects gleaming briefly in the sun, mysterious for the moment, and then identified them as gulls or airplanes when a shift in orientation cut down the reflection.