As one member of the panel later stated to a correspondent, the explanation of UFO beliefs “lies in a logical defect. It is this: UFOs form a class of all celestial observations that cannot be immediately explained. There is no other truly common feature; some manifestations are optical, others are detected by radar; some are points, others circular, others patterned; some are seen by night, others by day, etc. The implication that they are somehow related is a false one, as we know from the large proportion positively identified after the fact (what relation is there between Venus and a meteorological balloon?). Calling all unidentified objects in the sky ‘flying saucers’ or even UFOs (Venus doesn’t ‘fly’ in any proper sense of the word) is like calling any word I cannot understand ‘Greek.’ The class of all words I cannot understand would scarcely form a single language. Therefore, the explanation of UFOs as a class is simply that they are not a uniform class but a hodge-podge of widely disparate, partly described phenomena that were seen in the sky.”[VII-8] Not until April 9, 1958, did the Air Force make public the internal recommendation made by the panel some five years earlier. If the entire study had been released earlier, with a full statement of the facts and the analyses made by the panel, it might have ended the saucer scare at once. Instead the UFO hysteria continued, with periods of remission, and is still dying a slow and lingering death. [VII-1] Ruppelt, E. J. _The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects._ Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1956. [VII-2] Olivier, C. P. “Tables of Hourly Rates Based upon American Meteor Society Data.” Interim Report No. 28, Harvard University Radio Meteor Research Program (May 1958). [VII-3] _Sky and Telescope_, Vol. XI (1952), p. 312. [VII-4] Air Force Files. [VII-5] Barker, G. _They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers._ New York: University Books, Inc., 1956. [VII-6] Robertson, H. P. Personal files. [VII-7] Chop, A. M. Personal communication. [VII-8] Page, T. W. Personal files. _Chapter_ VIII PHANTOMS ON RADAR The evidence of radar, according to the saucer enthusiasts, provides final proof that alien spaceships indeed patrol our skies. Because radar is an electronic device, it allegedly cannot be fooled by mirages, reflections, or peculiar weather conditions. If radar records an echo from an unidentified object and, at about the same time, a human witness reports a puzzling light in the sky, the believers proclaim that the unprejudiced testimony of science has confirmed the presence of a solid flying saucer. Sometimes a radarscope reports unidentified objects at a time when observers on the ground and in search planes cannot see anything unusual in the sky. The believers then conclude not that radar evidence can be misinterpreted, but that the operators of the flying saucers may somehow be able to make both themselves and their ships invisible![VIII-1] _Radar as a Reporter_