UFOs equipped with E-M powers have occasionally been reported in France since 1954[IX-1], but they had rarely appeared in the United States until late in 1957 when freak weather in Texas, plus the birth of the space age, started a new wave of flying-saucer incidents. Few spectacular UFOs had appeared since the 1952 panic (_Chapter_ VII) and the average citizen had almost forgotten about flying saucers. Then on October 4, 1957, when Sputnik I went into orbit and opened the door to outer space, people once more began to watch the heavens uneasily. Uneasiness became alarm a month later when, with American satellites still sitting on the launching pad, Sputnik II roared into space. A ball of fire floating over a field in western Texas provided the small stimulus needed to turn alarm into hysteria, and for several weeks people tended to see spaceships in every cloud and every unfamiliar light in the sky. The reasoning seemed to be that if man with his limited powers could launch satellites to orbit the planet, why shouldn’t interplanetary ships already be visiting the earth? In the months of November and December the Air Force received more UFO reports than during the entire ten months preceding, and the reports had their highest frequency in the single week following November 2[IX-2]. For a period of about eight days, if all the stories were true, our skies were crowded with flying saucers. Spaceships with electromagnetic powers roved from the Dominican Republic to Alaska; they stopped automobiles, turned off headlights, jammed radios and stopped clocks in cars, blurred TV sets in the home, dimmed the cabin lights in airplanes, and altered a speedometer to register a dangerously high speed instead of the legal sixty miles per hour. (Whether the driver in question offered this novel defense to a judge in traffic court is unknown.) Police in squad cars pursued UFOs in Elmwood Park, Illinois; Danville, Illinois; and Hammond, Indiana. In Brazil, an orange-colored, whistling UFO hovered near Fort Itaipu and first caused a temporary failure of the lights, then knocked out the generating plant for several moments. A driver in Santa Fe, New Mexico, saw a UFO that not only stalled his car but also stopped the dashboard clock and the driver’s own wrist watch. A driver in western Texas saw a UFO that, not content with stopping the engine and radio of his car, also magnetized the right half of the bumper and a part of the fender. One driver reported that his car and those of several other motorists had stalled near Cortez, Colorado; he had not thought of looking at the sky, but any saucer enthusiast could have told him that a UFO must have been hovering there.