The World of Flying Saucers: A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space AgeMenzel, Donald H. (Donald Howard)
Science
The World of Flying Saucers: A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space Age
Menzel, Donald H. (Donald Howard)
Unidentified flying objects
In the print of Frame 3 shown in _O Cruzeiro_[X-22], the UFO is
slightly more than ¼ inch long and less than ⅛ inch thick. Assuming an
enlargement factor of a little more than three, we find that the UFO on
the negative would have appeared merely as a pale blur about 1/16 of an
inch in length and no thicker than a pencil line. Miraculous eyesight
would have been required to distinguish a “Saturn-like” or any other
shape.
The Navy’s officers on board showed astonishingly little interest in
the film and did nothing to prevent the possibility of fraud. All
during the homeward trip the photographer had both the camera and the
negative in his own possession. When the ship stopped at Santos, he
and his fellow club members were allowed to debark (with camera and
negative), and they completed the journey to Rio by bus. The ship had
been anchored at Rio for two days before Captain Bacellar, of the
Trindade station, finally called on Barauna and asked to see the prints
so that he could show them to the Navy. Thus the photographer had been
free of supervision for days. In that time he could have produced
pictures of little men from Mars, if he had wanted to.
The pictures themselves raise many questions. The three witnesses had
emphasized the brilliance of the UFO, yet the prints show merely a gray
shape with no suggestion of luminosity. Barauna had used a Rolleiflex
camera, 2.8 Model E, f/8 lens, set at 125. Finding that he had
overexposed the film, he said, he had treated the negative with silver
salts after development in order to increase the contrast. (During this
procedure he was, again, without official supervision.)
The prints used in _O Cruzeiro_ have obviously been cropped since,
unlike the film frames, they are not square. Frame 1 shows the UFO
above the sea, some distance from the island; Frame 2 shows the
UFO above rocky crags, at the right of a peak. Frame 3 shows it at
the right of the peak but at lower altitude. Frames 4 and 5, not
reproduced, did not show the object, and in Frame 6 the UFO is a mere
speck low on the horizon.
Frame 3, the only one showing the Saturn-like shape, deserves special
attention. In the published print the mountains in the foreground are
quite clear, while the UFO is little more than a dark line with an
indistinct beginning and end, with a faint suggestion of rounding at
top and bottom; without the dark line the curves would scarcely be
visible, so completely does the object merge into the background of
overcast sky. The picture widely distributed by news agencies is a
further enlargement of the section containing the UFO. In the enlarged
section, the foreground rocks are a mere black blur, but the UFO has
gained greatly in clarity. The central band is darker, particularly at
the left, and the outlines of the object are no longer vague.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account