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
These migrations occur in spring or, more frequently, in autumn--but
only when the weather is exactly right. Spiders may sit patiently for
days, waiting for a calm, clear, windless day. On such days the steady
upward currents of air from the sun-warmed ground carry the spiders
gently aloft[XI-7]. The association of angel hair with UFO sightings is
completely natural. The drifting patches of gossamer reflect the sun
brilliantly. A whole armada of saucers can appear overhead and then
vanish as the gossamer cascades to earth.
The description of the material and the date of the fall both indicate
that the angel hair observed in France in October 1952 was of arachnid
origin. Even the weather was exactly right--“superb, with a sky of
cloudless blue”--for the migration of a smother of spiders.
A similar fall of angel hair occurred in the United States on October
22, 1954, near a school in Marysville, Ohio. At afternoon recess the
pupils of the Jerome Elementary School noticed a dazzlingly bright
object in the sky. It disappeared, and for the next forty-five minutes
both children and teachers watched white, cottonlike tufts floating
slowly down to the ground. The material was in long strands, very fine
and soft, could be stretched and rolled into a tiny ball, but quickly
vanished to nothing and left a green stain on the hands. The stuff clung
to grass and cars, draped the telephone wires for a distance of three
miles, and was like a misty canopy over the road[XI-6].
Unfortunately none of the material was preserved and no analysis was
possible. Marysville is near Columbus, Ohio, an industrial center,
and the stuff might have been waste products from one of the many
factories. Since similar falls were reported in Indiana during the same
period, the substance more probably was gossamer. As in the French
incidents, the time was late October and the weather was perfect, a
warm autumn day with a sunny, cloudless sky. Both the time and the
weather were ideal for migrating spiders to take to the air, float down
to earth on their fluffy parachutes, and then discard the no longer
necessary _fils de la Vierge_.
Many falls of angel hair that occur in the warm days of Indian
summer are probably abandoned gossamer. It is significant that of
fourteen such incidents reported in Europe and the United States, all
but three took place in October and November, the season of spider
migration[XI-6]. In one of the three incidents reported in other months
(Horseheads, New York, February 21, 1955) the angel hair was identified
as waste products from the local milk plant.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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