Over Norwich, Connecticut, on May 15, 1962, a cloudless day with perfect visibility, a Navy aircraft and a commercial-airlines plane reported a near collision at about 7000 feet. The Navy pilot filed a complaint, stating that the two planes had missed each other by a distance of only about 600 feet. According to the commercial pilot, who did not file a complaint, the planes had had a leeway of about 4000 feet--a more than sixfold difference![XII-8]. Thus good pilots can differ widely in estimating the position of objects in the sky, even known aircraft seen in full daylight. With an unrecognized phenomenon seen in darkness or in semidarkness, as in the Chesapeake Bay case, good estimates are impossible. The extraterrestrial conclusion depends even more strongly on the second assumption, that the UFOs were material objects. Nearly every part of the description is in direct conflict with this idea. The instantaneous reversal of course, for example, if performed by solid objects, should have produced a shock wave that would have broken windows in Norfolk, Newport News, and points west. Only one observation even suggests that the unknowns had a material nature: when the disks flipped on edge they seemed to reveal bottom surfaces, which would indicate a solid body. The witnesses specifically qualified this statement, however, by adding that though they had the impression that the bottom surfaces were unlighted, the “bottoms” were not clearly visible. Thus the three-dimensional structure was not actually observed, but only inferred. The night was dark, the UFOs were glowing like hot coals, and were supposedly more than a mile away. Even if the disks had been solid objects, an observer could actually have seen only a circular-shaped light that suddenly narrowed to a very thin ellipse; if he believed the object to be solid, he might infer the presence of other surfaces, but a side edge 15 feet thick and an unlighted bottom surface, even if they had existed, would not have been detectable. Of the other observations, all are inconsistent with the theory that the UFOs were material in nature. All, however, are completely consistent with the theory that the disks were immaterial images made of light. Images made of light can glow with brilliant colors, can show well-defined circular shapes, and can flip on edge. Since they are not subject to the forces of gravity and inertia, they can travel at incredible speed, change direction sharply and instantaneously, and perform all of the maneuvers ascribed to the UFOs. On this new assumption, the observations become credible and the major part of the mystery vanishes.