An Airing For All The UFOs (11 March 1977)

I note with interest that UFOs are with us again.   I say “again” because they have been with us from time to time for the past 20 years at least.  When they first appeared they naturally attracted our attention at the Gazette office and after making a number of inquiries we arrived at an explanation which I believe still stands.  Namely, that they were meteorological balloons.  In those days they were launched at Cardington and maybe they still are today.

The recent sightings made by some schoolboys of the Neath Crescent area is typical of practically all that have gone before.  The boys were going home after playing football when they noticed a white object, like a star, travelling across the sky.

One said:  “It kept coming in and going out of view and travelled backwards and forwards several times before it finally disappeared.  We first saw it at about 6.10pm and watched it for about 30 minutes before it flew off.”

An excellent description.  As was that of another boy who said the object was curved in shape.

Not so valid was the children’s agreement that the object was far too high to be an aeroplane.  The distance of a light is very difficult to judge in gathering darkness – as most motorists know.

Judging the height of a light is doubly difficult.  For instance, some of the brightest stars are farthest from the earth and some of the dimmest are nearest.  And generally speaking, the closer the object the greater appears to be the speed.

Met. balloons are subject to the direction and strength of prevailing air currents at different heights.  At one level the air can be moving in one direction and at the next level, up or down, it can be moving in quite another.  Consequently, in light airs, a balloon can drift to and fro and round and about one patch of sky for quite a time before a particularly strong current whisks it away.  Sometime they come over in broad daylight, but are little noticed, being just silvery specks in the sky.

But the most significant fact about the sightings has been that almost all have been made at dusk.  That is the stage in the earth’s daily rotation when the sun has been set for some time but can still be reflected down from objects high in the sky.

Light plays strange tricks around the earth.  Desert mirages are one example.  The study of such phenomena was one of the purposes of the International Geophysical Year (1957-58) when Sir Vivian Fuchs crossed the Antarctic continent via the South Pole, sounding the thickness of the ice-cap as he went along.

The only case of an alleged sighting at dead of night which I remember in this district turned out to be an aircraft which still had its ground headlights on for some time after leaving the airport.  And so far as I can recall, nobody locally has claimed to have seen more than one UFO in the sky at the same time.

So, although I cannot make any positive declaration, I still think these twilight UFOs are met. balloons drifting about in exceptional conditions of light.

I have always been curious about this sort of thing, but I have never yet seen anything in the sky which could have been taken for a flying saucer.

When Sputnik One went into orbit, I noted the direction and time at which it would be visible in this country – and there it was, absolutely on course and on time!  Orbiting the whole globe in 96.2 minutes!

That was in October, 1957.  It doesn’t seem like nearly 20 years ago.  Yet there are some youngsters now married who were not born at the beginning of the space age!