Wonders in the Sky Read Free

ancient sightings and modern reports are the rule rather than the exception. In this book we will examine 500 selected reports of sightings from antiquity to the year 1879, when the industrial revolution deeply changed the nature of human society.
    We selected the cutoff date of 1880 for our study because it marked a turning point in the technical and social history of the advanced nations. We wanted to analyze aerial phenomena during a period that was entirely free of those modern complications represented by airplanes, dirigibles, rockets and the often-mentioned opportunities for misinterpretation represented by military prototypes. There may have been a few balloons in the sky towards the end of our period, but the first dirigible able to return to its starting point was not demonstrated until the celebrated flight of French Captains Renard and Krebs on August 9, 1884, and the first airplane (equipped with a steam engine) would not fly until Clément Ader’s feat at Satory on October 14, 1897.
    Even more important than technical achievement were the social changes that marked the end point of our study. It is in 1879 that the world’s first telephone exchange is established in London and the first electric tram exhibited by Siemens in Berlin. The following year, both Edison and Swan devise the first practical electric lights, Carnegie develops the first large steel furnace, and New York streets are first lit by electricity. Any study of unidentified flying objects after that date has to adopt the standards of a world where communications, social interaction, travel patterns, and the attitudes of people in everyday life have been deeply altered by the impact of technical progress.
    We will show that unidentified flying objects have had a major impact not only on popular culture but on our history, on our religion, and on the models the world humanity has formed since it has evolved a culture that includes writing, science, and the preservation of historical records in stone, clay, parchment, paper, or electronic media.
    So why hasn’t science taken notice? Given the robust nature of the phenomenon, and the enormous interest it elicits among the public, you would think that interdisciplinary teams of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and physical scientists would rush to study it.
    The answer lies in the arrogance of academic knowledge and in the fact that our best and brightest scientists have never bothered to inform themselves about the extent and reliability of the sightings. In a recent interview (for www.ted.com, April 2008) the celebrated astrophysicist Stephen Hawking flatly stated he didn’t believe in flying saucer stories: “I am discounting reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?” were his exact words.
    He later asserted that we were the only form of technologically evolved life in a 200 light-year radius, thus out of reach of interplanetary travelers.
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    Unfortunate and ill-informed as they are, these statements by one of the brightest scientists of our time reflect the general view of academic researchers. Back in 1969 the U.S. Academy of Sciences put its stamp of approval on a report by a commission headed up by physicist Edward Condon, stating that science had nothing to gain by a study of unidentified flying objects, even though fully one third of all the cases studied by the commission had remained unexplained after investigation! Clearly, we are dealing with a belief system here, not with rational science.
    There are two obvious problems with Stephen Hawking’s statement: first, as we will show, most of our 500 cases come from known witnesses who represent a cross-section of human society, including numerous astronomers, physical scientists, military officers and even emperors– hardly the motley crew of cranks and weirdos rashly hypothesized by Hawking. Second, even if the witnesses were of unknown background, the fact would remain