airplanes into Los Angeles International Airport, Air Force pilots
flying out of Long Beach saw them, two CBS reporters in Hollywood
gave an eyewitness account, and countless people called police and
civil defense officials. All of them excitedly reported lights they
could not identify. The next day the Air Force identified the UFO's;
they were Air Force airplanes, KC-97 aerial tankers, refueling B-47
jet bombers in flight. The reason for the weird effect that startled
so many Southern Californians was that when the refueling is taking
place a floodlight on the bottom of the tanker airplane lights up the
bomber that is being refueled. The airplanes were flying high, and
slowly, so no sound was heard; only the bright floodlights could be
seen. Since most people, even other pilots, have never seen a night
aerial refueling operation and could not identify the odd lights they
saw, the lights became UFO's.

In other instances common everyday objects look like UFO's because
of some odd quirk in the human mind. A star or planet that has been
in the sky every day of the observer's life suddenly "takes off at
high speed on a highly erratic flight path." Or a vapor trail from a
high-flying jet--seen a hundred times before by the observer--becomes
a flying saucer.

Some psychologists explain such aberrations as being akin to the
crowd behavior mechanism at work in the "bobby-sox craze." Teen-agers
don't know why they squeal and swoon when their current fetish sways
and croons. Yet everybody else is squealing, so they squeal too.
Maybe that great comedian, Jimmy Durante, has the answer: "Everybody
wants to get into the act." I am convinced that a certain percentage
of UFO reports come from people who see flying saucers because others
report seeing them.

But this "will to see" may have deeper roots, almost religious
implications, for some people. Consciously or unconsciously, they
want UFO's to be real and to come from outer space. These
individuals, frightened perhaps by threats of atomic destruction, or
lesser fears--who knows what--act as if nothing that men can do can
save the earth. Instead, they seek salvation from outer space, on the
forlorn premise that flying saucer men, by their very existence, are
wiser and more advanced than we. Such people may reason that a race
of men capable of interplanetary travel have lived well into, or
through, an atomic age. They have survived and they can tell us their
secret of survival