Observations placeholder
Bolides and flying saucers
Identifier
004979
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
It is extremely difficult to correlate the existence of bolides and meteorites with hallucinations and other spiritual experiences, but the following observation seems to make a reasonably good correlation.
There are many sightings of ‘flying saucers’ and other phenomenon, and these seem to coincide with the appearance of a particularly active time of meteor bombardment.
One could, of course, attribute all the sightings to the meteors, but the indication in the description is that this would not be wholly accurate.
The piece of metal found, tends to support the view that there were a lot of bolides around at that time
A description of the experience
From the Condon report: THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF FLYING SAUCERS - R. V. JONES
Based on a lecture given to the North Eastern Branch of the Institute and Society (sic) and the Newcastle Astronomical Society
……….the modern scare about strange celestial objects started in Sweden early in 1946. I was Director of Intelligence on the Air Staff at the time and I had to decide whether or not there was anything in the story.
I am not sure of the incident that started it off, but the general atmosphere was one of apprehension regarding the intentions of the Russians, now that their post-war attitude was becoming clear. …. At any rate, a number of stories began about people seeing things in the sky over Sweden, and this gained such volume that the Swedish General Staff asked the population in general to keep its eyes open. …………..
The belief was strongly aided by what I think must have been two unusually bright meteors, which were clearly visible in daylight. One of these led to many reports almost simultaneously, from a wide area of Sweden;
…since we had two years before studied the behaviour of German flying bombs, we knew the order of reliability of missiles, which was such that 10% or so would come down accidentally through engine failure. The Russians were supposedly cruising their flying bombs at more than twice the range that the Germans had achieved, and it was unlikely that they were so advanced technologically as to achieve a substantially greater reliability at 200 miles than the Germans had reached at 100 miles. Even, therefore, if they were only trying to frighten the Swedes, they could hardly help it if some of their missiles crashed on Swedish territory. The alleged sightings over Sweden were now so many that, even giving the Russian the greatest possible credit for reliability, there ought to be at least 10 missiles already crashed in Sweden. I would therefore only believe the story if someone brought me in a piece of a missile.
I did not have to wait long. The other Director of Intelligence on the Air Staff, an Air Commodore who tended to side with those who believed in the story, telephoned me to say that while the Swedes had not actually picked up a crashed missile, someone had seen objects fall from one of the missiles and had collected them. The Swedish General Staff handed them to us for examination; they were a miscellaneous collection of irregular lumps of material. The piece that I remember best was perhaps three inches across, grey, porous and shiny, and with a density not much more than that of water…………..