Flying saucers - A great astronomer explains the facts

Bon état général. Jaquette légèrement défraîchie

... of the natural origins of flying saucers from mirages and sundogs all the way back to Ezekiel's wheels in the Bible.

In this book a top-flight scientist who has seen many a so-called flying saucer himself explodes everyone of the cur­rent myths about their nature and origin. People who like to be scared or mystified may not want to agree with what Dr. Menzel has to say-but everyone who wants to know the real answer will find it in these pages. And the answer ban­ishes forever the 'little men,' the foreign power's guided mis-

Forty-nine years ago the magazine The Electrical Experimenter published a science fiction story : Baron Münchhausen's New Scien­tific Adventures, which ran serially for many months. The No­vember 1915 installment pictured three flying saucers which an interplanetary space flyer held captive by the Martians. The yellow Martian rays also held the humans captive by paralyzing them.

siles, the space ships, and all the other highly-colored scare stories.

"But truth is stranger than fiction, and Dr. Menzel does far more than debunk. Flying saucers are real, he says, as real as rainbows-and just as hard to catch. Moreover there is nothing new about them: from the famous air-ship of 1897, similar sights (and similar scares) have been known through­out history. These optical ghosts in all their variety of size and shape and color and motion are about for anyone to see: what is new, in our supposedly more rational society, is the air age-more people look at the sky, from below and from above, than ever before.

Contents

The saucers start to fly

Flying saucers seen from the air

Flying saucers seen from the ground

Hoaxers and jokers

The scientific detective

The flying-saucer scare of 1897

The great saucer of 1882

The unknown lights of Japan

"Strange signes from Heaven"

Flying saucers of the Bible

The invasion from Mars

The little men from Venus

Sight and saucers

How far away is a rainbow ?

Ice crystals in the sky

Lenses of air

The aurora borealis

Comets, meteors, and other astronomical apparitions

The galloping ghosts of radar

Interplanetary saucers and space travel

Visits to Mars and Venus

What to do if you see a flying saucer

Appendix : theory of mirages

Harvard University Press, 1953, 320 p.