The 1961 Salt Lake City UFO sighting
Official responses to witness accounts of UFO sightings have been notoriously dishonest, illogical and even ludicrous over the years. Students of the UFO phenomenon are well aware, for example, that government and military officials claimed to explain the famous 1951 Lubbock Lights event as the reflection of city streetlights on the bottoms of high-flying ducks and tried to dismiss the Levelland, Texas sightings of a disk-shaped craft landing repeatedly on the roadways, as “ball lightning.”
Such bogus attempts at mundane explanations of things clearly not mundane to the witnesses, one must conclude — indicating that at numerous times, government officials have believed or at least hoped that the public is lacking in intelligence, logic and clarity of perception — that they can be counted on to accept practically any story, however ridiculous.
They also seem to count on people having no reliable memory since official accounts often contradict themselves over time.
A good case in point is the Salt Lake City, Utah UFO sighting event on Oct. 2, 1961, around noon.
The primary reporting witness on that date was a private pilot and real estate broker named Waldo Harris. He was preparing to take off at Utah Central Airport when a bright light in the southern sky attracted his attention. At first, he was inclined to assume that it was light reflecting from some other airplane, and he continued his takeoff procedure. But when he was in the air, he saw the light source again and began to have different reactions.
He first noticed that the light seemed to remain in roughly the same place in the sky, which, of course, would suggest a hovering object. He modified the turn he was making and approached the spot, hoping for a closer look.
This soon revealed to him that the object he was seeing had no physical features of the sort one would expect for an airplane. In particular, it had no wings or tail. As it hovered, it seemed to exhibit a sort of rocking motion. It was, in fact, disk-shaped and appeared to be about 50 feet in diameter or slightly wider, with a thickness of about 10 feet. Its surface seemed to be metallic, resembling aluminum.
There were witnesses on the ground, too, both at the airport and elsewhere in the city. They gave consistent accounts of a silvery object flying from west to east in the southern sky. These witnesses also mentioned the rocking motion when they were interviewed by Hill Air Force Base personnel.
The official explanation? The Pentagon told the press that the witnesses had probably seen the planet Venus! Right, on a bright sunshiny day around noon. Afterward, they dropped the Venus story in favor of the claim that the object was a “sun dog,” i.e. a high-altitude reflective ice crystal.
The weather bureau indicated no cloud cover whatever, which there would have had to be for there to be sun dogs. But never mind — we mustn’t confuse the secret-keepers with mere facts. Heaven forbid.
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