Part 8 (1/2)

When I returned to ATIC I spent several days digging into our collection of green fireball reports All of these reports covered a period from early December 1948 to 1949 As far as Blue Book's files were concerned, there hadn't been a green fireball report for a year and a half

I read over the report on Project Twinkle and the few notes we had on the Los Alamos Conference, and decided that the next tio to Albuquerque several times but my visits were always short and I was always in a hurry so I didn't get to see hiht reen fireballs caroup of people at the AEC's Los Alaroup reen balls of fire The strictly unofficial bull- session-type discussion that followed took up the entire lunch hour and several hours of the afternoon It was an interesting discussion because these people, all scientists and technicians froht be All of thereen fireball, some of them had seen several

One of the ht while he was flying his Navion north of Santa Fe and he had a vivid way of explaining what he'd seen ”Take a soft ball and paint it with soreen in the dark,” I re, ”then have someone take the ball out about 100 feet in front of you and about 10 feet above you Have hiht at your face, as hard as he can throw it

That's what a green fireball looks like”

The speculation about what the green fireballs were ran through the usual spectrum of answers, a new type of natural phenoed reen fireballs' being associated with interplanetary vehicles ca a lot of thinking about this, they said, and they had a theory

The green fireballs, they theorized, could be so projected into our at several hundred o I would have been aroup of reputable scientistsstatement Noever, I took it as a matter of course I'd heard the same type of stateroups

Turn the tables, they said, suppose that we are going to try to go to a far planet There would be three phases to the trip: out through the earth's ath space, and the re-entry into the at to land on The first two phases would admittedly present formidable problems, but the last phase, the re-entry phase, would be thein from outer space, the craft would, for all practical purposes, be similar to a

You would have h aerodynas, and very probably a host of other problems that no one can now conceive of Certain of these problems could be partially solved by laboratory experi, and the results obtained by flight tests in our atmosphere would not be valid in another type of atical way to overcome this difficulty would be to build our interplanetary vehicle, go to the planet that ere interested in landing on, and hover several hundred miles up From this altitude we could send instrumented test vehicles down to the planet If we didn't want the inhabitants of the planet, if it were inhabited, to knoe were doing we could put destruction devices in the test vehicle, or arrange the test so that the test vehicles would just plain burn up at a certain point due to aerodyna his ideas

Maybe the green fireballs are test vehicles--soht be explained by the fact that thedown to within 100,000 or 200,000 feet of the earth, or to the altitude at which ato down to the airstrip to get a CARCO Airlines plane back to Albuquerque so I didn't have tiet to make one comment From the conversations, I assureen fireballs were any kind of a natural phenomenon Not exactly, they said, but so far the evidence that said they were a natural phenohed by the evidence that said they weren't

During the kidney-jolting trip down the valley from Los Alamos to Albuquerque in one of the CARCO Airlines' Bonanzas, I decided that I'd stay over an extra day and talk to Dr La Paz

He knew every detail there was to know about the green fireballs He confirreen fireballs were no longer being seen He said that he'd received hundreds of reports, especially after he'd written several articles about the mysterious fireballs, but that all of the reported objects were just greenish- colored, common, everydayDr Joseph Kaplan and Dr Edward Teller, thought that the green fireballs were natural meteors He didn't think so, however, for several reasons First the color was so much different To illustrate his point, Dr La Paz opened his desk drawer and took out a orn chart of the color spectrureen; one a pale, alreen and the other a reen and told reen fireballs He'd taken this chart with hireen fireballs and everyone had picked this one color The pale green, he explained, was the color reported in the cases of docureen meteors

Then there were other points of dissireen fireballs The trajectory of the fireballs was too flat

Dr La Paz explained that a meteor doesn't necessarily have to arch down across the sky, its trajectory can appear to be flat, but not as flat as that of the green fireballs Then there was the size Al as the ” had been used to describe the fireballs Meteors just aren't this big and bright

No--Dr La Paz didn't think that they were meteors

Dr La Paz didn't believe that they were meteorites either

A meteorite is accompanied by sound and shock waves that break s and sta the observers reported that they did not hear any sound

But the biggest reen fireball had ever been found If they were meteorites, Dr La Paz was positive that he would have found one He'd missed very few times in the cases of known meteorites He pulled a map out of his file to shohat he meant It was a map that he had used to plot the spot where a meteorite had hit the earth I believe it was in Kansas The map had been prepared from information he had obtained fro toward the earth At each spot where an observer was standing he'd drawn in the observer's line of sight to the meteorite From the dozens of observers he had obtained dozens of lines of sight The lines all converged to give Dr La Paz a plot of the meteorite's doard trajectory Then he had been able to plot the spot where it had struck the earth He and his creent to thesteel poles, and found the meteorite

This was just one case that he showed me He had records of many more similar successful expeditions in his file

Then he showed me some other maps The plotted lines looked identical to the ones on the map I'd just seen Dr La Paz had used the same techniques on these plots and had marked an area where he wanted to search He had searched the area

These were plots of the path of a green fireball

When Dr La Paz had finished, I had one last question, ”What do you think they are?”