From: Jerome Clark <jkclark@frontiernet.net>
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 14:27:29 -0500
Fwd Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 18:52:50 -0400
Subject: Donald H. Menzel, Unreliable Witness


Listfolk:

Few people in the history of the UFO controversy have played so
destructive or dishonorable a role as the late Harvard
astronomer and obsessed UFO trasher Donald Howard Menzel
(1901-1976).

Through his power and position -- as well as a fierce
personality which many found intimidating (he did not hesitate,
according to astronomer Ian Seymour, to "blacken the reputations
and damage the careers of scientific opponents") -- he
discouraged his generation of scientists from looking into the
UFO phenomenon. He wrote or co-wrote three books on the subject,
classics of pseudoscience in which, as James McDonald
documented, "well-known scientific principles" are cast aside
"almost with abandon.... In 'explanation' after 'explanation' in
his books, Menzel rides roughshod over elementary optical
considerations governing such things as mirages and light
reflections." In the recent collection from the University Press
of Kansas (UFOs and Abductions: Challenging the Borders of
Knowledge), sociologist of science Ron Westrum remarks that
Menzel's UFO books "represent quite shoddy science" and notes
that even the UFOphobic Edward Condon deemed Menzel's
explanations laughable.

What brings Menzel's name to mind is the recent list discussion
of witness reliability. Menzel made much of alleged witness
unreliability (to the degree that he refused to investigate UFO
cases from anywhere but the armchair, on the principle that
witnesses didn't know what they were talking about and thus were
unworthy of his time). Ironically, it turns out, that one of the
most unreliable UFO witnesses ever was Menzel himself. The
following appears on pages 633-34 of my UFO Encyclopedia, 2nd
Edition:

On May 12, 1949, Menzel had a personal encounter with the UFO
phenomenon. His private description of the event and his later
public one differed markedly. His initial account of the
incident did not come to light until the 1970s, when researcher
Brad Sparks managed to uncover the report, sent to the Air Force
and marked "CONFIDENTIAL." (Sparks, 1977).

Menzel related that at 9:30 that evening he and a driver left
Holloman Air Force Base on their way to Alamogordo, New Mexico.
As they traveled along Highway 70, heading east-northeast,
Menzel, in the backseat, admired the full moon ascending in the
southeast and noted the presence of the reddish star Antares
just below and to the left of the moon.

A minute or two later he saw another object in the sky, this one
nearer the horizon and farther to the left. As he told the Air
Force, "The star had a fuzzy appearance, caused, I thought, by
low-level atmospheric haze. As I watched, I noted, within half a
minute, a second star about three degrees to the South of the
first." Thinking at first that these were the stars Castor and
Pollux, he watched them for another minute as they gradually
became brighter.

Suddenly he realized that "the two stars had to be something
else." They were too big, and Castor and Pollux were in the
western, not the east-southeastern sky. The objects, he related,
were "very nearly identical in diameter, nearly one-half the
size of the full moon." The drawing accompanying his report
shows two small circles.

Quickly determining that these were not reflections on his
bifocals or on the car window, he continued to observe the
"ghostly objects" for another four minutes. They were white,
almost as bright as the brightest stars, and level with each
other. Then the object on the right "suddenly disappeared."
Convinced that what he was seeing was "exceptional," he ordered
the driver to stop immediately, but the very moment he was
speaking, the second object vanished instantly.

Menzel calculated that if the objects were truly motionless, as
they seemed to be, they were at least "180 miles away" and about
"3/4 of a mile" in size. (If they were closer and in motion,
they would be smaller.)

When Menzel submitted his report to the Air Force soon
afterwards, he was clearly puzzled. But when he recounted the
story four years later, in the first of three anti-UFO books he
would write over two decades, he had it solved, even though he
grudgingly acknowledged that "I cannot explain the phenomenon in
every detail." He wrote, "It was merely a reflection of the
moon.... A layer of haze, perhaps disturbed and tilted by the
moving car, probably caused the trick reflections of the moon."
The situation was comparable to "that of a person riding in a
fast motorboat. He might see the moon reflected in the bow wave
thrown up by the boat. But the reflection would vanish when the
boat stopped." Therefore, he reasoned, the lunar- reflection
theory "would also explain why the pair of ghostly attendants
faded at the moment we stopped the car; the reflecting bumps
would then disappear" (Menzel, 1953). As Sparks has pointed out
(his italics):


The facts that Menzel so neatly fitted to his moon-reflection
hypothesis are exactly wrong. These UFOs that Menzel called
"extra moons" in his four-year-old account actually were _one-
fourth to one-half_ the apparent size of the moon, according to
his original four-_day_-old report. The UFOs did not "fade
away," they "suddenly disappeared." And that did not occur when
the car stopped, but while the car was _still traveling at 50
mph_. The second UFO vanished at the precise moment that Menzel
_asked_ the driver to stop. By then the first UFO was already
gone [Sparks, op. cit.].


Menzel had altered the details of his own sighting so that he
could "explain" it. There is no mention of this sighting in
Menzel's two subsequent UFO books, though in the last of them he
would claim his "first encounter" with alleged UFOs was in 1955
(Menzel and Taves, 1977).

Menzel, Donald H. Flying Saucers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1953.
Menzel, Donald H., and Lyle G. Boyd. The World of Flying Saucers:
A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space Age.
Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1963.
Sparks, Brad. Refuting the Skeptics: A Close Look at Donald H.
Menzel. Berkeley, CA: The Author, 1977.

See also:
McDonald, James E. UFOs: Greatest Scientific Problem of Our
Times? Tucson, AZ: The Author, 1967.
Seymour, Ian. "The Curious Case of Donald Menzel." Astronomy
Now 6 (December 1992): 58.

Jerry Clark