kookscience transcribes:

No branch of science has been more filled with chicanery and delusion than the sightings and study of extra-terrestrial phenomenoa; flying saucers, if you will. Ever since Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre invasion hoax, some manner of Martian-paranoia has persisted, resulting in dozens of U.F.O.-sightings every week. Many, it seems, are honest errors and some fall under the “crack-pot” category. Still, however, there are those reported by people whose credibility cannot be denied. Some reports are so detailed and confirmed by so many witnesses that only the most naive would attempt to write them off with concise, rational explanations. The often-avoided truth may just be that the sightings are exactly what they seem to be.

Above, a reconstruction of what many witnesses reported in 1957 off the Argentinian coastlines. The reports, in three different languages, told of a flame trial which blazed over the city late at night and, at one point, blazed bright enough to illuminate the entire ship. Deductions based upon the reconstruction state that it is some sort of sensory-device, picking up light and/or sound waves from the surface.

At left, a seemingly-doorless craft with a smaller, orbiting ship was sighted over a mountain range in Australia. Supposedly, the funnel-like device at the bottom of the larger ship was its means of propulsion; a continuous jet of air that kept it aloft and blasted small holes across the landscape, as it went.

At right, what meteorologists could not explain was the basis for a sighting of electrical disturbance between two small, silver crafts. In rebuilding them, scientists were aided by unusually-vivid descriptions from several people spread over a three hundred-mile radius. The reports stated that the smaller craft was firing upon the larger and would glow intensely at periodic intervals.

Below, investigators had to translate sighting-reports from Himalayan and revealed reports of a “floating ash-tray” over eight-five feet in diameter and hovering over a long-dead volcano. The face of the ash-tray was filled with a constantly-changing pattern in the most brilliant colors and the U.F.O. was sighted around the same area, every night for two weeks. Official investigators, however, were not among those who spotted it and they wrote the entire case off as a mass-hallucination. Two weeks later, it was spotted again and the volcano, dead for over two hundred years, erupted that very night.

Across the land, there are many groups whose sole function is to record and investigate sightings of inexplicable flying phenomena. To be sure, this often involves running down many false leads but the U.F.O. sighters are convinced that many of their cases are legitimate. Workining in conjunction with and, sometimes, sponsored by certain governmental agencies, they keep detailed, accurate files on every report they come across and even the most cynical skeptic has to be impressed by the large volume which cannot be written off as “swamp gas” or “hoaxes” or “hallucinations.”

The theory, of course, is that these ships come from other planets— more advanced than ours. Like Earth, they have found it a natural quest to seek out other intelligence and contact it. While the reports of actual contact with a space ship are far less substantiated (Stories such as the Newark, N.J. man who describes, vividly, the ride they took him on to Venus must, for now, be placed in the same class as “Take me to your leader” jokes.) there is no doubt that, if these ships exist, someone sent them. Descriptions are always of man-made vehicles, often quite intricate in their construction. And most witnesses describe the ships’ movements as “investigative” —that is, they are looking at, or for something. While we can attest to the authenticity of no sightings in particular, we regret that a field which may prove so vital to our world’s progress and safety is so flooded with skeptics and lunatic-elements. The facts are, however, available at any library for the interested. The conclusions are yours to make, but most researchers have to agree: They’re still up there!

THEY’RE STILL UP THERE by Jack Kirby (photo-montages & article from an unpublished issue of Weird Mystery Tales, via GrantbridgeSt)