The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 25

glie Atlanta flournal and CONSTITUTION SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1 977 ANCIENTUNSOLVED WO Mystery Still With Us All aboard "The Random Time Machine" for weekly journeys into yesterday some of the strangest, most mysterious true stories that have ever occurred. An eerie side of history you may never have heard of before. By DOANE R. HOAG THE EAST CHINA SEA, Feb. 27, 1893 As the British ship Caroline steamed slowly northwards through the tropical night, the forward lookout suddenly spotted a line of strange, luminous globes that were passing slowly across the horizon betwpn the ship and the China shore.

Puzzled, he called the first officer, who in turn called Capt. Charles J. Norcock. As the captain later reported, they watched the mysterious lights for several hours. Sometimes they moved in a long straight line; sometimes in a mass.

What are they? No one could imagine. They were not ships, for they were high above the sea. They were not stars or plants. Norcock navigated by the stars; he knew them well. They were not meteors, for they moved too slowly.

Birds? Impossible. The sun had set hours ago and the night was dark. They could not be aircraft, for this was 10 years before the Wright Brothers' first flight. Balloons? Hardly. They were moving against the wind.

Norcock had no explanation for the strange, reddish lights. Later he learned that he was not the only one who had seen them. They had also been sighted by the Leander in the same area, at the same time. The luminous bodies seen by the Caroline and the Leander were not the first UFOs to be reported, nor were they by any means the last. On Nov.

30, 1880, at about 8:30 in the morning, Signor Ricco of the Observatory of Palermo, Italy, was making a routine observation of the sun when, through his telescope, he saw two long, parallel lines of objects passing slowly across the sky. He thought at first they were birds, probably cranes. But when he computed their position, he discovered that they were no less than 5 Mi miles high. No bird known could fly that high. These reports of mysterious flying objects have been with us for hundreds, even thousands of years.

Alexander the Great reported that two huge silvery objects "like shields" that spit fire from around their edges swooped down from 3 for 4.00 that's the ticket for our Blush panty sale Reg. 2.00 to 2.66 and more. Rich's panty counter. It's where you want to be for 30 to 50 savings. For French bikinis.

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All for sizes 4 through 7. Daywear, fourth floor, Store for Fashion, Downtown and all Rich's stores. ST he Random A SOUTHERN INSTITUTION SINCE 1867 Time Machine the sky and attacked his army.That was about three centuries before Christ. The Haida Indians of British Columbia have a legend of visitors from the stars who descended to earth on "discs of fire." Our own Navajo Indians have a similar legend, and so do the natives of Brazil. Even far out in the Pacific, among the Maori people of New Zealand, there are similar tales of visi-' tors from space who came to earth, stayed a while, then left.

UFOs were reported in the United States over Texas in 1873, over Kansas in 1897, and over Tennessee in 1910. In 1945 the first atomic bomb was exploded in Almagordo, N.M., creating a light so brilliant that it could have been seen from other planets. Two years later, the United States began to be visited by a perfect rash of flying objects. The first one was sighted by Kenneth Arnold, an Idaho businessman, on June 24, 1947, when he was flying his private plane near Mt Rainier, in Washington State, Arnold described seeing nine disc-like objects skimming along "like saucers skipping across a pond of water." Within a month after bis description reached the newspapers, "flying saucers" were being reported from every part of the country. Some believe the UFOs are merely Illusions, yet they seem capable of being picked up on radar screens, and have allegedly been photographed.

They appear to disrupt radio and TV reception, cause automobile engines to stall, animals to panic. They are said to cause mild radiation sickness in close observers, and when they land they leave withered foliage and scorched circles in the earth. In 1952 a whole swarm of unidentified flying objects hovered over Washington, D.C. But they seemed to be of peaceful Intention, so no hostile action was taken against them. It probably would have been futile to attempt such action anyway, for pilots who have attempted to pursue them say the things easily outdistance any modern jet plane.

In 1948, Flight Commander Thomas Mantell at the controls of an F51 fighter, was asked by the tower crew at Goodman Field, to investigate an unidentified aircraft that bad been reported over Maysville and Owensboro. Accompanied by two wing men, also in F51s, Mantell set off in pursuit of the mysterious object that he could see ahead of him. At 15,000 feet his two companions turned back, since they did not have oxygen. Neither did Mantell, but he stubbornly kept after his quarry. His last words to the tower were: "I'm still climbing.

Going to 20,000 feet" A few minutes later, 90 miles from the tower, his plane was seen to explode in mid-air. The official explanation was that Mantell had blacked out from lack of oxygen and gone into an uncontrolled dive. The excessive speed had caused the plane to disintegrate. So what is the truth? Are these things real or are they imaginary? If real, where do they come from and why? Although more than 15 million Americans now claim to have seen them, we know little more about them than we did 84 years ago when Norcock and his crew on the Caroline watched those glowing objects float serenely across the darkened China sea. UFOs remain to this day a mystery that Just won't be laid to rest (CooyrleM Doan Hog W77) 'P '1 4 ft fi if ,4 '3Mlf vSV'SfcSX lH meet Chessie and Peake Our newest bundles-of-fun needleworks.

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