Fatuus Season

In the lonely hills northwest of Ann Arbor, Frank Manner stepped from his farmhouse one night last week to quiet his yelping dogs. Off beyond the cornfield, he spied a glowing, "quilted" object--which he later sketched in detail --bobbing over a swamp. After a futile attempt to stalk it, Manner called police, who also saw the apparition.

Gasped Washtenaw County Sheriff Douglas J. Harvey: "If there is such a thing as a flying saucer, this must be it."

By next night, Manner's farm looked like a fairground. Saucer-seekers bearing telephoto lenses trooped to the swamp through driving rain. From the University of Michigan came a scientist who welcomed extraterrestrial visitors by flashing the universal equation of pi with his car headlights -- three blinks, one blink, then four blinks. He got no response, to the loud chagrin of Renee Scott, 3, who came with her parents, ex pecting to see a spaceman with "green, yellow and orange-juice hair."

A sure sign of primaveral delirium, the sighting touched off pandemic reports of preternatural phenomena across the U.S. Manner's drop-in was followed by a shimmering object that settled obligingly on a marshy Michigan hollow in full view of 87 Hillsdale Col lege coeds and a county civil-defense director. Ann Arbor's Democratic Congressman Weston E. Vivian called for a Defense Department investigation of the unearthly goings-on. Michigan's Gerald Ford, House Republican leader, suggested a congressional inquiry. Air Force investigators donned hip boots to slog through Michigan marshland.

Through its Project Blue Book, the Air Force had looked into 10,147 other Unidentified Flying Objects since flying saucers entered American mythology in 1947. Because of inadequate sighting data, 646 elude technical explanation.

The rest proved to be anything from lenticular clouds to runaway balloons, kites to jet-engine exhaust. At week's end the Air Force attributed the Ann Arbor and Hillsdale apparitions to marsh gas (methane) created by organic decomposition and ignited by combustion.

The phenomenon that results is known to scientists as ignis fatuus -- "the wicked and devilish wills-o'-the-wisp," as Thackeray noted 126 years ago, that "gambol among the marshes and lead good men astraye."

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