The Gullibility Experiment

TECHNOLOGY The Gullibility Experiment

From East Coast to West, unidentified flying objects (otherwise known as UFOs) appeared with the spring. Some of the sightings were explained away simply. The glowing "objects" that hovered over southeastern Michigan, said the Air Force, were only burning marsh gas. But what of the vivid reports that came in from Southern California, where hundreds of residents of metropolitan Los Angeles were startled by an assortment of weird sights in the night sky? Eyewitnesses reported red, white and blue (or orange, red and green) lights moving at "fantastic speed." Others detected a strong odor of perfume as the UFOs moved overhead. One woman saw "four glowing fireballs arranged in a cube," while another insisted that she had seen a light plane shoot down one of the strange things.

As always, the descriptions were more than a little fanciful. This time, though, there really were some objects overhead--man-made objects that did not contain any visitors from a far planet. They had been sent aloft by three ingenious students at Pasadena's California Institute of Technology.

Inspired by wild discrepancies in reports of earlier UFO sightings, Science Students Terry Warren, James Gould and Douglas Eardley decided to perform a complex "gullibility experiment." Working secretly in a steam tunnel under the Caltech campus, they rigged balloons out of polyethylene sheeting and filled them with an inert gas--probably helium. From the bottom of the balloons they suspended metal rods, each with fins and a railroad flare fastened to its lower end.

On four different nights, after walkie-talkie-equipped lookouts radioed that campus guards were out of sight, the students slipped out of the tunnel, lit the flares, and launched their experiment. As the balloons soared skyward, wind caught the fins on the dangling rods and started the burning flares rotating like slowly twirling beacons.

Though a Caltech employee saw the final launching and informed the sheriff, it was too late to prevent the headline-making results. "We succeeded beyond our wildest hopes," said Gould. "We suckered everybody. We could have made the balloons do fantastic things--like zip across the sky--but we preferred to keep the experiment simple."

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