Green Fireballs, Part III

Then Who?

When it comes to trying to assign blame for the fireballs, we obviously enter into realm of pure speculation. Of course, that can make it all that much more fun! It is, however, worth remembering that everything you read about this part of the unknown, whether from my proverbial pen or that of another, should be taken with a salt block.

So, let us suspend our disbelief for a moment, temporarily banish our doubts, and presume for the sake of argument that the fireballs cannot be explained as a purely natural phenomenon. Again, we can break down the possibilities into some basic, logical categories and then consider the pros and cons of each based upon the limited evidence we have available to us.

For our purposes, we can break down the possibilities thusly: The Natural World (private citizens, governments—foreign and domestic—and standard conceptions of extraterrestrial biological entities [EBEs]) and the Realm of the Supernatural (beings that in some way transcend the closed system of the natural world—conceivably angels, demons, or [to adapt a designation from John Keel] intelligent ultraterrestrial entities [IUEs]).

Naturalistic Possibilities

Frankly, if the fireballs have an intelligent origin, I tend to think it is a natural one. Anyone who has seen a holiday fireworks display knows full well that mankind is more than capable of producing pyrotechnics very similar to what observers describe and I know I saw. In fact, a determined hoaxer could probably purchase most of what would be needed from a hardware stores (though he would have to be either very brave or very stupid to start fooling with explosives in the quantities required to produce the fireball I saw). It is certainly well within the capability of even third rate governments.

Still, there are a number of definite problems with this interpretation.

• There is the issue of motive. Why in the world would anyone—either a government or a private citizen—waste time (not to mention risking life and limb) launching gigantic green sparklers across the sky over the course of 60-70 years?
• Hoaxing would make sense if the fireballs provoked a crop circle-esque media circus that set the world to gabbing. While the fireballs do attract attention, they’ve never even come close to becoming a “major” attention getter.
• While some private citizens might enjoy setting things off like this, one might expect them to get bored with the same thing over and over for six decades. Why not some purple fireballs, or perhaps blue or red every now and again?
• And why in the world would you haul these things all over two countries to shoot them off? Perhaps Mexican green looks different from Texas green. If not the same people, we would then need to address how we can have sixty years of copycats who somehow produce identical results but leave no clue as to how they communicated their methods to each other.
• The lack of physical evidence is another problem. Standard fireworks would need some kind of launch point and people to do the launching. Like the crop circle hoaxers, it is more than likely that something of this sort (or someone) would have turned up by now. Also, many conventional explosives would leave some kind of physical trace (i.e. the picture found here).
• The fireballs’ trajectory is an issue too. If the fireballs all basically fly parallel to the ground, they must either be launched that way (from a plane perhaps) or their unexploded form must include control surfaces of some kind that would allow the projectile to transition to horizontal flight after reaching the appropriate altitude. While both are physically possible, they only complicate matters further when it come to explanations. Aircraft launching what amount to missiles in the vicinity of nuclear facilities and large metropolitan areas would be likely attract attention, and traces of significant control surfaces capable of surviving the speeds the fireballs reach would almost certainly be found by investigators (and a number of well-funded, determined attempts to solve the mystery have been made).

All of these problems make it difficult for me to fully commit to any of the standard, comfortable explanations.

And what of the EBEs? Jerome Clark mentions a statement from Project Bluebook (more about my discussion of Bluebook with the Chief Historian of the CIA in the future) head Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt, who claimed that at the Los Alamos nuclear research facility “scientists theorized that the fireballs were projectiles fired into earth’s atmosphere from an extraterrestrial spacecraft” (Clark, 263). My current problem with this idea (aside from general issues regarding physical visitors from planet Morpholon in the Alpha Zeta Tau cluster) is that to the best of my knowledge, no one has connected the fireballs to other, more standard UFO phenomena any more than they’ve connected them to a terrestrial aircraft or naval vessel. Unless perhaps the Los Alamos scientists had access to information that I do not (entirely possible) it seems a first rate leap of logic to bring aliens into this discussion.

Supernatural Possibilities

While I tend to favor supernatural explanations to many paranormal phenomena, I run into the same issues with IUE participation that I do with EBE: I have seen no clear evidence (beyond plain weirdness) to suggest that there are any connections between the fireballs and the supernatural. I could only arrive at that sort of explanation by “wanting” it to be true hard enough to believe it is there. On the other hand, there is one distinct possibility that might, with further research, provide that connection. If Clark is correct in arguing that the fireballs are related to the smaller, odder southwestern lights he discusses in The UFO Book, then IUEs might be brought back into play. These lights tended to be very small, often were only a few inches across, were less than twenty feet off the ground and seemed to be under some kind of intelligent control. “Most of the slow-moving lights changed color from red to green. One was white with a red blinking light and one had …[a]…’cone shaped affair’ on its rear” (Clark, 259). These descriptions bear at least a superficial resemblance to the light observed at the infamous “Skinwalker Ranch” researched by the National Institute for Discovery Science in Utah. Those lights did all sorts of interesting things like chasing cattle and even vaporizing dogs.

So, it would take two strong evidence streams (one to connect the fireballs to the “Killeen Lights” and another to establish that the Killeen Lights are fundamentally similar to those at Skinwalker Ranch), but that door might still be open a crack. While I don’t think it likely, neither do I think we can categorically rule the supernatural out as at least a vague possibility. We simply do not have enough evidence.

Final Thoughts on the Fireballs

The Green Fireballs seem to be as much—if not more—of an mystery today as they were in 1947. As we have seen, they do not seem to fit comfortably into any of the ready-made categories humanity has manufactured to try to box up the paranormal into handy packages. Based on the currently available evidence, no single explanatory paradigm can theoretically answer all the difficult points connected with the phenomenon. The resulting see-saw effect as one teeters back and forth between theories is definitely unsatisfying.

One good side to the fireballs is that they do not have the same unsettling effect that some other aspects of paranormal might. Unlike ghosts, fairies, angels, demons, aliens, etc., I do not believe that there is even the slightest chance of a fireball “coming to get you” or “going bump in the night.” It is one of those nice, impersonal questions that, while I wouldn’t mind getting to the bottom of it, I am perfectly content leaving unanswered.

Up next: "Christian Attitudes Towards the Paranormal"

References:

• Clark, Jerome. The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial. Visible Ink, 1998.
• Kelleher, Colm A. and George Knapp. Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah. Paraview Pocket Books, 2005.

Images:

• Rawree. "Green Fireball" FXhome. http://media1.fxhome.com/plugin-images/1408/thumbnail
• "Green Fireworks for the 4th?" http://gothamist.com/2007/07/03/green_fireworks.php
• Photo of Strange Lights at Skinwalker Ranch. Utah UFO Hunters. http://www.aliendave.com/files/Photos/Ranch/Ranch16002anominserts.jpg