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Professor McDonnell, the professor of atmospheric physics at the University of Arizona, sir,

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you said a moment ago that the subject requires considerable examination, rectification.

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Would you begin by telling us of how you first got interested and came to this opinion?

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Well, I've had a mild interest in this problem for perhaps a decade.

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My field is atmospheric physics, and a lot of the official explanations have centered around

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atmospheric physical phenomena, optical effects and so on.

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And this led me all in 1954, so to begin checking cases in the Southern Arizona area where I live and work.

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Let me take one case. This is now almost ten years ago.

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Another important case, probably many listeners will remember when it was headline news,

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occurred in Lumberland, Texas, the night of November 2nd and the morning of the 3rd, 1957.

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It involved some very interesting phenomena.

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I've interviewed some of the people who were involved, and I have a map here that will give us a little bit of a notion of the general geography.

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Here is Lumberland, Texas, a small town of about 30,000.

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The lines are highways running in and out of Lumberland.

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I'll tell you about the 11 o'clock at night on the 2nd till around 1 in the morning on the 3rd.

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A series of about ten independent sightings by ten persons, a couple of them were law enforcement officers,

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others were just drivers over here, there were two grain combines involved.

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In every one of these instances, the interesting thing that happened was that the driver of the vehicle suddenly came upon a very large,

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and when I say large, the reported sizes were the order of 100 to 200 feet diameter, glowing,

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sometimes reddy, sometimes bluish objects, hovering over fields or roads.

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The first effect on the vehicle was an interference with the lights, and then the ignition system failed.

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Excuse me, Doctor, I noticed that you have a lot of numbers out of math.

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You could point them on these places where the sightings commence.

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Yes, there are ten numbers on here.

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I won't bother the names of individuals, but ten miles is about the size of this pencil to give you some scale.

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And these are spread over a two-hour period, and each one of these numbers here is one, seven, they correspond to the names of the people,

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or instances in which cars were stopped and the lights went out.

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Now, as soon as the object took off, which is the characteristic pattern,

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so the car was stopped for two or three minutes, that then the objects rose from the ground, sometimes with enormous accelerations,

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then the lights came back on without any manipulation of the ignition key, and the driver found he could immediately start his car.

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This was common to all of these cases.

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Now, the official explanation of this Level in Texas case, based on the Air Force handling of the Project Blue Book investigation,

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was that this was ball-lighting, that's what accounted supposedly for these 200-foot diameter objects, plus wetting nations,

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and that was the official explanation of why the car stopped.

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Now, since we're all about the fact that cars, when they do get wet, don't usually start immediately,

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there's a bit of a problem there, but this is only secondary compared to what one finds when he looks, as I have, at the actual order data for the case in question.

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Excuse me, sir, before we get there, if it were ball-lighting, is it normal to have ball-lighting of that size,

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and then would that ball-lighting have the electromagnetic quality of stopping these engines?

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Well, there are, first of all, the typical size of ball-lighting, and, more importantly, it's a fairly rare phenomenon.

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Most of us have never seen it. I have never seen it, though that's very much in my field.

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The foot diameter is a typical phenomenon, but the cases of ball-lighting that are on record are strictly limited to extreme thunderstorm conditions,

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where you have an energy source, a high potential, high gradient, and there is no, I am not aware of any case where a vehicle stopped by ball-lighting.

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I could not assert that it could not occur.

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Well, then this is a question I asked. I discussed this problem with a colleague at Westinghouse who is an expert in these problems.

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He said, well, maybe in the event of a really severe thunderstorm, you could scale up ball-lighting through tens of feet, and maybe they made an error on the side.

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So I looked at the map, and I was quite startled as a person with meteorological training.

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Here is the map for the very time. This is 12 o'clock midnight, right in the middle of the level in Texas after weddings.

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This is a weather map. These are the ice bars. I think perhaps many persons looking on will be familiar with this from weather sessions.

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Here is the Gulf Coast, and the state of Texas is in here.

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Now, I'll point with my pencil to Leveland, Texas, which is in the Panhandle.

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And any of you who are familiar with meteorology will immediately be bothered by the fact that Leveland was being evaded by a large high pressure area pushing down over the Great Plains.

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The nearest front was down near San Angelo, hundreds of miles away. The nearest rain was about 100 miles away.

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The weather report for the nearest stations involved only scattered clouds in the Leveland area.

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There were no stations at the time of the outage. There even hadn't been rain.

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Two hours later, the one station had less than 100 per inch.

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And here is the selection of nations charging severe thunderstorms and wet ignitions.

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And I'm sorry, I'm not a scientist. And when I asked the people at Wright-Patterson, they really had no very good answer.

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And all I can say is that in cases of this sort, and I had a whole explanation, is almost pulled out of the blue.

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I have just seen it in too many instances to be happy with this.

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There are many very definite things that could be done in a scientific context to pursue this problem.

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And it badly needs the same attention in my opinion.

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Thank you very much, Professor McDonald.