Chapter 5 Summary and Analysis

In the late 1940s and 1950s, in fact through much of the Cold War, the United States employed extremely high-altitude weather balloons loaded with meteorological devices, as well as espionage equipment, to fly through the upper atmosphere and peer across the Iron Curtain for a glimpse of what the Soviet Union might be up to. Some of these balloons also served as radar targets for the US to test its radar defenses to warn of aerial attack. In 1947, one of these weather balloons crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, leaving some debris that had strange markings on it. They were identifying marks placed by the toy manufacturer who produced the radar targets for the balloons. Why can't this explanation be accepted? Sagan wonders.

Why must UFO believers and non-skeptics insist this was the crash of a flying saucer with little green men...