Date:   Wed Sep 08 1993  12:04:00
From:   Sheppard Gordon
To:     All
Subj:   More on Road Sign
UFO                            -------------------------------

07/16/93
SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER

A baffling UFO photo has apparently bitten the dust. On a
November morning in 1966, a driver on Route 58 along the
Oregon coast paused at a lookout point and took pictures of
Diamond Peak. After the photos were developed, the
photographer - a seemingly credible witness with a respectable
scientific and military background - found that one image
included a dome-shaped object with a series of alternating
light-and-dark bands beneath, and what appeared to be a
vaporous trail under the bands. The world's most distinguished
UFO investigator, astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek, called the photo
"one of the most puzzling on record."  Another saucer researcher
speculated that the dark bands shed light on UFO propulsion.

Now, after years of careful study, an intrepid Bay Area physicist
has apparently solved the mystery. The UFO wasn't a spaceship
from another world or another dimension. It was something much
more mundane:  a road sign that was blurred because it was
photographed from a moving car.

Los Altos physicist Irwin Wieder, who has a Ph.D. in physics from
Stanford, began investigating the case in the early 1980s. Initially
enthusiastic about the photo,he became increasingly skeptical as the
years went by, partly because of holes in the witness' story. In the
latest issue of the Stanford-based Journal of Scientific Exploration,
Wieder explains how he eventually determined that the witness, in a
moving car, had photographed a sign saying "Diamond Peak" with an
upward-pointing arrow. Wieder reconstructed the incident by
photographing a replica of the sign from a different moving vehicle.

Result:  An image of a blurred object that looks exactly like the
purported "UFO."

To be specific, the car's movement blurred the image of the sign,
creating the illusion of a "dome" (the blurred top of the post holding
the sign), "light-and-dark bands" (the blurred letters reading
"Diamond Peak") and the "vapor trail" (the blurred bottom of the
post).

Eventually Wieder traveled to the Diamond Peak area and found the
smoking gun - the broken post on which the sign once sat.

In his article, Wieder acknowledges he might have hit on the truth
sooner if he hadn't been so convinced the photo showed a mysterious
phenomenon. For a while, he "remained oblivious to an abundance
of evidence that should have signaled something was wrong. If
anything can be learned from this, it is that UFO researchers need to
be more diligent in applying the principles of scientific research."



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