UFOs in Reality by T.R. Dutton Read Free Book Online

bases within the Solar System over a long period of years.
     

CHAPTER 7
P ATHWAYS OVER THE EARTH  
    Up to this point in the investigation, Great Circles in space had been considered, these being supposed to represent the paths followed by the visiting spacecraft. But when a craft is moving in orbit round the world, its path over the ground beneath it is a helical (spiralled) one . This is the result of the relative speeds of the satellite and the rotating Earth below it. During one rotation of the satellite, the position on the equator passed over initially becomes displaced by the number of degrees of the Earth’s rotation corresponding to the time taken by the satellite to complete a single orbit. A typical low altitude satellite takes about 90 minutes to complete one orbit. In that time, the Earth’s surface rotates 22.5 degrees to the west of the original crossover point on the equator. This is clearly seen on NASA’s and Russian projections of the Earth, which show the successive paths (ground tracks) followed over the surface of the planet as a given spacecraft (say, the Space Shuttle) continues to orbit. The time taken for one orbit is referred to as the period of any satellite, and this becomes greater than 90 minutes if the height of the satellite above the Earth is significantly greater than a nominal one of, say, 100 miles.
    My next step was to look for signs of spiralling lines linking the geographical locations of the reported SAC encounters . Considering the 90-minute satellite as the fastest likely to be encountered, I began curve matching using tracing paper with lines representing orbital ground tracks for different natural orbital periods. This turned out to be a fruitless exercise until, out of desperation, I tried a period of 65.45 minutes . Almost instantly, UFO-event locations on the Earth began to be linked up in significant numbers! Very soon I was able to identify 34 well-aligned sets and then went on to identify a further 32 –— 66 in all. Table 2 lists them, in the order in which they were identified. Ground tracks numbered 5, 10, 11 15 and 27 were found to represent five of the Water Events GCs, except that they were now spiralled lines. It is also important to notice that some intersections with the Earth’s equator were shared by tracks having different inclinations , emphasising the importance and fixed nature of the equatorial intersections.
     

 
    When a computer graphics representation of these tracks (Fig.14) was produced by professional colleagues in the Computer Services Department of HSA Ltd., Woodford, as a trainee exercise, using available 3D global software, another important feature of these discoveries became apparent. It was noticed that when the limited ground track arcs were extended to represent complete orbits, the end of one track often linked up at the equator with the beginning of another, this indicating that continuous orbiting might have been carried out.

    Fig. 14
     
    This being so, the spacecraft executing those operations had been literally ‘out of this world’. They would have had to have held themselves in orbit by powerful and continuous thrust-vectoring directed towards the Earth’s centre. This is a technique well beyond any foreseeable human capabilities.
    Another important characteristic of the established tracks was that they represented, without exception , retrograde orbiting of the planet; that is, the visiting craft had been moving from East-to-West, against the direction of the Earth’s West-to-East rotation. Further analysis of the intersections at the equator also showed that three distinct orbital sequences had been adopted and these are shown by Fig.15. But there were, in addition, non-conforming intersections so that the total number of intersections came out to be 101. From each one of these, 10 ground tracks with fixed inclinations to the plane of the equator could be assumed to have been generated, in a north-westerly direction,