What are flying saucers?

Lynn Poole describes various historical accounts of flying saucers and reads from an article in the 1893 "Nature" magazine about mysterious lights. Although Harvard's Dr. Donald H. Menzel was unable to appear on the program as planned, he permitted Johns Hopkins Science Review to tell his story using his photos from "Life" magazine. Dr. Menzel has actually seen these mysterious lights or flying saucers and attempted to recreate them in his lab. An explanation of temperature inversions shows how they can produce optical mirages by reflected sunlight, and Menzel's lab experiment reproduces this phenomenon. Lynn Poole shows viewers a home experiment to simulate the gradual bending of reflections to make them appear as mirages. A film shows another explanation of flying saucers, offered by Noel Scott, Army physicist. Believing that "flying saucers" are created in the same way as lightning and the northern lights, he simulated the atmospheric conditions in a bell jar, producing tiny "saucers" of ionized gas from charged particles sensitive to magnetic movements.