A Harvard astronomer and astrophysicist who summarized the scientific argument against the ideas of Immanuel velikovsky.
Menzel also attacked the idea of flying saucers. He argued that these discs or saucers were a sort of mirage caused by unusual weather circumstances, which in different times would not attract much, if any, interest. But, he suggested, the public’s imagination had been stimulated by the growing belief that there was a real possibility of some sort of invasion, benign or malign to taste, from outer space: from Mars or from a planet from another star system. With their minds receptive to these ideas, many people were more than ready to invest the objects or lights that they observed with an exotic significance. He published his interpretation of these flights of imagination as he saw them in The Truth About Flying Saucers, 1956.