In the summer of 1946, a Mr. Harrison came to the studio and asked for a
quotation on the production of an educational motion picture. He was thinking of
have [sic] a film made, largely consisting of animation, to explain a phenomenon
he had seen in the sky on August 4, 1917 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The story he
told me was so fantastic that after he left, I wrote down the main parts of it together
with the date, and a copy of his diagram. I have kept it ever since as an instance of the
odd type of people one runs into in the motion picture business.
In talking over the specifications of the film with Mr. Harrison,
he was rather evasive in his answers as to the subject matter. Naturally, in order to
give a fair quotation, I had to know what the exact content of the film would be in
order to give a proper quotation. Rather reluctantly, he told me the following story,
and explained that he wanted to make this film to show to interested groups of
people to explain what he had seen.
In mid-afternoon of August 4, 1917, this Mr. Harrison had
been standing at the window of one of the upper floors of an office building in
Philadelphia. There were a certain amount of clouds in the sky, but the sun was
shining. High in the sky he saw a series of bright glittering objects. They were
arranged in a pattern as drawn below. [Image not yet available]
He did not describe any movement of the entire group as
a unit. He saw the phenomenon for less than a minute and then it faded from
view. He alone saw the phenomenon, and apparently he did not have time to
call anybody else's attention to it. He never saw it again.
Between 1917 and 1946, Mr. Harrison had been trying to
interpret what he had seen..
