shaped by late arriving issues and fluid fashions of interpretation, reason enough to ignore them. The principal counterargument advanced to save the ETH is that flying saucers were seen before Kenneth Arnold's story hit the headlines and those could not have been shaped by the rumor. Many of these reports were never published, let alone investigated, before Arnold became news and so are vulnerable to errors of memory and suggestion. Even if any are eventually found with a satisfactory pedigree, the argument overlooks that Hynek and Jacobs only offered the questions they did because saucers are the dominant shape of ufos after 1947. No amount of research is ever go change the fact that saucers make up only a trivial percentage of things seen in the sky before 1947 and will never be proven to be dominant. The fallacy of this approach is demonstrated by imagining what a Hynek-like thinker, immersed in the reports of the airship era (1896/7), asked and answered, "Why cigar-shaped and not globes or cubes?" and then was told that reports of a slow, low-flying cigar-shaped object in 1347 A.D. meant he had not found the source of the problem. He would clearly dismiss the report as irrelevant – the implicit issue is explaining the dominance of the shape. The rumor generated by Arnold's report is the clear answer to Hynek's question, regardless of minor cases that were exceptions to the dominants of their own era. Flaps of flying phantoms One of the more striking failures of the ETH has been in the realm of offering explanations of UFO flaps. In the first couple decades of the saucer controversy, several researchers sought to argue that flaps were generated by saucers timing their arrival to the proximity of Mars. Predictions were generated, but notably failed. One 1962 study remarked, "If one works with data limited to the period 1950 to 1956 one can argue a correlation as strong as one in a thousand against chance existed." Outside this limited set, however, it is clear no correlation can be found. Charles H. Smiley, Chairman of the Department of Astronomy at Brown University computed 14 ideal minimum energy orbits for transportation from Mars to Earth and Venus to Earth between 1956 and 1965 and determined the likely arrival times plus and minus ten days. He then looked at the number of ufo reports to Blue Book for these periods.