Yuma, Arizona: Chemist sees oblong object, three dark rings through Polaroid glasses

At 9:45 a.m. on May 5, 1953, chemist Wells Alan Webb was standing in a field near the Vacuum Cooling Company plant, not far from Spain Flying Field and about a mile north of Yuma AFB (now Marine Corps Air Station Yuma) near Yuma, Arizona, when he saw a fuzzy-white oblong object at an angle of 45 degrees in the north, about half the diameter of the full moon. He observed it both with the naked eye and through greenish-tinted Polaroid glasses that he used for cloud observations. After 5 minutes the object moved to a position 30 degrees eastward, suddenly became circular in appearance and gradually grew smaller. Through the Polaroid glasses three concentric dark rings appeared around it, the largest about six times its diameter. Webb thought the rings resulted from the rotation of polarized light scattered from the atmosphere (Faraday effect); he described the observation in his 1956 book Mars, the New Frontier. The account follows the entry in George M. Eberhart's chronology UFOs and Intelligence (CUFOS) and the sources cited there; it is not an independent determination by From Beyond Space.