Busted Dish

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!

How I wonder what you're at!

Up above the world you fly,

Like a tea-tray in the sky. . . .

--Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The mysterious ''flying saucers" that had bedeviled the heavens for a fortnight (TIME, July 14) seemed to have whisked back to Wonderland. A few U.S. citizens still saw them, last week; so did people in England, Italy, Chile, Iran, Holland, Japan and China (see A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER). But by last week the "somethings" had petered out into a trail of rueful headshaking and self-conscious laughter.

Psychiatrists put the pandemic uproar down to mass hallucination, horseplay, suggestibility, insecurity or outright psychopathy. Scientists found "no evidence to substantiate the existence of heavenly disks."

Even Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Gromyko got into the act. Said he, twinkling like a Russian tea-tray: "Some attribute [the 'saucers'] to the British for exporting too much of their Scotch whiskey into the United States; some say it is a Russian discus thrower training for the Olympic games who does not realize his own strength."

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