TITLE: Unbelievable Flying Objects
NAME: Bob Franke
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: bobfranke@halcyon.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.halcyon.com/wordsltd/pov/pov.htm
TOPIC: Unbelievable
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: 1stufo.jpg
ZIPFILE: 1stufo.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.0

TOOLS USED: 
    Nathan Kopp's lnsflare.inc, Bob Franke's
wDem2Tga,  Lview Pro for jpeg conversion and copyright
POV editor


RENDER TIME: 
    25 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 133 w/ 128 Mb RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold was returning home
from a business trip when he made a detour into the
Yakima, Washington area to help in an aerial search for
a missing C-46 marine transport.  Is was a crystal
clear day, perfect for conducting a search.

At around 3:00 AM he was flying near Mount Rainier,
when a flash of light caught his eye. He turned and saw
a procession of nine very strange objects flying from
north to south.  Arnold estimated their size at about
two-thirds that of a DC-4, and he calculated their
speed at over 1500 mph by timing their travel between
two mountain peaks of known distance.

Arnold initially described the objects as flat discs,
like pie tins, very shiny, moving erratically, like a
"saucer would if you skipped it across water."  From
this description a reporter coined the phrase, "flying
saucer" in a newspaper article the next day.  This
started a flood of sightings in the Pacific Northwest
in the following several months.  To this day most
UFO's are described as looking very much like a saucer.

Kenneth Arnold is no crack pot and did not claim to see
alien space craft.  He thought the objects were secret
military aircraft.  However, he later change his
description of the objects to be crescent like and this
is what I show in my image.  This sighting is generally
considered the beginning of UFO sightings in the US.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I downloaded the 1:250,000-Scale Digital Elevation
Model (DEM) data for Washington State from URL
http://edcwww.cr.usgs.gov/doc/edchome/ndcdb/ndcdb.html.
I used my wDem2Tga program to create the three 16-bit
tga heightfield images from three DEM data sets.  You
may download a copy of wDem2Tga from the Utility page
of my POV web site.

I used Nathan Kopp's lnsflare include file, but could
not get it to work with POVRay 3.1, so I rendered with
version 3.0.  The atmospheric haze is ground fog. The
landscape heightfield uses a gradient texture.  The
rest of the image is simple constructive solid
geometry.  To save space, the heightfields are not
included.

Well, that's about it.  Hope you like the image.