Mahood himself is an interesting study. The way I understand it, he was originally trained as a civil engineer and worked in the area of traffic control. Somewhere along the line he developed an interest in UFOs and, in particular, the goings on at Area 51. His investigations so intrigued him that he went back to school and obtained a masters degree in physics in order better understand what he was observing. He apparently worked as a physicist for a period of time specializing in research on gravity. Somewhere along the line he apparently lost interest in UFOs, and the last I read he was back working in his old field of traffic control. I tried to contact him once at the email address shown at the bottom of his essay but I received no reply. 

 

Here is another speculation that I believe deserves more attention: Most people have a rudimentary concept of what a mirage is, but I think the phenomenon is larger than is generally realized. Mirages are usually divided into inferior and superior depending on whether the false horizon is below the natural horizon or above it. In addition, they are also active at night which I believe is not generally understood. For a mirage at night the context is probably missing so one may not see anything at all unless the scene observed has a source of light in it. Suppose, for example, there is a brightly lit interstate crossing which is surrounded by dark desert, and this is observed courtesy of a superior mirage at some distant location. Observers at the distant location would see a formation of lights in the sky at some elevation above the horizon. The lights may even appear to move if there is some undulation in the temperature inversion layer that caused the mirage in the first place. Maybe the famous Phoenix lights could be explained in this manner.

 

In my book: The UFO Experience Reconsidered I propose that the classical case of Father Gill in Papua, New Guinea (1959) was, in fact, a complex mirage. In order for this to be  true he would have to have been looking east when he saw what he saw. Does anyone know if this was the case?