MIRAGES—GORDON 343 
the others, scrambled down to the shore with the lake still in sight, 
dropped down to the lake floor—and there was no lake! I walked out 
toward where it had seemed to be. The surface was a thin coating 
of white with black alkali underneath, which kept getting softer. 
I must have gone well over a mile and was sinking over my shoetops 
at every step. The white surface stretched away ahead without a 
break as far as I could see, so I turned back. From the ridge we 
could follow my footsteps, black against the white surface, ending less 
than a hundred yards from the real lake. 
A few hours later we were telling the story to Imperial Irrigation 
engineers in Calexico. Their comment was, “Of course it was water. 
People go down there to swim.” A few months later I saw our lake 
from the air. This is rather a reversal of the usual mirage story of 
seeing water where there was none. We were unable to see water 
where there was some. 
OPERATION LONG DISTANCE 
The mirages of Operation Long Distance are the best remembered 
and the most difficult to explain. It seems best to establish a back- 
ground of what they do; later we can start trying to explain how they 
do it. Their job is to make an object seem to be where it is not—not 
just lifted a little way into the air, but moved a few or many miles 
away. 
In a small Maryland town only one mirage seems to have been seen 
in nearly a hundred years, but that one is remembered. It showed 
a city in the sky, a city of domed roofs—foreign looking, not at all 
American. Judging from appearances, it would seem to have started 
on its long journey from North Africa or one of the eastern Mediter- 
ranean countries. Reaching back fully 75 years is the story of a 
mirage seen not too infrequently over the Palomas Plain, about mid- 
way between Yuma and Phoenix. It has long been known as the 
mirage of a Mexican city with no attempt to identify it. In 1920 the 
station master at Baghdad on the Santa Fe Railroad some 60 miles 
east of San Bernardino told me of mirages seen over a dry lake bed 
south of the station. He had seen them several times. According to 
some of the watchers it was the modest city of San Jose, Calif., 500 
miles and half a dozen mountain ranges away. Recently an Army 
sergeant called to tell me of a mirage he had seen some 40 miles north- 
east of Yuma showing a city set up in the desert close to the head 
of our rugged Castle Dome range. He watched it carefully for 
more than 20 minutes and was sure he could recognize buildings 
that would identify it as San Francisco, even farther away. He 
said it seemed about 4 miles distant. San Diego seems especially 
well situated for Operation Long Distance. From two quite lim- 
