LONG BEFORE this point, many readers must have asked themselves, "How did Scully get into all this?"
Frankly, I wrote my way into it. Years ago I wrote the inside story of how I happened to be the author of Frank Harris's life of Bernard Shaw. I later incorporated the articles into a book called Rogues Gallery-a title which I subsequently gave to Ellery Queen for a book of detective stories, only to find it used without permission in movies, radio, and everywhere else as time went by.
Among the readers of Rogues Gallery was one who wrote in substance: "You keep picking around the edges of Harris. Why don't you write a book about him?" It was signed "Silas M. Newton.
The name rang a bell in my memory. When Harris and his wife made a trip from Nice to New York in the winter of 19291930, Silas Newton paid for it. He housed them in his Park Avenue residence and arranged for their invitation to talk to Washington officialdom on Shakespeare.
"Obviously it's an outcropping," he said. "No prospector would know how to get it otherwise."
He organized an expedition. He ordered equipment, men, and a jeep dispatched from Denver. They were to meet us at a motel near the California-Nevada line. We were routed out at 3:45 in the morning. We traveled to a jumping-off place in a new Oldsmobile and the jeep.
Four of them transferred to the jeep taking instruments, water, and food with them. I was left to guard the pass. From what? The nearest sign of life were some dinosaur's hoof prints-and they were 30,000,000 years old.
"If we don't come back by noon, don't worry," said Newton. "If things go bad we might be held up till 4:30."
"And if you don't come back by sundown?" "We're lost," he said.
Then he drove off with the keys to the rescue car. That meant if they were lost, I was too.
They left just as the sun was coming over the mountains. I was parked on a volcanic lava bed-barren of the slightest vegetation. Not even a buzzard flew over the area all day.
By noon the heat became stifling. I stripped nude except for army boots and crawled under the car. Never had I seen such a God-forsaken spot.
I began to think of myself in terms of Captain Scott, that my end would be simply a matter of "these few notes and my dead body will tell the tale." In fact I even feared that the notes would burn up and never be found. I could see fifty miles in any direction and I could see nothing. I could get a radio station from Salt Lake City but they didn't help because they couldn't get me.
A sandwich and a canteen of water were gone by noon. I began to dry out, to salivate. I could have tried the radiator water, but it was full of rust and I felt that all that was left of me was ferrous oxide, the sodium chloride having long since evaporated.
Even if rescued I wouldn't know where to hunt for the others. There are 360 degrees in even a secret circle, leaving a 359-to-1 shot that a searching party would find them.
They didn't return at noon. They didn't return by 4:30. So by Newton's own definition they were lost. It was too late to try hobbling back to civilization, so I decided to spend the night in the car, without food or water.
But after the sun had set I saw the lights of a jeep weaving in and out of the cactus, sage, lava beds, and sand. After three attempts to get to me they finally found a way in.
They returned gasping for water, pooped, glass-eyed. They drank some of the radiator water, threw a sack of ore, some tools, and their gold-crazed bodies in the car. Newton took the wheel and tore across the open valley to the crib where we had spent the night.
Once refreshed by a couple of coyote sandwiches and some diluted marijuana the natives used for coffee, Newton gave out with the big news. They had found the outcropping all right.
"Only it's on a reactivated military reservation," he said, "and we'll get our butts shot off if we go in there again. So I guess we'll have to shelve the project till the cold war is over."
The others agreed.
"Well, it vindicated my hunch that we could find other things besides oil by instrumentation," he added. "Let's get some sleep. We've got to get back to business."
The sack of ore he lured from a government military reservation weighed fifty pounds. It assayed $1,250.
It was a year almost to the day, after this adventure in the broadcasting of microwaves from a gold outcropping to Newton's instruments, that Newton introduced me to his newest secret. I had introduced him to a girl, Sharon Chillison (he has since married her), and he invited her, Mrs. Scully, and me to dinner at the Sportsmen's Lodge in the San Fernando Valley. He had just come from Arizona, where he had been referred for some improvements in his geological research equipment. At the time of the dinner he had made thousands of surveys in the Mojave Desert and had just about decided to drill some test wells. All the big oil companies were convinced there was nothing in the area, but by instrumentation he was sure there was.
"Petroleum in place," he contends, "radiates magnetic energy and this is measurable."
The trouble was, how much? How deep did the wells go? Petroleum deposits hidden deep in the earth were constantly broadcasting through magnetic microwaves, he believed, what had been trapped in the various fault zones. The only handicap his instruments showed was that they could come within inches of telling him where oil could be found but could not tell him how much volume to expect. Thus he might come out with so little oil that for all practical purposes, he had drilled a dry hole.
In 1945 Newton told Walter Russell that the broadcasting of microwaves by his instrumentation never exceeded 32 miles. He didn't understand why. Russell explained why.
"Under one of my laws covering circular motion," he said, "the radius is limited to 32 miles because that is the limit of the earth's crust. Beyond that depth is a solid substance. Without knowing it you have discovered the thickness of the skin of the earth."
Newton was delighted to hear this and the delight was not lessened when 17 months later the telephone company announced that they were setting up a line between New York and Boston with relay stations every 30 miles because that seemed to be as far as microwaves would reflect. They did the same thing when setting up television relay stations between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1950.
Meanwhile Newton was applying the knowledge of microwaves to "petroleum in place." Since trapped oil was what he was looking for, that's all he was concerned about. That of course and an estimate of how much would be there before he started digging.
In the summer of 1949 he met Dr. Gee, a magnetic engineer who had been released in July after seven years of government servitude on all sorts of top-drawer projects. He had become
a master of magnetic energy but $7,200 a year was all he could make for all his mastery. So he begged off government projects to get back to a more profitable_ business. He and Newton exchanged views and he told Newton that he thought Newton was operating, not merely on microwaves but on magnetic waves. He thought a magnetron, such as was developed during the war, might be able to detect the volume of oil. This, he explained, was possible because magnetic waves will not go through oil. They move over and under the petroleum. Thus it would be easy to subtract the difference and tell you how much volume there was in a given oil trap.
This was the answer Newton was looking for and he signed Dr. Gee and his equipment to check on the Mojave Desert field before starting any wildcat operations.
While driving with Dr. Gee from Denver to Phoenix one day early in the summer of 1949 Newton tuned in on a news commentator who happened to be reporting a flying saucer story.
"Do you think there's anything to these things, Doctor?" Newton asked the magnetic research scientist.
The doctor nodded his head. "Too bad we weren't associated before," he said. "I could have worked you into the project of the first one we were called in to examine."
He pointed south of where they were driving.
"It landed down near Aztec, New Mexico. I got a call and flew down from Denver in three hours."
It was his group that had worked out the means by which Japanese submarines were detected by magnetic devices. So successful were the instruments, that we were able to knock out as many as 17 Jap submarines in one day. They had conducted 35,000 experiments for the government on land, sea, and air. They had moved magnetic research ahead hundreds of years and had spent a billion dollars doing it.
Newton was explaining all this to us at dinner and then, as if he could keep a secret no longer from old friends, he started to tell the details of two saucers the research magnetic scientist had personally seen, examined, checked on, and researched.
His story was so fantastic, that if he weren't a solid man of industrial service, you might have suspected that he had gone crazy in a quiet, plausible way.
He said that Dr. Gee of their group was coming to the coast very shortly to check on some government defense work which for the present was top secret. He was then going to check on Newton's own geophysical findings in the Mojave Desert and maybe he would tell us what he had told Newton.
Dr. Gee might show us some of the things that had been taken off one flying saucer-some small disks of a metal unknown to this earth, a tiny radio which operated under principles quite unknown to our engineers, a strange cloth, some gears and other small things which he could carry with him, and which he had taken off one of the ships for research, after he found members of the Air Force picking off pieces just for souvenirs.
Frankly, I never expected to hear any more of this but a few weeks later, I received a call from Newton asking me if I'd like to drive up to the town of Mojave, which is about ninety miles from Los Angeles, to see how his exploratory operation was getting along. The geophysicist who was the top man in magnetic research would be with us. This was on September 8, 1949. He said that Peverly Marley, cameraman at Warner's and the husband of Linda Darnell, would be coming along too.
We failed to make connections with Marley and went on without him, but at the cutoff at Newhall we heard a honking behind us and there was Marley who had pursued us and caught up with us. He parked his car at a gas station and we all repaired to Mojave in Newton's Cadillac.
Marley and the magnetic research scientist sat in the back; Newton and I in the front.
As on most long trips, people talk about all sorts of things. So we got started on flying saucers. There was no secrecy, official or otherwise, at the time and the scientist answered any and all queries. His explanations were as phlegmatic as those of a combustion engineer explaining how gas explodes in the cylinder of
an automobile. On the oil field proper, the magnetic scientist got out his magnatron and Newton got out his own instruments. Though their instruments looked in nowise alike, these men kept checking each other and invariably coming out within a foot of each other's estimates. Newton would ask the magnetic scientist what depth he thought oil was at a particular point at which they agreed there was oil and within seconds the scientist would say something like 2,750. Newton would check in his book and say, "I got 2,749 when I checked here last May."
There would be a calm exchange of how this discrepancy of one foot could have arisen, but the difference was so small that it constantly amazed a layman like me that they could split hairs about digging one foot more or less into what must have been millions of dollars either way.
Instead of staying overnight on the desert, we decided to drive back to town, a matter of only two hours and the eminent geophysicist stopped off at our house for a short visit to meet Mrs. Scully and our family.
Showing no feeling whatever that he was airing confidences which might be violated, he answered all sorts of questions concerning the possible origin of the flying saucers and how they might have got to this earth from another planet, and, more important to his mind, how they could have got back to where they came from. The smallest detail, which a woman might bring up, about the interior of the cabin of the flying saucer, matters of water, food, clothing, were quietly explained just as one might describe the furniture of his own home.
His knowledge of magnetic energy was as far ahead of us as, say, the knowledge of atomic-energy scientists must have been to the average person in relation to nuclear fission ten years ago. Indeed, he said some things at that time which since have been heralded far and wide by Albert Einstein in relation to his modified theory of the universe, wherein he discounted Newton's law of gravity in favor of one involving electro-magnetic forces. This didn't mean much to me at the time but it means a lot more to me now.
He said he regretted the ship was dismantled this way but the Army seems to breed souvenir hunting as it does rank. When he saw what was happening he grabbed a few things himself, not to put in his trophy cabinet but to use for research.
The Air Force took some film, he explained. But it fades in two hours, for reasons of security. A special chemical, got only on license, restores the image for another two hours. Naturally this film was not available to him. He said he shot some film of his own, but it wasn't very good. He'd bring that along, though.
In time we saw all those things-all except the jacket. We examined the radio, the gears, the film.
Then began the reign of error. Air Force closed Project Saucer and went underground. All were told to forget what they knew. "Hallucinations" became a routine answer. "Psycho" became a veiled threat. Everybody shut up but the people. The official dams were closed but the public spilled its observations into the lake of a free press.
But the conflict between free inquiry and official censorship grew. Men who talked freely in the summer of 1949 wouldn't tell their story for $20,000,000 by the summer of 1950. But I remembered. Better than elephants, I remembered. In fact, elephants come to me when they forget.
It means more because the geophysicist said he had checked over two of the saucers and believed they were driven, not by fuel, jet, turbojet, or even athodyds, but by magnetic power and that due to certain metals not found on this earth but found on the saucers, he suspected the space ships were from another planet. In fact he ridiculed the idea of anything getting even as far as the moon on jet propulsion or anything like it. As at this time he was doing research for men whose living came out of oil, and was in fact a partner in their properties, he could hardly be suspected of feathering his own nest by discounting gas or petroleum as a means of propulsion from one planet to another.
Another thing I remembered from that first meeting was his interest in my infirmity. I have only one leg and have not had much luck with artificial legs, chiefly because they are too heavy and my stump too short.
He suggested a suction socket, eliminating all shoulder and waist harness. He said he could make one of a material as strong as steel and as light as plastic. I told him it would still have to be manipulated. He suggested he could install a small motor that could be operated by push button.
"The whole thing shouldn't weigh three pounds," he added. "Fine," I said, "but suppose I stopped to shake hands and chat with a friend, and the leg should keep on walking. Wouldn't I look silly?"
"I'd control that with a push button too," he said.
It gave me a clew to the practicality and sweep of his mind. Before he left he promised us he would show us small parts of one of the saucers on his next trip from Phoenix. A radio had him particularly baffled. It had no tubes, no aerials, no wires. He guessed the cabin must have been its antenna. He was trying to rig up a substitute antenna. He could hear a high singsong note 15 minutes past the hour. But the dial was so micrometrically keyed it was difficult to stay on the wave. He was thinking of setting up something like a block-and-fall which permits a clumsy hand to lift a heavy object. Anyway he'd take it along. Wasn't much bigger than a king-sized cigarette package.