IN ASTRONOMY, it may be a long voyage from the lunar to the lunatic, but they frequently cross each other's orbits when the subject of flying saucers comes up. In fact, one of the hardest things serious men in the field have to deal with is the partisans they attract to themselves.
It should of course be no reflection on a magnet that some of the steel filings it picks up spent their youth in a Nazi hand grenade, or were rust on the bars of a madhouse. But juries do have a weakness for such irrelevancies, however much a judge may warn them to ignore such things.
Some of the supporters of flying saucers have rocked even me, a man with the balance of Gibraltar. It might be a mark of discretion to hide them in a closet, but unbelievers would find them and seek to blow up the whole case with such concealed evidence.
One pro-Saucerian, a most fantastic witness, even submitted photographs of God with his brief. His case was that flying saucers were connected with the throne of God "a spiritual nebulous, standing 49 trillion miles in height." His photograph was taken through a one-hundred-inch telescope on an exposure of 4 hours 47 minutes.
Like Immanuel Velikovsky he was able to drag in Ezekiel, Ephah, Zechariah, and other Old Testament prophets, to back up his contentions. The angels referred to by the prophets were really flying saucers and could travel far faster than light--372,400 miles per second, according to this photographer's cosmographlex. He had been spotting flying saucers since 1922seven in all by 1950-and had exchanged information with everybody from the late Robert Ripley to Dr. Walter S. Adams of Mt. Wilson Observatory. Seemingly, they all agreed he had photographed God, and even the Century of Progress at Chicago in 1934 had found a place for his camera's revelations.
The flying saucers, he stoutly maintained, were not people from other planets snooping around this earth. They were chariots of fire that angels employed for space travel when sent by the Almighty on certain missions. The first report on them could be found in Zechariah, chapter 5, verses 1 and 2. That was in 519 B.C. Their size was given: "20 cubits in length and 10 cubits in breadth."
Lest this confuse those who think of a saucer as round or oval and having diameter rather than length and breadth, the celestial photographer added, "You don't have to be an Einstine (sic) to figure that out."
I suppose he was referring to the scientist who usually spelled his name Einstein.
By referring to Ezekial, chapter 1, verses 8 to 26, this Wyoming research scholar was able to describe flying saucers in detail. They were a wheel in the middle of wheels. Their wings were so high they were dreadful. He interpreted this to mean that they must have been more powerful than radar. They reached from the earth to the Throne of the Almighty. When the living creatures were lifted up the wheels (saucers) were lifted up, "for the spirit of life was in the wheels."
The Wyoming scholar explained that meant that "the spirit of God was in the flying saucers" and he warned all, particularly Air Force pilots, "don't never try to shoot down a flying saucer," or you will be "instantly crisped up" as were those who pursued flying saucers in army planes over Fort Knox.
It would be easy not to take such a scholar and his cosmographic findings too seriously, but how about believers in St. Joseph Cupertino who had the gift of levitation? He reportedly had it so marked that he was ordered to desist by his superiors. Once he saw a man falling from a roof and by employing his heavenly powers stopped the man in mid-air. Then remembering his vow of obedience he sought the permission of a superior before allowing the laws of gravity to complete their earthly mission. Even so, he intervened enough to let the man down gently.
Then there are the Lost Planet boys. Ever since Ceres was discovered, and that goes back to 1801, there have been hunters of the heavens trying to piece a planet together, which they are certain blew up between us and the Sun. More than 1,200 such asteroids have been listed; 50,000 believed to exist. Hermes, the smallest, measures, one mile in diameter; Vesta, 240 miles.
On the assumption that the asteroids are exploded bits of a planet not unlike the Earth, they would be neither balls of fire nor balls of ice. They would, in fact, be just the right temperature to be used as stepping stones by space ships. In fact, the smaller ones might be hauled into our orbit and given the job of space stations along the asteroid way.
The example of the Arizona asteroid, which if it had landed in midtown Manhattan instead of Arizona could have wrecked the whole city, does not seem to sober the Lost Planet boys. It was composed like any meteorite of magnetically attractive metals. But in hitting this earth at seven miles per second it got burned so badly by the resistance of our atmosphere that it was set on fire. This is what happens when a meteor gets out of line. Imagine what would happen if some space-ship wrecking crews tried to move one around in the heavens!
Not quite so far out in space nor so far back in time as the Wyoming biblical scholar nor St. Joseph Cupertino, nor the Lost Planet boys, were the Borderland Sciences Research Associates. Between 1945 and 1950 they appeared with bulletins almost as often as a flying saucer was reported, and that, for a while, was almost daily.
Set up in San Diego and Los Angeles and dually directed by N. Meade Layne and Max Freedom Long, BSRA were interested in happenings which orthodox or official science could not or would not investigate-"such as the officially `damned' facts which Charles Fort and his associates studied at great length."
Among these were "the problems of underground races" and "the origin and nature of the ether ships and other unknown aircraft now visiting our planet."
Before treating their researches to a fraction of the length their own round-robin bulletins, pamphlets, and mimeographed books have done, perhaps it would be a brisk and possibly revolting therapy to give an example of what they mean by a borderland science.
This underground race problem they refer to was advanced by Paxson C. Hayes, "a discoverer," according to Who's Who, "of mummified remains of an ancient Mongoloid civilization and lost city in Sonora, Mexico." He one time managed the political destinies of Brigadier General Herbert C. Holdridge, U.S.A. retired, and myself when we ran for governor and lieutenant governor of California, and that one never got off the ground either.
A man of assured convictions Hayes believed the mummies he unearthed lived in huge caves 9,000 feet deep as long ago as 23,000 B.C. Unlike Saucerians of today they were reported to be big men, at least seven feet tall. Hayes found their remains far below the levels of civilizations which have come and gone since.
How many civilizations are buried between the presently accepted six feet of sod and the center of the earth 4,000 miles below, Hayes didn't know, but he claimed at least five have been lost.
He believed this earth was a ball of fire thrown off by the sun (the first hydrogen bomb), millions of years ago, took its place in the orbit of the planets and tried to keep up a long-range battle of bombarding the sun with its own radioactive rays and getting pelted back until a leaded vapor was formed between them. This currently circles Hayes's concept of the earth, as the rings encircle Saturn, to a height of 800 miles.
The earth began to cool off. Not all at once of course. In fact it blew hot and cold for a long time. The center of the earth remained a ball of fire. The contractions and expansions indicated something had to give and so, according to Hayes, the ends blew out. Nice warm caves were the result. People moved there.
It is a Hayesean guess that the atomic explosions have stirred these underground people into a curiosity and they have flown out of their caves at the terminal ends of the earth (polar vents), and are cruising around on magnetically-directed saucers trying to determine what manner of neighbors have taken to living upstairs.
This would explain, according to Hayes, the Chilean Navy's Saucerian reports in the spring of 1950.
He didn't share the view of other borderland scientists that the space ships had come from outside our atmosphere. Asteroids would knock them around like ping-pong balls. He believed they came from down under. Away down under.
Thus softened by a subterranean attack on his credulity, the reader may prove an easier victim for other borderland scientists, many of whom, though otherwise quite sane, take even more fantastic liberties with academic and industrial scientists than does Paxson Hayes.
To the ribaldry attending testimony that the crews of flying saucers were dwarfs or little people, a doubt which even Associate Hayes shares, the Borderland Sciences Research Associates advanced a solution. In fact, they advanced two. One was that the Etherians suffer shrinkage when they and their craft penetrate into this atmosphere too rapidly. The other was they chose to materialize in small forms "simply for convenience of operation and flight."
And why are they here in the first place? Because it may be their intention to prevent destruction of the omniverse by makers of hydrogen bombs, an eventuality that could prove as deteriorating to them as to us. "Unfortunately," added one BSRA, "not everyone will find the explanation easily understandable."
What explanation? Well, Mead Layne's for one. His mimeographed booklet published by BSRA in 1950 was entitled: Flying Discs: The Ether Ship Mystery and Its Solution.
Though Meade Layne was its author, other borderland associates, notably Millen Cooke, John A. Hilliard, and Edward S. Schultz, contributed. Together they hadn't the slightest doubt about the presence of flying saucers in our atmosphere, nor the likelihood that some have landed, crewed by little men.
They called them ether ships, and claim they were manned by Etherians. Since BSRA opened its doors to metaphysicians, theosophists, mediums, trances, and students of the occult, it is a little difficult to reduce their far-flung beliefs to the confines of a book as small as this. They have been exchanging information among themselves and their associates for years and have quite a library of papers dealing with everything from the Problem of Disk Propulsion by Hilliard to the Mystery of Ether Ships, as edited by Layne.
"The basic statements," one bulletin reported, "concerning etheric origin of ether craft come to us from the `other side.' They were first made in the fall of 1946 by the trance controls of the medium, Mark Probert, during a sitting held in the city of San Diego."
They do not agree with the Air Force which announced officially after Christmas, 1949 that no genuine and factual basis for the belief in flying saucers exists. They insist they do exist and feel it necessary to inform at least their public to mitigate the danger of panic if and when the facts become officially recognized.
They do not believe the saucers come from a foreign and unfriendly government or even another planet. Neither Russia, Venus, nor Mars figure in their explanations of the source of these space ships. They not only do not believe they are not constructed by a foreign power, but they also do not believe they are put together by our own authorities.
They believe they come from a place they call Etheria, which to them is one of the seven planes between this earth and the next planet. They touch a possibility that the ether ships travel along magnetic meridians, north and south. They have explanations too as to why these planes seem to appear and disappear, and give off various colors which are confused with vapor trails.
A widely circulated story that these saucers originated from a mother ship at least ten miles long and more than five hundred miles above our earth, a giant airship thought to be revolving around the earth at enormous speed, but slowing down even so, seemed to derive from Oahspe, according to borderland scientists. This is a book which described Etherians as ancestors of both the Chinese and Aryan races-originators of the Sanskrit language, but long removed as taxpayers on this earth.
According to the borderland scientists, four-fifths of our world lies outside our normal range of vision.
Flying saucers are observed when they slow down-much as the blades of a plane's propeller are countable when the speed of their revolutions approaches zero. They give credence to the belief that several of these ether ships have fallen and the contents examined in utmost secrecy.
"There is no motor," one borderland report said, "no propeller nor any mechanism inside the falling disks, so far as we have been able to learn. The outer skin of the falling disks is harder than steel and is an unidentified substance."
They hold to the belief that from nothing, no thing was ever born. They illustrate if you hold a magnet over a nail, a miracle occurs. The nail jumps as if prodded by demons. It was first believed nothing existed between the magnet and the nail so scientists postulated the presence of ether.
This assumption becomes an eight-lane boulevard of travel among borderland scientists, whose "postulates" seemingly have the value among their associates of infallibility.
The borderland scientists informed newcomers in the field, who may feel at a loss to count all the states in the union, and who therefore look bewildered at the word "Etheria," that the place has been known to occultists, adepts, and initiates "for thousands of years." They quote Cory's translation of Ancient Fragments and Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled.
In The Ethership Mystery and Its Solution Layne says: "In spite of a policy and an unofficial censorship, it is widely believed by this time that a number of ether ships of the disk type have landed in the United States, through accident of some kind. We have no reports that any of the `dwarf' occupants survived the landing, and we are told that the propulsion and control of these craft is very much of a puzzle to scientists who have inspected them. They are said to be without motors, propellers, or anything recognizable as a drive mechanism. This suggests, of course, some kind of magnetic propulsion. And the performance of these crafts, their extraordinary speed, power and maneuverability far outclasses anything our own engineers have been able to achieve."
Obviously some of these men have either contacted magnetic engineers who researched flying saucers reported in the Denver lecture, or had access to sources of material of scientists who had researched some of the ships.
John A. Hilliard, of the borderland associates, gives an entertaining theory as to the propulsion of these ships. He takes the analogy of a piece of steel heated to a thousand degrees above normal, and points out it will stretch .00743 of an inch. If this could be done three million times a second and the steel directed to move along in one direction like an inchworm, the bar would move along at 1,254.59 miles per hour.
From here he goes into even greater speculation-and then tosses the baton to Edward Schultz, a fellow believer in the theory that this is a septenary universe and that everything goes by sevens. (We now have 52's, 9's and 7's as secrets of the universe.)
Leaning on the "abundant and irrefutable observations of thousands of persons who claimed they have seen flying disks," Schultz concedes that the originators of these space ships are centuries ahead of us in their science, that they make the transition from one plane to another independent of air for support, and that they can travel at terrific speed. He adds that there is reason to suppose that they travel to other planets and if sufficiently provoked on this one they can retaliate in a manner to set the world "into a frenzy of misinterpretation and fear." He postulates further than the force of gravity at their place of origin may be twice what ours is, thereby giving the pilot a greater freedom of movement here.
The theory that these ships may travel on alternate currents of intense heat which would expand and contract their skins, was a postulation derived from a Science News Letter o f 1949 in which Dr. J. D. Cobine, General Electric engineer, reported that he had generated enough heat to melt tungsten. (Tungsten at that time had the highest melting point known-3,370 degrees centigrade.) The heart of the electronic torch was a tube known as a magnetron, which produced radio waves of one billion cycles per second. The jet flame was nine inches long, and though the heat it generated was strong enough to melt down tungsten, the jet itself, it is claimed, wasn't particularly hot.
It is a short step from here to applying the discovery to the propulsion of space ships. Assuming their outer skins could move like an earthworm's and that the intense outside heat would not burn up the passengers inside the ship, the concept is not too fantastic for even intermediaries in the field of science.
Unfortunately, these borderlanders rarely take the middle way. They go from science to fantasy. They suspect that in an earlier civilization the survivors of a previous collapse immigrated to another chemical island in space. Etherians, it appears, populate planes around several planets and the ones observed in
flying disks here, the borderland researchers believe, might be coming from an area surrounding Venus, Mars, and even Saturn. They believe that the Etherian observers are hundreds of years ahead of us in their knowledge of sound and speed. No doubt they have caught disturbances on this earth; such as our explosions from our atomic proving grounds in New Mexico and our atom bombs in Japan and at Bikini. They are curious to know what is causing these disturbances. If disturbed themselves by attacks of persistent pursuit, these Etherians, we are assured, have the power to disintegrate every earth-made production from a hydrogen bomb to the jet plane that might have dropped it.
Because of the diffusion of their pseudo-scientific interests in an age of specialization, the borderland scientists, up to now, have had a difficult time getting themselves taken seriously. They, in turn, have found it hard to absorb some of the dogmatic writings of those on the outer edges of their scope of inquiry.
Grant them that it is possible to change H2O from a solid to a liquid, to a gas (that is, from ice to water to steam), and they will move forward with Saucerian dispatch and insist that it is equally possible for little men in the ether beyond our atmosphere to materialize space ships from thoughts of space ships; easier, in fact, than it is for a carpenter to materialize a table from a thought of a table by building what is in his mind from material that is within reach of his body.
Such a space ship would be visible, they contend, once it came within the three remaining planes which are within our perception-at least within the preception of those who are occultists, mediums, adepts, clairvoyants, vortexans, serious students of Oahspe, or specialists in astral-etheric-mental deep trances.
As the borderland scientists warn writers and publishers that they have a high duty not to treat these phenomena with ridicule, because even at the eleventh hour things can and do happen for the first time, it would be flying in the face of storm warnings perhaps for me to do so.
The Hindus illustrated the fallacy of a barrel supposedly full of apples, by putting a bushel of rice between the apples and a sack of flour between the grains of rice. The idea was to show that there is no such thing as nothing and no such thing as full. The borderland boys use this to fill in the empty space between here and their Etheria and once you admit that by concentrating on it you can see particles in the air, they will proceed to fill it with everything from rice to little men in space ships carrying apples, ships which can be seen and then not seen, depending on how fast the power is being put on and off, which is the key to their propulsion-materialization and dematerialization.
In advancing this theory of materialization and dematerialization the borderland scientists believe they have a secret (which they call MAT and DEMAT) of the propulsion behind space ships.
You might get a better idea of what they mean by this MAT and DEMAT by observing the workings of an electric newspaper or flash-cast in Times Square, New York. These intelligences materialize through a series of small dots and dashes. Lights go on and off according to a design. The total effect is a flow in a certain direction. A space ship might conceivably scoot through the atmosphere on such an on-and-off current.
Anatomically if a caterpillar could be speeded up to thousands of miles a second, he too would serve as a good example of what these men believe is the type of propulsion behind ether craft.
They have another bait line to believability and that is the spectrum of color. They believe there are colors far beyond what has been so far accepted by the physicists, and since the color spectrum was widened a good deal by the Bunsen and Kirchoff discoveries, they do not believe it is the mark of a true research scholar to close off both ends of the spectrum and say, "This far and no further." They insist there are colors we can not see, sounds we cannot hear, and solid bodies which we can not discover by touch.
Oddly, seeing things which may not be there is not con sidered by psychiatrists but hearing things puts you within recognizable distance of the 20,000,000 crackpots currently adjudged insane in America.
Since every physicist knows now that colors have their wave lengths-from red with 0.0007594 cms. to violet with 0.0003968 cms.-how can we dismiss without a hearing the testimony of others exploring beyond present-day frontiers who claim they have additional wave lengths and can even see flying saucers before the rest of us can? They will point out to you that there are animals that cannot see the colors that we see. On the other hand, there are animals that hear sounds inaudible to us. Beyond the supersonic is the ultrasonic, and beyond ultrasonic, they ask, who knows?
"Seriously," they sum up, "what we face in the ether ship situation is far from amusing. On the face of it we have what seems an equal chance of utter disaster, or of making in a few years the leap from our present bedeviled condition into a comparatively golden age of knowledge, reason, and morality."
They point out that men of scientific reputation have remained cautiously silent about ether ships and in some instances have joined or led the popular course of derision. But these scientists are obviously not among the borderland scientists.
