LOWEST in the list of air-minded persons, and therefore likely to be unworthy of the compassion of even the Air Force checkers, were those Machiavellians who have joined the secret manufacturers of hoaxes. Suspects on the lunatic fringe might presumably be cured of their personal hallucinations or participation in a mass hysteria, but the fabricators of hoaxes belonged understandably on the cold side of the moon, the side we never see.
Such a sentence would be mild enough, but did the cloistered characters who knew life almost exclusively in terms of the five walls of the Pentagon know a hoax from a hot potato? They picked up at least one such hot potato and described it as a hoax and haven't heard the end of it yet.
A bomb that refuses to explode is called a dud. In other words, a hoax. Does that make the Air Force believe less in bombs? Many hoaxes have been perpetrated in the name of flying saucers, but like the duds among bombs, that shouldn't lull people into believing there are no such things as bombs or flying saucers.
Anything as lively as a flying saucer is bound to excite lively imaginations, and among such imaginations one has emerged now and then with a story that seemed almost foolproof. But founded on fiction, reared on faith, it invariably died, if it were a hoax, of overexposure.
It is generally believed that to be any party to a hoax spells ruin, once the hoax is exposed. Nothing is further from the facts. The exposure of the Locke hoax did not ruin The New York Sun, any more than Lincoln Colcord's exposure of Joan Lowell's Cradle of the Deep ruined Simon and Schuster or Orson Welles's realistic broadcast of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds destroyed either C.B.S., Trenton, N. J., or Orson Welles.
Nevertheless, no one wants to be either a collaborator or a dupe in such a literary lollypop if he can avoid it.
In general a fair backlog of believable data has to be accumulated before a hoax can be tried with hope of any degree of success. You just can't pull off a practical joke about something no one ever heard of before. That's why Richard Adams Locke's hoaxes in the Sun back in 1835 were so successful. They not only were well written but they dealt with men on the moon and were supported by the best astronomical data of the era. They claimed, moreover, to be reprints of articles from the Edinburgh Journal. They supposedly reported the findings of Sir John Herschel, a British astronomer busy at the time making observations at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa.
There actually was such an astronomer. He was the son of Sir William Herschel, the man who in 1787 discovered Titania and Oberon-the last two satellites to be identified with the Planet Uranus.
The telescope that presumably revealed habitation on the moon was described by Locke as a 288-inch job. As the much advertised mirror at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego is only 200 inches, you can get some idea of how far ahead Locke's imagination was of present-day facts.
In subsequent installments to his first article, which appeared on August 25, 1835, grass, trees, animals, and eventually bat-men, and of course their female counterparts, began to circulate on the pages of the Sun as well as the surface of the moon. The paper climbed to a circulation in excess of 19,000, giving it preeminence over all Anglo-Saxon newspapers of the day. The articles were subsequently printed in pamphlet form.
Two Yale professors played the main roles in the eventual expose, but the Sun didn't suffer in the least by their proofs of fraud. It grew in stature and died in 1950 at the ripe old age of 117, tending to support the theory that a reputation however acquired ("If you read it in the Sun it's so") tends to become hallowed if held on to long enough. Like all old Sun men, I have a copy of the first issue published in 1833, but I have never seen any issues of the days of its greatest notoriety.
At the close of the Civil War there was another outburst of strange tales from skies. Most of them, like Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, and Achille Eyraud's Voyage To Venus, were frankly science-fiction pieces, but in Rockets Willy Ley recorded one that came nearer to the Locke format. It was called Beyond the Zodiac by Percy Greg. It was printed in German in four volumes, presumably as a translation.
Ley, a zealous research scholar, claimed he never was able to find the "original" and naturally fell back on the suspicion that the German translation was actually the original, following the lines of Locke's "reprints" from the Edinburgh Journal.
Of course much of the early astronomical literature shows a recklessness with facts that leaves the scientist walking a tight rope and frequently falling into what amounts to a hoax of his own making. Franz von Paula Gruithuisen, for example, started out by discovering a walled city on the moon. Then he moved into discovering a moon for Venus. After that he was sure he detected life on Venus. He traced a particularly bright period of the planet's life to a festival in honor of a newly-crowned Emperor of Venus.
It turned out the walled city was at best some dead mountains; the moon of Venus, a distant star; and the Emperor of Venus, hardly more than a musical-comedy character.
That contemporary arts, sciences, and professions are free from hoaxes, I would be the last to contend. While deep in this opus in the spring of 1950 I received a telephone call from Jack Paar of radio fame. It was on the night of March 29. He told me that KTTV, a West Coast television outlet of the Columbia Broadcasting System, had just cut in on a program to announce that big news would be released at 9 P.M., Pacific Coast Time. That would be an hour later.
Unable to bear the strain, he called the television station and said it was an outrage to do that with news. But the station manager said he could do nothing about it, not till 9 P.M. anyway.
At the appointed hour Roy Maypole, public service director of the station, flashed photographs of a saucer-shaped aircraft which was claimed could start and stop like a polo pony. Fired by turbojets, it could hover at zero or scoot to 550 miles per hour.
It was suggested that possibly these ships were the saucers people thought they saw flying around and if so the pilots in the disks were Navy men-a branch of the service which doesn't cater to men 23 to 40 inches tall, even when it employs disk jockeys for public work.
Jack Paar reported to me as soon as the telecast was over and I was able to calm him by telling him that the flying saucer in question sounded like a Chance Vought job originally designed by Charles Zimmerman in 1933 and tried out in 1942 under the description of V 173. When the Navy first announced it had the ship its spokesman said it was the only plane that offered both extremely high speed and extremely low speed in one machine.
At the time only one had been made and thereafter not much was heard of it. It is now listed in Jane's as XF5U.
The next day the Los Angeles Times, which has an interest in KTTV, made no mention of the sensational news of the night before, but an afternoon paper, the Los Angeles Mirror, which
is owned by the same company, turned over its whole front page to a ballooned-up photograph of the ship and asked its readers across five columns:
THIS NAVY PANCAKE IS REAL
COULD IT BE A FLYING SAUCER?
It referred its readers to page 3 where a story began and ran over to page 12. All the previous suspicions were borne out by the story. It was just one of those things. It was our old friend, XF5U, alias V 173.
Now, this comes perilously close to a contrived hoax. It is designed to sell papers and nothing else. As of that day, March 30, 1950, it sold 195,000 copies, according to Virgil Pinkley, the Mirror's editor and publisher.
Somebody deserved a bonus, possibly the poor readers. If further speculation is not closed, the Mirror's editors might try a much more plausible follow-up. The Nazis had a squat little job, which by stretching the word a little here and there, could be described as a "saucer." It was jet-powered, and was believed to be capable of a speed of 1500 miles per hour. What became of it?
By April 3, XF5U, alias V 173, was revolving out of Washington, D. C. under imprime' of both the A.P. and U.P., which in turn leaned on an article in the U.S. News and World Report for support.
The news dispatches stated that these flying saucers were real aircraft of revolutionary design. They were developed in the United States by the Navy and were a combination of helicopter and fast jet plane. The models were built by engineers of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.
Everybody printed this story, including The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. David Lawrence in his syndicated column quoted freely from the original too-without making reference to the fact that he was publisher of the U.S. News and World Report.
But the Navy and the Air Force reduced the "pancakes" or "saucers" to a lot of baloney. They denied that they had any such secret missile in operation, and said it must have referred to an old thing they bought years before, tried out, found it anything but a success, and stored it in Maryland as a curiosity for a subsequent museum of aviation.
This was almost charging David Lawrence with manufacturing a hoax. Almost but not quite. In one of its official releases the Air Force listed several hoaxes about which it had no doubt.
It claimed the month of July, 1947 as a banner month for the practical jokers. A Seattle woman reported to the police that a flaming disk had landed on her roof. Quickly extinguished, the object was turned over to federal agents, who in turn had it checked by Navy electronic experts. They discovered it to be a twenty-eight-inch circular piece of plywood held in position by wire. The letters USSR and EYR were painted on the disk in white. There was of course a hammer and sickle on the disk as well. Two radio tubes and a cylindrical-shaped oil can, mounted on pieces of bakelite, were inside the object. There was also a cloth saturated with an inflammable fluid. The final consensus among Air Materiel Command Intelligence officers was that the disk could not fly and was the work of practical jokers.
The next one came from Shreveport, Louisiana. A saucer, whirling through the air, shooting smoke and fire, landed in a downtown street. This one was seemingly solved without recourse to either the FBI or Air Force Intelligence. The Shreveport police said it was the work of a prankster, who had launched the homemade disk from the top of an office building. The saucer had a fluorescent light starter and two electric fan condensers. It couldn't fly either.
Black River Falls, Wisconsin, was next in line among the hoaxes of 1947. Fashioned from plywood, this flying saucer was seen in flight. An electrician found it lying in the deep grass on the town's fair grounds. He proceeded to make it a side show at fifty cents a peek.
The police stepped in and put the gadget in a bank vault. It was subsequently analyzed at Mitchel Field. The report read "This contrivance is patently a hoax. It will be held for a reasonable time and then disposed of in the nearest ash receptacle."
Next in line in the July platter parade, was a disk from Danford, Illinois. This one had burned the weeds in the area in landing. It was revealed to be composed of plaster of Paris, bakelite-coiled form wrapped in enameled copper wire, an old-fashioned magnetic speaker diaphragm, parts of an electronic condenser and of a metallic magnetic ring.
But the big joker of July, 1947, according to the Air Force report of April 27, 1949, was one which involved Fred Crisman and Harold A. Dahl, previously respected citizens of Tacoma, Washington. According to the Air Force they rated number one among the nation's practical jokers and publicity seekers, at least as far as Project Saucer was concerned.
A few days after Kenneth Arnold had reported about the nine saucers he saw flying above Mt. Rainier, Dahl reported sighting six disks while he was patrolling off Maury Island, Washington. He said one of the disks fluttered to earth and disintegrated, showering his boat with fragments. The fragments killed his pet dog and caused other damage.
According to the government document, Dahl and Crisman then attempted to sell the story to a Chicago adventure magazine which in turn asked Kenneth Arnold to check it for errors. Arnold went to Tacoma with Captain Emil J. Smith, a United Airlines pilot, "who had also received saucer publicity," according to the Air Force digest, "when he reported seeing disks on the Fourth of July while on a routine flight out of Boise."
Arnold, a businessman who flew his own plane, arrived in Tacoma and there asked two officers of Army A2 Intelligence to help screen the claims of Dahl and Crisman.
"Thus," to quote the Air Force report again, "began a story of secret hotel meetings and mysterious anonymous telephone calls which ended in death for two of the participants and exposed the Tacoma disk story as a hoax."
All parties met at the Winthrop Hotel. There Dahl produced some fragments "which he alleged came from the disk which damaged his boat." He repeated the story in detail in the presence of Arnold and Smith and the identified Army Intelligence men.
The next day the A2 officers left to return to Hamilton Field, California, taking some of the fragments with them for technical analysis. But tragedy struck en route. The plane crashed, killing both officers. On board also was the crew chief and a hitchhiker. These parachuted to safety.
On the heels of the tragedy, Tacoma newspapers began receiving telephone calls informing them of the fallen ship which had been carrying flying disk fragments and that the plane had been shot down with a 20 mm cannon by saboteurs. The papers went along with the saboteur idea but the official Air Force opinion was that the crash revealed no indication of foul play.
On the day of the crash Captain Smith went with Crisman and Dahl to check on the damage the boat had suffered from the falling disk. Smith saw some repairs, but was not convinced that they were the result of the claimed incident of a falling disk.
"Later under questioning," the Air Force report concluded, "Crisman and Dahl broke and admitted that the fragments they had produced were really unusual rock formations found on Maury Island and had no connection with flying disks. They admitted telling the Chicago magazine that the fragments were remnants of the flying disks in order to increase the value of their story. During the investigations Dahl's wife consistently urged him to admit that the entire affair was a hoax, and it is carried as such in Project Saucer files."
Now, to check on the checkers. According to Fred L. Crisman, the Air Force report was so garbled and twisted as to bear no resemblance as to what actually happened. He said he had told Roy A. Palmer, editor of Amazing Stories (which seems to be the name of the publication the Air Force report bypassed), that he refused to write the story. He had been made an offer, but he had refused it as he had offers from several other publications.
As to the Air Force report that he and Dahl broke under questioning and admitted that the fragments they had secured were really unusual rock formations from Maury Island, "This," said Dahl, "is a bald-faced lie."
What, he wanted to know, became of the fragments aboard the ship that crashed? What became of the analytical reports that Palmer received and why did a West Coast check differ from that of the University of Chicago if they were the same substance? Why did the Air Force refuse to allow pictures of the crash? Why if he and Dahl were such blackguards as to deliberately cause the death of two Air Force pilots and the loss of a $150,000 plane did not some government agency clink them for damages in the courts?
"I was at the time active in reservist affairs of the Air Force," Crisman reported. "Why did not the Air Force call me to account for my dastardly actions? You know as well as I do that they would not take such shenanigans from a junior officer of the reserve without some form of punishment."
He had other things to say and he was telling the world if anybody perpetuated the Air Force version, he would institute legal action.
Editor Palmer of Amazing Stories confirmed what Crisman said. So did Kenneth Arnold, and the general verdict (the Air Materiel Command dissenting) was that Crisman did not perpetrate a hoax to sell an adventure story.
In fact, there was testimony that after the tragic crash which killed the two Army fliers, Crisman was ordered to take a flight to Alaska in any army plane, and the Air Force would hardly be reposing that trust in a reserve pilot, listed in their records as a perpetrator of a hoax, if they believed their own literature told the whole truth and nothing by the truth.
Instructed verdict for Defendant Crisman. But what happened to Dahl and the flying pieces from a flying disk? Up to April, 1950, nobody knew.