IT IS an accepted practice in jurisprudence to give the plaintiff enough rope in the hope that he will hang himself and thus spare the defendant the task of doing it by way of rebuttal. On occasion when such a procedure may have left some doubt in the minds of jurors it is up to counsel for the defense to spring a surprise witness, and this I propose to do.
In the summer of 1949, while consorting with men engaged in magnetic research on the Mojave Desert, I met a man of science whose contemporaries rated him the top magnetic research specialist of the United States. He had more degrees than a thermometer and had received them from such diverse institutions as Armour Institute, Creighton University, and the University of Berlin. He is the scientist I have called Dr. Gee.
He has been assigned to direct a division of top scientists during the war. Their task was to knock submarines out of the seven seas and directed-missiles out of the skies by other than the slow and disheartening methods then in use. They conducted 35,000 experiments on land, sea, and air on this
defense project. They worked out of two laboratories and had a budget of one billion dollars at their secret command. Their work has never been publicized, as was the two billion spent on creating the first atomic bomb, first, because defense is never as spectacular as offense and, second, because so much of their work was still uncompleted by the war's end that it has remained top secret to this day. Suffice it to say that it was of magnetic origin.
Long after other scientists were discharged and back in their industrial and scholarly laboratories, these men labored on. The director in fact didn't get even a conditional release until July, 1949.
I met him shortly afterward. He was the man who told us the whole story of the first flying saucer that had landed in the United States. Another had landed in the Sahara before this, but that one was more cracked than a psychiatrist in an auto wreck. But the one he had worked on had gently pancaked to earth like a slow motion of Sonia Henie imitating a dying swan.
Two tenescopes caught this unidentified ship as it came into our atmosphere. They watched its position and estimated where it would land. Within a few hours after it landed, Air Force officers reached the flying field at Durango, Colorado, and took off in their search for the object.
When they found it, it was in a very rocky, high plateau territory, east of Aztec, New Mexico. They immediately threw a guard around it. Then Dr. Gee and seven of his group of magnetic scientists were called in to examine this strange ship. When they arrived on the ground they decided that the best thing to do was not to touch it or try to get into it. They studied the ship from a distance for a matter of two days, bombing it with Geiger counters, cosmic rays, and other protective devices.
"Finally, we decided that it was probably safe," the doctor said, "as nothing had transpired inside the ship to indicate that there was life therein. Apparently there was no door to what unquestionably was the cabin. The outside surface showed no
129 marking of any sort, except for a broken porthole, which appeared on first examination to be of glass. On closer examination we found it was a good deal different from any glass in this country. Finally, we took a large pole and rammed a hole through this defect in the ship.
"Having done this, we looked into the interior. There we were able to count sixteen bodies, that ranged in height from about 36 to 42 inches.
"We assumed that there must be a door of some kind, unless these people had been hermetically sealed in a pressurized cabin, so we prodded around with the pole which we had used to push through the opening made through the broken porthole, and on the opposite side from the broken porthole, we hit a knob; or a double knob, to be exact. When we pushed against that double knob, to our amazement and surprise, a door flew open. This enabled us to get into the ship.
"We took the little bodies out, and laid them on the ground. We examined them and their clothing. I remember one of our team saying, `That looks like the style of 1890.' We examined the bodies very closely and very carefully. They were normal from every standpoint and had no appearance of being what we call on this planet `midgets.' They were perfectly normal in their development. The only trouble was that their skin seemed to be charred a very dark chocolate color. About the only thing that we could decide at the time was that the charring had occurred somewhere in space and that their bodies had been burned as a result of air rushing through that broken porthole window, or something going wrong with the means by which the ship was propelled and the cabin pressured.".
They then began an examination of the ship itself. First they decided to take complete measurements of the ship from the outside. The skin was aluminum colored.
"Reports that had appeared from time to time in the papers about these strange visitors," continued Dr. Gee, "had always been to the effect that `they looked like flying saucers.' With this ship on the ground we could not help but be aware of the
fact that it looked like a huge saucer, and you might almost say that there was a cup in it, because the cabin set in an insert in the bottom of the saucer. The over-all dimensions of the ship were found to be a fraction short of 100 feet in diameter. To be exact it measured 99 99/100 feet wide. From the outer tip of the wing, which was entirely circular, to the bottom of the saucer, measuring in an imaginary line vertically, was 27 inches. The cabin which was entirely round, was 18 feet across, and 72 inches in height. Exactly 45 inches of the cabin was exposed above the outer rim of the saucer. The portholes were located in this area."
On getting into the ship, the doctor said, their first objective was to decide, if they could, how the ship was propelled. He was the first to suggest that it probably flew on magnetic lines of force. Some of his staff suggested pushing some of the buttons on what appeared to be the instrument board to find out if his suspicions were true. But all agreed after some discussion that that would be about the worst possible thing they could do, because if the ship started, nobody would know which button to push to stop it again.
"So the result was," said Dr. Gee, "that none of us pushed any buttons on the instrument board."
There were two "bucket seats," as the doctor called them, in front of the instrument board and two of the little fellows were sitting there. They had fallen over, face down, on the instrument board.
Now, it appeared that this ship, if flying on magnetic lines of force, must have had an automatic type of control, so that when it came into danger or when its occupants were not in a position to operate the ship, it simply settled quietly to earth. Obviously it had already flown into our atmospheric area, either on intelligence or instruments.
"None of us could arrive at any conclusion as to when or how this window had broken," Dr. Gee remarked, "or at what possible point in space these occupants must have been killed. The simple fact was that there they were, dead from either
131 burns or the bends, and we proceeded with the further examination of the interior of the ship.
"We found some pamphlets or booklets, which in all probability dealt with navigation problems. However, we were unable to decipher any of the writing, which we judged to be a pictorial type of script. All of these booklets were turned over to certain officials of the Air Force, who in turn reported that they were going to have them placed in the hands of men experienced in translating work of this kind."
I asked the doctor if he had heard if the handwriting experts had much success. He said as far as he knew no headway of any kind had been made in working out a translation of the written subject matter of the booklets. He said there were not any maps, and so far as they could determine the ship carried no instruments of destruction, nor the crew any firearms of any sort.
In studying the matter further, the doctor pointed out that this of course was entirely unnecessary, because if the ship had been operated magnetically, it unquestionably had the means by which it could demagnetize any object, from an asteroid to a F-80 that might cross its path. The demagnetization would destroy or disintegrate the obstacle. This of course would equally be applicable to human beings on this earth, or any form of matter which they came in contact with on this planet.
I said, "Doctor, what do you make of this whole thing? Where do you think these ships are coming from?"
He said, "Of course we don't know, but our best guess at this moment, astronomers to the contrary, is that they have flown here from the planet Venus."
I asked him why they had decided this.
"Well," he said, "in all the latest research regarding the possibility of life on other planets it was fairly well agreed among quite a school of thought in astronomical research, that there was more likelihood of human habitation on the planet Venus than. on the planet Mars."
The size of the men, too, was a factor in his decision. He went so far as to say that if there were any human beings on the planet Mars they would probably be three or four times as large as human beings on this planet, and since the people on the grounded disk ship ranged in height from about 36 to 42 inches, that, in his judgment, ruled out Mars.
Day after day over a period of the next ninety days following this first talk about this first space ship, or as we came to talk of it, this "flying saucer," one of our number, made it his business on all sorts of occasions, most of them when alone with the doctor and in the midst of research in magnetic work, to ask him for more details. The questioner came up with questions at the most inopportune times, because, it must be understood, that he felt that he owed it to himself as well as to us, to run this thing down to where we could finally decide as to whether or not this was all true.
On one occasion he asked, "Doctor, how were these ships constructed?" He said, "The outer skin of the ship was what looked like aluminum, but on all the tests so far made, there was nothing that had been found by the scientists who had checked into it, to indicate that this was any form of aluminum that we know."
He said that on the big ship two or three men could lift one side of it, it was that light. On the other hand, as many as a dozen of them had crawled up on top of the wing and it was so strong they made no impression on it whatever.
He said that the Air Force, in wanting to move the ship, decided to dismantle it because it was too big to move otherwise. This began a most interesting study. There were no rivets. There were no bolts, no screws. There was nothing on the outer skin that would indicate how the ship was put together.
After a long study it was found, however, that the ship was assembled in segments. The segments fitted in grooves and were pinned together around the base.
When the cabin was lifted out of the bottom of the saucer, they found a gear completely encircling the bottom of the ship and this gear fitted into a gear that was on the cabin.
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The whole thing was very ingeniously put together, and there had to be a lot of care taken in breaking it down.
After it had been broken down, it was moved to a government testing laboratory and there it remained while parts were being tested for a considerable period of time.
When Dr. Gee next saw it, the instrument board, to his amazement and chagrin, had been broken up and all of the inner workings torn apart. This, he said, prevented any further study by them as to the magnetic operation of the ship itself.
He regretted this dismantling very much, because he said that had they been able to keep it intact long enough, there might have come a time when they might have worked out a plan whereby they could make certain tests as to the different push buttons on the instrument board. These, he was certain, held the clews to the magnetic form of combustion developed on the ship itself.
One of us asked, "What has been done with the people that were on the ship?" Dr. Gee said that some of them had been dissected, and studied by the medical division of the Air Force and that from the meager reports he had received, they had found that these little fellows were in all respects perfectly normal human beings, except for their teeth. There wasn't a cavity or a filling in any mouth. Their teeth were perfect.
From the characteristics and physiology of their bodies they must have been about 35 to 40 years of age, judged by our standards of age.
As to clothes, he said they all wore the same type of uniform, a dark blue garment, with metal buttons. He said it was significant that there was not any insignia of any kind on the collars or on the sleeves or on the caps of these people. So, to all intents and purposes, all of them had the same rank.
He said it might of course be possible that they had different ranks among themselves but that by our standards of military ranking there was nothing to indicate who they were nor what they were.
Going into the matter of physical possessions on the bodies of these people, Dr. Gee said that so far as he saw himself, they
were very limited, but that there were two or three pieces to which he had had access that might have been timepieces. He said it was very interesting to study these timepieces, because they seemed to do their work, or functioning, without any attention. The timepieces were about the size of a silver dollar in diameter and a little bit thicker. They had four markings, one at the top, and one at what would be 3 o'clock, another at 6 o'clock, and a fourth at 9 o'clock.
It was discovered that the inside part of what he and his staff called a timepiece, actually moved, but that it took a full magnetic month for it to complete its circle.
"Now," said Dr. Gee, "you know of course that a magnetic day is 23 hours and 58 minutes. We found that the time it took for the timepiece to make this complete circumference, was over 29 days. Figured out in hours and minutes, that totaled exactly the number of magnetic days in a magnetic month."
He said that there was what appeared to be food on this ship and that these were little wafers. They fed them to guinea pigs, and they seemed to thrive on them. On one occasion one wafer was put into a gallon container of boiling water and it very quickly boiled over the sides of the container.
This was the only evidence of food on the ship. He added that there were two containers of water on this particular ship, and on checking the water they found it to be normal in all respects to our water, except it was about twice as heavy. The doctor pointed out that there was a water in Norway that was about the weight of this water.
One day Si Newton, who was closest to Dr. Gee and felt he was in a position to act as a sort of buffer state, since he was both a partner in geophysical research and independent of any Pentagonic ties, past or present, was surprised to hear the doctor say, "I want you to see these ships and judge for yourself whether we are on the right track and not guessing at their point of origin. I'm trying to get clearance right now."
Newton asked, "Did you say ships?"
"Oh yes," responded Dr. Gee, "we have had three and we saw a fourth. But that one got away," he added with a laugh. "The second one landed near one of the proving grounds in Arizona, as opposed to the first which landed near a proving ground in New Mexico. When we got to the second one we found almost the same conditions of the first, except that the door was open and the sixteen dead people in it were not burned nor browned. In fact medical opinion was that they had not been dead more than two or three hours. Our conclusion was that they had died in our atmosphere when the double knob of the door was opened and our air rushed into their cabin which was probably vacuumed or pressurized for their atmosphere but not ours."
Newton asked, "How do you determine the presence of these particular ships. Do you stumble on them or know the moment they come in our atmosphere?"
Dr. Gee replied, "In the laboratories and also at Alamogordo and Los Alamos and at different parts of the country we have tenescope observers who spend 24 hours a day watching for evidence of objects or ships flying in the sky. Everything that comes within the range of these tenescopes is noted. If it is unfamiliar and lands, the Air Force is aware of it almost immediately, and if it presents scientific problems we or other groups are consulted."
He said that the second ship was smaller, 72 feet in diameter, but otherwise similar to the 9999/100 foot ship. He and his fellow scientists had decided that the mathematical system of the operators of these ships was in all probability the same as ours, "because mathematical law should follow for all the planets in this solar system." Their reason for thinking this was because they were struck with the fact that when the measurements of the ship in all its parts were broken down they found that it followed what he called "The System of 9's."
He went to considerable length to explain the mathematical system of 9's, and added, "We concluded from this clew that in all probability they used a system of mathematics similar to ours!'
The third ship he and his staff examined landed right above Phoenix in Paradise Valley. "We happened to be in Phoenix, so we got out to it in a hurry."
One of the little men was half out of the escape door or "hatch," as the doctor called it. The little man was dead. The other little fellow (there being only a crew of two on this ship) was sitting in his seat at the control board. He also was dead. This ship was 36 feet in diameter and the size of the cabin and all the rest of dimensions balanced out on the same system of 9's, that had been found in the other ships.
Asked if they had any sleeping quarters or toilet facilities, the doctor explained that on the 72-foot ship there was a very ingenious device which when they discovered how to operate it, turned out to be the sleeping quarters. Pushed back into the wall was what turned out to be a collapsible or accordion type screen, and as it was pulled out, it moved around in a half circle, so that by the time it reached the wall of the circular cabin little hammocks had dropped down from this screen or accordion-like wall, and there were the sleeping quarters for these men.
He said there were toilet facilities inside the sleeping quarters. The smallest ship, however, had no such conveniences, from which the doctor deduced they were making round trips so fast they didn't feel the need of such facilities any longer.
Newton asked, "Where is the little ship?"
"We have that one in the laboratories at the present time," replied Dr. Gee. "As soon as I get your appointment through I will be authorized to let you inspect it."
In time Newton's appointment came through, but by then the ship had been dismantled and reported shipped to Dayton, and all comment thereafter proscribed, denied, or ignored.
All the doctor had to show for his labors was a tubeless radio, some gears, some small disks, and other items that could be carried in one's pocket. He was granted these baubles for research.
I saw and examined these. More than 150 tests had failed to break down the metal of the gears. The gears themselves were of a ratio unfamiliar to engineers on this earth; had no play, no lubrication.
As for the radio, it was not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes. It had been torn from a corner of the cabin, which was in all likelihood its aerial antenna. It had no tubes, no wires, and only one dial. Dr. Gee built a special antenna for it, about 4 inches high, and was able to catch a high C sort of note at 15 minutes past every hour. It wasn't radio as we know it, but it was a means of communication with somewhere.
Asked what possible reason there could be for keeping all this a secret, Dr. Gee couldn't imagine, "unless," he added, "fear of a panic or the upsetting of certain religious beliefs, or just plain brass exercising its authoritative powers to keep their powers from atrophying. The government wants to keep people away from that area of New Mexico, as this could very well start a stampede of curiosity seekers as well as a panic among certain types of people who are easily frightened. I've talked to religious leaders and they ridicule any idea that this would upset theological concepts. So I can't imagine what the Air Force had in mind. All I know is they ruined our chances of working on `live' models and have left themselves groping and guessing ever since. I think we have some of the answers by now, but they are derived from our side not the visitors, who, my guess is, are 500 years ahead of us-in their knowledge of propulsion at any rate."
Whether we can soon return the compliment and visit the Saucerians, with or without permission of the Pentagonians, even with nothing more than the charred body of Orson Welles, depends, Dr. Gee believed, on how fast we can step up our knowledge of magnetic propulsion and the whole subject of magnetic energy generally. That the visitors showed improvement in each ship they sent out, the doctor didn't doubt. He pointed out a three point landing gear which was on the smallest ship. It held steel balls in vacuum cups which permitted the balls to revolve. While the balls were moving in one direction, nothing could tilt or tip the ship, but when they were motionless a child could tilt it. To solve that secret alone, Dr. Gee contended, would be worth years of research. Maybe others in the vast interdepartmental structure of the Pentagon are doing it and keeping it a secret from those who worked on some other phase of it. The whole procedure tends to make a man hoard what he knows instead of sharing it, lest he be clinked for giving away the nation's security, or what some fallible and unidentified authority has decreed for the moment is the nation's security.
We asked the doctor what in his opinion were the chances of the Air Force's eventually admitting that the flying saucers have come from another planet. He replied that as nearly as he could judge from all the work that he and his associates had done, the Air Force was not interested in admitting the discovery of a new method of flight. Jet propulsion was their story and we were stuck with it. Then he launched on a technical explanation concerning the creation of motive power by the breaking of magnetic lines of force. He called to my attention that there are 1,257 magnetic lines of force to the square centimeter. These are counted on a tenescope as one would count strands of wire at the cut end of a cable.
He said that the crossing of two or more lines of force made it possible in effect to permit movement in a manner hitherto unknown in aerodynamics.
"Of course, you understand," he added, "the saucer-like construction is the most ideal type of vehicle to move in the air. The fact that the saucer whirls is only for the purpose of balance, because there is not any thrust insofar as the wing surface is concerned. There is not any thrust by reason of any propeller, either, because there are no propellers.
"What actually happens is that, even though the wing part is whirling, the saucer actually crawls forward from one crossed magnetic line of force to another.
"Now, when you consider there are 1,257 lines to the square centimeter and no two cross. we have the problem of combustion or propulsion, or power created when they are crossed under control. The successive crossing of these magnetic lines of force under control makes possible the speeding up of the whirling action of the plate or wing part of the saucer, because the saucer is attempting to get to the next succeeding line of force; or, perhaps we could say, seeking to get back in balance.
"In other words, the ship is trying to get away from itself, or trying to get away from the position it finds itself in, when combustion power is created by the crossing of magnetic lines of force.
"We think in terms of electric current, when it is produced in a wire, as traveling in the wire itself, or as some scientists put it, flowing through a wire. This has never been conclusively proved. But we do know that where the electric energy is created at its source, the dynamo, it is transmitted through the wire, and the wire of course becomes a magnetic field and at its various termini we have the use of it, as electric light or in other forms."
Asked if he didn't consider that the motive power of the saucer was what one might say, in reverse as to electric energy in a wire, Dr. Gee explained, "What we have here is energy existing and created without a wire and actually in the lines of force themselves. The saucer being so regulated magnetically is eternally trying to get away from its disturbed magnetic points, as a person prodded from behind by a needle might try to get away from the disturbance, and thereby movement is created.
"When the saucer moves out of our atmospheric area, or control, then, of course, we have no weight and we have no resistance. And all we have left is magnetic lines of force, which are in an undisturbed state, out to where they approach magnetic lines of force from another planet. Since these magnetic lines of force are identical, they act similar to the two north poles of any magnet. In other words, like poles (which is the first law of magnetism) repel. Therefore, the planet Venus, for
example, and the planet Earth, is each held in position by reason of its magnetic repulsion. All are in universal balance and all move in their orbits in the same fashion.
"We do not understand how these magnetic fields are created from the sun; we only know that they exist, and when we learn something about how they are created, or how they evolved, then we can begin to learn something about how they act."
His reason for appraising the interplanetary visitors who have flown in here as being 500 years ahead of us, is based on the fact that they now appear to come and go at will. Somehow they can cross from their magnetic lines of force on to ours, despite the fact that the two planets involved are positive and would therefore repel any object's effort to move from one to the other. It is as easy to conceive of them traveling in their zone and we in ours as it is to conceive of traveling up and down on a scenic railway once given sufficient push. But hopping from one scenic railway to another going in the opposite direction represents a triumph of magic over experience. This the Saucerians appear to have achieved. They fly singly, and in groups and, as reported at Farmington, New Mexico, during the month of March, 1950, they even appear now and then in groups of hundreds. It is as if they were demonstrating that where one, two, and even three of their number had failed, they later corrected the faults that caused the failures and came over in strength, flying over the very area where their pioneers had died trying.
Those whose doubts exceeded those of the Pentagonians have harped on the size of those piloting the flying saucers. It has seemed to them like a rewrite of Gulliver's Travels. These scoffers should not be allowed to forget that Jonathan Swift's little friends measured six inches high, whereas these Saucerians measured three to three-and-a-half feet tall and are therefore at least as believable as Mickey Rooney.
