ON JANUARY 11, 1950, 1 asked the Pentagonian desk generals twenty questions. They have not answered them to date. This has put me in a unique position. Everybody else has been answered. At least Donald E. Keyhoe, Henry J. Taylor, David Lawrence, Walter Winchell, Ray Palmer, R. B. McLaughlin, and several thousand eye-witnesses to flying saucers have been answered, but I have been left in a deep freeze. They have been either ridiculed or diplomatically heaved on to the huge rubbish heap which divides the sane from the insane.
I may have received a brushoff for violating protocol, because instead of sending the questions to the Air Force chief of staff and delaying all publication until receiving a reply tersely worded "no comment," I caused the questions to be published in Variety, the showman's bible, and sent the military no personal communication whatever. I assumed that those hired for espionage and counterespionage can read and do not need either to have things drawn to their attention or spelled out for them. It was an erroneous assumption.
Others, however, picked up the questions and reprinted them, notably The Buffalo Evening News, The Christian Science Monitor, Fortnight, The Canyon Crier, and Dick Williams in the Los Angeles Daily Mirror.
One of the editors of the eminent Buffalo daily went so far as to telephone me in California for permission to reprint the questions and, as proof that capitalism is not dead, sent a check on publication, though money had never entered the telephonic conversation. The others took the position, I suspect, that in spreading the saucerian inquest they were doing a public service.
Of the twenty questions, only one has ever been answered, and that not by those to whom it was addressed but by an employee of a privately endowed institution in Chicago. He said No. I could, of course, have then addressed the question to Philadelphia's Drexel Institute, or New York's Museum of Natural History, or Washington's Smithsonian Institution, or Denver's Phipps Museum, and so on. But I was not interested in chasing the Air Force collaborators or indeed Air Force generals themselves, on foot, while they could either hole up in the Pentagon or skip off in a B-29 to check on installations anywhere between Frankfort-am-Main and Indo-China and bill me for the junket, on the grounds that security was involved.
So without even exercising an editorial blue pencil or asking leave to amend, I am submitting the original questions again. I have been charitably explaining to believers in free inquiry that the Air Force closed down Project Saucer with 34 of its cases still unsolved because the desk pilots didn't want to be asked any more questions to which they personally didn't have the answers. Nobody likes to say, "I don't know," though Dr. Samuel Johnson added to his immortality when he explained that a wrong definition in his famous dictionary was the result of "pure ignorance, madam."
As several months have passed since those questions were addressed to the Air Force, it is quite possible that by now they either have the answers or reasonable facsimiles of same. So I'm asking them again:
As for the query concerning one of the men picked up from a flying saucer, put in a preservative solution and placed between human specimens in an exhibit at Rosenwald Institute, Chicago, Fortnight said: "An old time newspaper man with a strong sense of public obligation, Scully swore his questions were based on good sources, wanted Air Force to answer."
Herb Hildebrand, a spokesman for the Rosenwald Institute, was quoted in Fortnight as replying: "Regarding your question the only specimen we have of a grown man is a plaster model, showing one-half bone and one-half nerve tissue. Dating back to the World's Fair of 1933 is an actual medical exhibit which shows the development of the embryo from conception to the full term."
It was Fortnight's opinion that maybe I had stirred up something on one of the biggest stories in history or maybe I hadn't. This two-way escape hatch was followed by the statement: "As usual the Air Force was keeping discreetly silent and-at
fortnight end-had issued no denial or answer to the Scully column."
As answers take time and maybe six months was rushing matters, perhaps we might entertain ourselves, if not the Air Force, by asking some more questions.
What about the boy in Appleton, Wisconsin, whose short-wave set hit a magnetic frequency which not only paralyzed automobiles within three miles of his home, but any plane flying over his house?
Chet L. Swital was sent by his paper from Chicago to cover the story and when he reached Appleton he found the place crawling with FBI men. They confiscated the boy's short-wave set and shipped him, his family, and the mystifying radio to Washington for further study. This was in 1941. What happened? Or is that one still "classified" five years after the war and nine years after the reported phenomenon?
What about the reported incidents of pilots who have been terrorized by their motors stopping dead, and then, suddenly, after everything from one minute to five minutes, starting up again? What about the incident specifically, of the two Army Air Force pilots attached to the transport command whose plane was frozen high above the Himalayas?
I have talked with pilots who were in on that one from the beginning. One of them, Charles F. Lane, who has been flying twenty years and is still at it, told me how it happened. The pilots were flying over the Hump. It was a clear day. Something bright whirled and circled around their plane several times. It was traveling at great speed. Suddenly their motors stopped. Their instruments froze. They felt as if they were gripped and suspended in mid-air.
The object circled a few more times and then zoomed away. With its departure, their instrument board began operating again, their motors coughed, their hair which had stood on end flattened down, and they were able to get their destination, though they claimed that they would never feel the same again about our mastery of the air unless someone cleared up that
mystery. Did their plane stop its forward motion? Did the law that "a body in motion tends to stay in motion unless impelled by some external force to change that state" meet such an external force? Or did the force merely demagnetize their motor and leave it floating along for a short time, much as the planes flying over that boy's ham radio in Appleton, Wisconsin, were left when a plane got in its way?
What about the young pilot at Muroc who suffered a similar experience in 1950? Was he quizzed by an officer of the Air Force brass who happened to be 3,000 miles from the Pentagonian frontier? Was he ordered to take it easy for a few days? Did he go up with a camera the next day, hoping to get a shot of the flying saucer which had left him suspended the day before? Was he ordered to return to the field and grounded for violating the previous suggestion to take it easy for a few days?
What about another case that Chet Swital reported? This one, according to Swital, took place over an Army airfield in New Mexico. Why do so many happen there? Is it because we are lousing up the atmosphere with our experiments and thus attracting the curiosity of those who fly on magnetic waves? This pilot claimed his progress was intercepted by a flying disk. He said it circled him, killed his motor, and paralyzed all movement of his instruments. The rest of his case history follows the classic formula. As soon as the flying saucer checked him as harmless and swished away, his motor sputtered to life, settled down to a reassuring hum, and, to his relief, his instrument board began telling him that God was in His Heaven and all was right with the pilot's particular part of the world.
Are we going to be told that meteorites tossing off dust caught and reflected in the sun effected the electromagnetic mechanism of these motors, and in doing so, heightened the imagination of the pilots to the point where they were seeing things? If so, it can also be argued that since these forces are in the universe somebody somewhere may be in control of them, and capable of turning them on and off, as easily as we turn on and off lights by touching one finger to a switch.
It can also be argued that they received warnings, like Captain Mantell, but were spared the disintegration of body and ship which were the end-result of his determination to chase a flying saucer and bring it down. But whether Mantell's plane was disintegrated by (a) getting in the magnetic dust of a meteorite, or (b) by having his magnetic lines of force crossed by an intelligence more versed in the laws controlling magnetic energy, the whole thing is still a mystery to the Air Force, though not, I hope, any longer, to our readers.
As to why the skies seem to have a heavier traffic load between December and March, men versed in magnetic research don't quite know, but they did warn me that it was as silly for Project Saucer to close down at that time of the year as it would for the police to vacate Times Square on election night. Ed Coffman, an amateur astronomer of standing, has suggested that perhaps that was the period when the magnetic lines of force between Venus and the earth came closest together.
Question: What is the difference between crossing magnetic lines of force for propulsion and crossing them for destruction? Answer: Essentially none. In both instances the combustion is controlled but in one it is used to travel onward and in the other it is used to destroy pursuing pests as flit destroys buzzing mosquitoes.
Question: What are eddy currents?
Answer: They are the magnetic lines of force that revolve around the earth laterally. They measure 1,850 to the square centimeter, as opposed to those which run at right angles to the poles and measure 1,257 to the square centimeter.
Question: Didn't the Denver lecturer say that two scientists saw a flying saucer and a live crew on one of the proving grounds in the Southwest?
Answer: Yes he did, but they didn't report it in because (1) it could have been a mirage, (2) because the men and the ship disappeared when they sought to come close to them, and (3) psychiatry is in the pilot seat of the Air Force and it is sometimes easier not to see what you see than to be told to lie down on a couch and let a flock of Freudians psychoanalyze you to see what connection all this had to do with your excessive affection for your mother. Joe Landon, however, advanced the thought that the visitors might have known how to bend light rays which would create a shield till they could get in their ship and sail off. In other words they would be there but couldn't be seen. Magicians can even do this with mirrors.
Question: Doesn't much of this theory of magnetic propulsion violate the conservation of energy principle? In traveling along a magnetic band, much as a package rides along on a conveyor belt, aren't two things ignored: all types of friction and gravity? Isn't more than one set of forces acting on a ship regardless of its shape? Since the saucer has no propellant force of its own, how would it offset the drag of wind resistance, convection of currents, and the pull of gravity? How about obstacles thrown in its path? Wouldn't these knock the package off its conveyor belt? And if the friction forces were constant wouldn't the saucer slow down inversely as the square of the distance, as does a rock thrown by a boy in the air or a rocket shot in the sky by your Air Force?
Answer: Now, here are questions which it would seem might take chapters to answer. Actually the answers can be reduced to a sentence or two. First get rid of the idea that magnetism and gravity are both fighting for control. They are one and the same thing. When an object is traveling on magnetic propulsion it is not fighting magnetic power; it is using it. It is the same thing that makes it possible to lift your arm to wave good-by to a friend. If gravity were so all powerful, you could never lift your arm. Who said the saucer had no propellant force of its own? The contention of the magnetic research engineers is that Saucerians have mastered the greatest propellant force in the universe-magnetic lines of force.
Robert Pike, a former Air Force pilot, acting as spokesman for a group of twenty which included one pilot who had flown everything from the crates of 1918 to modern bombers, listened to a recording of the University of Denver lecture and turned in a
report that had much more depth but by no means the length of an Air Materiel Command Digest.
A bit dazed by the whole thing, they found themselves divided on many points, united on others. They all agreed that the obviously high level of intelligence which had applied itself to the solution of what was behind the flying saucers was the biggest single factor in its favor. Without it the solid wall of skepticism which the government had set up through its various Air Force denials would fortify the disbelief of the average person. These were some of their queries:
Question: What about those famous square-cornered turns? Any pilot knows that's impossible in an aircraft relying solely on aerodynamics. Or is this the long sought anti-gravity machine that spares ship and crew alike?
Answer: It is indeed. Once everything is set in magnetic balance and the crew sealed in, say, a vacuum turret with oxygen tanks strapped to their backs, all talk about how many g's a body can stand loses its meaning.
There might be some question as to how fast an ordinary ship could be stepped up without cracking if veered at too sharp an angle but a saucer isn't that sort of ship. It moves at all angles and no angles. We have even now commercial planes which fly at 20,000 feet. Yet the pressure within the cabin remains at 7,000 feet. When that pressure is reduced to sea level even cardiac cases may find flying at 50,000 feet as easy as lying on the sand. This is but an inkling of what is ahead of us and behind those who have mastered old theories of motion and gravity by controlling magnetic lines of force.
Question: What about those dimensions? We seem at odds as to those multiples of nines. When I translated all the dimensions of a saucer I found everything was divisible by three. How would that apply to the metric system?
Answer: Frankly I don't know. That was Dr. Gee's theory not mine. He says everything about the ships worked out in nines or multiples of nine. Typical was the second ship. It was 72 feet in diameter. Its cabin was 18 feet across, and 72 inches high. September has nine letters and is the ninth month. There are nine planets in our solar system. Every ninth wave according to Dr. Gee that beats on every shore on this planet is larger than the other eight. Check on this yourself and see if he's right.
Question: What is the significance of a magnetic month? Answer: No significance except that it seems a more scientific way to measure time. It takes 23 hours 58 minutes to complete a magnetic day. That makes 28 days 23 hours 29 minutes for a magnetic month. Under this computation the earth completes its orbit around the sun in 13 months, instead of 12 months and 1/4 days. The Chinese have used a 13-month year for centuries. Question: Why can't metallurgists analyze any and every metal especially when your scientists say the whole solar system is comprised of blood relations? How could something be present on one planet and not on all, since according to your theory they are all castoffs of the same sun?
Answer: This does seem to present a flaw in Dr. Gee's case. However, he did not say the flying saucers contained two metals which could not under any circumstances be found on this earth. He said they hadn't been found to date. After all, new elements have been found in our lifetime. We are now up to 97. Forty of these have been found on the sun as well. That still leaves a lot unaccounted for. It is quite possible that on another planet an element is on the surface, whereas on this one it is miles below the skin of the earth. What Dr. Gee said was that 150 tests and 10,000 degrees of heat had not been able to break down two of the metals and therefore it was assumed they must have come from elsewhere. They could of course have worked out an alloy unknown to us out of metals known to us.
Question: Is the one-inch square magnetic radio telephone that Dr. Gee and Mr. Newton use okayed by the F.C.C.? Answer: Yes, I've seen their license numbers.
Question: Are you sure there were no written instructions on the ship? All of us are experienced pilots of from 2,000 to 10,000 flying hours each, and we cannot conceive of an aircraft without written instructions all over the ship, both inside and outside. My brother, convinced that they cannot have a language or it
would be printed some place on the controlling mechanism, suggested they might use an advanced form of mental telepathy such as birds and animals, and even ants use. Is that possible?
Answer: Of course. As was said before, anything is possible. But it so happens there were parchments on the ship which Dr. Gee said looked like picture language. These were turned over to specialists in the field who so far have not been able to make anything out of them.
Question: We find any conversation about "little men" is poison. Women are tolerant of the idea but not men. Are you sure they weren't dwarfs or Singer Midgets or something?
Answer: All the Singer Midgets have been accounted for. And as I said before, the fact that the men were small is no more incredible than the fact that little Mickey Rooney is a big star in motion pictures. Climatic conditions have a great deal to do with the size of men's bodies, a good deal less with their brains. The dinosaur weighed 120,000 pounds; his brain weighed a pound. He wasn't very bright. At any rate he's joined the dead dragons and the dragon slayers. It would be nice of course to be able to report that the Saucerians were 6 feet tall, weighed 175 pounds, and looked like members of a varsity crew, but Dr. Gee says they measured between 36 and 42 inches and were 30 to 40 years old. Otherwise he found nothing unusual about them.
Question: Could the facts be withheld on higher grounds than an inability to answer the questions? Say, to avoid panic, or religious controversies?
Answer: Some of the magnetic research scientists have advanced this as a possibility but I doubt it. Panic is a two-way street. Those skilled in public relations could condition the people, "prepare" them, and even work up a stampede of general acceptance of the idea before the facts were released. As to the religious problem, none exists as far as theologians on this earth are concerned. God created this earth. We are descended from Adam. Other planets, other Adams. That God is almighty is best proved by the endless pattern of His creations. The more that is revealed the more almighty He becomes. Even an atheist can find little comfort in infinity or eternity, but those who believe a divinity shapes our ends, rough hew them as we will, must welcome additional proof of this divinity.
Question: What books are recommended on the technical aspects of all this business?
Answer: This one.
Question: Is there any available information about the exact function of the push-button controls in the saucers?
Answer: Ask the Air Force. They may be using the same buttons on their directed missiles, for all I know. Probably listed as "reclaimed war surplus."
Question: These portholes which they can see out of but nobody can see in. Could they be half-silvered to stop cosmic rays?
Answer: Could be.
Question: Did they have any heating devices?
Answer: None that one could see, but of course a complete mastery of magnetic energy would include a mastery of heat, because heat is the lowest form of energy.
Question: How were their clothes. Where were the seams? How were the buttonholes made? How about their shirts? Did they wear ties? Did their pants have pockets? Did their shoes have laces? Were they high or low shoes? Did they have heels? Nails? Did they have stockings? Caps? Were the seats upholstered? Flat, hard, or soft? Did their bunks that disappeared into the cabin wall have blankets, pillows, sheets? Were the beds hard or soft? Was there any floor covering? Curtains? Any first-aid kits? Or drinks other than the heavy water? Any eating utensils? Pictures? Rings? Tables? Were their documents bound or rolled? Any other reading matter?
Answer: These are women's questions. They are good questions, but I can't answer most of them. Maybe a WAC assigned to Air Force Intelligence can. After, of course, the first twenty questions have been answered by the WAC's superiors. After all, priority still is a magic word around the Pentagon, and I want my questions answered first.
