"You can measure a circle beginning anywhere," said Charles Fort. The same is true of the flying saucer story. In three years it had completed a circle. In a very literal sense it was back to where it had started.
On June 25, 1947, Kenneth Arnold reported nine objects flying in saucer-like fashion over Mt. Rainier, Washington. On April 30, 1950, Mrs. Albert Goelitzer reported seeing eight flat cylindrical-shaped objects flying over Centralia, Washington. Were eight of them the same ones Kenneth Arnold had seen three years before? Were they looking for the missing ninth, the one that had had "magneto trouble" and had dropped out near Aztec, New Mexico?
Between those two observations and the intervening three years, thousands had seen strange objects in the sky and from trained observers to rank amateurs they almost to a man, woman, and child, had reported that they looked like flying saucers.
But the Air Force took the position that they were all out of step but Jim. Jim of the Air Force had decided that everybody else was either a little crazy or playing jokes. I have decided that
when 150,000,000 persons are rated crazy it's the psychiatrist who is cracked. If this is any consolation to Jim of the Air Force, he's welcome to it.
At the beginning of this project I took the position that if the Air Force said there was such a thing as flying saucers, don't you believe them. If they said there is no such thing as flying saucers, don't you believe them. If they said I didn't know what I was talking about, don't you believe them. In brief, don't believe them. Believe me.
I have viewed with compassion those reporters who tried to get at the truth of this story, only to get slugged for playing ball with the Pentagonians. I have told them that if the pen were really mightier than the sword they were poor hands at proving it. I'd as leave go into a combat of this sort unarmed as Marines would have gone into Guadalcanal unarmed.
Like others, I have thrilled many times at the picture of General Douglas A. MacArthur stepping into the shallow waters of Luzon and wading ashore. But I knew before that happened that barrages had been laid down, flame throwers had cleared out all snipers and, though the beach looked a wreck, it was comparatively safe from enemy fire. I have followed the same procedure in dealing with the Pentagonians and the flying saucer story. I have treated them as a race apart and have, I hope, warned my readers to dig in and so be prepared to laugh off a counterattack. Thus when it comes all of us can say, "See, I told you the truth would burn them up!"
The hypocritical pattern is ever the same and when broken down it remains essentially the same. Note how the chancellor of the University of Denver got all steamed up about an unidentified lecturer. He issued a faculty order that all lecturers must be screened henceforth. He and his faculty knew who the speaker was. It was all a part of the great American game of chumping the common people. The military and now the intelligentsia believe Lincoln was wrong. You can fool all the people all the time, if you change your act now and then. Did that Denver chancellor ever ask that the anonymity of Air Force spokesmen
be revealed? Did he ever ask them to stop snooping around, trying to get information on a project that was publicly announced as closed? Did he ever ask the newspapers not to print press handouts unless Air Force spokesmen were identified?
When I reflect on all the money that was spent on Project Saucer and how little these master minds had to show for it I wonder if the object of a military training is not only to use language to conceal thought but to make thinking appear ridiculous.
Read again the Digest of the Air Materiel Command and see if it shows an inkling of even a theoretical knowledge of magnetic propulsion. It reads like the learned essays of the pre-Copernican era-full of things which when weighed mean nothing. There was never better proof that a dull mind hides behind many a smart uniform.
It reminds me of Lee Bowman and his ship, which he designed during the war. Because high octane gas was at a premium, he designed his ship to fly on carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide was cheap. It couldn't explode or burn. Roscoe Turner tested an X model and pronounced it well worth developing. The Navy decided it wanted it. They horsed around for eighteen months while Bowman awaited essential material. He finally said, "Listen, get this stuff or forget it." They told him to hold his horses and wait his turn. He told them to get moving and to leave the horses to the bookies. They said there were two ways to do it: their way and their way. He said, "Not with my brains." They said, "We have ways of making men do it our way." He said, "Not now you haven't, because I just pulled out of the whole deal a minute ago."
The ship was never made and Bowman is rich and the brass that tried to push him around is unwept, unhonored, and unsung. If he had been a poor scientist, forced to take that $7,500 a year and all the guff that went with it, or in a worse position where he had to rely on their caprices for essential materials, he'd have had to take their orders, or else.
Bad as that is in wartime it is absolutely intolerable between wars. The Council of the Federation of American Scientists have decided to fight back. In deploring an order against the discussion of scientific information the council stated:
"It is hard for any American to take an order from some one in Washington to `keep his trap shut' even where there is a belated `please' attached to it."
Gerard Piel, publisher of the Scientific American, who was ordered to burn 3,000 copies, because the issue contained material known to every scientist short of Haile Selassie's physician, said: "For the pall of secrecy which so dangerously frustrates its legitimate activities, the press must blame itself as much as anybody. Our newspapers and magazines have sold themselves a gold brick."
David Lawrence, who found himself at the receiving end of a flying saucer, asked editors to stop being confused by worn-out arguments concerning national security since "too often it can cloak a desire for a hush-hush policy that can hide incompetence behind the scenes."
Well, that's a charitable view. But suppose it hid willful duplicity. Suppose it hid the truth about something that couldn't possibly prove we were worse off than anybody else on this planet? Suppose at worst it merely proved that we are 500 years behind some other part of the universe in the matter of propelling objects through space? Is that such a disgraceful thing to confess?
Almost everybody else in the world agrees that where there is much smoke there must be some fire. But not the Air Force. To them we all have soot on our sun glasses and the moving disks we think we see are really drops of sweat. Very simple fellows in the Air Force. Too simple. If only you could put a magnet on one side of their minds and draw brains into it we might be officered by Einsteins.
There is still hope that they may decide that we the people are worth taking into their confidence. Or are we like the deceived wife, the last one to know?
By April 9, 1950, even The New York Times had begun to weaken. It published a feature by Joseph Nolan, entitled: "THOSE FLYING SAUCERS: ARE OR AREN'T THEY?"
Everybody, including the President, the story said, "was puzzled and many guesses were made."
The only guess that came near the mark, in my opinion, was by Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko, who walked into, instead of out of, this one for a change. He suggested they might be caused by a Russian discus thrower who didn't know his own strength.
Could be, for when George Washington threw that silver dollar across the Potomac he might have got on a magnetic line of force that flustered the law of gravity for a moment.
It's an old story, you see. If goes back to the lodestone and that goes back thousands of years. Official ridicule to the contrary, the world will have to go back to Thales, to Gilbert, and to Faraday, and work up from these sources to an understanding of modern magnetic research before any one can answer the question of how real or unreal are flying saucers.
With that I leave the door open for a last minute confession from the Air Force that the saucers were (a) ours, (b) Russia's, (c) from another planet, or (d) from all three. After that they may come home and all will be forgiven.
