Ever since the cliché ‘Flying Saucer’ was coined, the greatest and most exciting mystery of our age has been automatically reduced to the level of a music hall joke. The comics of Vaudeville and the comedians of State and Science banded together, most successfully, to encourage humanity in its oldest and easiest method of escape—to laugh at what it does not understand.
From then on, anyone who said ‘I have seen a flying saucer’ or, worse, ‘I believe in flying saucers’ was considered a bit of a leg-puller, or some kind of a crank. Despite evidence to the contrary (and there is enough of it to fill many volumes), there is still a widespread notion, hazy and ill-defined as are all popular notions, that flying saucers are some kind of American joke, a newspaper stunt, or the result of something not quite nice. On top of this comes an even hazier reassurance that the mystery has already been cleared up; that the skies have been purged of these ungodly objects and that there is nothing more to worry about.
For this latter notion we can thank those semi-scientists and self-appointed ‘experts’ who have simply failed to study the facts. Too many glib pontifications have been issued to the Faithful by those who should know better. Scores of neatly parcelled explanations have been doled out which barely cover a few of the facts. But to say, as their perpetrators say, that they cover all the cases on record is a flagrant untruth for which a Higher Justice may, or may not forgive them.
Let me say at the outset that I have devoted the last two and a half years solely to the investigation of this phenomenon: that I have studied thousands of cases and read reports both ancient and modern; that I have studied with an unbiased mind things which seemed possible, and things that seemed impossible, and that I feel as qualified to speak as any ‘expert’ who after a few weeks, or even days, of research calmly announces the once-and-for-all solution, and returns thence to his normal activities. www.universe-people.com www.cosmic-people.com
Let me say also that if I write of the flying saucer mystery in a light or easy style it is not because I do not seriously mean what I say. On the contrary, I take flying saucers extremely seriously; but I deplore pedantry and, like the ancient Toltecs, I find the serious things of life a cause for joy and pleasure rather than for pompous gloom.
And lastly, though I would prefer to use the ancient names for the sky disks such as ‘cars celestial’, ‘vimanas’, and ‘fiery chariots’, I shall use the modern abomination ‘flying saucers’ throughout this volume, merely to. avoid confusion.
I would like to devote little time to proving or disproving the reality of these wonderful flying objects. In fact, I would like to get right down to essentials without further ado, but for those who have heard of saucers only by hearsay or read of them in the popular Sunday papers that would prove a little unsatisfactory, so I shall dedicate the first part of this book to an account of what has happened up to the time of writing.
Let me say once again, that although I quote less than two hundred incidents, these have been selected from nearly two thousand cuttings, reports, articles, manuscripts and ancient documents supplied to me by kind helpers from many countries this side of the Iron Curtain. To quote them all would require a volume the size of a city telephone directory. For the past eighteen months barely a single day has gone by without flying saucers being reported somewhere in the world. But I am being modest. On some days there have been as many as ten different sightings in different places. And if a thing is seen daily, week after week, month after month, by ordinary people in free countries, then it follows that the thing in question must surely exist.
Do you remember the first amazing story ?
It came on 21 June 1947, three days before Arnold’s experience over Mount Rainier. A man named Dahl was out in the Tacoma Harbour Patrol boat near Maury Island. He looked up and saw six large disks about 2,000 feet above him. Five of them were slowly circling one that seemed to be in difficulties. Slowly they sank to within 500 feet of the sea, without a sound or whisper. Then suddenly there was a loud boom from the central disk and out fell a light, and a dark, metal object. Fragments landed in the water near the island, causing a loud hissing noise, whereupon the whole flight rose and shot off to sea.
Three days later Maury Island was visited and layers of slaglike substance were found there. Reports circulated that dark and light coloured metal disks were among the droppings. Air Intelligence was brought in and pronounced ex cathedra, through the vocal organs of a Major Sanders, that the metal was just slag. Neither the Major, nor Dahl, seemed to have noticed that slag, cinders, blue ice, jelly-like stuff and clinker have been recorded as arriving in large quantities on this planet, in utterly unexplained circumstances, for the last three hundred years.
Then came a variation. Experienced airmen began to see them. Two airline pilots, Adams and Anderson, were flying their D.C.3 the 130 miles from Memphis to Little Rock on the night of 31 March 1950 when a huge glowing flying saucer zoomed down at terrific speed to investigate them. On the central cupola there was a bright blue-white flashing light—either a signal or part of the propelling mechanism. And on the lower side, the airline pilots observed a row of eight or ten brilliantly lighted portholes. They thought they were portholes, but admitted that they could have been vents through which some kind of powerful energy was flowing.
‘I’ve been a sceptic all my life’, said Adams in his report,’ but what can you do when you see something like that ? We were both flabbergasted.’
Both pilots were slightly blinded by the glare. ‘It was the strongest blue-white light I’ve ever seen,’ said Adams.
Something just as bright, but quite different in construction, was seen by Eastern Airline pilots, Chiles and Whitted, early in July 1948 on a flight near Montgomery, Alabama. A large ‘aerial submarine’ three times the size of a B.29 came alongside and circled their aircraft. It was torpedo-shaped and glowed all over with a weird dark-blue light. There was a double row of ports or vents along the side from which came an unearthly white light. After inspecting them for some moments, the thing suddenly let out a sheet of flame, fifty feet long, turned up its nose at an abrupt angle, and shot off at about 700-1,000 m.p.h., rocking the sedate D.C.3 with its mighty blast.
Earlier still, nine flying saucers, in loose formation, were seen by Captain E. Smith, of United Airlines, eight minutes flying time away from Boise, Idaho, on 4 July 1947. Smith and his copilot, Ralph Stevens, saw the disks silhouetted against the late-evening sky, and at first thought they were aircraft. Notice, please, that they were ‘silhouetted’. Fireballs, illusions, and refractions of light do not produce dark silhouettes against the evening, or any other, sky. Four more saucers joined the group, giving the two pilots and their stewardess time to observe them thoroughly. ‘They were flat and roundish,’ they said afterwards, ‘and larger than ordinary aircraft.’
A huge round disk flying on its edge came alongside a Chicago-bound plane on the night of 27 April 1950. Captain Adickes, the airline pilot, said it looked like a giant wheel. ‘It was very smooth and streamlined and glowed evenly with a bright red colour as if it were heated stainless Steel. It appeared to fly on edge like a wheel going down a highway.’
It was intelligently controlled—either by repulse mechanism or by thinking beings, for each time Adickes tried to bring his plane nearer, the object turned away from him, keeping perfect distance until it decided it had seen enough of the comic terrestrial contraption lumbering along at a mere 200 m.p.h., and shot off in a sudden burst of speed, zooming down to 1,500 feet, where it passed over a place called South Bend, and disappeared in the distance.
Then came the tragedy.
A red glow in the clouds over Godman Field, Kentucky—a disk the size of the Pentagon, lurking, silently, above a fighter base—a construction dwarfing the Queen Mary supported by dull orange flames that lit up the cloud base and caused Captain Mantell, of the U.S.A.A.F., to be dispatched in his tiny pursuit plane to investigate. When Mantell found it, his voice came over the radio, full of excitement. It was immense, he said, a colossal metallic thing, 500-1,000 feet in diameter, and cruising at 250 m.p.h. He was going to try to overtake it. As soon as it sighted (or sensed) him, the giant began climbing at 400 m.p.h. It accelerated faster than any jet, and Mantell went streaking up in pursuit. The next news of Mantell was that the wreckage of his plane had been found in tiny pieces, scored by peculiar deep lines as if he had got into a shower of some terribly powerful unexplainable something; as though he had flown into the tremendous exhaust stream—or worse—against which no terrestrial metal could survive.
Ex Cathedra spoke Authority. First, Mantell had been ‘chasing the planet Venus’. Will some kind illusionist kindly explain how the planet Venus could appear as a disk 500 feet across, going at 200 m.p.h.; afterwards climbing rapidly and emitting orange flames ? Later, we read of a new official explanation, that Mantell had hit a ‘Skyhook’ meteorological balloon and crashed.Well, say he had ? Would it tear his plane to pieces ? I am quite willing, for anyone who will pay my expenses, to pilot a fighter plane through a Skyhook balloon any time of the day or night and observe the results, without very much fear of hurting myself. But when has a Skyhook ever cruised along at 250 m.p.h., or risen sharply at 400 m.p.h., with orange flames, etc., etc., into the bargain ?
But officially Mantell had chased the planet Venus, metamorphosed later into a Skyhook balloon, and thus, alas, met his death.
Another theory followed about a mirage or magnification caused by layers of hot air or cold air, or something no one knows anything at all about, but in that case why doesn’t this sometimes magnify the sun, distort the moon, stretch out the stars ? Why always pick on poor old Venus ? This Venus idea makes it very hard to understand a sighting at White Sands Rocket Testing Ground, New Mexico, where a flying saucer was tracked by radar, and found to be cantering along at a mere 18,000 m.p.h. We’ve had radar echoes from the moon, but not yet from Venus, so far as I am aware.
Far from solving the mystery, radar has only added to it. Sometimes, ‘invisible’ flying saucers have produced the type of radar echo that indicates a solid body moving at high speed. At other times, when the flying object itself was visible to the eye, it has produced the kind of indefinite image on the radar screen associated with ionised air or radioactive clouds. And other times, solid-looking saucers have given clear ‘solid body’ echoes and have been tracked at speeds up to 20,000 m.p.h. The American papers have contained many such reports over the last few years, and the U.S.A.A.F. has issued special equipment to various units in an attempt to solve the mystery.
In England the R.A.F. has had incidents, most of which occurred during large-scale official exercises. The two I shall now quote as examples come from officers personally known to me. Reasons oblige me to withhold their names; one is a scientist, the other the son of a famous London editor and theatre critic.
One (the editor’s son) told me that while on duty in November 1952 he tracked a vast object, flying in cloud, from the river Humber in Yorkshire to the Thames Estuary; it covered the 200 miles in a matter of two and a quarter minutes !
The other (the scientist) was in comand of an East Coast radar post during ‘Exercise Ardent’. At 3.20 a.m. his attention was drawn to a ‘blip’ on the radar screen which suggested a flight of ten closely-packed aircraft leaving the English coast and heading towards Holland. The incredible speed of these objects—or object—made direct measurement of their speed impossible, but calculations, twice checked, showed them to be shifting along at 21,000 m.p.h. !
Worse was in store. When they—or it—reached the Dutch Coast, the screen went blank. The thing had physically disappeared, which even a schoolboy knows to he impossible.
The scientist’s explanation (which is the only explanation to our limited knowledge) is that the thing ‘dematerialised’ or rather translated itself into a higher octave of matter, quite beyond our present comprehension.
Unfortunately, most scientists and other ‘experts’ are not willing to be so broadminded. Saucers offend them because they cannot be conveniently pigeon-holed into What-Is-Known-and-Accepted. From the time of Captain Mantell’s tragic death to the present-day, the ‘experts’ have told us glibly one thing after another—contradiction following contradiction until our heads, like the saucers, are spinning in the air.
They say that flying disks are:
We thought sex would creep into it sooner or later.
And lastly from Russia where, because Stalin failed to invent them,’ they are a case of pure war-mongering psychosis,’ according to Professor Kukarkin, of Moscow.
In fact, flying saucers are everything except flying saucers.
Bewildered, befuddled, and unimpressed, we turn to Washington, D.C. There, surely, in the City of Experts, we shall find an expert who really knows what it is all about ?
Tons of paper meet our eye; a vast and costly monument known as ‘Project Saucer’ which, a few years ago, was launched to find the complete and final answer. ‘Project Saucer’ fizzled out, or was shelved, or sent in disgrace to the dungeons of the Pentagon for not giving the correct answers. ‘Project Twinkle’ followed (was some humorist responsible for this choice name ?) and vast quantities of paper were consumed; many men did many things, so that from time to time the Pentagon could issue a new Dogma to the Faithful.
Some of the Dogmas thus issued were:
30 July 1952: General Samford of the U.S.A.A.F. speaking: ‘Eighty per cent, of all objects sighted could be explained by natural causes, but twenty per cent. remain inexplicable.’
Exactly a month earlier, a Mr. Sid Eubanks had arrived in Enid, Oklahoma, white and shaking; he tells the police how an enormous flying saucer, ‘four hundred feet wide at least’, swept down and almost blew his car off the road with its colossal exhaust, blast, or back-wash.
General Samford adds comfort, for there is nothing to fear. ‘Flying saucers are definitely not a menace to America.’
Mr Eubanks is comforted.
A day before the General’s announcement, the Faithful are told that saucers are definitely not American secret weapons, but more likely ‘spots before the eyes’.
Possibly a spot 400 feet long before Mr. Eubank’s eyes caused him to drive his car into a ditch.
25 September: the Pentagon announces a ‘breath-taking report’, expressing the belief that some flying saucers are interplanetary and may originate in outer space; this report they decided not to publish, lest it cause too much public alarm.
The announcement adds that over 1,800 sightings have been examined.
Eighteen hundred sightings ! 2
2/ At the time of first publication of the cloth-bound edition this figure had risen to ‘over 3,000’.
That’s practically one for every day since Arnold first saw them.
Eighteen hundred or not, the panic and possible alarm was swiftly allayed. On 12 November came the ‘final, complete and official answer’, exquisitely phrased by an official spokesman called Colonel Watson:
‘Bunk !’
‘It’s a lot of damn nonsense... they just don’t exist,’ said the Colonel to the Faithful. He may, in keeping with the general mood of erudition and enlightenment, have added an anathema to heretics: ‘Let all who believe to the contrary be damned for un-American activities’, but I can find no trace of it. Or maybe it was forgotten when, at Christmas six weeks later, the Pentagonists found a heretic in their ranks, as General Samford hinted that landings by flying saucers ‘were possible’.
At this stage, we would like to leave the Pentagonists alone and be troubled by them no more, for it seems we shall obtain little truth, coherence or guidance from that modern Tower of Babel. But the question is ‘Will they leave us alone ?’
It is doubtful.
For a long time various world powers have, despite their contradictions and denials, been doing their utmost to build a flying saucer of their own. If my information is correct they have nearly succeeded in constructing a moderate imitation—that is to say—a near-circular aeroform such as the ‘Avro Saucer’ that will far exceed the performance of most existing aircraft.
Very well ! What of it ? Let them get on with it. Why confuse the issue ?
Only that we may be sure that if, and when, the existence of such an aircraft is announced, it will also be declared as the cause of the mystery all along. We shall be told that all the flying saucers seen to date (with the exception of illusions, balloons, etc., etc.) were experimental prototypes and nothing more.
The pity is that many people will believe it. It will sound so convincing. ‘You, the public, have been seeing flying saucers. We, the Powers, have been making flying saucers !’
What could be simpler ? The two pieces fit together with all the moronic neatness of a form and its carbon duplicate. Unfortunately, neither I nor many saucer researchers will believe it.
So to safeguard the Faithful from all duplicity we shall now, with their indulgence, start going backwards through time... back to when there was no Soviet Russia, no United States of America; back to an age when there actually was no Great Britain; then back farther to when there was no Rome, no Greece, no Ancient Egypt, back and back until we are lost in the earliest mists of time.
And what do we find there ? The hazy outline of a prehistoric flying saucer ? Alas no ! We find, instead, the solid outline of wonderful vehicles, beautifully built, packed with power sources still unknown to us. We find in fact that space vehicles are not a product of the twentieth century imagination, but have existed in human memory and records since our particular human family first began to think and to remember.
So if the flying saucers are the experimental craft of modern governments, then we can only say that they have been experimenting a very long time.
