I would have dispensed with the statistic almost entirely had not the Pentagonists shown how, by taking a handful of facts and figures, and by distorting them ad lib., you may make them prove spots, balloons, meteors, cobwebs, hallucinations, or anything you like.
That is my only excuse and my only reason for loading Part One with so many sightings of flying saucers. For in order to dispel the official smoke-screen (so easily produced with the aid of a swollen bureaucracy) there was no course open to me other than to marshal as many of the facts as possible; tabulate them; put them in some kind of chronological order, and present them for a discerning and open-minded public to judge for themselves.
I hope by now that it will be no longer necessary to drag out further long lists of sightings (both ancient and modern), for it must surely be obvious to anyone except to the Harvard Observatory that flying saucers are real, and that not very many of them can be explained away by that useful little phrase ‘natural phenomena’.
But, again, a certain doubt lingers in the mind.
Suppose for a moment that you were elected head of a Western state, holding office by a not-too-large majority, you would think twice before making a proclamation of such startling nature. You might have been present when a space ship landed, conversed and consulted with men from other worlds, but you would hold your peace. Imagine if the English Prime Minister or the American President were to tell us of his government’s encounter with space-men. Even if it were true and supported by many witnesses, his party would not remain in office a week. The voters would be thrilled; fascinated; some might even be delighted; but they would be shocked. They want to be governed by trustworthy, unsensational rulers. They expect their governments to be fundamentally respectable, like a bank.
So if you were head of the state and you knew all about flying saucers, why should you risk your seat to make such a statement, until you were absolutely forced to do so ?
There is plenty the government does not tell the people— sometimes they tell less than is strictly ethical.
And if you were head of a slave state, and you learned one terrible day that there were greater gods in heaven than the ugly faces on your party posters, you would do anything to prevent the people finding out. For a big fish in a little pond can remain a big fish only as long as the little fishes know nothing of giant porpoise and ocean whale. The inopportune arrival of a mighty fish from the great waters beyond would reduce you to your proper size. No longer frightened by your correct proportions, the slaves would laugh—at first. Later they might do something rather more unpleasant. So by all means stick to the story that saucers are ‘a product of western war-psychosis’.And what of the scientists ?
They are many, and I have spoken to some of them, who believe we have slender grounds for supposing that human life on the little planet called Earth is the highest form of life in the Universe. A true scientist is also a philosopher, and a philosopher believes that life is no unique and isolated freak, but that it pervades the entire Cosmos.
It is not the philosopher-scientist but the technician-scientist, the little man who cannot believe in God because he cannot take His temperature nor peruse His spectroscopic analysis, to whom the idea of any being greater than himself is repugnant. For if a man from another world knows enough to be able to travel through space, then he must know more science than us. He might even know a different type of science. He might even disprove our accepted theories, overturn our pet conceptions, dethrone our personal idols. He would be as welcome to the little technician-scientist, as Einstein would have been to the pre-Copernicans in the Middle Ages. Therefore, he must not exist. It would be insufferable if a space-man kindly pointed out to the students of astro-physics that they’d got their light years all wrong, their measurements confused, and that the conditions on other planets were quite different from what they had so proudly proclaimed, owing to the fallibility and inaccuracy of their instruments. So, for heaven’s sake, there must be no space-men except in comic strips; and flying saucers must be brushed off as any old thing you choose.
Politicians have a valid excuse. It is their duty as guardians of the people to make no disturbing statements until forced to do so.
But the little technician-scientist, half educated in a smattering of chemistry and physics, has no such excuses to redeem him. He should drop all pretensions to the title of ‘scientist’ which implies ‘one who knows’ and ‘one who thinks’. For he does neither.
