In the spring of 1952 an event took place four miles inside the Russian Zone of Germany which caused some alarm in high circles. A forty-eight-year-old ex-mayor named Linke was chugging along through the woods near Hasselbach, Meiningen, when the back tyre of his motor-cycle burst. He and his daughter, the eleven-year-old Gabrielle, jumped off and started pushing the bike towards the village. As they pushed, Gabrielle pointed to something 150 yards away in the twilight, which Linke thought must be a young deer. He crept up cautiously to investigate, leaving his bike against a tree.
At 60 yards (twilight plays strange tricks) the deer turned into a couple of weird silvery human figures, all too like the man in the film The Day the Earth Stood Still. Either their skin or their clothing shimmered like metal, and one of the creatures had a light in his chest which, flashed on and off as if signalling.
And then Linke rubbed his eyes. Behind these creatures in the forest glade loomed an enormous circular object, ‘like a huge warming pan’. Fifty or sixty feet in diameter, it sat there, squat and enormous in the failing evening light. But super-warming pans do not sit around in forest glades in normal civilised communities. Linke was in the Russian Zone where anything might happen; where anything unusual was frightening; where it wasn’t good to see unusual objects; where people who did, and were known to do so, usually disappeared. He kept very quiet and wished he had never come.
At that moment his daughter called across to him and the two silvery figures jumped up from what they had been examining, rushed towards the saucer and scrambled up a dark central conning tower in the centre and disappeared inside it.
Immediately the outer rim began to glow. Linke noticed a double row of foot-wide holes, eighteen inches apart. The glow changed from bluey green to red and a faint humming was heard. Linke describes this glowing, at the same time he says that swirling exhausts gave the whole contraption the appearance of spinning round and round like a top. He does not seem quite sure whether it was gases corning out of the vents, or the glowing metal, or actual rotation of the saucer that produced this effect.
Then the dark conning tower disappeared. It was a simple and ingenious arrangement; just what one might expect to answer the question of how a whirling disk can take off from the ground. The saucer rose up its own conning tower until is resembled a flat mushroom on a stalk. This enabled it to whirl until it had obtained enough rotation to become airborne. Slowly at first, it rose in the air, then gathered speed. Immediately the conning tower retracted and returned to its normal position on top, where Linke observed it, as the saucer gained speed and altitude, with a faint whistling sound ‘like a falling bomb’.
Linke does not seem quite sure whether the saucer actually rotated or whether only the outer rim was spinning. Nor is it certain whether he saw actually smoke and flames coming from the perimeter or whether it was merely a sudden increase in radiance. I am inclined to believe the latter, for the actual discharge of gases from a series of whirling jets would surely have made a considerable noise. And possibly the appearance of the outer rim riding up the dark central conning tower was an illusion, easily understandable in the bad light, especially if one studies the two pictures (Plates 1 & 3) of Adamski’s saucer in one of which the lower dark ‘conning tower’ appears to extend almost to below the rim, but when the structure was higher in the air this central object gives the appearance of having retracted.
At the time of writing, Adamski’s photos had not been sent to Herr Linke, but later, when this is done, it will be interesting to see if he identifies it as a similar craft to the one he saw or whether he considers it to be different, like the drawings made at the time. Certainly there is little evidence to suggest that all saucers are identical in shape, propulsion or place of origin.
Other observers—a sawmill watchman said he saw something like a comet flash away from the hill where Linke had been, and a shepherd, half a mile away, thought he saw ‘a comet bounce off the earth’.
There was great alarm when Linke finally escaped to Allied territory and revealed his carefully-kept secret before a judge in a sworn statement. Nasty cold feelings down the spine. Is it— are they Russian ?
If it is a secret Soviet weapon it was surely not on the agenda that it should come down within four miles of the decadent capitalist plutarchy and risk detection ? Certainly it was nowhere near its base. Notice the absence of forbidden zones, barbed wire, sentries and all other indications of secret experimental areas. And, if challenged point blank, the Russians would surely give a typical Russian answer, for it would be in their interests to make us believe they were one up on us in the field of aerial surprises.
If it and its strange, silvery crew were from another planet or of the ‘aerial hosts’, it was just curious chance that brought them down on that side instead of our side, or in the American Zone, where camera-happy fingers are more numerous. We might then have had another close photo of a saucer on the ground to include in this book. But in Russian countries, the casual camera is a one-way ticket to Siberia, so Linke swore his daughter to silence until they had left the zone. Later he said he could convince himself that they had both imagined the whole thing but for the circular depression he later found in the grass where the conning tower had stood.
Linke, then, is the first of our race publicly to announce setting eyes on the men who pilot the most common category of flying saucer—the disk with central cabin. What has been seen in secret is a matter for later chapters. Compare the frontispiece with Linke’s story. He swears he had never heard of saucers till his escape, and had thought all along he had seen a new Russian weapon land four miles inside the Eastern Zone.
But are those four miles so important ? A secret Russian weapon could force-land by mistake four miles inside the Soviet Zone or it could force-land four miles inside the American Zone—or in America itself. And, unless apprehended and examined, could still be (a) Russian, (b) Inter-planetary. Objects of both categories could land in Allied, or in Russian, Zones. If (b) landed in Russian Zones, the Russians would be just as alarmed as ourselves, and suspect it to be part of a capitalist plot to sabotage the ‘People’s Democracy‘ just as the passengers from aerial ships landing in the ‘Charlemagne Zone’ were accused of coming to poison the springs and pollute the crops. No wonder that when the silvery men heard a human sound, they made off as fast as their saucer could carry them.
