Flying Saucer Invasion... Real or Fiction?
SUNDAY, AUGUST 6, 1967
THE LIMA NEWS, LIMA, OHIO
PAGE D—ONE
By JOHN A. KEEL
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NEW YORK (NANA) - The American public is not telling the Air Force the truth about flying saucers. At feast not the whole truth. This is one of the many things I iearned while traveling through 20 states and interviewing thousands of people who claim to have had firsthand experience with unidentified flying objects.
Only a few of these people bothered to report their sightings to the Air Force. Many have kept their mouths shut altogether, discussing the subject only with friends and neighbors who also have seen something strange in the sky.
On the evening of Wednesday, April 12, 1967, scores of people in Point Pleasant, W. Va., gathered in the fields around the home of a James Lilly family- The crowd included the Mason County sheriff and several police officers and local reporters.
At 8:45 p.m., Lilly glanced at his watch and announced, "It's about that time." The crowd tensed. Moments later a large luminous sphere with a brilliant red light on top and dazzling diamond-shaped windows, according" to the testimony of the many witnesses, came fluttering in from the north.
It passed slowly, silently, overhead at a low altitude. Once out - of sight, an experienced UFO-watcher in the crowd mumbled, "It'll be back in about an hour" and headed for the nearest bar for a warmer-upper. .
From one end of America to another, this scene was being
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EDITOR'* NOTE
Millions of Americans are convinced that Plying Saucers — or Unidentified Flying Objects — exist, and yet the government is only now beginning to spend minimal funds to find out what they are. Following is an article that attempts to make some sense out of the public sightings. John A. Keel in the past year has visited 20 centers of "Saucer activity" and has interviewed thousands of Americans who have seen the strange objects. He has written and lectured widely on the phenomena and his definitive study of UFO's, Operation Trojan Horse, will be published next year by Putnam's.
unidentifiable objects in a single evening. The policemen and reporters who were with me compared notes on what we had seen and we were able to rule out natural phenomena such as falling stars, satellites and weather balloons.
On the night -J April 6th, Mrs. Mary Hyre, a reporter for the Athens, Ohio Messenger, accompanied me to an isolated spot on the Ohio river where we observed a pale red sphere moving at tree-top level about three hundred feet from our car. I flasht * my lights at it three times and, to our surprise, the object returned the signal before shooting off into the 'night sky. —NO FAITH IN AIR FORCE—
When a large orange sphere, apparently under intelligent control, hovered over North Philadelphia, Pa., on the night of March 1st, hundreds of witnesses said that they saw four ordinary airplanes circling around "it. Yet Air Force officials maintain their stance of complete denial of these in-
repeated this spring. Despite ajcidents. And many Americans,
cases in my 1966 files and I'm sure they represent only a fraction of the total.
The almost unbelievable scope of this phenomenon has been generally underplayed by the press. While many newspapers make a valiant effort to record all new sightings in their own locale, they tend to ignore reports from other areas. Actually, similar reports come pouring in. Australia, Japan, France, and even the Soviet Union are apparently viewing these objects, and Canada, too, has shared the monumental 1966-67 "flap" with us.
-FROM '64 ON—
After a long lull of several years, UFO sightings took a sharp turn upward in 1964 and have climbed steadily ever since. Now as many as ISO sightings from credible witnesses are reported throughout the world in a single day.
A preliminary statistical analysis of the reports of 1966 indicates that, for some strange reason, over 20 per cent of all sightings are made on Wed-
Atomic Energy Research Establishment in North Berkshire, England.
—SAUCERS AROUND THE WORLD-
At 7:48 a.m. on the morning of October 1, hundreds of adults and more than 2,000 pupils from the Lycee E. Mounier at Grenoble, France,. reportedly observed a' large white disc hovering stationary in the sky for several seconds.
In Finland, a reddish flying cigar accompanied by a saucer-shaped object was reported by several witnesses the day after Christmas, 1966, near the village of Alavateli.
Behind the lron; Curtain, C z echoslovakian newspapers published letters from people who claimed to have observed a triangular-shaped object with an orange glow in its center.
The pilot of a Portuguese air liner, Captain Henrique Maya, declared that two luminous orange objects played tag with his plane over Angola, Portuguese West Africa, ^n December 7th,
Five Canadian Pacific Airlines crewmen claimed a similar experience on January 11, 1967, while flying from Lima, Peru to Mexico City, situation emerges "We tried to discredit the thing unbelievable scope from beginning to end," pilot plexiity. Not only
total lack of publicity, the amazing UFO "flap" of 1966-67 continues unabated. And it seems to be happening everywhere at once.
April 12tb was not an exceptional night for UFO-watching. March and April sightings hit an all-time high. UFOs seemed to be operating - -on regular schedules over farms, state and national parks and major highways. UFO-watching has become an eerie, new American sport.
While 'skepticism remains high in major cities where few UFOs are ever reported, the atmosphere of contempt and ridicule which formerly surrounded UFO reports in the in-terlands is now rapidly Diminishing. In many parts of the country, the appearance of "flying saucers" is said to be a routine daily occurrence.
"I've seen so many of these things," Rolfe Lee, a gentleman fanner of Gallipolis Ferry, W. Va., told me recently, "that I don't pay any attention to them any more."
In states like West Virginia California, Kansas, Nebraska and New Jersey, the number of UFOs reported actually exceeds by far the flights of man-made aircraft.
In West Virginia, in April alone, 1 personally counted three normal aircraft and 22
now so exasperated with the men who guard their skies, no longer report their sightings to the Air Force.
Colonel George P. Freeman, Pentagon spokesman for the Air Force's UFO investigating group, PROJECT BLUE BOOK, recently complained to me: "We're getting less and less cooperation from the public."
In February, PROJECT BLUE BOOK issued its annual report on the UFO situation, asserting that only 30 out of a total of 1,060 sightings reported to the Air Force in 1966 had gone unexplained. All of the others, according to BLUE BOOK'S staff of two officers, two secretaries and an enlisted man, were weather balloons, satellites, astronomical phenomena and hoaxes.
My own files of clippings, reports and personal investigations show that in the last two weeks of March 1966 alone, 93 police officers in 20 states went on record as having observed flying objects which they were unable to identify. Thousands of pilots, doctors, lawyers, school teachers and professional people, as well as just plain folks, also claimed that they saw strange lights and saucer-shaped objects in American skies last year. I have over 10,000 documented
nesdays; more than on any other day of the week. This trend seems to be continuing.
On Wednesday, March 8,1967, the sheriff of Chase County, Kansas, and several of his deputies reported watching a glaring white light hovering over Hesston, Kansas. Scores of people in Towanda, Kansas, also reported seeing an object flashing red, white and blue lights as it apparently descended near the town's reservoir that same night. Dozens of other reports came in from Massachusetts to Oregon on that day.
A recent Gallup Poll indicated that five million Americans now claim to have seen UFOs. That's a lot of witnesses, and a lot of objects. Despite all of these alleged observations, the Air Force files contain a meager total of 11,108 cases covering the last twenty years. Simple mathematics tells us that a lot of people are keeping their sightings to themselves.
A greenish globe whizzed across Hong Kong on the morning of November 8, 1966, according to Mrs. A i r e n e Johnson, and apparently headed inland to baffle the Chinese Communist Air Force-Two days later, on November 10th. a strange "flying octopus" maneuvered o^er the Harwell
Captain Robert Millbank said, "but it couldn't be anything we could think of."
Today nearly every country in the world has one or more clubs of UFO buffs. Some, like Japan, have elaborate magazines devoted to the subject. Germany has a weekly newspaper, UFO HACNRICH-TEN.
In South America, always a hot-bed of UFO reports, there are many 'flying saucer' clubs and UFO publications. Great Britain is the home of the most impressive of all the journals, the scholarly FLYING SAUCER REVIEW. Published in London, this sober magazine is filled with articles by famous scientists, astronomers, historians, and men who have earned the title "Ufologist."
—HISTORY AND UFO'S-
If the United States cannot claim a monopoly on the current apparent activities of the UFOs, neither can it claim any historical precedence.
Sweden has suffered a rash of sightings for half a century. In 1910, the Swedish government established the first official UFO investigating agency-Australia had the first of a long series of visitations by unidentifiable lights and objects in the skies in 1909. South Africa broke out in a UFO-sighting frenzy in 1914. England has had a long line of such incidents since the 1830s.
Historical records in India go back 5,000 years and scholars have unearthed descriptions of aerial objects almost identical to those being reported today. They are allegedly still seeing flying saucers in modern India.
A rash of UFO sightings in Brazil after the Second World War found LIFE magazine suggesting that there might be a flying saucer "base" somewhere in the inland jungles.
A section in northern Argentina is popularly called "UFO Alley" because of the constant sightings and landing reports. And one of the first of the celebrated 'Tittle men" stories came out of Venezuela in 1914. When all this is totaled, a
saucer seem to be referred to historically from the Bible to ancient legends of the American, Indians, but they seem to be present over every part of the world. There have even been frequent and well-substantiated reports from scientists living at both ends of the Poles.
—WHERE'S THE ANSWER?— It is only in the past 20 years that we have begun to really take notice of UFOs. Even more remarkable in the past 20 years we have made no genuine, all-out attempt to study their possible existence and to determine their exact nature.
The American taxpayer is involuntarily paying for projects ranging from studies of cactus needles to attempts to communicate with porpoises. But when a taxpayer turns to the government to find out what that thing was that landed in his backyard and left scorch marks in his crab grass, be discovers that there is not' a single "UFO expert," on a payroll heavy with "experts."
In 1965, when UFOs appeared throughout Mexico, TV stations wheeled their cameras onto the streets and did live broadcasts of the event.
Still, we don't know what all of these millions of people have been watching. Are these the same things that the cave men of China saw and painted on their cave walls 45,000 years ago? Are they the same mysterious aerial vehicles described by the Piute Indians? Not only have unidentified flying objects been consistently reported for many years, hut the witnesses have described an almost infinite variety o f shapes and sizes.
The only attempt , at an organized scientific study of this mystery was made by the staff of Ohio Northern University, Ada, in 1952. They carefully studied 54 of the "unexplained" reports of that year, and in their PROJECT "A" summary, revealed "the shape indicated by 39 persons was that of a disc, nine indicated a sphere, three a cylinder, and three other shapes." This led them to conclude that "the shape of the phenomena is that of a disc"
In 1955, sometime before it clamped down completely on UFO information, the U.S. Air Force released a long and comprehensive summary of the "flying saucer" situation in their^ PROJECT BLUE BOOK REPORT NO. 14.
In that document the Air Force stated, "Out of the 434 object sightings that were identified as unknowns, there were only 12 that were described with sufficient detail that ihey could be used in an attempt to derive a model of a 'Dying saucer.' "
Those 12 cases included detailed ■ drawings of objects shaped like boomerangs, rockets, World War I helmets, bottle caps and footballs with portholes. Here we have an official admission that by 1955 there were already 43 4 Unknowns" yet in PROJECT BLUE BOOK'S 1967 summary they claim a total of only 676 unknowns for the entire 20 year period, 1947-67.
There wrere actually more than 10,000 published UFO
BOUNCING BALL? — A New Mexico State University student took this photo of what he says is an Unidentified Flying Object, while he was photographing land formations for a geology class
of almost or pass low overhead reported and com- a variety of accompanying do flying sounds.
Such witnesses said the UFOs made a bussing or whirring sound. Others insisted they heard "popping" noises and hissing sounds. One -group of witnesses in Finland testified that the flying cigar which they observed made a noise "like that of heavy rain on a metal roof." •
One chilling fact becomes painfully clear if you accept these many thousands of reports, most of which, come from seemingly honest and sincere people who strongly feel they have seen something, and that is: there seems to be a great many UFOs in our atmosphere, and they are definitely engaged in some unknown activity which is important to them. It should be equally important to us.
On March 30, 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara "categorically denied" flying saucers exist and said all of the thousands of alleged UFO photographs were "only illusions."
The first photograph of an unidentified flying object was
near Crices last March 12. The picture was taken with a 4 x 5 press camera. The student said the object made no noise and disappeared as he looked down to change camera plates. (UPI Telephoto)
"doughnut shaped" machines appeared over Puget Sound outside of Tacoma, Washington, spewing great quantities of a slag-like metal. When analyzed, this metal was found to be an alloy consisting of calcium, aluminum, silicon, iron, zinc and other rather ordinary elements.
This' "slag" has turned up many times since, however, in places like New Hampshire, Indiana, and Michigan, following UFO sightings.
When a wildly-gyrating metal disc allegedly appeared over the city of Campinas, Brazil, on December 14, 1954, hundreds of witnesses reported it dribbled a stream of "silvery liquid" which spattered in the streets and was collected by government scientists. Later, Dr. Risvaldo Meffei analyzed the substance and announced that it was almost pure tin.
The egg-shaped object which police officer Lonnie Zamorra said landed outside of Socorro, N. M., on April 24, 1964, left behind it a metal-like material on some rocks. It proved to be silicon, although the U.S. Air Force persists in calling it "silica," which is common
nurse, were riding in a Red Cross Bloodmobile along Route 2 in the Ohio Valley.
Suddenly, according to their story, a bright glare fell over . the night-shrounded road. : Looking out of his window on the driver's side, Shertzer was astounded to see a huge luminous machine hovering directly overhead and keeping pace with his vehicle.
Two long arm-like projections seemed to come down from the object, one on either side of the Bloodmobile, he said later. The nurse became hysterical as Shertzer stepped on the gas, certain that the object was trying to pick up his truck.
Fortunately, for the horrified pair, another truck appeared from the other direction and its approaching headlights seemed to scare the "thing" away.
Today Beau Shertzer refuses to drive along Route 2, even in the daytime.
On Route 55, outside of HiUsboro, Kansas, an object shaped "like an upside-down cup on a saucer" reportedly hovered over Mary Beth Neufeld's new car, causing the engine to stall and making the
SAUCERpOR SPACESHIP?
unusual shaped flying object was photographed by Gabriel Kozora near New Castle, Pa., while he was taking pictures of his nine-year-old son
taken by an astronomer named sand. Bonilla in 1883.
He had been observing the sun from his observatory of Zacatecas, Mexico, when he was startled by the sudden appearance of a long parade of circular objects, 143 of them, he said later, which slowly flitted across the solar disk. His film revealed a series of cigar-shaped and spindle-shaped objects which were apparently solid and non-celestiaL
Since those pictures were first published in the French journal, L'Astronomie, hundreds of others have been taken. Some were patent hoaxes, rigged by teen-agers and crackpots, but many have been snapped by pilots, sheriffs, city and county officials and professional people who had nothing to gain and who risked ridicule and harassment by revealing photos they had made.
Unhappily, UFO photo experts such as Mr. Ralph Rankow of Xew York City, concede that even the most authenticated pictures prove little beyond the fact that there was "something" in the sky when they were taken. —SAUCER DROPPINGS
Hard core UFO buffs, most of whom believe that the flying saucers come from some other planet, have busily collected another kind of "evidence" over the past 20 years: physical substances which witnesses
reports *s jS66 (and who knows jclaim were either dropped from how many sightings wentiumdenlified flying objects or
OUT OF THIS WORLD? — ZanesviUe barber Kalph Ditter took this photograph of what he described as an object from a different solar system than our own. Ditter, an amateur
astronomer, shot the picture with a Polaroid camera using an exposure of 1-125 of a second, atf-16.
{UPI Telephoto)
unreported? X the majority of which described the objects as moving in total silence. However, people who claimed that they saw the objects land,
which were found on sites where they say flying saucers have landed.
On June 21, 1947, a group of witnesses reported six
Silicon, a plastic, has been found at landing sites in New York State (Cherry Creek, 1965) and Pennsylvania. A triangular-shaped object which reportedly ianded on a beach outside of Erie, Pa., in 1966. left behind three wet spots which local chemists analyzed as silicon and which dried to a flexible, plastic-like material.
Another exploding UFO, this one in Ubaluba, Brazil, in 1957, left behind particles which were nothing but pure magnesium. And great quantities of tiny strips of aluminum, with traces of magnesium and silicon, are being found all over tbe world.
Thousands of people in Choisi City, Chiba, Japan, reported seeing a circular flying object eject a flood of these shreds above their city on September 1356. Piies of it have been found m West Virginia, Pennsylvania. Michigan, and many other places during UFO flaps.
It bears no apparent relationship to aluminum '"rope,"" deployed by U.S. Air Force planes to interfere with radar signals.
Jimmy. Kozora said the object, about 60-feet long, hovered overhead for 15 seconds before scooting away into the northwest.
(UPI Telephoto)
car "rock real bad."
Another family, the Russell Carters of Pierre, * South Dakota, told of an even more frightening experience on the evening of March 5th, when a brilliant V-shaped light came out of the sky and flew directly over their car.
The family, two adults and three children, all testified that they felt a partial numbness as the mysterious object illuminated the road. They also reported hearing a humming sound while the thing was over them.
—POWER FAILURES—
Hair-raising stories like this now appear constantly in local newspapers from coast-to-coast, but rarely ever make the wire services. Nor do we hear much about the continuing rash of power failures which occur with alarming regularity when UFOs dip down for their low-level flights.
Somebody turned out tbe lights in ShelbyviHe, K y,, January 33th, for 25 minutes while alarmed citizens were trying to call the police to report a bluish cone-shaped object bounding around their
homes at an altitude of 300
feet When the UFO's aren't being
blamed for power failures, they prove that the flying saucers] are supposed to be fooling may be made of ordinary 'around reservoirs. According to eaTthly materials, although itiinnumberable reports, they are
Altogether, none of these incidents or substances seem to uphold tbe popular extra-terrestrial thesis. If anything, they
is reasonable to assume that tbe same elements are probably present throughout our solar system and, perhaps, throughout the universe. —NIGHTS OF HORROR— One rainy night in earfy March, Beau Shertzer of Htra-tmgton, W. Va^ and a young'
frequent visitors to the Sanaque Reservoir in N. J., New York's Croton Reservoir and the complex of reservoirs in southern ConnectJcoL
On Long Island, many witnesses have reported seeing
<See INVASION, Page D-2)
PAGE D—TWO
THE LIMA NEWS, LIMA, OHIO
SUNDAY, AUCUST 6, 1«W7
Invasion
Frost Page D-l)
strange flying objtcti hovering over telephone micro-relay stations, and one circular machine if said to care dropped down near a micro-relay station outfide of Camden, N.J., last October and lowered a double-pronged device which "sniffed around the ground."
Many people living is "flip' areas now complain of strange noises, or even of voices chattering in some unidentifiable foreign language on , t h e i r telephones. Phones have also been reported going dead while UFOs were allegedly being observed in the vicinity. —HOSTILE INTENT?— Most otologists are now completely convinced the great eastern power blackout of IMS was directly caused by flying saucers.
Phones continued to function during that power failure! L. J. Lorenzen, the electronic engineer who heads the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) in Tucson. Ariz., points out.
He and many others have predicted the U.S. will suffer a missive .telephone blackout sometime this year. Such blackouts have already been occurring on a small scale.
Seventy-five per cent of ail long distance service Northern Ohio was disrupted for several hours on April 27th, apparently due to an unexplained fire in the basement housing long distance equipment.
Throughout the past 20 years, flying saucers have frequently been reported over military installations and secret experimental sites. Oak Ridge, Temi.,' home of the atomic bomb, has a long history of sightings, as has the Banford Atomic Energy installation in Washington, but saucers have also been sighted regularly over ancient Indian mounds.
Dr. Olavo LTontes, Brazil's leading ufologist, believes he has found q'gng of future hostile intent in the reported UFO activity in his country. AFRO' Lorenzen grimly agrees with him. On the. other, band, the U.S.- Air Force -has annually declared .Hat, "ho unidentified flying object reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security." : LITTLE GREEN MEN? IPatrolinen Charles Hutehins and;;A-„G.' Huskey are, both pretty: soM. cltizons. in.G-atfiiey SIC.- H they^ferr'tfefijl- the judge that you were' speeding, he would be most apt to believe them.
• But a little green man in a flying saucer? : These two sober, hard-working officers claim that at 4:45 i-m., on November 17, 1966, they saw a "spaceship" land off the West Buford St extension in. Gaffney and a four foot-tall man with, a greenish complexion, wearing a gold-colored space suit, got out and exchanged a. few words with them- in stilted Knglwh \ "He told us bell be back in two days" Hutehins reported.
"Of course, we don't know how long his days are."
This is only the latest In the long line of "little green men" stories that have been popping up over the years. There are now hundreds of them. Too many, say most ufologlats, to discount them.
Another police officer, Verne Morse, SO, on the California Highway Patrol for 20 years, insists be and several other people got a glimpse of a UFO occupant, albeit not a little green one, at 11 p.m., December 3, loss.
They saw what they described as a "glowing cylindrical object about three feet in diameter and eight or nine feet long" passing over San Carlos, California, at an altitude of about two-hundred feet.
It looked like a flying platform" Morse said, "with somebody wearing a helmet standing up inside it."
He tried to follow the thing
in his car, but as the object
maneuvered overhead both his
and car radio went
dead, he reported.
An hour later, Donald Bennett, supervisor of the control tower at the San Francisco Airport (about ten miles from Morse's position) reported observing three red-grange glowing objects. "I could not make out any shape," Bennett told reporters, "but they were definitely not aircraft." —GIANTS AND MONSTERS—
During the UFO outbreak of 1965-67, there have been hundreds, of new reports of cupant sightings. Most of these are handled gingerly by the press and are carefully investigated by civilian ufologists. There have been more than
500 such reports since" 1947, all of which fall into four general categories: '
1. "Little Men," reported in every country, including the Soviet Union and Africa. Generally, tiey are-described as wearing "space suits." Only a handfsi of witnesses, however, have said they were
". Most often they are described as either very pale or having a "rich sun-tan."
2. Medium - sized "pilots." These are described as being normal - sized, human-shaped, with pointed chins, narrow, oriental-like eyes, and dark skin. They are supposed to be dressed in a coverall-type of garment, either black, brown or green.
Giants. These characters allegedly stand-sevenforj eight-feet-tall,- have Ug^-round- eyes and egg-shaped heads. They are said to wear coveralls or rather absurd shorts and sa Reports of this type have come of South America continuously since 1947.
4. Monsters. We've got all types of monsters, ranging from four-foot-tall shapeless blobs to hairy giants 15-feet-bigh and seven-foot winged creatures with blazing red eyes. More than 100 witnesses neve not reported seeing these winged "Moth Men" in West Virginia since last-November.
Like everything else about the UFO mystery, these."occupant" sightings are endlessly varied and full of contradictions. One of the few consistencies is the facial descriptions, no matter what size the "pilot" is supposed to be.
Most witnesses seem to agree these "people" have tnin, lipless mouths, small noses, ItUe or no facial hair and the eyes are either bulging and froglike or long and narrow.
Since these "occupant'
sightings usually receive very little publicity, it is quite remarkable that so many.people in so many different parts of the world could come up with identical details.
-contact cases increase-Now there is a growing epidemic of "contact cases" ii which people claim to have actually talked with the UFO occupants.
Where once ufologists tossed such stories into their crackpot" file, they, are now studying them seriously.
'Contactee" stories can be traced all the way back to 1897, following in the wake of the "Mysterious Air Ship" ai| of that year. One witness, Judge Lawreace A. Byrne of Texarkana, Arkansas, was quoted in newspapers of the period as having encountered a grounded "airship" bayou in April, 1897.
He said the object seemed to be made of aluminum and that it was manned by three people who spoke a foreign language. Because of their small stature, oriental features and' strange language he assumed that they were Japanese.
Seventy years of repeated reports of contacts with occupants of UFOs have failed to produce any real evidence they come from another planet, eves though that seems to be the most plausible explanation. But if the flying saucers and their occupants are not from outer space, and they do exist, where then do tbey come from? And if they are earth-based, where do tbey take off from. What are tbey? Where are their vehicles rnanufactured?
Over and over again during my travels the past year, people who have claimed to have seen flying saucers have whispered to me, "I think mase firings arc something the government is putting up ; That's why they're so hush-hush about it"
14. Colonel George F Freeman, the Air Force's Pentagon spokesman, emphatically denied this in April
"Hearty nil experimental craft now being tested," he told me, "are high speed, high
altitude machines. While we have experimented with disc-shaped designs in the past, they proved to be unstable' and tin-airworthy. In any case, secret experimental air-craft are not test - flown over people's backyards, but are usually tried out in remote desert areas/ —EXPERIENCE VS. OBJECTIVITY—
I'm afraid I can't be too objective about all of this, for I've seen' many of these unknown aerial "things" with my own eyes during my wanderings to UFO hot-spots. And I have talked with thousands of people from all walks of life who say tbey have shared my experiences.
Angry bulls have chased me across pastures in the middle of the night I have climbed many a fence only to discover, too late, that it was electrified, in my pursuit of saucers.
I have spent hours arguing with famous scientists and hours trying to comfort and aid policemen and sheriffs who were at a loss with how to cope with what seemed to be happening in their communities- I've met a lot of frightened, concerned and quite wonderful Americans.
It has been the most rewarding adventure of my life, and the most frustrating. —MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS—
The late Captain Edward Ruppelt, who headed the Aurora's PROJECT BLUE BOOK in the early 1930's, later wrote: ". . . with the help of the best brains in the country, we worked on a giant jigsaw of a puzzle that was either utterly meaningless or would rock the world.
'For every piece that we fitted into place, we found two more had been added to the puzzle's pile. I finally found myself soberly inspect) piece of cow manure to learn if it had come from outer space."
Are the flying saucers real? If so, do they come from some other planet? The Nation*] Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), a dub of dvuian UFO hooters in Washington, D. C, believes
that is the only answer.
Major Donald E. Keyhoe, director of NICAP; has' long asserted the Earth has been under constant surveilance for almost two-hundred years. NICAP, however, has carefally. ignored the reports of UFO contacts, stressing the belief flying saucers are merely remote controlled devices, space probes from another world.
On the other hand, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) of Tucson, Arizona, has deliberately collected and studied the landing-stories and ed for -patterns which might offer some answers..
Endlessly recording the descriptions of frying saucers, their speed, size and attitude, is a ticket to no-wbere, APRO realizes. It is like carefully charting every appearance of a Volkswagen on our highway! with the hopes of one day determining the location of Germany and the nature of the German People from such data.
But help may be on the way atlast
A handful of scientist* at Colorado University have now; been given an Air Force grant of 1300,000 to perform a bask, 15-month study of UFOs.
They are carefully reviewing aB of the major sightings of the past 20 years, and staff members have been investigating new incidents as tbey occur. Despite these sincere efforts, many USO buffs regard the project as a government "stall."
'It seems unlikely the project has either enough time or enough funds to obtain any final x," MCATs newsletter, the UFO INVESTIGATOR, recently observed.
"However, the fact (bis is the first organized scientific attempt to getter meaninj data about UFOs is sufficient reason by itself to applaud the effort As a pilot study, toe program is u-Juable."
Even the United Nations it now quietly concerned about the subject and is collecting data in an undercover investigation of its own.1 Secretary General TJ Tbant has! taken a personal interest in the mystery and the UN's "Outer Space Committee" is busily compiling reports behind a screen of silence.
Meanwhile, there are thousands of UFO buffs all ova the world who continue to collect clips, reports, taped interviews with UFO witnesses and fragments of strange aerial debris^
And with each new bit ol information, with each report of a new sighting, the disbelievers scoff and the buffs grow in number. But. neither the scoffers nor the buffs provide an answer to the question: Do UFOs exist? -
If UFOs are eventually prov-ven to be figments of very inventive imaginations, then you have your answer. But if at some time concrete evidence proves that tbey do exist, where do we go from there?
Down the same paths we are traveling now, probably, groping for a few answers among a myriad of questions.