THE CASE FOR FLYING SAUCERS AND THEIR CREWS
BEING AN EXAMINATION OF THE QUESTIONS: WHERE DO UFOs COME FROM? WHAT DO UFOs LOOK LIKE? WHO IS INSIDE THE UFOs?
The majority of those who have sighted flying saucers have reported eight basic shapes—domed, disks, cigar-shaped saucers, half-globes, fireballs, flat disks, and more unusual Saturn and gyroscope-shaped objects.
The very number and variety of UFOs has seemed an almost a priori proof of their origin being close to earth; that is, within the Milky Way Galaxy. Many scientists have seriously begun to look to earth’s own moon as a source of flying saucers—not, of course, as a point of origin, but rather as a stop-over base for aliens from another system.
As early as 1930, two French astronomers reported a number of domes on the moon’s craggy surface. Their immediately skeptical colleagues attempted to explain the domes as volcanoes, but then it was noted that the “volcanoes” were moving from place to place.
On November 22, 1966, a photograph of the moon taken by the Boeing Lunar Orbiter 2 showed strange spires which had never been seen before. A National Aeronautics and Space Administration spokesman said that the 750-by-550 feet area photographed by Lunar 2 had six protuberances, the largest of which was estimated at between 40 and 75 feet high and about 50 feet wide at its base.
A scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said that one of the spires “looks like the George Washington Monument. Some of the smaller ones look like upside-down ice cream cones. There are small white dots which cast rather lengthy shadows… They appear almost like an antenna array.”
On January 13, 1967, 33 new pictures from Lunar 2 were released in Washington. One photo, which covers an area of thousands of square miles, shows a remarkable array of domes which appear to be 1000 to 1500 feet high and two to ten miles in diameter.
Such domes and antenna would seem to indicate the presence of intelligent life at work on the surface of the moon. While U.S. astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts have been competing with one another to see who will be first to plant a flag on the moon, it may be that an alien species has already claimed earth’s moon for development.
“It is pure ignorance to assume that earth is the only inhabited planet in the universe,” Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith, aeronautical historian for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, said in May, 1966. “Certainly there are other civilizations, perhaps thousands of times older and wiser. And I believe intelligent beings from those civilizations are visiting us in spacecrafts—and have been for years…” It is only
natural fear and human arrogance that make some authorities say saucers don’t exist.”
Air Chief Marshall Lord Dowding, who headed the Royal Air Force during World War II, has said: “Of course, the flying saucers are real—and they are interplanetary.”
Albert M. Chop, deputy public relations director for NASA, has written: “I’ve been convinced for a long time that the flying saucers are interplanetary. We are being watched by beings from outer space.”
Dr. Herman Oberth, the grand old man of German rocketry, has long been outspoken in his opinion that flying saucers “come from distant worlds.”
On February 1, 1967, the editorial page of the Huntsville, Alabama, Times printed an interview with Oberth, a former resident of NASA’s “Rocket City.” From his retirement home near Nuremberg, Germany, the rocket pioneer continues to insist that science should pay attention to the countless observations of UFOs.
“Science should regard anything as possible so long as it cannot be proven impossible by facts based on observations,” said Dr. Oberth. “Each explanation should be considered valid as a working hypothesis until observations are presented to contradict it.
“According to the information available to me, there exist more than 70,000 eyewitness reports of UFOs. British Air Marshall Lord Dowding says there are more than 100,000 eyewitness reports… Eleven per cent of these reports cannot be easily explained. They should not be lies or hoaxes because they involve responsible senior Air Force officers, or radar readings, or photographs from responsible sources.
“Their [the UFOs’] speed can be enormous. Radar measurements have shown up to 11.8 miles per second, more than 42,000 miles per hour!”
Dr. Oberth is used to taking an unpopular stand with the appointed guardians of the scientific establishment. Forty years ago his manuscript By Rocket To Interplanetary Space was rejected as being too fantastic. A contemporary expert commented that the time had not yet come for delving into such problems and “indeed probably never will come.” Today Dr. Oberth can regard a picture of the awesome Saturn 5 rocket with a smile. The time for delving into such problems came much sooner than his less imaginative scientific opponents had dreamed.
Dr. Oberth works on the hypothesis that the UFOs are intelligently controlled machines.
“A) They are not built by human beings… today we cannot produce machines that fly as UFOs do.
“B) They are flying by means of artificial fields of gravity. This would explain the sudden changes of directions… This hypothesis also would explain the piling up of these disks into a cylindrical or cigar-shaped mother ship upon leaving the earth, because in this fashion only one field of gravity would be required for all disks.
“C) They produce high-tension electric charges in order to push the air out of their path… and strong magnetic fields to influence the ionized air at higher altitudes… This would explain their luminosity. Even the poles of our electric influence or induction machines glow in the dark. Secondly, it would explain the noiselessness of UFO flights… Finally, this assumption also explains the strong electrical and magnetic effects sometimes… observed in the vicinity of UFOs.”
In 1955, Colonel Gernod Darnbyl of the Norwegian Air Force released information that a UFO had crashed near Spitzbergen, Norway.
“It has—this we wish to state emphatically—not been built by any country on this earth,” Colonel Darnbyl said. “The materials used in its construction are completely unknown to all experts who participated in the investigation.”
The Colonel promised a complete report as soon as “some sensational facts have been discussed with US and British experts.”
We should reveal what we have found out, as misplaced secrecy might lead to panic!”
What Colonel Darnbyl did not know was that British and American Air Force experts had, in the early ’50s, adopted a policy of silence and ridicule toward UFO reports. No report on the analysis of the downed UFO was ever issued. Ufologists have charged that the Norwegians were silenced by threats of economic pressures.
James McDonald, senior physicist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics and professor of meteorology at the University of Arizona, has accused the Air Force of systematically debunking flying saucers at the request of the CIA. Dr. McDonald says the CIA asked for this policy of ridicule and secrecy because of the large wave of UFO reports in 1952. The astrophysicist no longer believes that the CIA actively restrains the flow of UFO information, but he maintains that the 1952 policy still has an effect on Air Force methods of investigation. McDonald has given his enthusiastic endorsement to the new study of UFOs to be conducted at the University of Colorado under the direction of Dr. E. U. Condon.
Dr. McDonald has suggested these hypotheses for explaining the flying saucers:
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Hoaxes, fabrications, frauds.
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Hallucinations, mass hysteria, rumor.
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Misinterpretations of well-known physical phenomena.
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Advanced technologies (test vehicles, satellites, and re-entry effects).
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Poorly understood physical phenomena (atmospheric-electrical effects, cloud phenomena, plasmas of natural or technological origin).
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Poorly understood psychic phenomena (psychic projections, images, etc.).
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Messengers of salvation and occult truth.
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Extraterrestrial probes.
Recognizing that the first seven of these hypotheses may have accounted for a substantial number of alleged flying saucer sightings, Dr. McDonald nevertheless concludes that about half of the UFO reports in the last 20 years are the result of category 8, “Extraterrestrial probes.”
“The evidence of UFOs is there,” says Dr. McDonald, “and this is an argument by elimination for the least unsatisfactory solution. There is strong evidence that these objects are extraterrestrial vehicles. And scientists all over the world had better stop accepting the ridiculous Air Force reports and start investigating the problem themselves at once. The matter is urgent. There are certain patterns that suggest that they [the UFOs] are engaged in something of the nature of reconnaissance. I regard this as the number one problem before science. It’s a problem demanding truly international investigation.”
If a scientific consensus has been reached that we are not alone in the universe, what might we expect the crew of a flying saucer to look like?
Antonio Villas Boas, the young Brazilian farmer who claimed to have been kidnapped for purposes of interstellar sexual experimentation, described both his abductors and his partner as being just over five feet in height, with eyes that slanted outward, straight noses, high cheekbones, nearly lipless mouths, and sharply pointed chins.
This description is remarkably close to that given by Betty and Barney Hill, the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, couple whose experiences aboard a flying saucer on September 19, 1961, were brought to light after a series of hypnoanalysis sessions by Boston psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon.
On August 13, 1965, Ellen and Laura Ryerson of Renton, Washington, claimed that three alien beings approached them while they were working in a bean field. They described the creatures as having white-domed heads, protruding eyes, and standing about five-feet-two inches tall.
French farmer Maurice Masse said that the two aliens that rendered him immobile while they studied his lavendar plants on July 1, 1965, were about the size of eight-year-old children with large heads and lipless mouths.
According to the rules for biological construction, which may or may not apply in another galactic evolutionary process, it would seem that the strangers from the skies would look very much like our own species. Aside from a few stories, which may have become exaggerated by fear or purposely distorted by alien suggestion, all those witnesses who have claimed to have seen UFO occupants describe humanoid creatures.
The basic rules of biological construction would seem to rule out three-eyed monsters, for instance, because two eyes combine to form a proper three-dimensional perception and a third eye would only confuse the message reaching the brain. A spaceman must have arms in order to gather materials with which to construct his spaceship. He would have to weigh at least 40 pounds in order to support a two-pound brain necessary for high mental capacity.
By earth science standards, the UFOs and their crews do some incredible things. The typical flying saucer hovers in the sky with no visible means of support, then shoots away without any apparent build-up, like a bullet shot from a gun. Flying saucers stop, start again, slow down to speeds lower than those of conventional aircraft, then accelerate to such speeds that it would seem that their crews would be mashed to a pulp and the vehicles themselves would be charred to a cinder by atmospheric friction.
It is obvious that the Newtonian laws which, combined with Einstein’s concepts, are the basis for much of our scientific world view, either have little bearing on the flying saucers or else the extraterrestrials have learned to surmount certain physical laws—if, indeed, there truly are any laws.
It must also be re-emphasized that there are many shapes or kinds of flying saucers. Whether the difference in shapes indicates many different models from the same planetary source or indicates that several different alien cultures are sending probes and expeditions to earth can be debated at great length.
It would seem, however, that the only real question worth debating is that of the flying saucers’ purpose in reconnoitering our planet.
Some researchers feel that UFOs have become almost permanent fixtures because they have been seen intermittently for many centuries. That we have so suddenly become aware of their presence may be due in part to increased saucer activity, but, certain researchers feel, it is more likely the result of homo sapiens’ own slow evolution into intellectual maturity.
These same Ufologists reason that if flying saucers have been here since the dawn of civilization (see “Flying Saucers In Ancient Times” in the Award Books paperback, Strangers From The Skies) and have yet to do definitely attributable harm, we need not get excited now. If we have not been seriously molested in 2000 centuries, why should we begin to fret about our physical welfare at this late date?
Yet even these determined optimists have difficulty discouraging the feelings of unease that come with a consideration that the recent great surge of activity on the part of the flying saucers may be in preparation for something bigger.
It is a human failing to judge others by oneself. Perhaps the alien space crews mean us no harm and, other than violating our law of trespass, will not injure us in any really large scale way.
But to judge the UFOs in an admittedly barbaric earth fashion, it would seem that one does not spend several light years traveling through space just for a ride and a look at the scenery.