Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (17 page)

The invisible UFO now shot ahead of them.
Then its light came on again—‘it was huge—not a small ball of fire’.
Chase increased speed again, and had almost caught up when the light went out.
The plane made a turn—at that speed taking about thirty miles to do so—and they saw the UFO again.
Again they tried to close in, and again the UFO vanished—this time, even off the scope.

They decided it was time to return to base.
Now the UFO again appeared on scope, and followed them for miles.
They finally lost it over Oke City.

Chase and his copilot were deeply impressed by its ability to vanish, then appear elsewhere, as if it had instant ‘relocation ability’.
The copilot and radar operator verified Chase’s story, and the radar operator commented, ‘Two different people were tracking on radar sets, two people were watching it visually, and I was watching it electronically .
.
.
Whenever we’d lose it, we’d all lose it.
There were no buts about it.
It went off!’

Craig’s team tracked down the original report in the Blue Book archives, and Craig toyed with a few explanations, such as an optical mirage.
But he has to admit that they all failed to fit the facts, and that this UFO seemed genuine.

In February 1968, the Condon Committee began to run into trouble when two of its members, David Saunders and Norman Levine, decided that Dr.
Condon was engaged in a kind of cover-up.
They had found an office memorandum from Robert Low, one of the project’s organisers, which seemed to demonstrate that the whole exercise was designed to pull the wool over the eyes of the public.
Low had written:

Our study would be conducted almost exclusively by nonbelievers who, although they couldn’t possibly prove a negative result, could and probably would add an impressive body of evidence that there is no reality to the observations.
The trick would be, I think, to describe the project so that, to the public, it would appear a totally objective study but, to the scientific community, would present the image of a group of nonbelievers trying their best to be objective but having an almost zero expectation of finding a saucer.

(from Craig, UFOs: In Insider’s View, 1995)

Craig had actually found this memorandum, and shown it to Levine.
And Saunders and Levine had shown the memorandum to a critic of the Condon Committee’s methods, Dr.
James McDonald, himself a ‘believer’; as a result, Saunders and Levine were fired.
They then decided to publish their own ‘rival’ report, and asked Craig to join the mutiny.
Craig declined.
He pointed out that Low’s memorandum did not represent the views of Dr.
Condon, and that, in any case, Low had never had any power to set an agenda for the committee.
Condon had agreed that
all
views would be fairly represented in the final report.

In fact, the publication of the report in January 1969 was a disaster.
John Fuller, the author of a book about a UFO ‘flap’ at Exeter, New Hampshire, in the mid-1960s, wrote a devastating article for
Look
magazine, called ‘The Flying Saucer Fiasco’, with a subtitle: ‘The Half-million Dollar Cover-up on Whether UFOs Really Exist’.
Craig still feels that all this was unfair and unjustified.
Condon was an honest man who did his best.
The unfortunate Bob Low, who had only been expressing his own sceptical view (which he had no power to impose on anyone else) became a public scapegoat, and saw his world collapse around him; he was virtually sacked.
The book itself, which according to
Newsweek
would be ‘an automatic bestseller’ was a flop.
Condon became the subject of endless cartoons—one showing him being kidnapped by little green men, while a friend shouts, ‘Tell them you don’t believe in them’.
And the name ‘Condon Report’ became a synonym for an official cover-up, a whitewash.

Craig’s book makes it very clear that this was unfair, and that everyone did his best to be honest and unbiased.
But he does admit that changes made in the introduction to his chapter on the physical evidence for UFOs, by the editor Dan Gillmor, enraged him by incorporating ‘a cynical attitude which was not mine’.

What becomes quite clear is that a project like the Condon Committee investigation was simply the wrong way to reach an unbiased conclusion on UFOs.
Most of the investigators claimed to be open-minded and unprejudiced.
But they were men like Craig—decent, hard-headed and simply disinclined to believe that UFOs were real.
And, after they had all encountered fiascos like Craig’s owl incident, they were no longer unbiased, but strongly inclined to be dismissive.

Yet Craig himself encountered at least two cases that he found convincing.
One was the B-57 incident with Colonel Chase, the other a sighting at Beverley, Massachusetts, in which three women saw a strange object, which came down right over their heads—a flat-bottomed metal disc about the size of an automobile, with glowing lights around its top.
Two policemen also saw the object, and verified this to Condon and Norman Levine.

The ‘alternative report’, by David Saunders, came out under the title
UFOs—Yes!—Where the Condon Committee Went Wrong.
Craig points out that this also contained a certain amount of nonsense—for example, mentioning the Ubatuba magnesium sample as a convincing proof of the reality of UFOs, without mentioning the laboratory analysis which showed that it was not as pure as the Lorenzens said it was.
But, from the publishing point of view, the alternative report was not a great deal more successful than the original.
It seemed the public did not want Condon in any form.
Condon died in 1974, five years after his report was published, saddened by the hostility of scientific colleagues, and baffled that his attempt to arrive at an honest conclusion about UFOs had ended in such disaster.

4

THE LABYRINTHINE PILGRIMAGE
OF JACQUES VALLEE

As I read Roy Craig’s book, it slowly became clear to me why there is such a deep reluctance to take UFOs seriously.
I think most of us are perfectly willing to concede that they may exist.
But we also feel that, whether they do or not, they are never likely to impinge on our personal lives.

Now this could well be a major error.
Ever since that early wave of sightings in 1947, their number has gone on increasing.
To begin with, UFOs were merely distant objects seen in the sky, which might or might not have been weather balloons, helicopters, or some other terrestrial object.
Cranks and imposters increased the sense of scepticism by describing how they had met the occupants of flying saucers and been taken on trips to the planets.
It all sounded like harmless lunacy.

Then the abduction reports began, and became increasingly difficult to dismiss.
And now that abduction reports run into thousands, and come from all over the world, it becomes clear that this is something we would be stupid to ignore.
This is no longer a story that cannot possibly affect the rest of us, like the Loch Ness monster or the Abominable Snowman.
This could conceivably affect the whole human race.

Of course, it
may
simply go away.
But, if past decades are anything to go by, the phenomenon will keep on demanding our attention until it finally gets it.

Craig’s section on J.
Allen Hynek underlines the point.
Craig refers to him as one of the ‘casualties’ of the Condon Report.
And, in Craig’s sense, this was undoubtedly true.
For Hynek, once the official mouthpiece of the sceptics, slowly became convinced that UFOs really exist, and that to try to ignore them or dismiss them would be dangerously short-sighted.

Hynek was a curious figure.
An astronomer and an expert on artificial satellites, he became involved in investigating UFOs in 1948, as astronomical consultant to the US Air Force.
His job was to examine reports of flying saucers, and to apply his specialist knowledge to determine how many could be dismissed as sightings of the planet Venus, lenticular clouds, reflections due to ‘temperature inversions’, and so on.
He admitted later, ‘I had joined my scientific colleagues in many a hearty guffaw at the “psychological postwar craze” for flying saucers .
.
.’.
And when he was asked to act as consultant for the air force, he saw it as a ‘golden opportunity to demonstrate to the public how the scientific method works, how the application of the impersonal and unbiased logic of the scientific method (I conveniently forgot my own bias for the moment) could be used to show that flying saucers were figments of the imagination’.

Hynek also tells a story about how, at a reception for astronomers in 1968, word spread among the guests that lights performing strange manoeuvres in the sky had been spotted.
The astronomers joked and bantered about it, but not one went outside to look.

Such indifference is, of course, by no means unusual; it is part of the human condition—as demonstrated, for example, on 21 August 1955, when Billy Ray Taylor went into the farmyard of his friend Elmer Sutton to get a drink from the well, then rushed back and told everyone that he had just seen a UFO landing in a nearby gulch.
Far from being excited, the assembled company was not even curious enough to go outside and look.
Half an hour or so later, the ‘siege of the Sutton place’ at Hopkinsville—described in the previous chapter—began.

Hynek demonstrated ‘how the scientific method works’ in March 1966, when eighty-seven female students of Hillside College, Michigan, observed a light the size of a football hovering over a swampy area; it approached the women’s dormitory, and apparently reacted to passing cars.
The next day, five people, including two policemen, saw a large glowing object over a swampy area.
Allen Hynek, now the astronomical adviser to the official study of UFOs, Project Blue Book, went along to investigate, and suggested at a conference in the Detroit Press Club that the ‘UFOs’ might be swamp gas.
(Swamp gas was
very
unlikely in March.) A howl of derision went up around the nation, and Hynek acquired a reputation as one of the ignoble instruments of an official cover-up.
One UFO writer, John Keel, even declared that Hynek had been ordered to dismiss the sightings as swamp gas, on pain of being fired by the air force.
This is almost certainly untrue.
But Hynek suddenly became the man UFO enthusiasts loved to hate—although, oddly enough, the swamp-gas incident turned him into the best-known ufologist in the United States.

Two cases helped convince Hynek that UFOs had to be genuine.
One was the extraordinary ‘Socorro incident’.
On 24 April 1964, Patrolman Lonnie Zamora, of Socorro, New Mexico, saw a flame in the sky, then saw that it was coming down in the desert.
Alarmed in case it landed on a hut containing dynamite, he drove to a hilltop in time to see a silvery object settle in the gully.
It was shaped like an egg balancing on one end, and was standing on four legs.
Two small figures—about the size of children, and wearing white overalls—were standing near it.
Zamora radioed back to his sergeant at Socorro, and drove round the hill to get a closer view; when he looked again, the craft was taking off with a thunderous noise, and vanished at a great speed.
The brush near it burnt for an hour.
Two colleagues arrived, and found four V-shaped depressions in the ground where the module had stood.

There is a kind of sequel to this story.
A year later, on 1 July 1965, a French farmer named Maurice Masse, who lived in the provincial village of Valensole, heard a whistling noise in the sky, and saw an egg-shaped craft standing on six legs, with two beings he mistook for boys standing near it.
Since vandals had recently been pulling up his lavender, he sneaked up on them—then became aware that they were not boys, whereupon he walked openly towards them.
One of them pointed a pencil-shaped object at him, and Masse found that he was paralysed.
The machine then took off.

Masse described his visitors as being less than four feet tall, with pumpkin-like heads, high fleshy cheeks, large eyes that slanted round the side of their heads, slitty mouths without lips, and pointed chins.
They were wearing close-fitting grey-green clothes.

A French investigator, Aimé Michel, went to interview Masse, and took with him a photograph of a model spacecraft that had been based on Zamora’s description.
When Masse was shown this he was thunderstruck, and went pale.
At first he thought this was his machine.
Told that this one had been seen in America, he said, ‘You see, I was not dreaming’.

As investigator for the air force, Hynek went to see Zamora, and set out to undermine his testimony by trying to get him to contradict himself.
He did not succeed, and ended totally convinced of Zamora’s honesty.
He then went to look at the site, and saw the charred plants and the marks left by the craft.
He also learnt of another witness, who had seen a ‘strange flying craft’ looking as if it was about to land, and then saw Zamora’s squad car on its way across the sandy terrain towards it.

But the case that most impressed Hynek was that of the Rev.
William Booth Gill, an Anglican priest who headed a mission in Boainai, Papua New Guinea.
At 6:45 p.m.
on 26 June 1959, he was leaving his house when he saw a huge light in the sky.
He sent a servant to fetch other people, then found a pencil and paper, and recorded his observations.
The light was close enough to see something—or someone—moving on top of it, then he thought he could see three men, ‘doing something on deck’.
A ‘thin electric blue spotlight’ was switched on.
At 7:20 the UFO vanished through the cloud cover, but an hour later, when the cloud thinned, Gill saw it again.
Then a second UFO appeared.
Finally, a third was seen over a nearby village.
Gill and numerous witnesses saw what they took to be a mother ship hovering, ‘large and stationary’.
Gill watched, on and off, until after 10:00.

The next evening the UFOs were back again.
Gill was walking with a nurse and a schoolteacher near the hospital, and the UFO came so close that the teacher was able to wave at a figure on its deck; the figure waved back.
Gill and several other people waved, and received waves in return.

Hynek learnt of the case from the British Air Ministry, who handed Hynek the report (apparently glad to get rid of it), and Gill’s notes, as well as some lengthy tapes he made.
Hynek remarks, ‘As a few excerpts from his tape show, Reverend Gill is utterly sincere.
He talks in a leisurely, scholarly way, delineating details slowly and carefully.
The manner and contents of the tapes are conducive to conviction’.

Typically, the Australian Department of Air decided to classify the UFOs as an ‘aerial phenomenon .
.
.
most probably .
.
.
reflections on a cloud’.

Hynek had earlier dismissed hundreds of sightings of UFOs as misinterpretations of astronomical objects; these sightings led him to begin stating publicly that he now saw the UFO phenomenon as ‘the greatest mystery of our age, perhaps the greatest mystery of all time’.
The air force was understandably upset by this unexpected turnabout of one of its most reliable debunkers; but Hynek was by now too well known to be silenced by threats.

For the rest of his life—Hynek died in 1986—he attempted to persuade governments and scientific bodies to take the study of UFOs seriously; to this end, he founded the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), whose purpose was to study the evidence scientifically.
But it was uphill work.
Most official bodies felt then—as they do now—that UFOs should be classified with ghosts and sea serpents, as something that could safely be ignored because it made no real difference whether they existed or not.

Yet Hynek failed to come to any ultimate conclusion about UFOs—apart from a conviction that a percentage of them are real.
He compared his task to that of Marie Curie, trying to refine tons of pitchblende to obtain a fraction of a gram of radium.

His caution exasperated his friend Jacques Vallee, another astronomer who had been preoccupied with UFOs since 1954, when he was fifteen.

In that year there had been a deluge of sightings in Europe, and Vallee had heard a railway worker describe on the radio how he had been relieving his bladder in the night air when he saw a UFO and two small robots near the railway.
Police found signs that a large machine had landed at the spot.
In the following year, Vallee saw one for himself.
His mother screamed from the garden, and Jacques rushed down three flights of stairs in time to see a grey metallic disc with a bubble on top, hovering above the church of Saint-Maclou, in Pontoise.

In 1958, Vallee came upon a book called
Mysterious Things in the Sky (Mysterieux Objets Celestes)
by an acoustical engineer named Aimé Michel.
That same day, Vallee recorded in his diary the wish that he could one day become a UFO researcher, and wrote a letter to Aimé Michel.
Two weeks later, Michel replied; but he also made the baffling comment that many UFOs simply vanished, as if they had dematerialised.
In other cases, they had changed shape instantaneously; ‘can you imagine a pyramid turning into a cube?’
It was obviously not a simple matter of visitants from another planet.

By August 1961, when he was twenty-two, Vallee had found himself a job at the artificial-satellite station of the Paris Observatory, at Meudon.
Yet he and his colleagues sometimes observed satellites that had no official existence.
One night, they tracked an exceptionally bright satellite of which there was simply no record.
Moreover, it was travelling the wrong way—in retrograde motion.
It took a far more powerful rocket launcher to boost a satellite into retrograde orbit, and no nation possessed one at the time.
Yet when he drew this to the attention of Paul Muller, head of the artificial-satellite service, Muller confiscated the tape and destroyed it.
When Vallee asked why they didn’t send the information to the Americans (meaning the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, under the Geophysical Year agreement), Muller replied, ‘The Americans would laugh at us’.

In spite of which, the satellite
was
tracked by a number of observatories all over the world.
Then it vanished.