Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (60 page)

NASA's statement in the 1978 information sheet that it was not engaged in a research programme involving UFOs, "nor is any other government agency," is demonstrably false, as is its denial of Air Force investigations.

In a leaked secret document purporting to originate with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations Force Base, DC, there appears government UFO research, led by NASA. The document is dated 17 November 1980, and includes this relevant passage:
(AFOSI) headquarters at Boiling Air an intriguing reference to clandestine

SEVERAL GOVERNMENT AGENCIES, LED BY NASA, ACTIVELY INVESTIGATE LEGITIMATE SIGHTINGS THROUGH COVERT COVER. . . . ONE SUCH COVER IS UFO REPORTING CENTER, U.S. COAST AND GEODETIC FILTERS RESULTS OF DEPARTMENTS WITH INTEREST IN THAT PARTICULAR SIGHTING. SURVEY, ROCKVILLE, MD 20852. NASA

SIGHTINGS TO APPROPRIATE MILITARY

"We have no information relative to the contents of the document," NASA told me in 1985. "Additionally, we have been informed that [it] is not an authentic AFOSI document." In this case, NASA is right. Although substantially legitimate, the document is a re-typed version containing errors, including the reference to NASA, which should be NSA—the National Security Agency.

PRESIDENT CARTER SEEKS TO
RE-OPEN INVESTIGATIONS

During his election campaign in 1976, Jimmy Carter revealed that he had seen a UFO at Leary, Georgia, in 1969, together with witnesses, prior to giving a speech at the local Lions Club. "It was the darndest thing I've ever seen," he told reporters. "It was big, it was very bright, it changed colors, and it was about the size of the moon. We watched it for ten minutes, but none of us could figure out what it was. One thing's for sure; I'll never make fun of people who say they've seen unidentified objects in the sky." Carter's sighting has been ridiculed by skeptics such as Philip Klass and Robert Sheaffer. While there appear to be legitimate grounds for disputing the date of the incident, Sheaffer's verdict that the UFO was nothing more exotic than the planet Venus is not tenable. As a graduate in nuclear physics who served as a line officer on U.S. Navy nuclear submarines, Carter would not have been fooled by anything so prosaic as Venus, and in any case he described the UFO as being about the same size as the Moon.

"If I become President," Carter vowed, "I'll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists." Although President Carter did all he could to fulfill his election pledge, he was thwarted, and it is clear that NASA had a hand in blocking his attempts to re-open investigations. When Carter's science adviser, Dr. Frank Press, wrote to NASA administrator Dr. Robert Frosch in February 1977 suggesting that NASA should become the "focal point for the UFO question," Dr. Frosch replied that although he was prepared to continue responding to public enquiries, he proposed that "NASA take no steps to establish a research activity in this area or to convene a symposium on this subject."

In a letter from Colonel Charles Senn, Chief of the Air Force Community Relations Division, to Lieutenant General Duward Crow of NASA, dated 1 September 1977, Colonel Senn made the following astonishing statement: "I sincerely hope that you are successful in preventing a reopening of UFO investigations." So it is clear that NASA (as well as the Air Force and almost certainly the CIA and National Security Agency) was anxious to ensure that the President's election pledge remained unfulfilled.

DR. JAMES MCDONALD

Dr. James McDonald, senior physicist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics and Professor in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Arizona, who committed suicide in unusual circumstances in 1971, tried unsuccessfully to persuade NASA to take on primary responsibility for UFO investigations. He reported in 1967:

Curiously, I have said this both in NASA and fairly widely reported public discussions before scientific colleagues, yet the response from NASA has been nil. . . . Even attempting to get a small group within NASA to undertake a study group approach to the available published effort seems to have generated no response. I realize, of course, that there may be semi-political considerations that make it awkward for NASA to fish in these waters at present, but if this is what is holding up serious scientific attention to the UFO problem at NASA, this is all the more reason Congress had better take a good hard look at the problem and reshuffle the deck. ... I have learned from a number of unquotable sources that the Air Force has long wished to get rid of the burden of the troublesome UFO problem and has twice tried to "poddlo" it to NASA— without success.

While McDonald recognized that there were "semi-political considerations" affecting NASA's reluctance to become publicly involved in UFO investigations, he failed to perceive that UFOs are more an intelligence problem than a scientific one. He was simply unaware of the true extent of NASA's secret involvement.

THE PIONEERS

One of the great pioneers in astronautics is Dr. Hermann Oberth, whom I had the honour of meeting in 1972. In 1955 Oberth was invited by Dr. Wernher von Braun to go to the United States where he worked on rockets with the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, and later NASA at the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center. Oberth's statements on the UFO question have always been unequivocal, and he told me that he is convinced UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin. In the following he elaborated on his hypothesis for UFO propulsion:

. . . today we cannot produce machines that fly as UFOs do. They are flying by means of artificial fields of gravity. This would explain the sudden changes of directions. . . . This hypothesis would also explain the piling up of these discs into a cylindrical or cigar-shaped mothership upon leaving the earth, because in this fashion only one field of gravity would be required for all discs.

They produce high-tension electric charges in order to push the air out of their path . . . and strong magnetic fields to influence the ionised air at higher altitudes. . . . This would explain their luminosity. . . . Secondly, it would explain the noiselessness of UFO flight. Finally, this assumption also explains the strong electrical and magnetic effects sometimes, but not always, observed in the vicinity of UFOs.

Earlier, Dr. Oberth hinted that there had been actual contact with the UFOs at a scientific level. "We cannot take credit for our record advancement in certain scientific fields alone; we have been helped," he is quoted as having said. When asked by whom, he replied: "The people of other worlds." There are persistent rumours that the U.S. has even test-flown a few advanced vehicles, based on information allegedly acquired as a result of contact with extra-terrestrials and the study of grounded UFOs.

In 1959 Dr. Wernher von Braun, another great space pioneer, made an intriguing statement, reported in Germany. Referring to the deflection from orbit of the U.S. Juno 2 rocket, he stated: "We find ourselves faced by powers which are far stronger than we had hitherto assumed, and whose base is at present unknown to us. More I cannot say at present. We are now engaged in entering into closer contact with those powers, and in six or nine months' time it may be possible to speak with more precision on the matter." [Emphasis added.]

There has been nothing further published on the matter. As Dr. Robert Sarbacher has commented, von Braun was probably involved in the recoveries of crashed UFOs in the late 1940s, and it is my opinion that he was constrained from elaborating on the subject owing to the security oath that he must have been subject to. I cannot prove this, of course, any more than I can substantiate information I have received from a reliable source that top secret contacts have been made by extraterrestrials with selected scientists in the space programme. It must be admitted, though, that von Braun's statement comes close to corroborating this. What else could he have meant when he said, "We are now engaged in entering into closer contact with those powers"? The Soviets?

NASA WITHHOLDS PHYSICAL EVIDENCE

That NASA has been engaged in UFO research behind the scenes is alone proven, to my satisfaction at least, by its shady involvement in the analysis of metal samples discovered at the site where Sergeant Lonnie Zamora encountered a landed UFO and occupants at Socorro, New Mexico, in April 1964. On 31 July 1964 Ray Stanford and some members of NICAP* visited NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center at Greenbelt, Maryland, in order to have a rock with particles of metal on it analyzed by NASA scientists. Dr. Henry Frankel, head of the Spacecraft Systems Branch, directed the analysis. The particles had apparently been scraped on to the rock by one of the UFO's landing legs. On first inspection of the rock through a microscope, Dr. Frankel declared that some of the particles "look like they may have been in a molten state when scraped onto the rock," and expressed the desire to remove them from the rock for further analysis. Stanford agreed to this, but said that he wanted to retain half of the particles for his own use.

The researchers were invited to go to lunch while NASA engineers conducted their analysis. After lunch, Stanford and the others (Richard Hall, Robert McGarey and Walter Webb), returned to the laboratory building. A NASA technician brought the rock over to the group. "As he handed it to me," said Stanford, "I was able to carefully observe it in the bright light inside the room. The whole thing had been scraped clean. Someone had gone over that rock with the equivalent of a fine-toothed comb. There was nothing, not a speck of the metal left. . . even the very few tiny particles that I had known were rather well-hidden had been removed."

When Stanford complained, the technician insisted that half of the samples were still on the rock, as promised, but seeing Stanford's disbelief hastily left the room. Dr. Frankel then returned, and after Stanford had remonstrated with him, explained what had happened. "Well, we tried to leave you

*NationalInvestigationsCommitteeonAerialPhenomena
some," he said, "but we also had to get enough to make an accurate analysis. The sample will be placed under radiation this afternoon, where it will remain the entire weekend. Monday, we will remove it for X-ray diffraction tests. That should tell us the elements it contains ... if you will call me, say on Wednesday, I should be able to tell you something very definite."

Before contacting Dr. Frankel again, Stanford and McGarey had a meeting with a U.S. Navy captain in Washington who was interested in the Socorro case. The captain told the researchers that they would never get their metal samples back from Frankel. "If that metal is in any way unusual," he said, "he will never give you any documentation to prove it . . . Those boys at Goddard know that they must report any findings as important as a strange, UFO alloy to the highest authority in NASA. Once that authority receives the news, the President will be informed, for the matter is pertinent to national security and stability. A security directive will instruct those self-appointed authorities at Goddard as to just whose hands the matter is really in. .. ."

On 5 August 1964 Ray Stanford phoned Dr. Frankel at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "I'm glad you called," the scientist said. "I have some news that I think will make you happy." He went on:

The particles are comprised of a material that could not occur naturally. Specifically, it consists predominantly of two metallic elements, and there is something that is rather exciting about the zinc-iron alloy of which we find the particles to consist: Our charts of all alloys known to be manufactured on Earth, the U.S.S.R. included, do not show any alloy of the specific combination or ratio of the two main elements involved here. This finding definitely strengthens the case that might be made for an extraterrestrial origin of the Socorro object.

Dr. Frankel added that the alloy would make "an excellent, highly malleable, and corrosive-resistant coating for a spacecraft landing gear, or for about anything where those qualities are needed." He also said that he was prepared to make a statement before a Congressional hearing to this effect, if necessary.

Frankel went on to say that further analysis would be carried out, and that Stanford should call him again the following week. On 12 August Stanford placed a call to Frankel, but was told by his secretary that he was "not available" and suggested he try contacting him the following day. On 13 August Stanford phoned again. "Dr. Frankel simply is not available today," the secretary announced. "He wonders if you might try him the first part of next week?"

On 17 August Stanford rang Frankel's office, only to be told yet again that he was not available. Ominously, the secretary added: "Dr. Frankel is unprepared, at this time, to discuss the information you are calling about." On 18 August Stanford tried again. "I'm sorry," the secretary said, "but Dr. Frankel is in a top-level security conference. I doubt that he will be able to talk with you until tomorrow or the next day."

Failing to get hold of Frankel the following day, Stanford left a telephone number with the secretary. On 20 August Thomas P. Sciacca Jr. of NASA's Spacecraft Systems Branch phoned Stanford. "I have been appointed to call you and report the official conclusion of the Socorro sample analysis," he said. "Dr. Frankel is no longer involved with the matter, so in response to your repeated enquiries, I want to tell you the results of the analysis. Everything you were told earlier by Dr. Frankel was a mistake. The sample was determined to be silica, SiO
₂
"

In 1967 Dr. Allen Hynek invited Ray Stanford to a lecture he was giving in Phoenix, and afterwards Hynek asked: "Whatever happened with the analysis at Goddard of that metallic sample from the rock you took from the Socorro site?" Both Hynek and Stanford had been closely involved in investigations at the landing site, but Stanford was puzzled as to how Hynek knew about the NASA analysis. "I was not sure where Hynek had learned of the fact that I had taken the rock which Lonnie Zamora had pointed out to both of us, and which the astronomer had ignored," he said. "I was interested to note that he specifically knew it was analyzed at Goddard. That fact had never been published."