Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (35 page)

“Well, they just don’t know who they’re dealing with....And as far as this is concerned, I intend to continue the fight....because, you see, I love my country. And I think my country is in danger.”

Help Me Decide

“And, now, finally, I know that you wonder whether or not I am going to stay on the Republican ticket or resign. Let me say this: I don’t believe that I ought to quit because I’m not a quitter. And, incidentally, Pat’s not a quitter. After all, her name was Patricia Ryan and she was born on St. Patrick’s Day, and you know the Irish never quit.

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“But the decision, my friends, is not mine....I am submitting to the Republican National Committee tonight through this television broadcast, the decision which it is theirs to make.

“Let them decide whether my position on the ticket will help or hurt. And I am going to ask you to help them decide. Wire and write the Republican National Committee whether you think I should stay on or whether I should get off. And whatever their decision is, I will abide by it.

“But just let me say this last word. Regardless of what happens I’m going to continue this fight. I’m going to campaign up and down America until we drive the crooks and the Communists and those that defend them out of Washington. And remember, folks, Eisenhower is a great man. Believe me. He’s a great man. And a vote for Eisenhower is a vote for what’s good for America.”

THE REACTION

When the speech was over, Nixon was depressed—he was sure his political career was over. “I loused it up and I’m sorry,” he told his aides. “It was a flop.”

But when he arrived at his hotel, the phones were going crazy with pro-Nixon calls. Telegrams supporting him poured into Republican headquarters all over the country. Ike wired Nixon: “Your presentation was magnificent.” Even movie mogul Darryl F. Zannuck (who knew good acting when he saw it) called to tell Nixon, “It was the most tremendous performance I’ve ever seen.” Hundreds of thousands of cards and telegrams were received; Nixon flew to Wheeling, West Virginia, to meet Ike and officially rejoin the ticket. Eisenhower rushed to Nixon’s plane, and the VP candidate burst into tears, “the most poignant photo of the campaign.”

The success of the speech, says one historian, “sent the Republican campaign soaring, establishing Nixon as a national figure and the best-known, largest-crowd-drawing vice presidential candidate in history.” Nixon’s career was saved, making his election to the presidency—and Watergate—possible two decades later.

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Some people who claim to have seen UFOs seem completely off their rockers. Others seem more credible. Here are five real-life “sightings.” Did they really see UFOs...or are they just making it up? You decide.

T
he Place:
Gulf Breeze, Florida, November 1987

The Sighting:
“Four-foot-tall gray aliens who sometimes speak Spanish.”

Background:
Ed Walters (a Gulf Breeze developer) and his wife, Frances (president of the local PTA), claim to have had repeated encounters with the Spanish-speaking space aliens over several months in 1987. In March 1990, the couple wrote a book,
The Gulf Breeze Sightings
, that chronicles their experiences.

The Place:
Greece, 1979

The Sighting:
Space aliens that “looked like fetuses wearing wrap-around sunglasses.”

Background:
Joseph Ostrom, an advertising executive, was honeymooning with his wife in Greece. One evening, he says, their hotel room “filled with an orangish-red light,” and a large alien (wearing a silver suit) led him to the roof of the hotel. His wife stayed behind. Suddenly, a turquoise ray-beam pulled him into the space ship that was hovering overhead. The aliens on the ship examined him, but he didn’t mind. “When they did their exam, I felt love and support. It was as if we knew each other.” The aliens hypnotized Ostrom to forget the experience, and he did. But several years later he visited an Earthling hypnotist, and the memories came flooding back, changing his life forever.

After a second hypnosis, Ostrom quit his job and moved to Colorado. Today he makes his living conducting New Age workshops and writing. He is the author of the book
You and Your Aura
.

The Place:
Mundrabilla, Australia, 1988

The Sighting:
A “huge bright glowing object.”

Background:
Fay Knowles and her three sons were driving along Eyre Highway when their car was sucked into the air. One of the sons told reporters, “we were doing about 68 miles per hour when it came over us and suddenly lifted the car off the road. We felt the thump on the roof and then it started lifting us. We were frightened and began to yell, but our voices had changed.” Then the car was violently dropped back to earth. The shock of the landing blew out one of the rear tires; police officers who later inspected the car said the roof had been damaged and that the car was covered inside and out with “a thick layer of black ash.”

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Several other UFO sightings were reported the same night—some more than 100 miles away. An airplane flying overhead saw a bright light hovering nearby; a truck driver on the same highway also reported being followed; and a fishing trawler spotted a UFO from offshore. Police officials told reporters they were taking the multiple sightings “seriously.”

The Place:
Somewhere near the Martian moon Phobos, 1989

The Sighting:
A “mysterious...long, faintly aerodynamic shaped pencil-like object with round ends.”

Background:
On March 25, 1989, the unmanned Soviet space probe Phobos transmitted a photograph to Earth of a strange object that appeared to have darted into the range of the probe’s camera. According to news reports, immediately after transmitting the photograph, the Soviet probe stopped transmitting signals back to Earth and “inexplicably disappeared.” It has been missing ever since. Marina Popovich, a top Soviet test pilot, displayed the photograph at a UFO convention and explained that the probe’s “encounter” and last photograph could be explained either as a legitimate UFO sighting, or the last, faulty transmission of a malfunctioning camera system.

The Place:
Mount Vernon, Missouri, 1984

The Sighting:
Aliens kidnapping cows.

Background:
One morning Paula Watson, a Mount Vernon resident, witnessed space aliens kidnapping cows near her house. Later in the day while canning vegetables in her basement, she noticed a “silvery alien with large eyes” peeking at her through the basement window. She tried to speak to the alien, but it backed away and she fell asleep. The next thing Watson knew she was inside the alien’s spaceship being examined. “I was standing up on a white table and the...alien was running his hands down my body, scanning my body.” Watson was later returned to Earth unharmed.

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Was she the victim of a fuel shortage, a bad navigator, or the Japanese military? America’s most famous aviatrix vanished on July 2, 1937. Now, over 60 years later, we may be close to finding out what really happened to her.

B
ACKGROUND

She was the best-known—and perhaps the greatest—female aviator in American history...which is all the more remarkable because of the age in which she lived. Born in 1897, Amelia Mary Earhart began her flying career in 1921, at a time when few women had careers of any kind and had only won the right to vote a few years earlier.

She took her first flying lessons at the age of 24, and, after 2½ hours of instruction, told her teacher, “Life will be incomplete unless I own my own plane.” By her 25th birthday she’d saved enough money working at her father’s law firm, as a telephone company clerk, and hauling gravel, to buy one. Within another year she set her first world record, becoming the first pilot to fly at 14,000 feet.

In 1928 Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean when she flew with pilot Wilmer Stultz. Ironically, she was asked to make the flight merely because she was a woman, not because of her flying talent. Charles Lindbergh had already made the first solo transatlantic flight in 1927, and Stultz was looking for a way of attracting attention to his flight. So he brought Earhart along...as a passenger.

That was the first—and last—frivolous flying record she would ever set. In 1930 she set the speed record for women (181 mph); in 1932 she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic; on another flight became the first woman to fly solo across the continental United States; and in 1935 became the first pilot of either gender to fly from Hawaii to the U.S. mainland. (She also set several speed and distance records during her career.) By the mid-1930s, “Lady Lindy” was as famous as Charles Lindbergh. But her greatest flying attempt lay ahead of her. In 1937 she tried to circumnavigate the globe along the equator.

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means “soggy shrub” in Navajo.

She never made it.

THE FINAL FLIGHT

Earhart described her round-the-world flight as “the one last big trip in her.” Taking off from Oakland, California, on May 21, 1937, she and her navigator, Frederick Noonan, flew more than ¾ of the way around the world, making stops in South America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the South Pacific. But when they landed in New Guinea on June 28, the most difficult part of the journey lay ahead: the 2,556-mile flight from New Guinea to Howland Island, a “tiny speck” of an island in the middle of the Pacific. It would be difficult to find even in the best conditions.

Monitoring the flight from Howland Island was the Coast Guard cutter
Itasca
. The
Lady Lindy
, Amelia’s airplane, rolled off the runway at 10:22 a.m. on July 2. She remained in contact with the radio operator in New Guinea for seven hours, then was out of contact until well after midnight.

• Finally, at 2:45 a.m., the Itasca picked up her first radio transmission. Another short message was picked up at 3:45 a.m.: “Earhart. Overcast.”

• At 4:00 a.m., the
Itasca
radioed back: “What is your position? Please acknowledge.” There was no response.

• At 4:43 a.m., she radioed in again, but her voice was too faint to pick up anything other than “partly cloudy.”

• The next signal was heard at 6:14 a.m., 15 minutes before the plane’s scheduled landing at Howland. She asked the
Itasca
to take a bearing on the signal, so that Noonan could plot their position. The signal was too short and faint to take a bearing. At 6:45 a.m., Earhart radioed a second time to ask for a bearing, but the signal again was too short.

• A more ominous message was received at 7:42 a.m.: “We must be on you but cannot see you but gas is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at altitude one thousand feet. Only one half hour gas left.” One radio operator described Earhart’s voice as “a quick drawl like from a rain barrel.” She was lost, panicking, and nearly out of fuel. She would radio two more times before 8:00 a.m. asking the Itasca to take a bearing, but each time her signals were too weak.

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• Her next message was received at 8:44 a.m.—a half hour past the time she predicted her fuel would run out: “We are on the line of position 156-157. Will repeat message...We are running north and south.” Operators described her voice as “shrill and breathless, her words tumbling over one another.” That was the last confirmed message she would broadcast.

Then Amelia Earhart vanished.

UNANSWERED QUESTION: WHAT WENT WRONG?

Theory #1:
Noonan’s erratic behavior and faulty navigation sent the plane off course, dooming it.

Suspicious Facts

• Noonan was an alcoholic. A former Pan Am pilot, he’d been fired from the airline because of his drinking problem. He claimed to have gotten his drinking under control, but during a stopover in Hawaii he’d gotten drunk in his hotel room. According to one reporter in Hawaii, Earhart didn’t want him to continue with the flight.

• The episode in Hawaii may not have been the only one. During a stopover in Calcutta, Earhart reported to her husband that she was “starting to have personnel trouble,” but that she could “handle the situation.” Paul Collins, a friend of Earhart’s, overheard the conversation. He took this to mean that Noonan had gotten drunk again. Whatever it meant, Earhart was still having “personnel trouble” when she phoned from New Guinea, the last stopover before she disappeared.

• Why would Earhart have used Noonan as her navigator in the first place? According to one theory, the reason was financial: unlike other navigators, “the reputed alcoholic would work for very little money.”

Theory #2:
Earhart herself was to blame. Despite her fame as America’s premier aviatrix, according to many pilots who knew her, she was actually a poor pilot—and an even worse navigator—who was unfamiliar with the plane she was flying.

Suspicious Facts

• Earhart had very little experience flying the Lockheed Electra she used on the trip. It was her first twin-engine plane, “a powerful, complicated aircraft loaded with special equipment” that was different from any other plane she had owned. Even so, in the eyes of the pilots who trained her to fly it, she didn’t spend enough time getting to know it.

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• In fact, her round-the-world flight was delayed after she crashed the plane during takeoff on March 20. Paul Mantz, her mentor and trainer, blamed the accident on her, claiming she had “jockeyed” the throttle. Paul Capp, another pilot who knew her, described her as “an inept pilot who would not take the advice of experts.”

• Earhart’s skills as a Morse code operator were atrocious—even though Morse code, which could be transmitted in the worst of conditions, was the most reliable form of communication. Earhart preferred to transmit by voice, which required a much more powerful signal and was harder to intercept. (In fact, she preferred voice communication so much that partway through the flight she abandoned some of her Morse code radios and flew the rest of the trip without them. She also dumped a 250-foot-long trailing antenna, which made the remaining radios far less powerful.)