UFOs From A To Z.
John F. Winston
Here is some information from a person who explains a great deal
about UFO. There are a few points made that that I don't agree
with and I'll attempt to point them out. At least he spells the
people's names right.
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From: J
Subject: Invaders from Elsewhere. Flying Saucers, Weirdness, and
Pop Culture.
by Bruce Lanier Wright
Let's open with a newsreel, "Citizen Kane"-style, at the beginning
that wasn't the beginning, with the saucers that weren't saucers.
June 24, 1947: Afternoon skies over the still-unspoiled Washington
Cascades. Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot from Boise, ID, takes in
the view.
Suddenly, he sees nine silvery, crescent-shaped objects flying in
tight formation. Later, he estimates their size at 40 to 50 feet
wide, their speed at a fantastic 1200 miles per hour. Yet they're
moving like no jet, no airplane, would ever move: rhythmically, as
if you were to skip a saucer across water, he tells the newspapers.
A headline writer garbles the quote and coins a snappy tagline
"flying saucers." And Kenneth Arnold earns his footnote in history.
We'll revisit some of the weirdest of those glorious days of our
youth and examine some tasty souvenirs for the collector. But, as
Bela would say, be varned. If you believe that a complete and
accurate picture of our world can be obtained from Newsweek or, G-d
help us, network TV, you will find this puzzling at best. If, on
the other hand, you're a big fan of talk radio, you may move your
lips when you read, but at least you've been exposed to, um,
alternate belief systems.
Saucer Time!
Of course, people have been seeing strange things in the skies for
a long time, globes, cigar-shapes and saucers, you bet; old English
accounts mention Yorkshire peasants spotting a silver disc in the
he-vens in the Year of Grace 1290. Dozens of more recent stories can
be pulled from the historical records, from the large saucer seen by
a farmer near Dallas in 1878 to the "ghost rockets" reported over
Scandinavia in the '30s and '40s. But in June 1947, the phenomenon
achieved critical mass, Go- knows why. A philosopher of history once
remarked that it steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time, and
1947 manifestly was Saucer Time.
After Arnold's initial report, UFO sightings in our skies exploded.
On June 26, four witnesses including a doctor saw a "huge silver
globe" moving along the rim of the Grand Canyon; two days after that,
an Air F-rce pilot reported a flight of six discs over Lake Meade,
NV. Within days, reports were pouring in from localities as widely
separated as Michigan, Ohio, Oregon, Louisiana, Quebec and Prince
Edward Island in far-north Canada.
And then there was the Roswell Incident.
Roswell
Another newsreel: Midnight on Friday, July 4, 1947, near Roswell,
New Mexico. During a thunderstorm, a rancher named Mac Brazel hears
an explosion.
The next morning, he discovers an enormous debris field in his
pastures, so thick he has to route his sheep around it to drive them
to water. The debris is odd: plastic-like beams, wire, scraps of a
metal light enough to flutter in the -------. (JW That word was
missing.)
The next day, Brazel reports his discovery to the sheriff, who
contacts Roswell Army Air Field, headquarters for the 509th Bomb
Group. Major Jesse Marcel, an air intelligence officer, visits
Brazel's field to investigate. He quickly concludes that the material
is literally unearthly. On Tuesday, July 8, the air base releases a
story to the AP newswire that begins: "The Army Air Fo-ces here
today announced a flying disc had been found." All h--l breaks
loose.
Just what happened next will always remain murky. The air base is
sealed off, and mil-tary police close some roads. The F-I squelches
a radio station's report. Every scrap of the mysterious wreckage is
removed. Roswell receives a series of visitors from Washington and
other mil-tary installations, and some very unfriendly statements
are made to the sheriff and other locals, encouraging them to forget
various things they've seen and heard. Mac Brazel spends over a week
in mili-ary custody. After his release, he doesn't say anything to
anyone for a long time. And a little more than 24 hours after the
first news report, the world learns that the so-called saucer was
only a weather balloon. The nation has a good laugh at Jesse Marcel's
expense. Marcel, a good soldier, keeps his mouth shut until near the
end of his life. Roswell drops out of the news for 30 years but not
forever.
Flaps
UFOs remained headline fodder throughout the late 40s, to the
increasing irritation of the United Sta-es Air Fo-ce and at least
some members of the scientific community. The 1947-49 sightings
constituted what came to be called a "flap," an unusually active
period for UFO activity. As in all flaps, a "me-too" factor was at
work; a hard core of genuinely unusual sightings were surrounded by
a great deal more misidentification, wishful thinking and general
flakiness. For awhile it seemed as if flying saucers were crashing
every week, judging from the regularity with which any shiny metal
found in a field was put ------- ----. Hastily prepared attempts
to explain away the phenomena were two-a-penny. In July 1947, for
instance, an Australian physiologist confidently stated that flying
saucers were merely "the effect of red corpuscles in blood passing
in front of the retina." Cloud formations, ball lightning, and the
planet Venus were trotted out regularly as well. The Air Fo-ce
mounted an official study effort that in 1949 grumpily concluded the
investigation of UFOs should be curtailed. The UFOs may have felt
snubbed as saucer reports seemed to taper off for awhile.
Then came the extraordinary Saucer Summer of 1952, when for months,
it seemed, you could scarcely leave your house without getting your
hat knocked off by a gleaming messenger from beyond. UFO sightings
piled up for months, with an impressive number of reports from
airline and mi-itary pilots. The flap reached its peak in the
Washington, DC area in July; an Air F-rce report declassified in
1985 describes radar sightings involving up to 12 unidentified
"targets" at a time near Washington National Airport. At its largest
peace-time press conference in history, the Air Fo-ce attributed
the radar activity to "temperature inversions." Local meteorologists
said: no way.
Kooky Kontactee Kults
I don't want to get all Freudian on you, but it's clear that flying
saucers answered a deep need in a lot of lonely souls. People were in
the market for reassurance. Nu-lear terror was in the air. They
wanted help. They wanted Space Brothers.
Enter George Adamski, the Grand Old Man of saucer re-igion, who in
1953 published Flying Saucers Have Landed, an account of his meeting
with a Venusian named Orthon (!) near Desert Center, CA. The book,
illustrated with his own photographs of various flying saucers and
"mother ships," sold well and gave him a group of followers who have
not entirely dissipated to this day. Adamski prospered on the lecture
circuit, assuming the title "professor" and talking up his
connections with Mount Palomar observatory (actually, he'd been a
fry cook at a nearby tourist cafe). Adamski's aliens were
spiritually advanced and conveniently handsome and Nordic-featured.
They took him on joy rides to Saturn and Jupiter. (JW I personally
believe that Adamski was telling the truth about his experiences.
He even had audiences with Queen Juliana and receive a gold medal
from the Pope of Rome.) Adamski's success spawned a series of
copy-cat space gurus, each waving his own book of revelations from
aliens whose names all sounded like new synthetic fibers. These
included Aboard a Flying Saucer (1954), by Truman Bethurum, who
chatted with UFO captain Aura Rhanes from the planet Clarion;
Secret of the Saucers (1955) by Orfeo Angelucci who once met a
space-babe named Lyra in a bus station; and Howard Menger's From
Outer Space to You (1959), (JW I've read all of these people's
books and believe them. These books do contain some mistakes.
I don't claim they or the people writing them are perfect. I've
met Howard Menger in Phoenix at a comvention and believe what
he has to say.) which reveals, among other mysteries, the alien
approach to organic farming.
The kindly aliens of 1950s contactee literature came from a
bewildering variety of planets, but the message of all these "space
brothers," as they were dubbed by their followers, was essentially
the same: our earth is a backwater, a dangerous slum on the
outskirts of a benign sort of interplanetary U.N., and we must Get
Our Act Together. (JW Seems good to me.) Space Brotherism is a
little starchy for my taste, (JW I love it myself.) but the movement
produced at least one series of events I would have given a lot to
attend, the Giant Rock Spacecraft Conventions held each year in
the Mojave Desert from 1954 to 1977. (JW I went down there and
observed that area many years after the Conventions were held.)
Hosted by George Van Tassel yet another Venusian contactee (and
founder of the Universal College of Wisdom and the Cosmic Brotherhood
of Chr-st), in its mid-1950s heyday the annual get-together attracted
crowds of up to 10,000 enlightened and out-there folks with vital
messages to share (and, on at least one occasion, packages of
"genuine Venusian dog hair" to sell). One of these celestial
proto-Woodstocks was attended by fantasy filmmaker Ray Harryhausen,
who was then planning his own UFO epic, "Earth Versus the Flying
Saucers."
Flicks
The movie business was quick to pick up on the cinematic potential
of the UFO phenomenon, and the drive-in screens of the 1950s soon
were flooded with a dazzling array of unearthly visitors. The first
of these was a fully dressed 1950 turkey called "The Flying Saucer";
its "saucer" is a Russian secret weapon, and about its only other
point of interest is that producer/director/"star" Mikel Conrad
promoted the film by hinting that his lame saucer shots were actual
top-secret go-ernment footage.
Part 1.
John Winston. john...@mlode.com
Scott-to-the-Max
Mechanics if you want to know what fell from the sky at Roswell. The US
government was working on a SPACEPLANE design for several years by then, and
captured Nazi scientists had been put to work on the project. I saw
schematic diagrams of the proposed vehicle - a kind of half saucer looking
vehicle, of lifting body configuration, and quite capable of a lot more than
1200 miles per hour. Anyone who doubts that this project was undoable at the
time should check out articles on the net about Dr. Eugen Sanger, and his
"Silverbird" project that was funded by the Reich under the "Amerika Bomber"
program. His design was workable, and so was the US one. Interestingly, the
schematics showed designs for gravity bombs, or rocket boosted gravity bombs
which some believe were an early attempt at the building of MIRVs (multiple
independant re-entry vehicles) at a time when the first H-Bomb had yet to be
detonated, and any public acknowledgement of MIRVs was quite some way down
the road. This project was doable. The craft had a "honeycomb" composite
fuselage remarkably similar in structure to photos of the debris found at
Roswell. Popular Mechanics found out about this project and did a very nice
article on it. It is a recent article, so you should be able to find some
reference to it one their website, or check their back issue catalog.
Anyway, I can understand why the Air Force wouldn't want even today to
acknowledge that a spaceplane was being worked on at Roswell back then,
can't you? Compare the proposed cost of that vehicle with what Lockheed will
probably want to charge for the X-33/VentureStar, and you will quickly begin
to understand why, I'm sure. The fact is, Lockheed has just been awarded TWO
contracts for new fighter aircraft - the F-22 Raptor and the Joint Strike
Fighter, and they already had the X-33/VentureStar contract. Would you want
the public to know that a workable spaceplane design had existed since the
40s, and the amount of research and developement costs that they are
probably claiming are associated with their developement of the X-33 are as
ridiculous as a $15,000.00 hammer?
"John F. Winston" <john...@mlode.com> wrote in message
news:Pine.BSF.3.96.101121...@shell.mlode.com...
John F. Winston
JW Thanks for your commeents about Roswell.