FSR 1961: The Human {?} Side.

The 1961 FSR was, generally speaking, more sensible than its predecessors. Occasional hoaxes were still in evidence, but they became less and less and were usually muted in how much enthusiasm they received. I believe that this was because the editor was receiving a great preponderance of feedback from readers who expressed themselves as finding such claims as preposterous and too often proved fallacious if not all the way to rapacious. This shift in editorial "tone" is a tribute to Waveney Girvan, who despite still valuing the potential for breakthroughs from contactee knowledge, was admitting that most of it appeared to be bunk. [He did, however, with some proper logic, take Keyhoe to task for apparently wholesale rejecting the humanoid case claims]. Despite this unexpected "conservatism" [relatively speaking], FSR did have plenty of "Rock and Roll" within its pages, including an article on Springheeled Jack [pictured above]. To the naive reader, there is no truth to the rumor that Jack was an early incarnation of Jerry Clark, despite Jerry's strange fascination with him in the 20th century. Jerry is much nicer.... and can't jump nearly as high. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The human event which had the longest term effect on FSR was the appearance of Gordon Creighton. Creighton, alongside Charles Bowen, would soon come to dominate FSR editorial policy for many years. At this point he showed up as an intelligent commentator on technical matters [things like artificial satellites] and most especially on Soviet attitudes towards UFOs. Creighton was a friend of Admiral-of-the-Fleet Hill-Norton, an overt fan of UFOs. Perhaps they had a little circle of ex-military people who regularly chewed over the phenomenon. This was also the year when FSR had constant flirtations with what the Soviets were doing about the subject and Creighton's interests fit perfectly with that. As time has gone on, we have found that these early rumors and deductions were basically nonsense, but that seems not to have been the fault of Creighton who seems to have done what he could with the poor resources available. Although only showing his Russian language talents thus far, Creighton would prove to be a linguistic genius and serve as the translator of dozens of important non-English language case reports over the next couple of decades. His buddy, Charles Bowen, the complementary editorial genius [and less leaping-to-conclusions member of the duo], was not yet in evidence at least publicly.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Creighton's first FSR foray was about satellites, and in that report he brought up the rumor circulating in American UFOlogy that the government had funded a secret study wherein astronomy legend Clyde Tombaugh would search for near-Earth orbiting "artificial moons". Juicing up the rumor was the claim that Tombaugh had "already" [back in the early 1950s pre-Sputnik] found at least two such "moons", and the only answer to that was that they had been put there in orbit by extraterrestrials. This "information", dated 1955, gave precise measurements of "moons" orbiting between 430 and 650 miles up, and being 60 to 300 feet in diameter. ET-monitors or a mothership, no doubt. Well, that should excite anyone. The reality of this seems less spectacular, as usual. [Again folks, I am working off memory here]. I have a copy of this secret study project--yep, that part is true. And it is also true that Tombaugh was the lead scientist on it. What is not true is that any "moons" were found because of it. There is commentary associated with the study proposal about what one would be looking for and how one would go about it, with a model example, but the project either was not done at all, or briefly so with no results--this is the part that I can't recall exactly. Tombaugh later talked about this and it's clear that nothing was found---remember that Tombaugh was a big fan of UFOs and the ETH, so there's no reason to doubt him on this. I would have loved there to have been this pre-Sputnik discovery, and I'm sure that Tombaugh would have, too.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And as to messing with extraterrestrials and vice versa: FSR presented a quote by Otto Struve on communicating with aliens. Struve [on the left with Chandrasekhar, far left, and Gerard Kuiper, middle] was the guy whose name I couldn't remember the other day when talking about radiotelescope signals and Frank Drake. Struve was the director of the Greenbank,WV observatory from which Drake tried listening to the two nearby Sun-like stars and sending out a message on his own. And Struve was then the guy who shut it [Project OZMA] down. Shortly afterwards he said: "I'm not sure that we should even answer if we did receive signals. When scientists ask when we will resume [sending signals] I tell them to come back in 100,000 years". FSR puzzled over this stoppage of the program, citing, as did US sources, the inadequacy of the lack-of-funding and insufficient equipment reasons, and this simply goes to show that they hadn't conceived of the military intelligence security concerns about exposing oneself to a technologically-superior and potentially hostile super-culture. We can disagree with the attitude, but the history remains and that's how it was.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Other stuff happened. Girvan actually praised the Father Gill case wildly while severely criticizing the contactees. Someone tried to clarify the kinds of cases in categories of potentially-valuable evidence [sort of a pre-Hynek look at case type and usefulness] and set up a decision tree for the readers to decide where their minds would take them on models of likely hypotheses. The Russian ancient astronaut theorizer [Agrest] was pilloried in his country as a nut [and on generally good grounds]. W.D.Drake continued his interminable nonsense with an article trying to link the Comte de St. Germain to UFOs. The Brazilian contactee, Dino Kraspedon, was debunked. The Brookings Report about the impact of technologically superior civilizations upon lesser was reviewed. And Olavo Fontes produced a three part article on the Brazilian flap of May 1960. The mini-wave itself is very interesting, but Fontes tried to turn it into a demonstration of Aime Michel's Orthoteny Patterns. I will bow to superior statistical minds on this one, but to me the "analysis" was no more than mapping case locations and then drawing lines every which way he felt to connect a dot with another one. I don't blame anyone for trying to find such patterns, but the "statistics" seem thoroughly unconvincing to me as anything other than random human eyeballing. This could possibly be the only thing that Donald Menzel and I have ever agreed about. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------And, on a better note, the fellow above, General Lionel Chassin, Coordinator for Air Defenses in NATO, spoke out on UFOs. Chassin, sort of France's Hillenkoetter when it came to a very big military wheel supporting UFO research, had authored the preface of Aime Michel's Flying Saucers and the Straight-Line Mystery, and immediately began to support early civilian UFO research in France. Showing that he had been reading Keyhoe [and also Tacker!], Chassin wrote a high-minded intellectual assessment of the status of UFOs as reality, and as rejected for understandable but not-praiseworthy reasons of bias, emotions, and secrecy. He called for all of us to join together in an objective and open policy of sharing information and results, as that was the only proper way to prepare for a more overt interaction with the UFOs to come. Well, hurrah, General! Too bad that no one in power paid any attention, unlike your experience with those same people before you retired. UFOs are the most resistant subject ever conceived [taking the ratio of evidence vs. willingness even to discuss it into account]. NATO general? CIA chief? Admiral-of-the-Fleet? Who cares? Just more UFO Nuts!------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So, if they're going to mock us anyway, we might as well have some fun while they do. FSR was obviously [always] of that mind, and offered apparently seriously, articles which brought The Loch Ness Monster and Springheeled Jack onto the pages. Now I'm as big a fan of the Monster as nearly anyone [Henry Bauer excepted], and could be talked into being a fan of Jack. But as core UFOlogy? Nope. Maybe we can match up Jack with "our" West Virginia Mothman in a category of winged weirdoes living Out Proctor, but UFO drivers? I don't think so. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------One last really anomalous thing: there was a letter from Jerry Clark to FSR this year, smacking Girvan for his allusions towards Keyhoe as close-minded and inappropriately rejecting of contactees. Jerry was a good defender of the major, though Girvan didn't think so. But the anomaly is this: that letter was written 50 years ago. This means that Jerry either wrote it in crayon or it is HE who is the Comte de St. Germain!!!

Flying Saucer Review Volume 7: The Phenomenon.

Dear folks: you'll notice that this is one of those yearly FSR reviews that I've been doing. Once I get this [and the Part Two on the human side] out, it will probably be the last one just like this for a while. This care-taking situation that I'm in now just doesn't allow the scope of free time needed to get through a year of FSR with any discipline. What I'm going to try to do to keep this up [after a fashion] is to read a copy of FSR one at a time, and try to write something about it. Maybe that way I can grind on forward. Whatever--this is my next experiment, I guess. Now, back to FSR 1961. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------There were 111 cases mentioned during the year. 68 were "objects" and mostly of low quality. Adding in the "lights", "radars", and "ordinary CE1s" they accounted for 88+% of the pile--good, safe, Keyhoe-style UFOlogy. Five of the remaining 13 cases were film cases. These included one of the better ones in UFO history [see below]. There were also five CE3s. One was surely Whack, one was poor old Joe Simonton with his pancakes, and three were from Brazil, of which one was a clear hoax [and later admitted as so]. Maybe they were all hoaxes, but it's hard to be too tough on Joe, and two of the Brazilian cases are at least interesting. We were very slight on actual physical evidence in 1961 FSR, with only a trace case in Scotland, an angelhair case in Australia, and a "thing" fallen from nowhere [with no UFO associated] to look to. There were a few good cases so as not to make the year a total loss.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the stars of the volume was the Namur, Belgium picture set taken by the "Belgian repairman". The photos were taken on June 5, 1955. This group of three photos has always intrigued UFO researchers [and myself] but I was taken even more by them when I finally read the FSR report. Perhaps the reason for that is irrational, but it is good enough for me: because it finally dawned on me that the researcher who wrote the case up was the great Aime Michel. I'm a fan of Michel, and I believe that almost everyone who has studied UFO history is. He was a very rare combination of incisive analytical intellect and creative deductive synthesis. Michel received the Namur evidence several years previously and did not want to give out the man's name [I believe that he stayed anonymous for decades and perhaps is still so]. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The witness stated that he saw the object arrive swiftly in the area and then slow to a hover. The witness who travelled with a camera [one of his few possessions] got it focussed and took one shot. It "posed" briefly, looking silvery gray and brightly shining. Beneath the disk where four legs as if landing supports. The craft then dove slowly, leaving a vapor trail, and he took a second shot. Michel got a meteorologist to examine the originals, and he thought that the trail was due to genuine atmospheric condensation. Given the weather conditions, the expert suggested that the disk had to be at least at an altitude of 1500 meters to produce a trail. If so, the minimum diameter of the disk was 12 meters [~40 feet]. All this made it seem unlikely to Michel that he was dealing with a fake object. Finally the object rose up and passed through its own trail, and the witness managed to get his third shot [this whole scene unfolded rapidly by the way, and he was lucky to get three]. The disk left at great speed. Michel was obviously very impressed, and because he was, so am I. UFO photographs tend to bring the ghouls racing out of their caves, dripping saliva, but I think that these three pictures might be able to survive their assault.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The biggest star of the publishing year was the Cressy, Tasmania case, as witnessed by Reverend Lionel Browning and his wife. Mentions of it appeared no less than in four places in FSR through the year. Often combined with the Father Gill case of Boianai New Guinea, these two incidents became like siege guns warding off charges that UFO cases were by disreputable persons, and unintelligent ones, who had seen rather ordinary things. Rather than mess up the case with my own writing, I'll let you read the core of the review, not in FSR but in the later excellent Australian summary:

A much lesser known but rather good disk observation comes from Ryde on the Isle of Wight. Here one of the witnesses was an excellent artist and we have her renditions of the sighting. Firstly, this incident was reported by a mother and daughter, but also seems to have been reported independently by at least one if not several others. The independent witness seems to have been retired military, but that also is not clear [the FSR write-up was by Leonard Cramp, which is the only bad thing about this case---the more I read of his thought processes, the more I get to feeling he is a bit of a lunatic. Regardless of that, he did a lousy write-up]. The two women had seen lights in the distance and stared as they approached. The lights resolved themselves into the distinctive disk shape that you see in Mrs. Taylor's drawings. The thing, as you see, was a neat domed disk with something like portholes in the dome. Cramp insisted on characterizing this as exactly like an Adamski vessel, in spite of the fact that there was no hint of three big ball-like landing pods on the bottom and the top really doesn't look exactly like it either. But Cramp was an Adamski enthusiast and lumped what he wanted to lump together. The object, despite its close approach, was completely silent, and its portholes shown bright orange light. Its whole base glowed in the same color. When the craft left, its speed was so shocking that the women felt dizzy in surprise. One possibly extremely odd thing: though the disk had left, near the ground remained a "glowing ring of light" which behaved as a smoke-ring in that it slowly rose and faded into the sky. Perhaps it was nothing more than "exhaust" of some kind--perhaps it was some much stranger remnant of light which signified the previous presence of a weird technology. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The last case that I'll [briefly] mention will be the angelhair example. The FSR notice came from a news story, but the case has been well documented elsewhere in Australian files, so I have a great deal of confidence in it. It happened at or near a place called Meekatharra almost 500 miles NE of Perth in West Australia. Here ten witnesses reported the passage of twelve round objects in six pairs passing "at regular intervals" over a period of about an hour [i.e. about every ten minutes or so another pair of the silvery round things would go over on the same trajectory]. The real strangeness was of course the "angelhair". The objects were seen to be trailing "streamers" as they flew. Once reaching the ground, a few of these streamers were grabbed up by witnesses. "I picked up one of the streamers, but it vanished in my hands as it touched my skin". Apparently, as usual, none of the stuff could be preserved long enough to get it into a safe container for testing. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lastly, there was more mention of the Grumman "satellite" photo, and FSR managed to get a version of the photo [which however was the black/white color reverse of the thing you see above.] Their version did not let you see the actual track. I then remembered that I'd sent my good version of the thing to Fran Ridge to post on his NICAP website, and so was able to get it there and post it for you here. Hopefully you can see the dashed line track of a never-explained "anomalous satellite". [running vertically just off the white arrow near the bottom]. So you see, all of us aren't nuts afterall---at least not all of the time.

Strolling in Wales///Trolling in Wales.

I have little to offer today. I wanted to present something about the fairyworld encounters in Wales [stimulated by the incident in Glamorgan/Caerphilly mentioned a post or two back, and encouraged by a synchronistic stumbling upon an encounter by Paul Devereux just to the north of Glamorgan]. But the subject is too large and time and resources are too short to do a good job. But I have the urge to get this "off my mind" for a bit, so, with some embarrassment, I'll post the vague picture that I have, and fool myself into believing that I'll get back to it and maybe do a better job.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Plus, today is Beltane. If you are going to see the "Good Folk", this is as good a day as any. The Olde Stones above are still standing in Radnor in Wales, and they have an orientation to sunrise on Beltane, so say the archaeoastronomers. Four thousand years ago did the predecessors of the Druids lay them? And did/do the fairies still dance there? Such things are believed and occasionally reported to this day. Places in Wales still exude a special something which says: the Other World is still here nearby. Get yourself "right" and maybe you can still touch it.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Devereux is a very intelligent man, and a lifetime explorer of the anomalies. He is an interesting Walker-of-the-Paths of mystery, and particularly the actual paths of Earth energies and Leylines, and, even "fairy paths". My interactions with Paul have been friendly, even when he has, essentially, been calling me an idiot [which he can do in a very gentlemanly way]. As long as we stayed away from the topic of UFOs as advanced technology, we'd have a great time together and I'd like to walk his leylines with him, and learn. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------What gets Paul into this blog is a brief mention that he had in an article [more of a lengthy report: Fairy Paths In Ireland And Wales; 2004]. He said that while in the Brecon Beacons he saw flickering luminous orbs in the tree-tops near the mountain range. [ On another occasion in Ireland, he saw a luminous patch which seemed to be trying to firm up into some sort of humanoid form materializing in the grass]. The Brecon Beacons are one place [of many] in Wales where "fairy" experiences and folk tales abound, and Paul having an anomalous encounter there is not a shock. The area is also large, and the megalith which accompanies this section is doubtless far away from Paul's sighting. I place it here because it represents the feeling of "oldness" of much of the place [and many places in Wales]. It is part of the "atmosphere", even the spiritual nature of the unengineered land. It does not intrude.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Such "naturalness" seems almost necessary to allow the intersection of whatever these experiences are based upon to manifest to us. In the area of the Beacons is something called in the literature Craig y Coed: a rocky outcropping which is a focus of fairy haunts. [near Pontneddfechan]. And there is a lake, Llyn Cwm Llwch, where on Beltane [appropriately] a door opens and one might there enter the fairyworld. At other times on that Lake, a fairy mermaid sings her siren song to lure men to a bad end---apparently Paul was able to avoid that. The point is, that encounters are felt to be part of this land in a variety of ways.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Below the area of the Beacons is the country called Glamorgan, all across the southern coast of Wales. As mentioned in the old post, it is one of the Welsh areas where the King of the Fairies allowed an entrance into the other world. Here and there megaliths like the one at left remind one that this is still ancient and sacred country. One such place is Rhondda, where another fairy siren sits on a stone near her lake and lures travellers to no good end. [as this is so near Pontneddfechan, I wonder if the two lakes are really the same one]. At Maesteg it is said that a group of Irish fairies migrated across the sea to take residence in an old oak tree. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Evans-Wentz in his great book, had an interview which told of an encounter at Newton in about 1870. Here people were about to go to market [a prime time for the "Good Folk" to show up], when a woman saw a number of very tiny men gamboling about on the back of a mare and climbing up and down its mane. When she pointed this out, no one else said that they could see them. In Glamorgan, the fairy people are said to dress mainly in red, but sometimes with green, and to dance on moonlit nights in circles. They are not angels nor demons, and can behave with good or evil intention just as do we. Evans-Wentz reported a truly Out Proctor story which he was told by a person who said that the percipient had told him. [that is, it was not told as an old folk tale but as an encounter]. At Eynonsford, a man awakened to see a tribe of pixies busily slaughtering his ox. When they were done, they placed the bones and skin back "in order" and when he got up the next morning he found that the ox was whole [except for a new limp when walking which he attributed to his seeing the pixies misplace one of the bones]. Well, this is a good candidate for a vivid dream, despite the protestations of the witness to the contrary, but it also reminds me of the phenomenon seen in exorcism cases where the attending priests see all manner of apparently physical action [flying crockery et al], which when the prayers take effect turn out to have only happened as illusions. Further along the coast, in Laugharne, [this is in Carmarthenshire], a modern [2009] report tells of a pale red-headed water nymph-like entity "flowing" in green-blue silks across a park area. In this same area at the Lake of the Maiden [Llyn y Morwynion], another common story is that a tribe of fairies live there and can be seen entering and emerging from the lake, bringing their cows to and from pasture. Perhaps the flowing nymph was out for an adventure of her own.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the north, there is a striking ancient megalith, the Pentre-Ifan Cromlech. This cromlech has a old connection with the Druids, who are said to have used it in their instructions of new candidates. Unusually roomy as cromlechs go, the inner space was said to be walled about with wood [or whatever] making a dark enclosed space. In this space, learnings/awarenesses would come to the novices. It reminds me of the mediaeval use of the underground tombs as "Purgatorios" for deep sacred meditation on ones life path.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Fairies were reported to Evans-Wentz as dancing about the cromlech as well as the fields of nearby farms. He was told that they preferred red clothing and appeared like little children in military clothes. Red caps were a staple attire. One informant told him that the fairy folk were always about in that place and in great numbers, but invisible to those of us who weren't in the proper state of mind [or, one supposes, that they did not want to manifest to]. Again the comment was made that they were not angels good or bad, but rather a spirit race capable of either. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Other manifestations were reported from nearby. "Death or Corpse Candles" were described. One had appeared [apparently a Ball of Light] right inside the house. It migrated to the outside and across fields for some distance, a light-blue patch, which "dances as if borne by an invisible agency, and sometimes it rolls over and over". It ended ominously at a graveyard, and the percipient interpreted a later death to its augury. Another incident involved a haunted farmhouse near the cromlech. Typical poltergeist activity abounded along with the apparition of a Lady dressed in silk. Whether these things are related who can say? Are the Fairyfolk incidents one part of the array of ghostlights, will-of-the-wisps, poltergeists, and apparitions, or are we dealing with an unsorted mess? My intuitions are that it is an unsorted mess of different phenomena, but probably deliberately mixed up by the fairyfolk tricksters. And...I can rest comfortably in the knowledge that I have no idea what I am talking about.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The old Welsh people are telling me that the Tylwyth Teg [the Fair Folk, their preferred name] have been with us [and are with us] since time immemorial. They are a spiritual race, not and never human [i.e. not "ghosts" of departed humans], and live in a world alongside our own [what we now call our parallel reality]. They can "cross over" and manifest, and allow us to glimpse them. They are like us not in body or "law", [that is they don't have to obey our physical laws] but are like us in that they have lives and interests and must make free choices to do good or ill. They like water and dancing for whatever reason and occasionally seem to like interacting with humans as well--but are pretty intolerant much of the time. Some seem to be generally good entities, and whole "tribes" sometimes are felt to be on the good side. And, the reverse is true for other individuals and groups---again, very like ourselves. Their behavior, when we are involved, seems to be aimed at amusement more than anything which we would regard as serious. One open-minded priest said that he wondered if God allowed them to interact with us at all, because we were so inherently non-spiritual in our ordinary lives, that an encounter with the Tylwyth Teg might shock us back to awareness that the spiritual world was really there. That is a thought, strangely, which resonates very much with this blog. { and "up there" I can feel Catherine Crowe smiling }.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the far north around the Snowdon Mountains the Tylwyth Teg dance around many lakes and on one floats a disappearing island [at Rhyd-ddu, Llyn Cwellyn] where you can hear the music, and the entrance to the fairyworld is nigh. But the most atmospheric [holy?] place is Anglesey. Here gratefully, are still awesome megaliths and the landscape which was a Druid stronghold long after the time of the Earth religionists who made them. The alien-looking megalith on the left is attributed to, who else?, the Queen of Fairyland who lives in the Sea. Here can be heard the Tylwyth Teg "singing like angels" and occasionally visiting homes of we mere mortals. At Pentraeth they sing by the nearby lake and incidents were reported to Evans-Wentz wherein they would show on moonlit nights and behave unthreateningly, suddenly disappearing if approached to nearly. Mostly they are described as small and garbed in red, but one young woman told of walking at night when she encountered a normal sized pretty girl. She came quite close and reached out to her. Like previous tales of the Black Dog Pookhas, her hand passed right through. Recovering her nerves, she asked: "Why do you not speak?", whereupon the girl just vanished. Whether this was Tylwyth Teg or a separate apparitional phenomenon, who can say? But once again, many sorts of encounters appear in the same ["accepting"?] environments. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is a great deal more which can and should be said about the ancient Welsh landscape and its apparent appropriateness for encouraging these exciting anomalous encounters. I admitted above the poor incompleteness of my own knowledge of these matters but maybe you can do better. I'll try [but I'm not sure when] to put more of this together by reading a wonderful new acquisition to my library, an 1881 edition of Wirt Sikes' British Goblins---yes, I know, I should have done it before I wrote this, but, what can I tell you? {The thing IS difficult to penetrate you know, not exactly a page-turner}. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------On the other hand the picture for this section is rather neat. It is the passage tomb of Bryn-celli-ddu on the Isle of Anglesey. A Tylwyth Teg inhabitation no doubt right out of Tolkien--and, its passageway is oriented towards the rising of the Beltane Sun--so there.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I can't help but believe that these encounters are still out there to be had. I can't help but believe that if I walked the welcoming sort of fairy path, that even I, with my horribly-trained scientific head, might be granted a glimpse of the Tylwyth Teg. And that would be one of the few sorts of experiences [this side of the Pearly Gates] that I would deem spiritually-expanding and just plain wonderful to be blessed with---even if it was a mischief making leprechaun. Seamus Muldoon, where are you?

Are "They" Friendly?: Hawking says Watch Out!

You've probably read the hoopla about the Discovery Channel program wherein Stephen Hawking warns us that sending out powerful signals about where we are might not be a smart idea. Afterall, Hawking says, why would we want to attract aggressive and highly-advanced technologists from deep space? The idea is not a foolish thought. Carl Jung warned us about even a benign superior civilization putting the brakes on our enthusiasms and our imaginations, and reminded us that Earth cultures have been [even unintentionally] stunted by contact that they were not ready for. The Brookings Institution did a famous study for the government in the 1960s [I think...might have even been the late 1950s] which had the same conclusions. In a NASA sponsored debate on the subject in the 1970s, although Carl Sagan and Philip Morrison expressed blue-sky optimism, two other panelists had the exact opposite view of "alien contact". Over in Great Britain, astronomers like Zdenek Kopal were saying things like "they could exterminate us", and "If the phone rings, hang up!". ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back in 1960, a naive young radioastronomer named Frank Drake was in charge of certain programs at the national radio telescope at Green Bank, West Virginia. [that's the old Green Bank telescope at the left, and the guy with it is radioastronomy legend, Grote Reber]. My memory is that there was a senior astronomer in charge of the whole show there, but he relented and let Drake and a few others decide not only to "listen in" for signals from a few stars but to actually send a signal out. [once again:apologies for the lack of my files]. Now this is where the rumors come in: when certain military people heard that an unauthorized broadcast [which was much more powerful and more concentrated in direction than ambient radio signals that we always make] had been beamed at two nearby stars, the Pentagon went through the roof. Allegedly, many naive astronomers got a talking to, which included protocols not only forbidding such transmissions without military "advisement" regarding security issues, but protocols for reporting and responding to incoming signals. I don't know whether all that happened or not, but it is information that I read and heard a long time ago in the 1970s. One reason that adds to my suspicion that this is true is that when Drake was cleared to send another signal many years later, he set the mighty Arecibo telescope to a globular cluster populated with many stars [yes] but only with stars of low metallicity [i.e. having no chances of having planets around them.] This latter fact is always conveniently not mentioned when persons like Sagan or Shostak regale their gap-mouthed audiences with this great reaching out to Space. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the 1980s when I was in my heyday of filling my head with frontier information about the sciences, I was privileged to attend many symposia at American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings. There I was able to hear nearly every conceivable expert in every field speak, and ask questions if I wanted. It was a learning paradise. One symposium was particularly disturbing and relevant to this topic. It was about deep space exploration and possible consequences of contact. One of the experts [and expert they were] was a technologist who, among other things consulted for the government. The panel had discussed deep space travel technologies. He took a different angle. Accepting the possibility of very high velocity ships [ships which could approach significant percentages of the speed of light], he noted that at that stage of development any highly advanced society would suddenly become uncomfortable with us. This is because we not only would have produced a "relativistic rocket", but that device would gain tremendous mass due to the relativity effects of the Special Theory. At that time we would have acquired a "Planet Cracker", a weapon of such mass that it could blast away anyone's home world. He referred to it as the "Gun Which Makes Everybody Equal". He even went so far as to muse that Aliens could be monitoring us right now to assess whether they can afford to allow us to make that last technological step, or to snuff the dangerous vermin out before they break out into space as destroyers. So you see, not everyone has the same sorts of thoughts in their minds.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Guys like Drake [above] and Sagan and the SETIans consistently want to believe that all the folks out there are good guys, and that we could never threaten them in any serious enough way to bring retribution upon us. And we'd all like to believe that. But we should also admit two other things at least: 1). we have no idea what we're talking about; and 2). such behavior on the parts of Drake, Sagan et al shows that they [and we?] are emotion-driven risk-takers. Sure, everyone in such discussions is emotion-driven. But emotion-driven and risk-taking is different from emotion-driven and not. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All of us interested in Space, ET, and UFOlogy want there to be extraterrestrials, and all of us would like them to be friendly [and tolerant]. None of us know that. In fact, the only chance that we have of trying to know that is to study UFO incidents. One might assume that the security-minded modern Pentagon types are not studying that data too hard, and the modern SETIans sarcastically reject it as well. So the major players in the issue remain stone-dead ignorant of the only source of information which might cast a little light on this. ..... except for Drake himself. Frank Drake never stopped being a closet UFOlogist. Maybe that's why he thinks that they might be friendly enough not to bring in the Extraterrestrial Terminix Man.

UFOs & The Enigma of the United States Navy

We know a great deal about the USAF's involvement in UFOs. We know a fair amount about the CIA's and the FBI's. There is not much indication that the Army had a lot to do with them, but there are many hints that the Navy had interests. But it is the Navy which stands as the one service or agency which we know had interest and yet remains almost completely silent [i.e. uncooperative to FOIAs] as to their history. That gap in our knowledge won't be filled by this post, but a small bit of information is available, so here goes.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The fellows pictured here are General Walter B. Smith [left] and Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter [right]. It is a picture to symbolize the handing off of the leadership of the CIA from the Admiral to the General. Hillenkoetter had been chief during an interesting time, vis-a-vis UFOs. There was Roswell, of course, but there was also SIGN and the Estimate of the Situation. That Estimate, as we have seen earlier in this blog, created a situation wherein all USAF UFO reports were sent in duplicate to the Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence, where a file was kept. Also, as we have seen earlier, the Office of Naval Research [in the person of Urner Liddel] used the files for an idiosyncratic study of UFOs and Balloon sightings and if one ONR person was reading the files doubtless others were. How active the Navy's Intel operations were about keeping tabs on the subject, we don't know; and perhaps never will unless they make some effort to be more cooperative about searching their records and releasing them. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The other thing that we absolutely know about the Navy, though, is that many highly placed officers were interested in the phenomenon. Roscoe Hillenkoetter himself joined NICAP and was willing to speak very publicly [and to congress] about the goodness of what NICAP was doing and that UFOs seemed to be a real but non-terrestrial mystery. He was far from alone.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Admiral Delmar Fahrney, the former chief of guided missiles research for the Navy, became NICAP's chairman of the board, following the abortive few months of the T.Townsend Brown era. Fahrney was very outspoken about the same two things which would be the NICAP mantra over the years: The UFOs were extraterrestrial, and the policy of secrecy was a big mistake. Office of Naval Research chief Admiral Calvin Bolster apparently believed the same, although Keyhoe and Fahrney were never able to get him to come out publicly with a statement. Several other Navy officers were NICAP members and Keyhoe occasionally got "leaks" from Navy people who obviously disliked USAF policy. A great deal of conversation had to be going on within that service [whether formally or not] which was sympathetic to research on the phenomenon and impatient with their rival service. One of these "conversations" which resulted in a massive "leak" was reported by Keyhoe in his 1960 book, as written about in the blog the other day.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In FLYING SAUCERS: Top Secret, Keyhoe described a meeting with two Naval officers which had been arranged "by an old classmate [from the Naval Academy] of mine". I'll speculate a little and guess that this was Bolster as Keyhoe mentions Fahrney in the text in a way that seems to eliminate him. Whoever it was he was a big wheel. --------------------------------------------------------------------------The meeting was in 1958, just after Dick Hall arrived at NICAP, and Keyhoe discussed the content of it with Dick. Using aliases, he described a meeting with a Captain [a Navy-style "Captain"] and a Commander in their office and quite "private". The officers danced about to begin with asking Keyhoe all manner of probing questions--as it turned out they were trying to get him to betray confidential sources of information to see if he could be trusted not to breach such confidentialities. Keyhoe passed the test, though not until wondering for a moment if these guys were setting him up for something. [because of his good friend who had arranged this, he didn't think that it could possibly be such a set-up and was patient].-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Ultimately the officers were convinced and began telling him of "hidden" cases from naval personnel. Keyhoe was told that they had been keeping a "log" of these things. They were keeping it [on naval sightings only] "with the Admiral's consent". So who was the "Admiral"? Normally that would mean THE Admiral, Chief of Naval Operations, Arleigh A. Burke. Could that even be possible? Could the Chief of Staff of the Navy be interested in someone keeping track of UFOs? As we can read shortly, this is far from impossible, as something very similar had happened just before. But WHY were they keeping track? "Just so we'll know how many important Navy sightings go into the 'sink' ". They sarcastically said that this was their nick-name for Project Blue Book. Everything goes in, and nothing [as to information] comes out. The officers were irritated by the policy which kept information on sightings even from the relevant service, and actual lies occasionally told back to them. The officers then pulled several NICAP bulletins out of a drawer and told Keyhoe that they agreed with the stance that he was taking on all this. Keyhoe was not shown the full log at that time but was told of cases. That log probably still exists somewhere in Navy records and they will not do what is necessary to find and release it to us. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And we know absolutely that another one existed and that it was ordered at the highest levels. This was the study ordered by Secretary of the Navy Dan Kimball, and soon-to-be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Of Staff, Admiral Arthur Radford, that was precipitated by the close passage of their planes by a UFO in mid-Pacific, and the subsequent blunt uncooperative treatment of the Secretary's aides when they later inquired about the incident from the Air Force. Kimball ordered, through Radford, that a separate Navy file be maintained, particularly of Navy cases, since the Air Force could not be trusted to act in a responsible and civil manner as to openly sharing information as to what was going on [This fiasco happened just before Ruppelt got on the scene and began to recreate the Project in a more orderly and sensible mode. Naval distrust caused him some early problems of information transfer which he had to try to repair, and one spectacular Balloon-Research-Team case was garbled enough that his report on it was a full year off in date---something that didn't get corrected for a few months]. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Kimball/Radford study was headed by a commander, Frank Lowell Thomas, out of the Office of Naval Intelligence [I think that this is correct, but it could have been ONR instead---these two offices work pretty closely together]. Commander Thomas' study/file went on for an unknown amount of time; it could have been a year, it could have been several. Radford didn't retire from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs until 1957---pretty close to when Keyhoe's informants were keeping their file "with the approval of the Admiral". We don't know if there was any relationship whatever between these two files, or even if they in some ongoing form were the same thing. Whatever the exact situation, one can never say with any honesty that the Navy had no interest in UFOs. And, those early files contained some of the best cases of the era, and would be historically important. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What did Keyhoe's "leakers" tell him? Somewhere there's probably an old unexamined NICAP file which would tell us this, but I haven't seen it. In the book, Keyhoe, the honorable man, makes things tough to suss as well. He gives a very abbreviated example of a Naval Transport plane encountering a red-orange glowing UFO coming directly at it, which the pilot dived beneath it to escape the collision. [with no more than is here, one cannot honestly rate this as more than a fireball encounter which fooled the pilot into believing that it was closer than it was]. Later in the book Keyhoe has a chapter entitled "The Hidden Reports". But, although several of these are Navy, each is described in a way that it cannot be one of these "log" cases that the leakers gave to him. This is frustrating to say the least, as I would really like to know the kinds of things these guys were saving in their files. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The only thing discussed that Keyhoe is willing to talk about [since it breaks no confidences] is the Piri Reis map. This is, to me, quite bizarre. You can hopefully read about it in the two NICAP UFO Investigator articles which accompany this section. The newsletter articles don't mention the role of the leakers in presenting this information to Keyhoe, but Naval references are still scattered about even here. The real point is that these guys who were charged with keeping a UFO log for the Navy thought that it was a strong possibility that someone thousands of years ago had been mapping the planet using aerial technology. And Keyhoe was apparently buying it: both in the book, and as indicated by his willingness to put the subject in the newsletter twice. Just so as not to be misunderstood, I believe that the Piri Reis map is a genuine artifact of the time frame of Christopher Columbus and an interesting mystery in many ways. I do not think that it is at all obvious that it must be drawn by using aerial technology--and in fact know that really wonderful maps can be [admittedly laboriously] put together by the grunt work of just-us-humans sailing and walking about making measurements and stringing them together [see the accuracy of the near-Greece Mediterranean area from Ptolemaic times, if you doubt this]. The fact that the Piri Reis map seems to be but a portion of a much larger thing, very possibly using an origin point around Alexandria Egypt, is also interesting, but hardly indicative of "ancient astronauts" or Atlantaens. The great debatable mystery as to whether the map shows Antarctica is the big thing, but even that doesn't lead you to ET. Still, we have Naval intelligence people concerned with UFOs [and Don Keyhoe] who are going there. This is more than intriguing to me, but I can't get much more clear about the Navy and Keyhoe in my mind without more to go on. How "sold" were people like this on a centuries-old surveillance, and in some sense, "presence" on Earth by extraterrestrials?-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ed Ruppelt once said "Why don't the #%@&!!! things swim so we could give them to the Navy?" Maybe the Navy would have been happy to "have" them. There sure seem to have been people there who took them a lot more seriously.

Don Keyhoe in 1960

Things have been cramped lately and it has been hard to move forward on the FSRs and the blog. Sort of out of desperation, I picked up a few texts and thumbed through. One was Keyhoe's TOP SECRET published in 1960. Since that's where we were in FSR I thought it a good coincidence. On top of that, the previous owner, [probably a NICAP person], had attempted a case index for the book and left it inside the back cover. Thinking that maybe someone out there could use the index, and thinking that maybe I could "spout off" a bit on the book without having to read the whole thing, .....well, here's the blog entry. {The four "illustrations" below are the previous owner's index.}
This isn't going to be a well-read and well thought out book review. It's an excuse to comment about Keyhoe et al more or less out of memory of the time and historical context. For those of you who are extraordinarily hip, you can survey the case list and immediately determine something about Keyhoe from what he was willing to put into the book. To begin: the list is "pretty" good, but not perfect. The vast majority of the book's cases are on it, and there aren't many errors. So it is a good gauge of Keyhoe's thought. I count a little over 130 cases listed, but there are a small number of duplicates. Lets call it about 130. Of these 80++% are "safe" cases: mainly "objects", "lights", Radar/Visuals [Keyhoe really likes those], and a very small number of CE1s. 10% [13] cases are traditional CE2 cases [not surprising since we're past Levelland et al, and Keyhoe liked all that.] Beyond that: essentially nothing: UFOlogy stopped at about 1000 yards. There were two CE3s mentioned: the Reinhold Schmidt hoax, mentioned very deprecatorily, and the Squyres case of Pittsburgh, Kansas---brief but not panned---perhaps the beginnings of a crack in Keyhoe's anti-CE3 armor? There was only one class of case types which we today would call risky: Keyhoe was all in on collisions and "near-hits-in-the-air" and extended that idea to explosions and fragments of possible UFOs. Keyhoe was, in this, the ultimate "nuts-and-bolts" guy. UFOs were metallic flying machines, period---nothing more.
We might chide Keyhoe for lack of imagination, a sort-of alter-ego to FSR at the moment, but he was constricted by two rather understandable elements: his own history as a military guy and a gee-whiz technologist [who naturally was sucked in to thinking in "understandable" mechanical terms], and the pragmatic need to be "error-free" if he was ever to get the support of congress. Keyhoe was no scientist--he didn't understand much about the real "frontiers" of physics et al--and he was certainly no metaphysicist. Where was he going to get any imagination? Keyhoe lived with the concrete and by gum, concrete were what the UFOs were going to be. Nothing's more concrete than something running into you, and so UFOs running into our planes, and near-hitting them was the extreme end of Keyhoe's model of reality.
But I was nevertheless surprised by him in this book. Keyhoe was beginning to stretch himself in ways that I hadn't realized he was capable of. I believe that the stretch was because he too was getting impatient to solve the big picture. Keyhoe, even Keyhoe, needed a big theory and therefore a big answer. Where he was going was far out in space and far back in time. As to Space, he reflected back on the essay that he had been shown by Al Chop which had been written by a Pentagon Intel Colonel named Odell. The essay painted a scenario of a dying world and the need for an advanced civilization to move en masse to another "colony" world--even if that world was already occupied. This intrigued Keyhoe because it was one way to explain the huge amount of UFO activity in our skies---they were surveying the situation and their prospects. They were here in numbers also because of our nuclear activities and the rest of the aggressiveness they then discovered. Any near-hits and collisions might be accidents or they might be deliberate--even tests. As to time, and here was the bigger surprise, Keyhoe gave apparent credence to the recently publicized Piri Reis map. What he was wowed about was the information that he received that the map had to be based on data many centuries old [dating at least back to when Alexandria was a major center of knowledge] and had to have come from an aerial survey [he says that in the book--much to the dropping of my jaw]. The survey of Earth as a possible colony world could have been going on for millennia. I trust that he didn't include this idea in his letters to congressmen.
Keyhoe has himself and Frank Edwards sitting together wowing each other with these ideas at the end of the book and vowing to do all they can to prepare the public for the big admission by government that was [as usual] just around the corner. Well---wrong again. In true dime novel fashion he has himself driving down the street towards the US Capitol and reflecting on his fellow humans. "None of them, I thought, would be concerned with more than their own familiar world. Yet each one, all the millions on Earth, stood on the threshold of something strange and tremendous. Inevitable as the rising sun, it would change the lives of all, for good or bad, irrevocably. How it would happen, when it would come, there was still no way of knowing. But one thing was certain, beyond all doubt. The world would never be the same." Well, Don, generically, I guess I can agree with most of that.

FSR 1960: Humans At Work.

Under Waveney Girvan's leadership, the pages of FSR were reasonably sane. Given the still-mysterious status of nearly everything associated with UFOs, and Girvan's own unflagging support of George Adamski, this was rather remarkable and a testament to Girvan's honesty [and good quality intellect] as an explorer. Still, we inevitably had some "human elements" to deal with which were not always pointed in the best direction.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The fellow pictured above is Trevor James Constable [going at that time by just "Trevor James"]. Ignoring a huge percentage of the phenomenon as reported, James decided that UFOs were Space Animals. The picture at the left is one of many really bad pieces of film that he used in support of this hypothesis. Many were printed in FSR. [I have reproduced perhaps the "best" of his photos here]. The idea has a certain "romance" about it, and could be entertained [mildly] for cases like the "Attack Glob from Magonia" described in an earlier post, but hardly addresses the core of the UFO mystery without a great dose of further imagination-without-evidence. But for me, and I hope all serious students of actual UFOs, James' speculations are more a science-fiction sideline to the research than something with much substance. ------------------------------------------------------------------------But we can give him one bit of comfort from the journal in 1960. [A doubtlessly quite young] Colin Wilson reported to FSR that a "few months ago" [therefore late 1959] a Scottish forestry worker named Moreland was walking in the foothills of Ben Nevis near Fort William, when, low on the slopes, he "came upon patches of an unusual jelly-like substance". The patches, of which there were apparently many, lay about on both ground and rock to a thickness of four inches. They appeared to be greyish-white, but had a "rather beautiful blue tinge". When Moreland kicked at it, bits would break away, and it acted "quite like table jelly". Once the Sun hit it, it dissolved away rapidly. Moreland subsequently asked fellow workers about the stuff, and one old man told him "It comes down i' the night frae the sky". Well, maybe. Whatever, it is at a minimum interesting, though without anything to link it to UFOs. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Trevor James went on to [basically] abandon his flirtation with Space Animals, and to take up Reichian Cloud-Busting, weather modification, and "free-energy harvesting" from the sky. All of that sounds like a great trajectory of a life consistently pursuing nonsense [and perhaps even scams-for-cash; the last of these things was a business]. Plus, I really think that his Space Animals wouldn't have liked any of his later schemes for meddling with their environment.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There was something of historical [human] importance which happened this year which FSR reported: the "recantation" of Edward Ruppelt. In the great scheme of things, this is of little importance, but in the petty scheme of things, it has engendered a lot of print and an equal amount of "Sturm und Drang" which has created a lot of error in some peoples' minds. I shouldn't waste your time with this, but, as it fogs up our understanding of history, I am driven to comment. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I have for many years been privileged to be the amateur archivist for the Edward Ruppelt papers. Having read them all, and much more in other file sources, I am going to claim, immodestly, to be about as much of an "expert" on Ruppelt as you can get. [that doesn't mean that I really know everything which went on, of course, just that my guess is as good as any]. So, what went on with Sir Edward? --------------------------------------------------------------------------Ed Ruppelt was a fighter pilot ace and an engineering graduate of Iowa State University. After the war he wanted to stay in for a while and shortly move on to a job in the aeronautical industry. And this is what he did. He was a smart guy, a personable guy, and a guy with high standards of personal work and loyalty to the USAF. He got assigned to intelligence at Wright-Patterson, analyzing intel on Soviet jets. He was fascinated with the UFO desk's job, and when Jerry Cummings left for Cal Tech, Ruppelt stepped in. Though not Cummings' fault [that belongs to the guys of the Grudge era], the desk and files were a complete mess. Ed went about trying to make things orderly and workable, and, within the limits of the support that he had, he did a good job. In fact, he did so well, and so personably, that he was respected by his superiors and trusted with giving briefings, even on his own, to anyone right up to the chief of intelligence. The bottom line here is: although just a lieutenant, Ruppelt managed to do a good honest job at Blue Book. That did not mean that he understood everything that had gone on with the USAF UFO project [he tried to talk with old-timers to find out what he could] nor everything that had ever been reported in files [some of which he couldn't even find as they had been discarded]. But all indications are that he did the best he could, and that was pretty good until the wave of the summer of 1952 swamped him. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------A key thing happened very early in Ed's career at Wright-Pat. He heard a critical tape recording by then chief-of-intelligence Charles Cabell, in which an irate Cabell screamed at his colonels about how betrayed he felt that they had trashed the project and regarded the subject itself as trash. The key phrase for the soon-to-be Blue Book chief Ruppelt was: "I want an open mind!! In fact I order an open mind!!" Absurd as that concept may be, in a long-distance way, Cabell was talking to the right guy. Ed Ruppelt was the master of the open mind. That is why when he talked to a skeptic, he challenged the skepticism. When he talked to a believer, he challenged their evidence. And that is why you can read Ed's book till you drop, and never can be sure whether he "believed" in UFOs or not. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This is why all the smoke has been created around him. Did he "believe" or didn't he? My answer is: it's not important. But others insist that it is and use their speculations on the point as launchpads for conspiratorial theories and/or character assassinations. What can we say with honesty? When people actually read Ruppelt's book, they became more certain that the UFOs were real flying technology anomalies. The reasons are both concrete and subtle. The concrete ones are the statistics of unknowns [which are staggering] and the fact that Ed clearly believed that many of the most puzzling things that he wrote about were real observations. The reason that we know the latter is that Ed was willing to take his cases of high strangeness to the CIA panel in front of both them and his boss [General Garland] and defend them as things to be considered by the scientists. These include things such as the "microwaved" soil of the Desverges case and the shoot-a-saucer incident of the Holloman report. I have independent confirmation that Ed used the Desverges case when he gave orientation talks to new intel officers about the kinds of things that they might see on the job. The subtler things are the "atmosphere" about how he talks in the book and in his file notes. When he is arguing with a UFO enthusiast, he writes humbly, and often humorously, with the joke being on him. when he writes about a debunker, he will be very deprecatory and even angry. Ed Ruppelt was sympathetic to the UFO mystery even in his "body language" in print. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------And so, the honest man wrote an honest book--true to his character as the ultimate open-mind, and true to his sympathy for the mystery. And then....the book revision. When the second edition came out, it had three new chapters. One chapter was just like the previous seventeen, open-minded and sympathetic. One chapter was a sarcastic look at the contactees, and who could blame him? The last chapter was a thoroughly unsympathetic laying waste of the subject. [The "Recantation"]. What had happened? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Conspiracy theorists want to believe that Ruppelt now finally showed his true colors, and had been an intelligence community stalking horse for manipulating everyone from the CIA to ourselves all along. Ed Ruppelt, the Iowa farmboy and lowly lieutenant, was really the original Man-in-Black with the blackest of hearts. [That theory is the equivalent of the amount of pig manure spilt on Iowa farms in a full year in my opinion]. Other people just don't like Ruppelt [for reasons which escape me] and are happy to use his betrayal to sling mud [or worse] all over him. But I believe that what happened to Ed was exceedingly understandable and perfectly in tune with his character. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------He had begun his post-USAF career very admirably as far as we UFOlogists are concerned, happily giving more and more positive commentary about UFOs to the press, joyfully giving talks and TV appearances [like "What's My Line?"] and corresponding with people like Don Keyhoe [to say nothing of helping get the UFO movie into the theatres]. I believe that if Ruppelt had lived, and if Keyhoe hadn't been so successful at getting the USAF into hot water in congress, Ed would have ultimately joined NICAP. As it was, the main thing that was stopping him was worry about what his air technology employer might say. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Ruppelt wrote his recantation at a precisely understandable time. He had been called to Washington by the Air Force to sit in closed meetings with congressmen and explain to them that the USAF was doing its job and that these hassles that Keyhoe was putting them through were a waste of both the congressmen's time and the USAF. Ed probably didn't think that it was a waste of the Air Force's time, but he stated explicitly to Keyhoe that it should not be on the agenda of congressmen when so many things of greater national importance existed. And he felt that it was wrong that Keyhoe and others were using his book as a weapon in this fight. When you add to that Ed's long feelings of loyalty to his service, what would you think you'd see next out of him? He did the most effective thing that he could--he changed the tone of his book. That's intellectually dishonest, yes; but it's understandable, and it's probably the only intellectually dishonest thing that he did in his short life in UFOlogy. Ed died young. What a shame. At the end of the twentieth century he might still have been with us and clear-headed --- and my what an oral history interview that would have been. Ed is a hero of UFOlogy in my heart. To those who viciously detract from him I have many words, none appropriate for the blog. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A few other things on the "human" side were in FSR [though surprisingly bare this year]. Leon Davidson unloaded his theory that this was all a CIA plot, using clever air technology which was our own, as well as "useful dupes" such as Adamski and the other contactees, for whatever their ultimate nefarious purposes were. ---------------------------------------------------The other major features were the march of articles by W.R.Drake presenting every possible reason why intelligent life forms, looking perhaps like us, and like "gods" or the contactee personages, could exist on each of the planets of the solar system. As esoteric as his writings were, they, in the end, have a batting average of zero. One wonders what it is like to be a theorist who is wrong 100% of the time--one cannot own a mental rearview mirror, I suppose. My own tastes go in these matters to old science fiction, and particularly, as to intelligent life on Mercury, to Ray Cummings' novels of the winged princess, Tama, who lives in the twilight zone between the hot and cold sides, and is completely charming---smart and tom-boy spunky too. Now if the universe was mine to order, I'd have Tama and her kind happily on a more hospitable Mercury, and Drake and I would have something to agree upon. Alas, neither one of us will get our wishes.