Flying Saucer Review Volume 8, #6: Slim Pickings in the Desert.

A slow news "month" at FSR. Despite this, Waveney Girvan said in his editorial that he was expecting a climax to the UFO phenomenon to occur at any time. This was because of a "recent increase in sightings". His eyes were looking in different directions than my own to spot this. Since UFO reports [of any quality] were down and stayed down for another year, his comment can only be the product of the "experience of the moment" of a small flap of cases in Sheffield and wishful thinking. Like all such predictions of the great climax and the great revelations to date, this intuition was a flat tire on the highway of life. It's hard to blame anyone for wanting the answers to be arriving soon [or even in their lifetime!], but the constant public publication of these yearnings, as if they had some substance, still amazes me a bit. There were in fact few incidents even worth mentioning. To-be Long-term UFOlogist Susanne Stebbing saw, in the company of three other people, an elongated silver-colored "airship" which "nosed upwards" and rose at great speed out of sight after nearly hovering as if watching a military flight below. She naturally was far too sharp to allow the British Air Ministry to put her off with the poppycock that the group had only seen the {much lower} military craft. Secondly, there was the claim that a United Airlines crew had taken a picture of a UFO while flying over the western US somewhere. I don't know what case they were referring to, but it would be worth looking for. Thirdly, there was one of the fairly big pile of cases that one can find where the UFO acts as is if it is stalking someone---often in an automobile but on foot or bike as well. This was a Leicestershire encounter where a darkish domed disk flew at telephone pole height directly over a car driven by a single woman at night. The thing was larger than the car and she was afraid that it might come right down "and sit on the bonnet". A pretty good case if there had been a confirmation of some kind. Fourthly, Buxton gave us an example of a case type that I irrationally like: one of those smallish roaming box-shaped UFOs which act, to me, as if they are probes rather than occupied craft. This one was noiseless and contained a few "windows" and was surrounded by a glow. I'm not sure I'd want to "go to court" with any of the others.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Definitely out-of-court was the book advertised with an insert into the magazine. With it we find out what previous editor Brinsley LePoer Trench had been up to. Men Among Mankind ravels out Trench's "insights" into what UFOs are really all about: Somehow they turn out to be the hidden technology of the remaining Atlantis People who survived the whatever-it-was cataclysm [often viewed as the falling apart of the 5th planet creating the asteroid belt and a lot of solar system havoc elsewhere]. How Trench thinks that he has any actual evidence for the idea mystifies me, as it appears to be entirely based upon his impressive imagination. The title gives the game away as to what is going on, as the Atlantaeans have been walking among us for all these centuries, and are the sources of all of our good ideas. This is a comforting thought, and our entry into the nuclear age [one of our bad ideas], is cause for us needing some special help at the moment. The utterly unsupported concept lives on to this day, as all comforting and/or exciting ones do, but if I had to go for something like this [and, sadly, I don't] I'd choose Shangri-La, Shambala, and the Regent of Agharti, which was there first and is a lot more fun to read about. Trench seems to have lost his sense by this time and it's good that he retired from editorship of FSR.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Current editor Girvan maintained his [had to be emotional] attachment to the ideas of Adamski by giving serious magazine space to a guy from South Africa [in both this issue and the previous one] who said that he had translated hieroglyphics seen by Adamski and discovered that they were the plans for an anti-gravity spaceflight engine. He'd already tinkered it together and, if you need proof, there it is on the left. The fact that this was technological nonsense does not deter the Badly-Wanting-It mind. The fact that each of these things has been shown to be a hoax does not expunge the starry-eyed claims from continuing on our beloved internet. Such things are bits in a nonsense pile which begins to impress people just because there's so much of it. Mountain William once said: no matter how many rotten ramps you cook up, they're still ramps. I'd LOVE there to be a breakthrough which allowed us to shield gravity [canceling out the gravitational matrix is probably not in the cards in terms of fundamental physics, but some sort of "blocker" could be], but these gravity machines and perpetual motion machines etc don't work. Particularly the ones which look like a bracelet and whose inventors won't let you test them. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gordon Creighton rose up in this number with one of his poorer efforts, but one which reveals a lot about him. Creighton had, as we've heard, seen his own UFO and had been collecting UFO reports from military and embassy people for a long time. He "knows" UFOs are real. He is also aware that they have been flying hither and yon all over the US and the USAF has had to make many statements about them. As a WW2 embassy person himself, he naturally thinks in political and strategic terms, and the only logical thing is: they've been flying hither and yon all over the Soviet Union as well. So, Soviet cases MUST be there, but how to get them? This puts him in a highly vulnerable mind state even as an intelligent man. This probably explains how he could write up a bunch of "soviet" cases that he acquired from a European magazine citing "anonymous sources", as if they were somehow respectable UFO data. But, when a person's mind "sells the ranch" all manner of surprising things slip in and out of it. Here are the cases that Creighton thought were legitimate to include in FSR on the basis of no documentary support whatever:
1). a "woman doctor" from a "laboratory" photographed two occupants and their craft near Irkutsk; [no photograph included]; 2). a mail plane and four passengers disappeared over central Russia. Two days later it was found intact in Siberia. No sign of the passengers was ever found, but a circular burn mark was nearby. The fuel tanks contained plenty of fuel; 3). a woman parachutist made a jump but was caught in mid-air by a UFO. She was treated well by the occupants who flew her to space and gave her a message for the Kremlin. She floated to Earth by parachute three days later [Creighton italicizes this] in a distant city; 4). a giant cigar descended over Voronezh and caused tremendous panic. It became transparent and disappeared completely prior to the arrival of jets. They left and the thing reappeared, shot flame out its rear and rose into the sky; 5). near Rybinsk, military operations on rockets were interrupted by one large and several small disks coming in and parking over the installations. The soviets opened fire. All ammo exploded before getting to the targets. small disks disabled the complex electrically, withdrew to the larger, and left. The apparatus subsequently worked; 6). a tank production factory was visited by a great number of cigars and saucers for weeks. Then, a ball of fire descended on the factory creating a loud explosion and a myriad of small globes. A great crater was all that was left of a part of the factory--the part which was making the Top Secret device for an Atomic Cannon [cue dramatic incidental scene music stage right]. "The greatest mystery was that no one was injured"; yep, that proves it. Creighton must have felt a bit uneasy in pushing this anonymous [dare I say?] crap on us, and defended himself by saying "that there is not one single element in all these accounts that we [royal "we"] cannot match precisely from reports of what has happened elsewhere in the world". Really? I'd like to see your files big fellow.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Creighton's Soviet UFOs were probably felt by Trench to be right in line with the UFOs from Atlantis. I guess I have to agree with that. As Douglas Adams said in the Hitch-hikers Guide To The Galaxy--there's only one REALLY intelligent species on Earth. [yeah, I know, the picture shows sharks, not dolphins, but I'm on a short budget]. May the Force be with us at least as much as the Farce seems always to be.