Flying Saucers Again: Do You Believe in Them?

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

# Approved For Release 2001/04/02 : CIA-RDP81R00560R000100010009-2

## A Persistent Date

It is amazing how June 24, 1947, has remained stuck like a burr in the public mind as the hallowed UFO Natal Day.

Life magazine, in its April 7, 1952, issue, wrote: "The shapes and the inscrutable portents of the flying disks first broke upon the skies of the world in 1947."

Time magazine, in its March 3, 1952, issue, wrote: "The first ones reported [were] sighted near Mt. Rainier in 1947."

Although what is now the United States military establishment dates back to several years before there was a United States, our military record-keepers did not start keeping tabs on UFO reports until, precisely, the year 1947. (See the statistical table on page 82 of "Flying Saucers and the U.S. Air Force: The Official Air Force Story," published in 1960, and note also the following flat statement on page 12 of the same book: "For all practical purposes, and for the purpose of this book, Air Force History relating to unidentified flying objects or flying saucers began on Tuesday, June 24, 1947.")

In his startling new book, "Incident At Exeter," John G. Fuller. staff writer of the column, "Trade Winds," in the Saturday Review of Literature, refers to "the twenty year history of the phenomenon's most yeasty occurrences."

And so it has gone and still goes .1947.1947.1947.

## Recommended Reading

Believers and Unbelievers alike, I think, should read Fuller's book, which reports, with depth of detail equal to that in Capote's "In Cold Blood," the September 3, 1965, sighting at Exeter, N. H., reported by a young man, Norman Muscarello, and two officers, Eugene Bertrand and David Hunt, of the Exeter police force. Mr. Fuller, microscopically studying this and other recent reported sightings in the area, interviewed some 60 down-to-earth, plain-spoken New Englanders, recording their every word on 20 hours of tape.

Having been in beautiful Exeter many times when my son was in school there, I felt a special immediacy about the whole book.

I am unable to judge the validity of Fuller's strongly held and elaborately developed thesis that UFOs, attracted to, and given to following, power lines, caused the Great Northeast Blackout a few months ago. How about judging that aspect of the book for yourselves?

I said I wouldn't try to proselytize, but—here I address the Unbelievers—would you read Fuller's book? Well, would you start it? (If you do, I think you will finish it.)

While at it, would you consider reading Frank Edwards' equally new, equally detailed "Flying Saucers—Serious Business"?

And then why not get hold of "The UFO Evidence," a massive 200,000-word document published in 1964 by NICAP (The National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena) whose headquarters are in Washington, D.C.?

I'm only suggesting!

## The UFO War

You won't find any of this reading dull. Take, for one thing, the grimness of the war being waged between these passionate authors and the hard-pressed United States Air Force. A few blistering quotes will indicate how, in this controversy, each side regards the other as the Devil's Advocate:

FULLER: "The Air Force has, in a very subtle manner, gone out of its way to insult hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of respectable citizens . . . pooh-poohing the serious reports of dozens of qualified pilots . . . playing dirty pool in relation to the citizenry. The UFO's greatest enemy is the U.S. Air Force. . . We are back again to NICAP's contention that the Air Force is, in the most simple and direct terms, lying. By the same token, of course, the Air Force is calling NICAP a liar."

EDWARDS: "In August of 1965, when tens of thousands of persons from the Dakotas to Mexico watched peculiar lighted formations hovering and maneuvering in the skies, the Air Force blandly informed the news services that all these witnesses, on the ground and

in the air, had been watching nothing more unusual than four stars in the constellation Orion!"

NICAP: "The U.S. Air Force is charged with the official investigation of UFOs, but has practiced an intolerable degree of secrecy, keeping the public in the dark about the amount and possible significance of UFO evidence."

U.S. AIR FORCE: "I [Lt. Col. Lawrence J. Tacker] state emphatically that the United States Air Force is not withholding information on this subject from the general public."

## Pre-1947 Reports

Far from having begun in 1947 reported UFO sightings go way way back.

They go back well over a century, as can be proven by the record. And they go back even to Biblical times, in some examples where the connection, although titillating when you get to pondering it, can only be speculative.

Time and Readers Digest have printed articles purportedly covering Pre-1947, but Time mentioned only the celebrated "airship" reportedly seen by thousands of Americans from Oakland, Cal., to Chicago, in 1896-97—and Readers Digest reported only on sightings in 1913, 1904, 1897 (the same one mentioned by Time), 1882, and 1870 These references barely scratched the surface.

In the books under discussion in this article, the one by the Air Force disposes of Pre-1947 in 22 lines at the beginning of Chapter 2, "The History of the 'Saucers'."

Even the NICAP book, magnificently detailed in the Post-1947 reports listed in its Section XI, "The UFO Chronology," gives only a column and a half to Pre-1947, under the headings of "19th Century," "Early 20th Century," and "World War II Foo Fighter' Era."

Fuller's book doesn't touch on Pre-1947. I think he was well advised to omit this complex quadrant entirely. His hands and his mind and his tape recorder were busy enough with the investigations in depth of New England 1965 and 1966 reports which he resourcefully initiated, doggedly carried out, and brilliantly chronicled.

Edwards' book, however, gave me great joy in its attention to Pre-1947.

Following a forthright statement that "As a professional reporter, I am well aware of the importance of including . . . the very beginning of the story," he touches on, among other things, the rather well-known Biblical "references" and also brings in an extraordinary extract from the archaic "Book of Dzyan-A Chronicle of Ancient India" which, for all my spading in the field of Pre-1947, I had never heard of.

The Biblical "references" are, of course, to a "wheel in the middle of a wheel" in the "whirlwind [that] came out of the north" (Ezekiel)—taken by some students to mean a flying disk—and, in Zechariah, "Then I lifted up mine eyes and looked and beheld a flying roll . . . the length thereof twenty cubits and the breadth ten cubits"—30 by 15 feet in our termi-