Hoax or Horror?
To the military and the public who weren't intimately associated
with the higher levels of Air Force Intelligence during the summer of
1952--and few were--General Samford's press conference seemed to
indicate the peak in official interest in flying saucers. It did take
the pressure off Project Blue Book--reports dropped from fifty per
day to ten a day inside of a week--but behind the scenes the press
conference was only the signal for an all-out drive to find out more
about the UFO. Work on the special cameras continued on a high-
priority basis, and General Samford directed us to enlist the aid of
top-ranking scientists.
During the past four months we had collected some 750 comparatively
well-documented reports, and we hoped that something in these reports
might give us a good lead on the UFO. My orders were to tell the
scientists to whom we talked that the Air Force was officially still
very much interested in the UFO and that their assistance, even if it
was only in giving us ideas and comments on the reports, was badly
needed. Although the statement of the problem was worded much more
loosely, in essence it was, "Do the UFO reports we have collected
indicate that the earth is being visited by a people from another
planet?"
Such questions had been asked of the scientists before, but not in
such a serious vein.
Then a secondary program was to be started, one of "educating" the
military. The old idea that UFO reports would die out when the thrill
wore off had long been discarded. We all knew that UFO reports would
continue to come in and that in order to properly evaluate them we
had to have every shred of evidence. The Big Flap had shown us that
our chances of getting a definite answer on a sighting was directly
proportional to the quality of the information we received from the
intelligence officers in the field.
But soon after the press conference we began to get wires from
intelligence officers saying they had interpreted the newspaper
accounts of General Samford's press conference to mean that we were
no longer interested in UFO reports. A few other intelligence
officers had evidently also misinterpreted the general's remarks
because their reports of excellent sightings were sloppy and
incomplete. All of this was bad, so to forestall any misconceived
ideas about the future of the Air Force's UFO project, summaries of
General Samford's press conference were distributed to intelligence
officers. General Samford had outlined the future of the UFO project
when he'd said:
"So our present course of action is to continue on this problem with
the best of our ability, giving it the attention that we feel it very
definitely warrants. We will give it adequate attention, but not
frantic attention."
The summary of the press conference straightened things out to some
extent and our flow of reports got back to normal.
I was anxious to start enlisting the aid of scientists, as General
Samford had directed, but before this could be done we had a backlog
of UFO reports that had to be evaluated. During July we had been
swamped and had picked off only the best ones. Some of the reports we
were working on during August had simple answers, but many were
unknowns. There was one report that was of special interest because
it was an excellent example of how a UFO report can at first appear
to be absolutely unsoluble then suddenly fall apart under thorough
investigation. It also points up the fact that our investigation and
analysis were thorough and that when we finally stamped a report
"Unknown" it was unknown. We weren't infallible but we didn't often
let a clue slip by.
At exactly ten forty-five on the morning of August 1, 1952, an ADC
radar near Bellefontaine, Ohio, picked up a high-speed unidentified
target moving southwest, just north of Dayton. Two F-86's from the
97th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron at Wright-Patterson were scrambled
and in a few minutes they were climbing out toward where the radar
showed the UFO to be. The radar didn't have any height-finding
equipment so all that the ground controller at the radar site could
do was to get the two F-86's over or under the target, and then they
would have to find it visually.
When the two airplanes reached 30,000 feet, the ground controller
called them and told them that they were almost on the target, which
was still continuing its southwesterly course at about 525 miles an
hour. In a few seconds the ground controller called back and told the
lead pilot that the targets of his airplane and the UFO had blended
on the radar-scope and that the pilot would have to make a visual
search; this was as close in as radar could get him. Then the radar
broke down and went off the air.
But at almost that exact second the lead pilot looked up and there
in the clear blue sky several thousand feet above him was a silver-
colored sphere. The lead pilot pointed it out to his wing man and
both of them started to climb. They went to their maximum altitude
but they couldn't reach the UFO. After ten minutes of unsuccessful
attempts to identify the huge silver sphere or disk--because at times
it looked like a disk--one of the pilots hauled the nose of his F-86
up in a stall and exposed several feet of gun camera film. Just as he
did this the warning light on his radar gun sight blinked on,
indicating that something solid was in front of him--he wasn't
photographing a sundog, hallucination, or refracted light.
The two pilots broke off the intercept and started back to Wright-
Patterson when they suddenly realized that they were still northwest
of the base, in almost the same location they had been when they
started the intercept ten minutes before. The UFO had evidently
slowed down from the speed that the radar had measured, 525 miles an
hour, until it was hovering almost completely motionless.
As soon as the pilots were on the ground, the magazine of film from
the gun camera was rushed to the photo lab and developed. The photos
showed only a round, indistinct blob--no details--but they were proof
that some type of unidentified flying object had been in the air
north of Dayton.
Lieutenant Andy Flues was assigned to this one. He checked the
locations of balloons and found out that a 20-foot-diameter
radiosonde weather balloon from Wright-Patterson had been very near
the area when the unsuccessful intercept took place, but the balloon
wasn't traveling 525 miles an hour and it couldn't be picked up by
the ground radar, so he investigated further. The UFO couldn't have
been another airplane because airplanes don't hover in one spot and
it was no atmospheric phenomenon. Andy wrote it off as an unknown but
it still bothered him; that balloon in the area was mighty
suspicious. He talked to the two pilots a half dozen times and spent
a day at the radar site at Bellefontaine before he reversed his
"Unknown" decision and came up with the answer.
The unidentified target that the radar had tracked across Ohio was a
low-flying jet. The jet was unidentified because there was a mix-up
and the radar station didn't get its flight plan. Andy checked and
found that a jet out of Cleveland had landed at Memphis at about
eleven-forty. At ten forty-five this jet would have been north of
Dayton on a southwesterly heading. When the ground controller blended
the targets of the two F-86's into the unidentified target, they were
at 30,000 feet and were looking for the target at their altitude or
higher so they missed the low-flying jet--but they did see the
balloon. Since the radar went out just as the pilots saw the balloon,
the ground controller couldn't see that the unidentified target he'd
been watching was continuing on to the southwest. The pilots didn't
bother to look around any more once they'd spotted the balloon
because they thought they had the target in sight.
The only part of the sighting that still wasn't explained was the
radar pickup on the F-86's gun sight. Lieutenant Flues checked
around, did a little experimenting, and found out that the small
transmitter box on a radiosonde balloon will give an indication on
the radar used in F-86 gun sights.
To get a final bit of proof, Lieutenant Flues took the gun camera
photos to the photo lab. The two F-86's had been at about 40,000 feet
when the photos were taken and the 20-foot balloon was at about
70,000 feet. Andy's question to the photo lab was, "How big should a
20-foot balloon appear on a frame of 16-mm. movie film when the
balloon is 30,000 feet away?"
The people in the photo lab made a few calculations and measurements
and came up with the answer, "A 20-foot balloon photographed from
30,000 feet away would be the same size as the UFO in the gun camera
photos."
By the middle of August, Project Blue Book was back to normal.
Lieutenant Flues's Coca-Cola consumption had dropped from twenty
bottles a day in mid-July to his normal five. We were all getting a
good night's sleep and it was now a rare occasion when my home
telephone would ring in the middle of the night to report a new UFO.
But then on the morning of August 20 I was happily taking a shower,
getting ready to go to work, when one of these rare occasions
occurred and the phone rang--it was the ATIC OD. An operational
immediate wire had just come in for Blue Book. He had gone over to
the message center and gotten it. He thought that it was important
and wanted me to come right out. For some reason he didn't want to
read it over the phone, although it was not classified. I decided
that if he said so I should come out, so I left in a hurry.
The wire was from the intelligence officer at an air base in
Florida. The previous night a scoutmaster and three boy scouts had
seen a UFO. The scoutmaster had been burned when he approached too
close to the UFO. The wire went on to give a few sketchy details and
state that the scoutmaster was a "solid citizen."
I immediately put in a long-distance call to the intelligence
officer. He confirmed the data in the wire. He had talked briefly to
the scoutmaster on the phone and from all he could gather it was no
hoax. The local police had been contacted and they verified the story
and the fact of the burns. I asked the intelligence officer to
contact the scoutmaster and ask if he would submit to a physical
examination immediately. I could imagine the rumors that could start
about the scoutmaster's condition, and I wanted proof. The report
sounded good, so I told the intelligence officer I'd get down to see
him as soon as possible.
I immediately called Colonel Dunn, then chief at ATIC, and gave him
a brief rundown. He agreed that I should go down to Florida as soon
as possible and offered to try to get an Air Force B-25, which would
save time over the airlines.
I told Bob Olsson to borrow a Geiger counter at Wright Field, then
check out a camera. I called my wife and asked her to pack a few
clothes and bring them out to me. Bob got the equipment, ran home and
packed a bag, and in two hours he and I and our two pilots, Captain
Bill Hoey and Captain David Douglas, were on our way to Florida to
investigate one of the weirdest UFO reports that I came up against.
When we arrived, the intelligence officer arranged for the
scoutmaster to come out to the air base. The latter knew we were
coming, so he arrived at the base in a few minutes. He was a very
pleasant chap, in his early thirties, not at all talkative but
apparently willing to co-operate.
While he was giving us a brief personal history, I had the immediate
impression that he was telling the truth. He'd lived in Florida all
of his life. He'd gone to a private military prep school, had some
college, and then had joined the Marines. He told us that he had been
in the Pacific most of the war and repeated some rather hairy stories
of what he'd been through. After the war he'd worked as an auto
mechanic, then gone to Georgia for a while to work in a turpentine
plant. After returning to Florida, he opened a gas station, but some
hard luck had forced him to sell out. He was now working as a clerk
in a hardware store. Some months back a local church had decided to
organize a boy scout troop and he had offered to be the scoutmaster.
On the night before the weekly scout meeting had broken up early. He
said that he had offered to give four of the boys a ride home. He had
let one of the boys out when the conversation turned to a stock car
race that was to take place soon. They talked about the condition of
the track. It had been raining frequently, and they wondered if the
track was flooded, so they drove out to look at it. Then they started
south toward a nearby town to take another of the boys home. They
took a black-top road about 10 miles inland from the heavily traveled
coastal highway that passes through sparsely settled areas of scrub
pine and palmetto thickets.
They were riding along when the scoutmaster said that he noticed a
light off to his left in the pines. He slowed down and asked the boys
if they'd seen it; none of them had. He started to drive on, when he
saw the lights again. This time all of the boys saw them too, so he
stopped. He said that he wanted to go back into the woods to see what
was going on, but that the boys were afraid to stay alone. Again he
started to drive on, but in a few seconds decided he had to go back.
So he turned the car around, went back, and parked beside the road at
a point just opposite where he'd seen the lights.
I stopped him at this point to find out a little bit more about why
he'd decided to go back. People normally didn't go running off into
palmetto thickets infested with rattlesnakes at night. He had a
logical answer. The lights looked like an airplane crashing into the
woods some distance away. He didn't believe that was what he saw, but
the thought that this could be a possibility bothered him. After all,
he had said, he was a scoutmaster, and if somebody was in trouble,
his conscience would have bothered him the rest of his life if he
hadn't investigated and it had been somebody in need of help.
A fifteen-minute radio program had just started, and he told the
boys that he was going to go into the woods, and that if he wasn't
back by the time the program ended they should run down the road to a
farmhouse that they had passed and get help. He got out and started
directly into the woods, wearing a faded denim billed cap and
carrying machete and two flashlights. One of the lights was a spare
he carried in his back pocket.
He had traveled about 50 yards off the road when he ran into a
palmetto thicket, so he stopped and looked for a clear path. But
finding none, he started pushing his way through the waist-high
tangle of brush.
When he stopped, he recalled later, he had first become aware of an
odd odor. He couldn't exactly describe it to us, except to say that
it was "sharp" or "pungent." It was very faint, actually more like a
subconscious awareness at first. Another sensation he recalled after
the incident was a very slight difference in temperature, hardly
perceivable, like walking by a brick building in the evening after
the sun has set. He hadn't thought anything about either the odor or
the heat at the time but later, when they became important, he
remembered them.
Paying no attention to these sensations then, he pushed on through
the brush, looking up occasionally to check the north star, so that
he could keep traveling straight east. After struggling through about
30 yards of palmetto undergrowth, he noticed a change in the shadows
ahead of him and stopped to shine the flashlight farther ahead of him
to find out if he was walking into a clearing or into one of the many
ponds that dot that particular Florida area. It was a clearing.
The boy scouts in the car had been watching the scoutmaster's
progress since they could see his light bobbing around. Occasionally
he would shine it up at a tree or across the landscape for an
instant, so they knew where he was in relation to the trees and
thickets. They saw him stop at the edge of the open, shadowed area
and shine his light ahead of him.
The scoutmaster then told us that when he stopped this second time
he first became consciously aware of the odor and the heat. Both
became much more noticeable as he stepped into the clearing. In fact,
the heat became almost unbearable or, as he put it, "oppressively
moist, making it hard to breathe."
He walked a few more paces and suddenly got a horrible feeling that
somebody was watching him. He took another step, stopped, and looked
up to find the north star. But he couldn't see the north star, or any
stars. Then he suddenly saw that almost the whole sky was blanked out
by a large dark shape about 30 feet above him.
He said that he had stood in this position for several seconds, or
minutes--he didn't know how long--because now the feeling of being
watched had overcome any power of reasoning he had. He managed to
step back a few paces, and apparently got out from under the object,
because he could see the edge of it silhouetted against the sky.
As he backed up, he said, the air became much cooler and fresher,
helping him to think more clearly. He shone his light up at the edge
of the object and got a quick but good look. It was circular-shaped
and slightly concave on the bottom. The surface was smooth and a
grayish color. He pointed to a gray linoleum-topped desk in the
intelligence officer's room. "Just like that," he said. The upper
part had a dome in the middle, like a turret. The edge of the saucer-
shaped object was thick and had vanes spaced about every foot, like
buckets on a turbine wheel. Between each vane was a small opening,
like a nozzle.
The next reaction that the scoutmaster recalled was one of fury. He
wanted to harm or destroy whatever it was that he saw. All he had was
a machete, but he wanted to try to jump up and strike at whatever he
was looking at. No sooner did he get this idea than he noticed the
shadows on the turret change ever so slightly and heard a sound,
"like the opening of a well-oiled safe door." He froze where he stood
and noticed a small ball of red fire begin to drift toward him. As it
floated down it expanded into a cloud of red mist. He dropped his
fight and machete, and put his arms over his face. As the mist
enveloped him, he passed out.
The boy scouts, in the car, estimated that their scoutmaster had
been gone about five minutes when they saw him stop at the edge of
the clearing, then walk on in. They saw him stop seconds later,
hesitate a few more seconds, then shine the light up in the air. They
thought he was just looking at the trees again. The next thing they
said they saw was a big red ball of fire engulfing him. They saw him
fall, so they spilled out of the car and took off down the road
toward the farmhouse.
The farmer and his wife had a little difficulty getting the story
out of the boys, they were so excited. All they could get was
something about the boys' scoutmaster being in trouble down the road.
The farmer called the Florida State Highway Patrol, who relayed the
message to the county sheriff's office. In a few minutes a deputy
sheriff and the local constable arrived. They picked up the scouts
and drove to where their car was parked.
The scoutmaster had no idea of how long he had been unconscious. He
vaguely remembered leaning against a tree, the feeling of wet, dew-
covered grass, and suddenly regaining his consciousness. His first
reaction was to get out to the highway, so he started to run. About
halfway through the palmetto thicket he saw a car stop on the
highway. He ran toward it and found the deputy and constable with the
boys.
He was so excited he could hardly get his story told coherently.
Later the deputy said that in all his years as a law-enforcement
officer he had never seen anyone as scared as the scoutmaster was as
he came up out of the ditch beside the road and walked into the glare
of the headlights. As soon as he'd told his story, they all went back
into the woods, picking their way around the palmetto thicket. The
first thing they noticed was the flashlight, still burning, in a
clump of grass. Next to it was a place where the grass was flattened
down, as if a person had been lying there. They looked around for the
extra light that the scoutmaster had been carrying, but it was gone.
Later searches for this missing flashlight were equally fruitless.
They marked the spot where the crushed grass was located and left.
The constable took the boy scouts home and the scoutmaster followed
the deputy to the sheriff's office. On the way to town the
scoutmaster said he first noticed that his arms and face burned. When
he arrived at the sheriff's office, he found that his arms, face, and
cap _were_ burned. The deputy called the Air Force.
There were six people listening to his story. Bob Olsson, the two
pilots, the intelligence officer, his sergeant, and I. We each had
previously agreed to pick one insignificant detail from the story and
then re-question the scoutmaster when he had finished. Our theory was
that if he had made up the story he would either repeat the details
perfectly or not remember what he'd said. I'd used this many times
before, and it was a good indicator of a lie. He passed the test with
flying colors. His story sounded good to all of us.
We talked for about another hour, discussing the event and his
background. He kept asking, "What did I see?"--evidently thinking
that I knew. He said that the newspapers were after him, since the
sheriff's office had inadvertently leaked the story, but that he had
been stalling them off pending our arrival. I told him it was Air
Force policy to allow people to say anything they wanted to about a
UFO sighting. We had never muzzled anyone; it was his choice. With
that, we thanked him, arranged to pick up the cap and machete to take
back to Dayton, and sent him home in a staff car.
By this time it was getting late, but I wanted to talk to the flight
surgeon who had examined the man that morning. The intelligence
officer found him at the hospital and he said he would be right over.
His report was very thorough. The only thing he could find out of the
ordinary were minor burns on his arms and the back of his hands.
There were also indications that the inside of his nostrils might be
burned. The degree of burn could be compared to a light sunburn. The
hair had also been singed, indicating a flash heat.
The flight surgeon had no idea how this specifically could have
happened. It could have even been done with a cigarette lighter, and
he took his lighter and singed a small area of his arm to
demonstrate. He had been asked only to make a physical check, so that
is what he'd done, but he did offer a suggestion. Check his Marine
records; something didn't ring true. I didn't quite agree; the story
sounded good to me.
The next morning my crew from ATIC, three people from the
intelligence office, and the two law officers went out to where the
incident had taken place. We found the spot where somebody had
apparently been lying and the scoutmaster's path through the thicket.
We checked the area with a Geiger counter, as a precautionary
measure, not expecting to find anything; we didn't. We went over the
area inch by inch, hoping to find a burned match with which a flare
or fireworks could have been lighted, drippings from a flare, or
anything that shouldn't have been in a deserted area of woods. We
looked at the trees; they hadn't been hit by lightning. The blades of
grass under which the UFO supposedly hovered were not burned. We
found nothing to contradict the story. We took a few photos of the
area and went back to town. On the way back we talked to the
constable and the deputy. All they could do was to confirm what we'd
heard.
We talked to the farmer and his wife, but they couldn't help. The
few facts that the boy scouts had given them before they had a chance
to talk to their scoutmaster correlated with his story. We talked to
the scoutmaster's employer and some of his friends; he was a fine
person. We questioned people who might have been in a position to
also observe something; they saw nothing. The local citizens had a
dozen theories, and we thoroughly checked each one.
He hadn't been struck by lightning. He hadn't run across a still.
There was no indication that he'd surprised a gang of illegal turtle
butcherers, smugglers, or bootleggers. There was no indication of
marsh gas or swamp fire. The mysterious blue lights in the area
turned out to be a farmer arc-welding at night. The other flying
saucers were the landing lights of airplanes landing at a nearby
airport.
To be very honest, we were trying to prove that this was a hoax, but
were having absolutely no success. Every new lead we dug up pointed
to the same thing, a true story.
We finished our work on a Friday night and planned to leave early
Saturday morning. Bob Olsson and I planned to fly back on a
commercial airliner, as the B-25 was grounded for maintenance. Just
after dinner that night I got a call from the sheriff's office. It
was from a deputy I had talked to, not the one who met the
scoutmaster coming out of the woods, but another one, who had been
very interested in the incident. He had been doing a little
independent checking and found that our singed UFO observer's
background was not as clean as he led one to believe. He had been
booted out of the Marines after a few months for being AWOL and
stealing an automobile, and had spent some time in a federal
reformatory in Chillicothe, Ohio. The deputy pointed out that this
fact alone meant nothing but that he thought I might be interested in
it. I agreed.
The next morning, early, I was awakened by a phone call from the
intelligence officer. The morning paper carried the UFO story on the
front page. It quoted the scoutmaster as saying that "high brass"
from Washington had questioned him late into the night. There was no
"high brass," just four captains, a second lieutenant, and a
sergeant. He knew we were from Dayton because we had discussed who we
were and where we were stationed. The newspaper story went on to say
that "he, the scoutmaster, and the Air Force knew what he'd seen but
he couldn't tell--it would create a national panic." He'd also hired
a press agent. I could understand the "high brass from the Pentagon"
as literary license by the press, but this "national panic" pitch was
too much. I had just about decided to give up on this incident and
write it off as "Unknown" until this happened. From all appearances,
our scoutmaster was going to make a fast buck on his experience. Just
before leaving for Dayton, I called Major Dewey Fournet in the
Pentagon and asked him to do some checking.
Monday morning the machete went to the materials lab at Wright-
Patterson. The question we asked was, "Is there anything unusual
about this machete? Is it magnetized? Is it radioactive? Has it been
heated?" No knife was ever tested so thoroughly for so many things.
As in using a Geiger counter to check the area over which the UFO had
hovered in the Florida woods, our idea was to investigate every
possible aspect of the sighting. They found nothing, just a plain,
unmagnetized, unradioactive, unheated, common, everyday knife.
The cap was sent to a laboratory in Washington, D.C., along with the
scoutmaster's story. Our question here was, "Does the cap in any way
(burns, chemicals, etc.) substantiate or refute the story?"
I thought that we'd collected all the items that could be analyzed
in a lab until somebody thought of one I'd missed, the most obvious
of them all--soil and grass samples from under the spot where the UFO
had hovered. We'd had samples, but in the last-minute rush to get
back to Dayton they had been left in Florida. I called Florida and
they were shipped to Dayton and turned over to an agronomy lab for
analysis.
By the end of the week I received a report on our ex-Marine's
military and reformatory records. They confirmed a few suspicions and
added new facts. They were not complimentary. The discrepancy between
what we'd heard about the scoutmaster while we were in Florida and
the records was considered a major factor. I decided that we should
go back to Florida and try to resolve this discrepancy.
Since it was hurricane season, we had to wait a few days, then sneak
back between two hurricanes. We contacted a dozen people in the city
where the scoutmaster lived. All of them had known him for some time.
We traced him from his early boyhood to the time of the sighting. To
be sure that the people we talked to were reliable, we checked on
them. The specific things we found out cannot be told since they were
given to us in confidence, but we were convinced that the whole
incident was a hoax.
We didn't talk to the scoutmaster again but we did talk to all the
boy scouts one night at their scout meeting, and they retold how they
had seen their scoutmaster knocked down by the ball of fire. The
night before, we had gone out to the area of the sighting and, under
approximately the same lighting conditions as existed on the night of
the sighting, had re-enacted the scene--especially the part where the
boy scouts saw their scoutmaster fall, covered with red fire. We
found that not even by standing _on_ _top_ _of_ _the_ _car_ could you
see a person silhouetted in the clearing where the scoutmaster
supposedly fell. The rest of their stories fell apart to some extent
too. They were not as positive of details as they had been previously.
When we returned to Dayton, the report on the cap had come back. The
pattern of the scorch showed that the hat was flat when it was
scorched, but the burned holes--the lab found some minute holes we
had missed--had very probably been made by an electrical spark. This
was all the lab could find.
During our previous visit we repeatedly asked the question, "Was the
hat burned before you went into the woods?" and, "Had the cap been
ironed?" We had received the same answers each time: "The hat was not
burned because we [the boy scouts] were playing with it at the scout
meeting and would have noticed the burns," and, "The cap was new; it
had not been washed or ironed." It is rumored that the cap was never
returned because it was proof of the authenticity of the sighting.
The hat wasn't returned simply because the scoutmaster said that he
didn't want it back. No secrets, no intrigue; it's as simple as that.
Everyone who was familiar with the incident, except a few people in
the Pentagon, were convinced that this was a hoax until the lab
called me about the grass samples we'd sent in. "How did the roots
get charred?" Roots charred? I didn't even know what my caller was
talking about. He explained that when they'd examined the grass they
had knocked the dirt and sand off the roots of the grass clumps and
found them charred. The blades of grass themselves were not damaged;
they had never been heated, except on the extreme tips of the longer
blades. These had evidently been bending over touching the ground and
were also charred. The lab had duplicated the charring and had found
that by placing live grass clumps in a pan of sand and dirt and
heating it to about 300 degrees F. over a gas burner the charring
could be duplicated. How it was actually done outside the lab they
couldn't even guess.
As soon as we got the lab report, we checked a few possibilities
ourselves. There were no hot underground springs to heat the earth,
no chemicals in the soil, not a thing we found could explain it. The
only way it could have been faked would have been to heat the earth
from underneath to 300 degrees F., and how do you do this without
using big and cumbersome equipment and disturbing the ground? You
can't. Only a few people handled the grass specimens: the lab, the
intelligence officer in Florida, and I. The lab wouldn't do it as a
joke, then write an official report, and I didn't do it. This leaves
the intelligence officer; I'm positive that he wouldn't do it. There
may be a single answer everyone is overlooking, but as of now the
charred grass roots from Florida are still a mystery.
Writing an official report on this incident was difficult. On one
side of the ledger was a huge mass of circumstantial evidence very
heavily weighted against the scoutmaster's story being true. On our
second trip to Florida, Lieutenant Olsson and I heard story after
story about the man's aptitude for dreaming up tall tales. One man
told us, "If he told me the sun was shining, I'd look up to make
sure." There were parts of his story and those of the boy scouts that
didn't quite mesh. None of us ever believed the boy scouts were in on
the hoax. They were undoubtedly so impressed by the story that they
imagined a few things they didn't actually see. The scoutmaster's
burns weren't proof of anything; the flight surgeon had duplicated
these by burning his own arm with a cigarette lighter. But we didn't
make step one in proving the incident to be a hoax. We thought up
dozens of ways that the man could have set up the hoax but couldn't
prove one.
In the scoutmaster's favor were the two pieces of physical evidence
we couldn't explain, the holes burned in the cap and the charred
grass roots.
The deputy sheriff who had first told me about the scoutmaster's
Marine and prison record had also said, "Maybe this is the one time
in his life he's telling the truth, but I doubt it."
So did we; we wrote off the incident as a hoax. The best hoax in UFO
history.
Many people have asked why we didn't give the scoutmaster a lie
detector test. We seriously considered it and consulted some experts
in this field. They advised against it. In some definite types of
cases the lie detector will not give valid results. This, they
thought, was one of those cases. Had we done it and had he passed on
the faulty results, the publicity would have been a headache.
There is one way to explain the charred grass roots, the burned cap,
and a few other aspects of the incident. It's pure speculation; I
don't believe that it is the answer, yet it is interesting. Since the
blades of the grass were not damaged and the ground had not been
disturbed, this one way is the only way (nobody has thought of any
other way) the soil could have been heated. It could have been done
by induction heating.
To quote from a section entitled "Induction Heating" from an
electrical engineering textbook:
A rod of solid metal or any electrical conductor, when subjected to
an alternating magnetic field, has electromotive forces set up in it.
These electromotive forces cause what are known as "eddy currents." A
rise in temperature results from "eddy currents."
Induction heating is a common method of melting metals in a foundry.
Replace the "rod of solid metal" mentioned above with damp sand, an
electrical conductor, and assume that a something that was generating
a powerful alternating magnetic field was hovering over the ground,
and you can explain how the grass roots were charred. To get an
alternating magnetic field, some type of electrical equipment was
needed. Electricity--electrical sparks--the holes burned in the cap
"by electric sparks."
UFO propulsion comes into the picture when one remembers Dr.
Einstein's unified field theory, concerning the relationship between
electro-magnetism and gravitation.
If this alternating magnetic field can heat metal, why didn't
everything the scoutmaster had that was metal get hot enough to burn
him? He had a flashlight, machete, coins in his pocket, etc. The
answer--he wasn't under the UFO for more than a few seconds. He said
that when he stopped to really look at it he had backed away from
under it. He did feel some heat, possibly radiating from the ground.
To further pursue this line of speculation, the scoutmaster
repeatedly mentioned the unusual odor near the UFO. He described it
as being "sharp" or "pungent." Ozone gas is "sharp" or "pungent." To
quote from a chemistry book, "Ozone is prepared by passing air
between two plates which are charged at a high electrical potential."
Electrical equipment again. Breathing too high a concentration of
ozone gas will also cause you to lose consciousness.
I used to try out this induction heating theory on people to get
their reaction. I tried it out one day on a scientist from Rand. He
practically leaped at the idea. I laughed when I explained that I
thought this theory just _happened_ to tie together the unanswered
aspects of the incident in Florida and was not the answer; he was
slightly perturbed. "What do you want?" he said. "Does a UFO have to
come in and land on your desk at ATIC?"