from space was Daniel Fry who, while strolling in the New Mexico
desert on the evening of July 4, 1950, noticed a flying saucer that
had apparently just landed. When he approached and started to touch
the ship, he suddenly heard a voice speaking in friendly caution:
“Better not touch the hull, pal, it’s still hot.” The voice, he
discovered, belonged to an extraterrestrial being in a mother ship that
was hovering some 900 miles above the earth. The craft on the ground
needed no crew, for it was a “remote-controlled cargo carrier,” sent
down to collect samples of the earth’s atmosphere. Communicating by
mental telepathy, the spaceman revealed that, although he came from a
remote planet, his ancestors had been earthmen who had migrated from
the island of Lemuria in ancient times (see _Chapter_ II). Strangely
enough, although the visitor’s first remark had shown a remarkable
command of contemporary English, he did not know what a roller coaster
was! He took such a fancy to Fry that he invited him to enter the cargo
craft and treated him to a quick flight to New York and back, a round
trip of 4000 miles completed in half an hour![X-3]
A contactee whose experience offered variations on the basic theme was
Truman Bethurum, a construction worker. According to his story, he
happened to be looking for sea shells in the Nevada desert sometime
before dawn one morning in July 1952 when he encountered a flying
saucer and its friendly crew. The captain was a female, a “queen
among women,” whose attractive costume included a bright-red skirt,
a black-velvet short-sleeved blouse, and a black beret with red
trim[X-4]. Though the grandmother of two, she was so beautiful that
at their first meeting Bethurum was speechless. Obviously trying to
put him at his ease, she smiled and said encouragingly, “Speak up, my
friend, you’re not hexed.” During the following months, he says, they
had several meetings and eventually, at her invitation, he accompanied
her on an enjoyable visit to the saucer’s home base, the planet
“Clarion.” Being placed directly behind the moon and apparently moving
in a parallel orbit, this heavenly body has entirely escaped the notice
of earthly astronomers[X-5].
George W. Van Tassel, operator of a commercial airport, resort, and
guest ranch in California (for some reason most of the better-known
contactees seem to be Californians), allegedly made contact with
space beings of a more ethereal type. Their saucers traveled on power
produced by the “transmutation of hard light particles into soft light
particles,” and a typical vehicle was 1500 feet in diameter, 300 feet
thick, and carried a crew of 7200. Why they needed so much room--more
than 70,000 cubic feet per spaceman--remains a mystery, for both the
ship and its occupants were made of pure light. The mother ships
remained thousands of miles above the earth at substations from which
they sent out their “ventlos,” or flying saucers, to patrol the earth
and try to improve conditions here. Speaking through Van Tassel, the
visitors sent many messages such as that of June 28, 1952:
“Salutations. My identity is Qel, 72nd projection, 15th wave, realms of
Schare [a saucer station in space]. We are passing over your cone of
receptivity, 172 thousand miles above you. Our center requests that I
inform you. You will see more of us if you watch the skies.”
Several times the spacemen threatened, if opposed, to launch thousands
of saucers per second against the earth. In January 1953 they warned
that they had three substations in space ready to release 500,000
saucers each; two months later, in March, they informed Van Tassel that
they now had 3½ million saucers in operation around the earth. Somehow
or other, this armada of UFOs seems to have remained invisible to both
the United States Air Force and the public[X-6].
Whether such tales are delusions, fantasies, or hoaxes may be
impossible to determine. Some contact cases, however, undoubtedly
contain elements of fraud. At worst, the witness may be deliberately
inventing the whole story from start to finish; at best, he may feel
so certain of the reality of his experience that he feels justified in
manufacturing evidence to convince possible skeptics. No matter what
his motives, when he tries to add verisimilitude to his narrative by
fabricating proofs, he joins the company of hoaxers[X-7].
In the Maury Island case (see _Chapter_ II), the witnesses offered
alleged fragments of a disabled spaceship, which turned out to be
chunks of slag. The scoutmaster in Florida exhibited singed hair on his
arm and a scorched cap to prove that he had suffered from the heat rays
of a landed flying saucer (see _Chapter_ VII), and the grain salesman
in Nebraska bolstered his tale of the Saturnian ship by pointing to
shallow cracks in a dry river bed and oil smudges on the grass (see
_Chapter_ IX).
A contactee who provided “proof” of his story was Howard Menger, who
specialized in describing visits to the moon. In the moon cities, he
said, he met many earth scientists who enjoyed a delightful, relaxed
existence. The lunar natives use no money, are born without appendixes,
and for entertainment play a game very much like baseball. In science
they are way ahead of us: using saucers equipped with “self-contained
gravity” and propelled by “processed free energy,” they transported him
from earth to moon in only two hours[X-8]. As a trophy of his visit,
Menger brought back a lunar potato. This remarkable vegetable was
supposed to have five times the protein content of an ordinary American
potato, but unfortunately it was not available for analysis. As soon
as he returned, he said, he had turned it over to the United States
Government, and the government was keeping it top secret[X-9].
_Adamski’s Travels_
Perhaps the best known of the contactees is George Adamski, who on
the night of November 20, 1952, in the desert of Southern California,
supposedly met and talked with the pilot of a vehicle that had just
arrived from Venus. Conversation was no problem; both men simply used
telepathy and sign language when words failed[X-10]. In the years since
then Adamski has reported many other pleasant chats with visitors
from Mars and Saturn as well as Venus, and has allegedly made several
journeys in their spacecraft, including an aerial tour of the moon.
On this trip he observed with surprise that the moon’s hidden side
contained fertile country abounding in lakes, rivers, vegetation, and
prosperous cities with people strolling along the sidewalks[X-11]. He
was not at all disconcerted when the Russian photographs of the moon’s
far side showed no trace of these delightful features. Obviously,
said Adamski, the Russians had simply retouched the pictures before
releasing them to the world, in order to deceive the United States and
to conceal the vegetation, trees, and buildings of the space people who
had their bases there[X-12].
[Illustration: _Figure 15._ Top, schematic drawing of Adamski’s
Venusian saucer. Bottom, schematic drawing of chicken brooder.]
Clearly aware of possible skepticism, Adamski did not ask the public to
accept his experiences on his unsupported word; as evidence, he offered
various photographs showing cigar-shaped objects, a rocky hillside with
a white blob on the horizon, and the drawing of a person apparently
clad in coveralls--without the book’s explanation no one would ever
suspect that he came from the planet Venus. One of the best-known
pictures he published showed a bell-shaped “spaceship” with circular
openings near the top and three large balls on the bottom for landing
gear. By an interesting coincidence, this craft closely resembles a
well-known type of chicken brooder, whose three infrared bulbs at the
base look very much like the “landing gear” of the alleged spacecraft
(see Figure 15). When skeptics doubted Adamski’s claim that he had
traveled from Kansas City, Missouri, to Davenport, Iowa, by flying
saucer, he displayed one of the most unusual items ever called upon
to prove the existence of spaceships: his uncanceled railway ticket,
for which he requested a refund![X-13]
_Photography and the UFO_
Those who believe in flying saucers have long hoped to obtain a good
clear photograph that would establish their existence once and for all.
Many “UFO” pictures show vague specks and blurs whose interpretation
is limited only by the imagination of the viewer. Of the many pictures
taken in good faith and offered in evidence, none shows an indubitable
spaceship. Most of them are genuine photographs showing indistinct
images of jet planes, birds, balloons, and other objects normally in
the sky. They are puzzling only until they are compared with similar
photographs of known jet planes, birds, balloons, and other normal
objects; then their identity becomes obvious.
Trick photography has often been called upon to prove the reality of
the incredible--fairies, ectoplasm, ghosts--and it has also played
a part in the history of flying saucers. While the most detailed
contact stories have usually come from the United States, for some
peculiar reason the best of the faked pictures have come from Europe
and South America. A widely publicized photograph supposedly taken
at Taormina, Sicily, in 1954 shows four men standing on a bridge and
apparently gazing at two UFOs soaring overhead [X-14]. The deep shadows
cast by the men and the bridge railing show that the sun was shining
brilliantly, but the objects in the sky, which look like the inverted
covers of teapots or sugar bowls, show only faintly shadowed areas.
Stranger yet, the shady side of one UFO is on the left, that of the
other UFO on the right. The men on the bridge have their heads tilted
at such an angle that they could not possibly have seen the objects
pictured, but are obviously looking at the hill in the background
instead of at the sky. Even a casual inspection exposes this picture as
a crude fake (see Plate VIa).
An even cruder fake was offered as evidence to Dr. Menzel in South
Africa in the summer of 1962. The optimistic photographer insisted that
he had snapped a genuine saucer on the wing, even though the circular
object shown in the print was an unmistakable hubcap, the Chevrolet
trade-mark clearly legible.
_The Isle of Lovers Hoax_
Some photographic hoaxes are more cleverly executed. In May 1952, a
few weeks after _Life_ magazine had alarmed the world with its article
“Have We Visitors from Outer Space?”[X-15], the Brazilian weekly
picture magazine _O Cruzeiro_ published startlingly clear photographs
of an alleged flying saucer[X-16]. According to the accompanying story,
a reporter and a photographer on the staff of the magazine on May 7
had visited Ilha dos Amores, an island not far from Rio de Janeiro, to
do a feature assignment. Late in the afternoon, at a moment when the
photographer just happened to have his camera pointed at the sky, the
reporter suddenly called his attention to a passing UFO. During the
minute or so the object was in view he obtained five pictures which,
along with the reporter’s eyewitness story, were released to the public
on May 17. If the editors actually believed in the reality of the
saucer, the ten-day delay before informing the world of its visit is
remarkable. The magazine has never admitted that the photographs were a
hoax, but they inspired doubt even in sympathetic investigators[X-17].
The UFO appears in a dull sky above a mountain peak. In the first
picture the object looks like a jet plane surrounded by an exhaust haze
and, with a little imagination, might be called a Saturn-like object.
In succeeding pictures it resembles the lid of a teapot, or the bottom
view of a rubber stopper for a sink. A study of the shadows quickly
reveals the fraudulent nature of these photographs: the dome on top
of the “saucer” casts its shadow to the right, while the trees and
mountains in the foreground cast their shadows to the left. The picture
could be authentic only in a peculiar world in which the sun shone from
the west on objects on the ground, but shone from the east on objects
flying in the sky!
_The Trindade Island Saucer_
The most famous of all purported photographs of a UFO, the Trindade
Island saucer, also came from Brazil. First published in Brazilian
newspapers on February 21, 1958, the pictures showed dark mountain
crags looming against an overcast sky. Above one peak appeared a
startling image (much like the _O Cruzeiro_ saucer of 1952) resembling
the planet Saturn--a flattened sphere banded round the middle by a dark
line that extended like a platform beyond the curved sides. According
to the accompanying news stories, the UFO had flown over the island of
Trindade and had been observed by the officers and crew of a ship of
the Brazilian Navy. The pictures, taken by a photographer on board, had
been examined and supposedly pronounced genuine by Navy experts before
being released to the press. Since a responsible military organization
and a major world government thus seemed to accept the photographs
as proof that flying saucers actually existed, the incident raised a
storm of official inquiry both in Brazil and abroad. Then, within a few
weeks, the storm abruptly subsided. Although no explanation was given,
the object in the pictures was obviously considered no threat to our
planet’s security (see Plate VIb).
Although saucer enthusiasts regard these pictures as genuine evidence
for the reality of UFOs, careful study of the facts strongly suggests
that this case, which rocked the Brazilian Government and created
a short-lived but world-wide saucer scare, was merely an unusually
skillful hoax[X-18].
At first glance, the circumstances of the sighting seemed to be
entirely clear and straightforward[X-19]. Trindade is a barren,
mountainous island of about six square miles, about 600 miles from
the coast of Brazil. Abandoned after the end of the Second World
War, the island remained deserted except by sea gulls until October
1957, when the Brazilian Navy established an oceanographic post and
a meteorological station there to carry out its research for the
International Geophysical Year (IGY). To facilitate the oceanographic
studies, the Navy also converted a training ship, the _Almirante
Saldanha_, into a floating laboratory equipped with scientific
apparatus and photographic darkroom. With a crew of about 300, the ship
routinely traveled between Rio de Janeiro and Trindade Island on its
duties for the IGY.
A major function of the meteorological station was the launching and
tracking of weather balloons; they were painted red, inflated with
hydrogen, and carried radio transmitters. Launched each morning, they
were tracked by radio and optical devices to show the movements of the
winds in the upper atmosphere. At a certain point (when the balloon
burst, or at a prearranged signal) the balloon released a bag of
scientific instruments which, attached to a parachute, floated to the
ground to be retrieved.
The Trindade station began operation in November 1957. Almost
immediately, UFOs were reported over the island. (Brazil had not been
immune to the flying-saucer epidemic that had begun in Texas early that
month [see _Chapter_ IX], and sentries at Itaipu Fort, near Santos, on
November 4 had reported a UFO that knocked out the lights and electric
plant.) With weather balloons going up daily, parachutes floating down
at odd times, and sea gulls cruising over the island, the advent of
other “saucers” was inevitable. During November and December several
UFOs were reported by workmen, none of whom were trained observers.
Although neither Captain Bacellar, the commanding officer at the
station, nor his officers saw any unidentified objects, he radioed Rio
to report the incidents and investigated each story. Some he found
to be false, some were based on mistaken identification of gulls and
balloons, and in others the evidence was inconclusive.
Early in January 1958, when the _Almirante Saldanha_ arrived on
schedule at Trindade, it had on board several civilian guests who were
to collaborate in various aspects of the research. Among them was
Almiro Barauna, a professional photographer. After several days at
the island, the ship prepared to leave for the return trip to Rio on
January 16. Shortly after noon Barauna was on deck with his camera,
waiting to film the departure. The sky was thinly overcast, the sea was
rough, and waves dashing against the ship and the rocky shore created a
noisy background.
According to the news accounts printed several weeks later, Captain
Viegas, of the Brazilian Air Force, suddenly shouted “_Olha o disco!_
[Flying saucer!]” Hearing the shout, Barauna peered at the sky and saw
a luminous oval object moving swiftly toward the island. Officers and
crewmen on deck also observed the UFO, he said, and interfered with
his aim as they ran about excitedly. Nevertheless he managed to take
six shots of the UFO as it approached the island, disappeared behind a
mountain peak, reversed direction and reappeared at a lower altitude,
retraced its course, and vanished with incredible speed against the
horizon. The unknown had arrived and departed in a period of about
twenty seconds.
According to the news stories, the photographer had retired to the
ship’s darkroom under the supervision of an officer to develop
the negative, and found that four of the six exposures showed the
mysterious object. He was not able to make prints, he said, because the
darkroom supplies unfortunately did not include any photographic paper.
However, he did exhibit the negative, and the officers and crewmen who
examined it allegedly agreed that it showed the same Saturn-like UFO
that had flown over the island. After the return to Rio he made prints
and enlargements and turned them over, together with the negative, to
the Brazilian Navy.
The question of authenticity arose immediately. Called down to
Intelligence headquarters for an interview, Barauna underwent a
four-hour interrogation concerning the pictures. During the questioning
he was asked, “If you were going to make a flying saucer appear on
a negative, how would you proceed?” He replied, as he later told a
reporter, “_Comandante_, I am an able photographer, specialized in
trick photography, but I could not produce one that would withstand
close and accurate examination.”[X-18]
In spite of this modest disclaimer, some of the photographic evidence
clearly suggested fraud, and a strong difference of opinion developed
among government officials. Some accepted the pictures as a genuine
record of a flying saucer; others pronounced them fakes. For several
weeks the incident was kept secret, but when eventually someone took
the prints to the President of Brazil, further concealment became
impossible. Yielding to the persuasion of certain military advisers and
newsmen, and against the advice of the Naval Ministry, he released the
pictures to the press.
[Illustration: PLATE V
_a._ Pinched lightning, August 1961. This is believed to be the first
photograph of a pinched lightning discharge. (CHAP. IX)]
[Illustration: PLATE V
_b._ Ball lightning, Lincoln, Nebraska, August 30, 1930. (CHAP. IX)]
[Illustration: PLATE VI
_a._ Trindade Island UFO, January 1958. (CHAP. X)]
[Illustration: PLATE VI
_b._ Taormina, Sicily, UFOs, 1954. (CHAP. X)]
[Illustration: PLATE VII
_a._ UFO at Boulder, Colorado, February 6, 1959. (CHAP. XII)]
[Illustration: PLATE VII
_b._ UFO over Norway, July 24, 1957. (CHAP. XII)]
[Illustration: PLATE VIII
_a._ Images produced by lens defects, Hamilton, Ohio, steel plant.
(CHAP. XI)]
[Illustration: PLATE VIII
_b._ Ghost images produced by internal reflections in lens system.
(CHAP. XII)]
_The Brazilian Naval Ministry_
The photographs were published on February 21, five weeks after they
were taken. Since the President had apparently accepted them at face
value, the Naval Ministry was obviously in a difficult position;
through an unofficial spokesman it issued a statement notable for its
lack of enthusiasm:
“On the morning of January 16, 1958, over the island of Trindade, the
crew of the school ship _Almirante Saldanha_ sighted an unidentified
aerial object for a few seconds. A civilian who was aboard the ship
took some pictures of the object. The Navy has no connection with the
case, and its only connection with the occurrence was the fact that the
photographer was aboard the school ship, and came back with the ship to
Rio.”[X-20]
On the same day another Navy spokesman released a similar unofficial
statement to _O Globo_:
“The news about a flying saucer sighted over the Island of Trindade
was received here with utmost reserve. There will be an investigation
to verify the authenticity of the sightings and photos. No officer or
sailor from the N.E. _Almirante Saldanha_ witnessed the event.”[X-20]
Immediately an international furor broke out. Were these pictures
indeed proof of extraterrestrial spaceships, or were they a hoax, with
the Brazilian President and the Brazilian Navy as victims? Who were
the witnesses, and exactly what did they report? In the United States,
high officials asked for copies of the pictures. An editor of _Look_
magazine asked Dr. Menzel to fly to Brazil to evaluate the evidence,
but later canceled the plan when the Rio office advised that the
photographs were generally considered fraudulent. Public excitement in
Brazil became so great that on February 23 the Naval Ministry released
an official statement, distinguished by its air of caution, which
concluded:
“Clearly this Ministry will not be able to make any pronouncement
concerning the reality of the object seen because the photographs do
not constitute sufficient proof for this purpose.”[X-18]
The day after the pictures were published the _Almirante Saldanha_,
which had been lying outside the harbor at Rio, received orders to
sail. Not until February 24, when the ship docked at Santos, did
newsmen have a chance to interview the officers and crewmen who
allegedly had observed the Trindade saucer and could support Barauna’s
story. None of them, it turned out, had actually seen the object.
The Assistant Naval Attaché of the United States, who was then in
Santos in connection with the visit of the U. S. Coast Guard cutter
_Westwind_, visited the Brazilian ship to collect information about
the Trindade saucer, but with little success. The commanding officer
stated that he had not seen the alleged UFO; he had seen the pictures
but refused to express an opinion on their authenticity; he stated
that his secretary might have seen the UFO but the secretary, when
questioned, preferred not to discuss the matter. The executive officer
said that he had not been on deck at the time of the sighting, but that
other persons might have seen the object.
During the next week arguments for and against the authenticity of
the photographs filled the Brazilian papers, and _O Globo_ published
deliberately faked views of a “flying saucer”--a china plate tossed
into the air. A federal deputy in an official note to the Naval
Ministry deplored their amazing failure to procure sworn statements
from the officers and crewmen who were reported to have witnessed the
UFO.
In spite of the widespread and increasing skepticism, the weekly
magazine _O Cruzeiro_ used the Trindade pictures for its lead story in
the issue of March 8. “Once bitten, twice shy” apparently did not apply
to its editors, who seemed instead to adopt the principle, “In for a
penny, in for a pound.” The photographs, they remarked editorially, not
only proved the existence of flying saucers, they also established the
authenticity of the Ilha dos Amores pictures published several years
earlier. As though to emphasize this point, the magazine assigned the
Trindade story and the interviews with witnesses to the same staff
reporter who had described the Ilha dos Amores saucer in 1952. The
Naval Ministry refrained from further comment and, since the military
authorities showed no alarm about the possibility of extraterrestrial
patrols, public interest in the pictures quickly died.
The report sent home by the U. S. Naval Attaché included the comment:
“There appear to be only two explanations for this peculiar incident,
and the peculiar handling of it by the Brazilian Government: (a) Some
overwhelming power has told the Brazilian Navy not to verify this
incident officially (which they should easily be able to do, if it
actually occurred) or to deny it (which they should easily be able to
do if it is a fake). I personally do not believe that anyone has told
the Brazilian Navy to keep quiet about it because there has been no
hint of such suppression in either Brazilian or United States circles.
I also doubt that their control of the individual officers and men
would be good enough to hold the line in any event. (b) The whole thing
is a fake publicity stunt.... This seems more likely....”[X-18]
_The Icarai Submarine Hunting Club_