Page 20 of Flying Saucers Magazine - October 1959

"One supposes that if extra-mundane vessels have sometimes come close to this earth, then sailing away, terrestrial aeronauts may have occasionally left this earth, or may have been seized and carried away from this earth." - Charles Fort in "NEW LANDS."

IN the heat of the summer the writer almost started wishing the flying saucers would go awaythey and a dog, a shaggy one, had driven yours truly into a mental state wherein he was afraid to visit the nearby town of Weston: there they had a large mental institution and he felt he was almost ready for it.

Five minutes ago I said goodnight to Thelma, the office girl, who all day has been busy answering threatening letters from good folks who have ordered the Howard Menger book, "FROM OUTER SPACE TO YOU," and are wondering when they will receive it. Now that the printer definitely has given us a close delivery date, we simply send out form letters advising our customers, who have ordered it on a pre-publication basis, of that fact.

Today, however, she received an unusual complaining letter.-The writer of the rather angry epistle stated she had already borrowed a copy of Howard Menger's book from a friend, had already read it and liked it fine-though she wondered what happened to the copy she had ordered. To us this remains an enigma bigger than even the one Menger writes about the flying saucers themselves-for as yet when WE haven't seen a copy of the book. At copy deadline it is not yet off the press! Other good customers have seen the book in lending libraries, and know people who have it already, while we, the publishers, still wish that WE had a copy!!

At Thelma's exit we picked up the large file of reports to put together for "Chasing the Flying Saucers," and the telephone rang. It was the Shaggy Dog after me again!

Most readers who have also real my book, "THEY KNEW TOO MUCH ABOUT FLYING SAUCERS," know that in order to make a living and support my saucering, I have a regular job. That is running a theatrical film booking agency, which selects and contracts for movies playing in theatres, mainly the drive-in type, of this area. All of my exhibitor customers have been calling me daily, asking just when they are going to be able to show Walt Disney's "Shaggy Dog," one of the biggest ticket-selling pictures of the year.

I picked up the phone and it was Mr. Lopez, of the local Park Drive-In, and I could sense he was already tearing at what little hair he had left.

"I met the plane and it isn't here!"

I knew he was refereng to the air express shipment of the film, which must be at the theatre about 8:00 tonight.

When he calmed down a bit. l realized that the flight of the small two-engine plane had been cancelled, as it often is, due to the various difficulties the airline experiences in getting down on the small airstrip at Clarksburg.

"Charter a small plane and go after it," I advised him, for that was the only thing I knew to do under the circumstances. And he did. Now as I write this I am wondering apprehensively if the private plane will make the trip to Pittsburgh and back in time for the show.

This probably has little to do with saucers, unless one of them shoots the plane down, which it probably will do, if the pattern held true to the troubled one I have been experiencing with "Shaggy Dog."

Speaking of Mr. Lopez and his drive-in, however, does remind me of May 30th, when Roger Pierce, former publisher of "THE UFO HOTWIRE," was in town, partly on a visit, and partly to try out his new Plymouth "Fury" Convertible he had just purchased. We were sitting at my place talking to Don Leigh McCulty, a business associate of mine, when Don's girl friend, Alma, called up. He picked up the phone fearfully, for he had just made up some theatre advertising for me on a science fiction picture, "The Blob," and, finding no actress in the picture who was well known, had devilishly inserted Alma's name in the ad as one of the players.

But apparently she hadn't seen the ad yet. Don turned from the phone.

"They've found the two women," he announced.

Even Roger, though he lived in Ohio, knew Don was referring to one of the most mysterious disappearance cases of the year. Two women returning home to Clarksburg by auto from a club meeting in Beckley, W. Va., had disappeared, almost into thin air, it seemed. Widespread searches had failed to turn up even a trace of the car or its occupants

"They found them in a deep creek just the other side of the Park Drive-In Theatre."

It is always easy to blame flying saucers for any happening for which there seems to be no other explanation. But I told Roger, as we drove out to the site where the auto was being hauled from the creek, it DID seem more mysterious at the time because the last place the two women had been seen was at a small restaurant near Flatwoods, W. Va. almost within shouting distance of the hilltop where seven people had seen the famed "West Virginia Monster" back in 1952. A lot of my friends had even asked me if I thought the saucers had got the two women.

After all, there HAD been the case of Oliver Lerch, which Frank Edwards had once spent a great deal of time tracking down. On Christmas Eve, 1889, Oliver, an 11-year-old boy, had gone to a well for a bucket of water and,never returned The South Bend, Ind., family ran outside when they heard terrible cries, coming from overhead, repeating, "HELP! HELP!! THEY'VE GOT ME!"

Oliver's tracks in the deep snow stopped within a few feet of the well. Something had snatched him right off the earth.

Near the theatre we found traffic jammed on the road for a mile ahead, so we decided to turn back Because our conversation had been concerned with disappearances I remembered a clipping I just received from Australia-a follow-up to the Joyita mystery of 1955. The ship had been reported overdue on Oct. 7, and the wreckage was found a month later. Since there had been no S.O.S. received, many saucerers had blamed UFO's for the tragedy.

The clipping told how an Australian wine bottle containing a note purporting to come from the ill-fated Joyita was picked up on Whirltoa Beach, eight miles north of Waihi, Australia, early in the year.

The three finders, two men and a woman, read this astounding message:

"ABANDONING SHIP. STRANGE CIRCULAR METALLIC OBJECT FORCING US ABOARD IT. HELP US. STEWART. JOYITA."

A small diagram of a saucershaped object was also included.

Fred Stone, head of the Australian Flying Saucer Research Society, believed the note was very likely a hoax, mainly because a check with steamship officials disclosed nobody on board the ship had the name "Stewart."

An analysis by A. W. Powell, conchologist at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, however, gave a bit more authenticity to the note. The bottle was encrusted with barnacles, the size of which indicated the bottle had been in the water for at least two years. Some of them were fully grown, Powell indicated.

"I'd like to see that note," Roger said, "for one reason."

"What is that?"

"I wonder if the name couldn't have been 'Steward' instead of 'Stewart'. That would change the meaning greatly."

I saw what he was getting at:, "Yes, it would. Or maybe the steward of the small ship wasn't very, literate. Maybe he just didn't know, how to spell "steward" and was trying to write the title of his position on board ship' instead of his name.

Roger would have been intrigued; by the report just received from Washington concerning a World War II B-24 bomber discovered early this month in the Sahara desert. The plane, with nine crewmen aboard, was reported missing sixteen years ago when radio contact with it was lost as it returned to a Libyan base from a bombing raid on Naples, Italy. Families of the, crewmen were first notified the men were missing in action, later that they had been killed.

But examination of the wreckage turned up a baffling mystery. The bomber had crash-landed on the desert wasteland, with little damage, except for the tail section. which had partly broken away. In such a crash, without a subsequent fire, surely some of the crew would have survived.

But survivors, if any, had apparently vanished into thin air! Nor were there any remains of bodies in the wreckage. Had the crew decided to walk to Civilization? Extremely unlikely, for water bottles, still filled, were found in the cabin of the plane-and surely nobody would have left the wreckage without taking all available water supplies. No written records, no clothing, no personal effects were found.

The Pentagon's explanation? The crew had bailed out. But how did the plane make an almost perfect landing all by itself?

In Seattle, Wash., the Air Force had been almost completely silent, instead of double talking their way out of a mysterious crash of a C-118 last April. At the time, Richard Ogden wrote us excitedly about the disaster which had been preceded by a frantic radio report that "We have hit something-or something has hit us!" That was the last they heard from the pilot, and wreckage of the plane was found over a wide area.

Had the plane hit, or been hit by a UFO? One would never find out from the Air Force, and civilian witnesses to the crash who had at first been talkative, suddenly clammed up after the visit of some AF officers to the town of Orting, scene of the crash in the Seattle area.

Norbert Gariety, publisher of the monthly bulletin, "S. P. A. C. E.", quoted an unnamed civilian investigator as saying, "The citizens of the Sumner-Orting area are silent and scared. They know something is wrong, but they can't put their finger on it. What, is the Air Force trying to hide? Did the radar see a UFO hit the C-118? Were there eyewitnesses to the contact which the pilot reported? Is there a crashed UFO Involved? Is this the reason for the secrecy?"

The investigator may have been simply excited and over-imaginative, but Robert Gribble, calm and objective head of the Aerial Phenomena Research Group of Seattle, thought the incident was unusual enough to depart from his usual conservative approach to UFO happenings. Said Gribble:

"We of APRG have heard a lot of AF censorship regarding UFO's. Many members of APRG are reluctant to believe these stories. The Air Force actions in connection with the crash of the C-118 have shacked these members into a reality which they shall never forget. They have experienced the censorship first hand. We were advised through a source at Orting to mind our own business, OR ELSE.

"We called their bluff and continued our investigation. AF officers have not been successful in their desperate attempts to silence all witnesses and sources of information that is being checked out. Much of this information is of a startling nature, and must be supported by additional data before being released."

Norb Gariety, who had amassed a great deal of data about the crash, was more interested in a weird chain of 'events preceding and following the crash, which happened about 8:30 p.m. on April 2:

1. At 7:00 and 7:30 preceding the crash, mysterious aerial explosions, or "skyquakes," occurred in the area, one of them causing ground damage.

2. At 7:45 two people saw a brilliant glow through trees in the direction of the crash scene. The glow died out, reappeared, then vanished again.

3. Mysterious lighted objects were seen over a wide area surrounding Seattle during the early hours of darkness; however officials at MeChord AF Base explained them away as "flares being dropped by parachute during a parachute jump exercise at Ft. Lewis."

4. Witnesses stated (before the AF investigators got there) that before the crash, none of the four engines of the C-118 were running, and that two parachute-like glowing objects were following the transport plane. Two other witnesses said they saw three or four parachute-like objects in the air as the plane passed near their home. None of the crew had bailed out, incidentally.

5. After the crash, at 10:00 p.m., more mysterious explosions of great intensity shook the Seattle area.

6. At 10:00 the following morning Gribble at APRG headquarters received an anonymous phone call stating that McChord AFB had picked up UFO's prior to the crash -though Gribble couldn't determine whether it had been a crank call or for real.

And although it might be considered fantastic to blame UFO's for this and other crashes, there had been some tremendous question marks, in Seattle, as there had been in other places. Before, the AF had often offered logical explanations. This time its closed-mouth attitude had done little to allay the suspicions of many UFO researchers, who, even though civilian, had dug up data over a number of years from under the watchful noses of officialdom. And the data spoke for itself. It said with almost certainty that the saucers had been involved in many air disasters. Some of them, such as the Mantell case, the Kinross AF Base incident of 1953, and the F-94 which crashed in 1954 after an intense heat had enveloped the plane left very little to doubt.

It is difficult to write of extramundane things while the immediate and the material constantly intrude. For instance, the telephone call which interrupted the fifth paragraph back, did not provide any medication to my frayed nerves. It is now 7:30 and still no Shaggy Dog Evidently the chartered plane hasn't yet come in, and Mr. Lopez, waiting at the airport, can't call the theatre because the small terminal is locked up for the day and there is no telephone booth outside.

"You can't hold off the show any longer than 8:00," I told Mr. Lopez's son at the theatre. "Gather up all the cartoons and shorts you have around and start run n i n g them. We'll just hope that the film gets there by the time all of them have been shown."

It is even more difficult at such a time to cast one's mind back to June 30, 1908, and to far-off Siberia, of all places.

But it is important. Not so important that a spaceship, carrying voyagers from an unknown world, may have crashed in the desolate marshes of Tungusia, on the brink of the Arctic circle - but that THE RUSSIANS ARE ADVANCING A THEORY OUR OWN GOVERNMENT WOULD CALL "FANTASTIC" AND PROBABLY TRY TO SHUSH UP.

Prof. B. Liapunov, of the Moscow Academy of Sciences, believed that what he termed a "cosmic ship" intended to land in Mongolia but crashed in Central Siberia because of mechanical difficulties. He made the statement after as analysis of a 1957 Russian expedition to the site of the huge explosion, heretofore thought caused by a huge meteor.

On June 30th, 1908, microbarographs and seismographs in London and Washington recorded a violent earthquake. Simultaneously the night sky in the south of England was brilliantly illuminated by a weird phenomenon for which there was no explanation. Little importance was given the data at the time, and it was soon forgotten.

At that early date Russia hadn't experienced the industrial revolution accomplished rapidly in the last few years, and communications were slow, even slower in Siberia. As a result, reports from near the scene of the event didn't trickle out of Russia until 1921.

These fragmentary reports told (1) The forest was now totally destroyed, 80 million trees throughout an area of nearly 2,000 square miles; and eyewitnesses, what few were left, told with frightened voices about a wall of fire 12 miles high and 20 miles long!

Scientific expeditions had difficulty reaching the remote area beause of the marshes, and jungles of firs. When the locality was found, he vast scope of the devastation mazed the explorers. All life aparently had been destroyed within a radius of 20 miles.

Scientists still held to the meteor heory, probably because they couldn't find a better one. But two strange things puzzled them: (1) The forest was not totally detroyed, only in patches; the slant of the fallen trees did not radiate rom a central point, which would have been true had a single blast flattened them. (2) More puzzling was their failure to find any crater left by a meteor of such huge size.

The 1957 Russian expedition turned up more evidence against the meteor theory. Particles of iron, which definitely could not be part of a meteorite, were found in the area!

Putting all the information together, Prof. Liapunov reviewed his space ship theory:

A French astronomer had sighted an unidentified aerial object in space on the day of the explosion. Prof. Liapunov believed that the object had orbited the earth, probably intending to land in Mongolia due to the flat character of the terrain, but had failed to reach that location because of mechanical difficulties Flying at terrific velocity, the ship probably found itself over Central Siberia, 1,000 miles north, in a very short time.

Anticipating a crash, the navigators put the ship in a vertical position to halt its fall, the exhaust producing the strange patches in the forest. In a final attempt to accelerate the ship upward, the crew may have over-taxed their reactors, resulting in an atomic explosion of great destruction.

Andrew Tomas, in his UFO BULLETIN (Box 1120, GPO, Sydney, Australia; $1.00 per year), recalled earlier reports which had further corroborated the Russian's theory, Witnesses reported a huge mushroom-shaped cloud, which followed a fireball in the sky. The fireball was described as "brighter than the sun." Many people from the surrounding country, though escaping the blast, died of an unknown illness, symptoms of which resembled those of modern radiation sickness.

Meanwhile, a Prof. Sternfield, described as "a Soviet scientist behind the Sputniks," stated that the "cosmic ship" likely came from Venus, because of the favorable position of that planet relative to the earth at the time.

Readers of the October, '58, FS will recall that the Russians have been talking about visitors from Venus for some time. Again, thanks to Andrew Tomas, we reviewed how releases from Russia's Academy of Space Research said that saucers are not products of the imagination or mirages, but actual solid objects from Venus. The scientist said 90% of the saucers came from that planet, did not comment on the remaining percentage.

Would the Reds again steal the headlines from Uncle Sam, as they had with Sputnik No. 1? And in a much more sensational manner? If Russia officially endorsed saucers from other worlds as real, people would listen-all over the world.

Those had not been all the saucery pronouncements from Moscow. Soviet scientists I. Shklovski got into the act by declaring that the two satellites of Mars-Phobos and Deimos-which have long puzzled astronomers, are actually artificial.

The satellites are illogically small to be moons, and one of them orbits in the "wrong" direction. Some U.S. saucerers, among them Major Donald Keyhoe, have advanced the theory that they could be Martian made.

Shklovski, however, gave the theory a new twist. He said they were constructed by Martians, but a former race of Martians, probably now extinct.

Mars expert E. C. Slipher, Lowell Observatory astronomer who was in the headlines for photographing Mars during recent oppositions, took verbal opposition with the Russian, however, stated that to heist such satellites into orbit would be like taking the entire mass of the San Francisco Peaks (huge mountains near Lowell Observatory) and shooting them into the sky-not taking into consideration, apparently, that US plans for artificial satellites involves shooting them- into space piece-by-piece, and assembling them there. So if we plan to do it, why couldn't the Martians--if there were or are Martians!

The July-August, '58, issue of FS had been memorable for a number of reasons, but chief among them a story about a man few saucerers had heard about at that time, but who since has become widely known.

The man was Otis T. Carr, subject of an article titled, "Has Man Conquered Gravity?"

Otis T. Carr claimed he had done' just that. By the aid of a new principle he had discovered, which he called The Utron Power-Package and which operated by free energy present in the atmosphere, he had successfully constructed a model flying saucer which worked. He had written Uncle Sam a long letter, offering to construct one of his saucers full-size, big enough to carry a man, and deliver it to the Government for $20,000,000. He promised

the machine could depart from any part of the continental U.S., orbit the earth once or twice, and land on the inner rotunda of the Pentagon Building. Although Carr stated the Government had investigated his claims, apparently Uncle Sam didn't take the deal and Carr printed lavish brochures offering the principle and patents to private investors.

On a Long John (WOR, N.Y.) "Party Line" show, Carr, along with an associate, again stated he had constructed a prototype which actually flew. In fact he had built more than one of them. One of the models, unfortunately, was not around any longer: in testing it had got away from the inventor and the last thing he saw of it, the thing was gaining altitude and disappearing from view!

Later Carr set up headquarters at Oklahoma City, Okla., after announcing that he, in the company of Mayor Wayne S. Aho (who became public relations director for OTC Enterprises, Inc.), would make a voyage to the Moon and back in the OTC-XL Electro-Gravitational Spacecraft, official name for the new craft.

Then saucer enthusiasts buzzed with the news of another announcement by Carr. He promised to demonstrate publicly a small replica of the larger craft he would build later. Said Carr's news release:

"On April 19, 1959, at Space Frontiers, Oklahoma, near Oklahoma City, Mr. Otis T. Carr will publicly demonstrate and reveal to the world for the first time all of the hitherto secret workings of his novel invention of the OTC-XL Electro-Gravitational Spacecraft. The craft to be exhibited is a six-foot-diameter circular-foil model whose flight will be propelled solely by electricity produced and self-generated by the unique and original Utron Electrical Accumulator Power-Package."

To celebrate the occasion, many famous writers and editors of flying saucer literature, along with those who had contacted space people, would be present to lecture and to meet the public.

The public was also invited to see a completed 5-foot animated model of the OTC-XL, at Frontier City, an amusement park. Visitors could actually enter the craft and ride in it, while a flight into outer space was simulated.

At the appointed time for the flight of the model saucer, however, the launching was postponed due to technical difficulties. Again and again throughout the day it was postponed, and then called off.

Maj. Aho told disappointed visitors that engineers had worked day and night for 24-hour stretches trying to get all the assembly complete.

"In this they succeeded and demonstration was planned. In preliminary pre-flight rotation tests (televised to the nation later) a leak developed in a seam of the accumulator, spraying mercury throughout the mechanism, making it necesary to disassemble and clean all parts. The accumulator failure is being corrected. All assemblies and circuits will be checked and tested for performance. We are not announcing a flight date and do not plan to announce it in advance. Pre-flight tests will be made, then validation and public demonstration will take place."

The launching had been further complicated by the sudden illness of Carr, who, Aho reported, had entered a hospital with a lung hemorrhage at a critical stage of the project. Doctors found a burst blood vessel in the upper right lung, prescribed rest; this resulted in Carr's absence during the launching.

A news release from Maj. Aho summed up the failure: "There is no deadline for the introduction of a new principle or discovery."

Like other inventors of devices evidently before their time-such as Keeley, Hendershot, and John C Roberts (little-known inventor who claimed to take power out of the air) -Carr had not been able to make his invention function successfully under public surveillance. Keeley and Hendershot had been able to demonstrate their devices, in those earlier days usually termed "perpetual motion" machines, only to individuals or small groups. The reigning scientists scoffed, terming the inventors fakes and frauds. John C. Roberts died in a federal prison, serving a long sentence for mail fraud.

Carr was also to suffer legal involvements. Late in May, a month after the unsuccessful launching, county attorney James W. Bill Berry brought charges of violating state regulations on stock sales against the president of OTC Enterprises. Also charged were Richard Colton, vice-president of Carr's firm, Lari Kendrick, sales director, and Maj. Aho.

Carr was specifically charged with offering for sale to G u e r n e y C. Warnsberg, a Yukon, Okla., locomotive engineer, 100 shares of OTC stock at $1.00 per share. The investor later purchased 300 more shares, according to the prosecutor.

At a preliminary h e a r i n g Carr testified his company had offered "options to buy stock" but had not been involved in any stock sales, admitted his company had not been registered with either the Federal Securities Commission or the Oklahoma Securities Commission. Maj. Aho and Kendrick p 1 e a d e d "not guilty."

If convicted of the charges the defendants could receive a maximum penalty of three years imprisonment plus a fine. The case was continued until September.

Had Carr sold stock in an enterprise which he did not personally believe could be fulfilled successfully, or was he like other geniuses, such as Nikola Tesla, the father of alternating current, who were adept at inventing but poor business men? If he had been attempting to obtain money without plans to invest it profitably, it might have been comparatively easy to make the stock sale legal.

Or was this only a part of the persecution which always seems to arise when a method of providing cheap power is discovered, or allegedly discovered? Had Carr's promise of free energy disturbed the "powers that be," the shadowy "group" or "force" which some saucerers say exist to protect big money interests, such as the fuel and power industries?

Only recently the Government had unsuccessfully tried to remove an auto battery preservative which proved to be effective beyond a shadow of a doubt, and to prosecute its inventor-one bright spot in the many legendary and factual accounts of suppressed discoveries.

One suspicious note was reluctance of newspapers to carry advance publicity about the Carr demonstration, even though it would have provided excellent opportunity to produce the usual tongue-incheek and even ridiculing type of story common to saucer-reporting by the fourth estate. But little if no coverage, except around Oklahoma City. Then the papers failed to pick up Carr's failure to launch the device, another opportunity to poohpooh saucers. Again, they did not give coverage to Carr's arraignment for the alleged illegal stock sales. Why? Were they afraid that Carr might actually have something.

But the agency to express the most confidence in -Carr's demonstration, prior to its scheduled date, may have been none other than the U. S. Defense department. Instead of making some pronouncement ridiculing Carr, which the writer looked for most every day, the Government suddenly stole headlines all over the world with the official release of information about its own flying saucer, the machine long in development by Avro Aircraft, Ltd., of Canada.

John B. Macauley, assistant secretary of the Defense Dept., told a House subcommittee on science and astronautics: "I've never seen anything like it in all the years I've spent in aviation - and that's most of my life."

The AV Avro saucer, Macauley declared, would be test flown this summer, and the public would be "absolutely amazed" when it got its first glimpse of the machine.

About $10,000,000 has been spent so far on the device which, though not supersonic, could perform incredible maneuvers near the ground. It could move sideways, hover or skim close to the ground, even dart among trees, under the range of enemy radar. It would provide the army with a modern airborn cavalry, he said. Troops and supplies could be rushed anywhere despite the terrain - whether it be mud, ice, water or mountains.

He reiterated, however, that it was not intended to be a space vehicle, since it depended on air for lift - though it would fly as high as most aircraft, he added.

Earlier the AF had said the saucer would employ jets, but informed sources in Canada reported to The

Toronto Telegram that the device would utilize propellers contained in pipes to give the circular "plane" its lift.

Two weeks later British papers announced England's version of a saucer, being secretly tested at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight. Officials said it had been taken off the secret list in August, 1958 (wonder why nobody had heard about it?) because it had "no military value."

The London Daily Sketch reported on June 1 that the saucer "is believed to have flown a few inches off the ground on Saturday. The roar of its 4'50 h.p. engine woke people in the area. But the saucer didn't fly far. It's tethered to the ground during tests."

Dimensions of the British saucer were said to be 24 x 30 ft., and the controls were reported to be simple. Although allegedly off the "secret list," tests were delayed and the craft rapidly hidden when a helicopter hovered near the test site.

(At presstime the British had successfully demonstrated their machine, a four-ton model 30 ft. long and 25 ft. wide. The machine hovered near the ground, powered by a 450-horsepower engine, and moved at speeds up to 40 miles an hour. Plans are laid for a 400-ton model, and the likelihood of a 10,000-ton liner capable of skimming the Atlantic at 100 knots.)

To most saucer enthusiasts the Avro Saucer was old hat. The AF had circulated an artist's sketch of a circular jet aircraft being developed by the A. V. Roe firm to news media to coincide with the release of the famed Project Bluebook report published in 1955. The report, also familiar with most readers, listed several unexplained sightings, but presented complicated charts and graphs to prove that only a very small percentage of cases could not be explained away.

Did the Government think Carr MIGHT have something, or did they KNOW that he had something? The widespread release of information about the earth-saucer came suspiciously close to Carr's announced launching, in fact within less than a week.

Or did Uncle Sam fear the public would believe Carr, regardless of the authenticity of his claims?

Anyhow, the news release, whether or not a smokescreen, probably was the deciding factor that pushed publicity of Carr's demonstration out of papers across the nation.

And although the writer's mind was just now relieved of his immediate mundane worries (the plane just got in, "Shaggy Dog" and all), there were still more worries to plague it:

What would happen to serious UFO investigation, since in the near future, the explainers would have much easier jobs: they would need not depend on temperature inversions, w e a t h e r balloons, "natural phenomena," or even hallucinations to convince the public that nonAvro saucers were the bunk?

Since only the AF would know where its own saucers were in flight at the time, how easy it would be to say that the witnesses simply saw a down-to-earth, made-in-Canada disk, built with the sighters' own tax money. Oh, surely, they would still send teams of investigators, spending thousands of tax dollars, to look into the sightings before explaining them away.

Soon the man on the street would forget Ken Arnold's saucers of 1947, the classical sighting which apparently heralded the most amazing phenomena of the century. He would forget, or never ask to be informed about the thousands of sightings even earlier than that.

His newspaper would be crammed with dramatic information about our space projects: our first visit to the moon, and our probes toward Mars and Venus, perhaps landings on them, too.

And if they explored Mars and Venus, and found them devoid of intelligent life, the saucer stories might be completely forgotten.

The writer, in his doddering old age, would rave on senilely to a few half-interested followers about the "things" he still insisted were flying, though he would have difficulty in defining the type of saucer he was talking about. And Ray Palmer, retired on his Social Security Pension, would sit comfortably on the porch of his farmhouse, chatting with passers-by about the weather, and, if possible, saucers; occasionally whispering confidentially about his Fact, while now and then glancing fearfully at the ground.

And all over the nation, commuters riding the new saucerbuses would laugh amusedly at the following feature story in the morning paper

WASHINGTON, Sept. 5,1990 (IPU) -A New England farmer found out the joke was at his expense yesterday, after recounting a fantastic tale of how three small green men landed in his back yard and abducted his wife.

A Space Force spokesman quickly quelled near panic in the area issuing a formal explanation of the incident which landed John A. Jones in the state mental institution. A check on Space Force flight plans disclosed that a circular-foil air craft of advanced design actually had been force-landed in Jones' back yard, due to technical difficulties.

"The landing did cause a great deal of consternation in Octagon security circles, because official release of information on the new craft was withheld until next week."

The recent adoption of a green uniform for Fall wear had caused the farmer to imagine that the "creatures" which got out of the machine had thick horny green skins, the official declared.

"The shock of seeing the forced landing led him to imagine the other details, including the 'elephant trunk-like proboscises' which were in reality hoses for oxygen equipment. The stature of the crew members was small, though not fourfoot height as the farmer imagined, due to the selection of short pilots to man the small craft."

The tale of the wife's abduction was a complete hallucination, brought on by anxiety, the spokesman declared. Neighbors in the isolated area had not seen Mrs. Jones for some time, and it was rumored she had eloped recently with a traveling salesman to an unknown destination.

Asked about the roadblocks set up in the area and the armed guard established around the farm last night, the official explained that since the unfortunate occurrence had deranged Jones' mind, the SF had deemed it wise to protect the property from hordes of curiosity seekers expected to show up.

It would be impossible for newsmen to reach Jones for an interview, he added, because doctors had ordered a "no visitors" regulation due to the seriousness of his mental condition.

THE END