Page 21 of Flying Saucers Magazine - June 1960

I rather doubt if this will be published at all-for lately Ray Palmer has again been recklessly tossing editorial challenges at the Three Men In Black, who Albert K. Bender said frightened and swore him into silence back in 1953.

Of course, if the Three Men are smart, they will avoid silencing Ray Palmer as long as humanly possible; for to interfere with him just after he has come up with a major new outlook on the saucer mystery would be, in effect, to confirm that theory.

If the holes-at-the poles explanation is WRONG, however, the notorious trio might decide to silence him just to throw people off the track. If Ray Palmer really has something (and his arguments so far have been pretty convincing), this writer believes the Amherst saucerer will get through ther winter without any terrifying visitors. At least, let's 9,11 hope so!

As this was written ( late November, '59) we could be absolutely certain of only one thing in reference to saucers: RAP'S contention that a race of spacepilots came from "beyond the poles" would stir up a hornet's nest of opposition and few sensible contradictions. People like Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe would still point a fearful finger toward space; believers in Buck Nelson, Adamski and Howard Menger would still contend that these "contactees" had actually met and talked with beings from other planets and had ridden with them to the Moon and maybe beyond. Donald Menzel would insist, even more loudly and vehemently, that the saucers are temperature inversions and various illusions. It is hard to give up a belief once you have stated it publicly.

As to the writer's belief, he had never really decided on any one theory, but could state with some assurance that the discs, whatever they were and wherever they came from, were still very much with us. For sightings, many of them very "good" ones, still flowed onto his desk.

Some of the "best" sightings, those involving close encounters with saucers, again came from New Zealand, where the December FS reported dramatic UFO appearances.

Two Invercargill (a town near Wellington, N. Z.) business men were frightened and awed by a big flying object which they spotted while driving home. The thing first appeared as a bright light above some pine trees bordering the main highway between Woodlands and Kennington. Attracted to the light, which moved slowly away from them, they soon observed its peculiar shape as they overtook it.

It appeared to be rectangular, with a huge balloon-shaped section hanging BELOW it. One of the men Estimated the rectangular part to be at least 40 ft. long, and the "balloon" to be "as big as a room." Knowing that sensible balloons usually carry a section for instruments or pilots, suspended below, the men' immediately sensed that something was wrong!

"My friend told me to step on the gas so we could get closer to it," the spokesman for the pair, who wished to remain anonymous, told the Wellington Evening Post, "but I thought it was going to come down right on top of us, or in the meadow alongside the road. So I didn't speed up the car. After all, it could have exploded, or done most anything imaginable, considering its unusual appearance."

But the car gained steadily on the object, and as they drew to within a few hundred feet of the thing, it suddenly took off in a burst of speed. As it departed it glowed brilliantly white, and changed its configuration to the shape of a sausage.

"I've never believed in these flying saucer reports, but now I just don't know what to think," one of the men said. "The two of us saw it absolutely clearly and we were close to it. We couldn't hear any noise, but no balloon could have moved as quickly as it did."

Five other Invercargill people, also driving the same night along the same highway, reported seeing a bright light in the sky.

Shortly after the "inverted balloon" sighting appeared in the paper, two brothers from Marton (another town near Wellington), Walter and Brian Hawkins, reported that a strange, unidentified flying object, "like a large street light," followed them nearly 60 miles as they drove from Marton to Matamata early in the morning.

They first believed it was a house light, until they approached it and could see sky between the object and the horizon. As they left the locality the light began following them. On several occasions the elder brother stopped the car and turned off the motor, but they could hear no sound coming from the object. Reaching the top of a hill, at Mangaweka, they again stopped, feeling they could observe the thing better from that greater altitude. The light then moved around in a valley below them "like a helicopter."

Then feeling even more uncomfortable because of their strange pursuer, they decided to get home as soon as they could; but the object again took up the chase, never flying alongside the car, but constantly moving about. Meeting another auto, they signaled it to stop, and its five occupants, who had spotted the object as they approached, got out and watched it with the two brothers. At the coming of daylight the lighted object suddenly went straight' upward and disappeared from sight.

Later, in October, police headquarters and newspaper office switchboards in Melbourne, Australia, were deluged with telephone calls a a hundreds of people reported seeing a huge cigar-shaped contraption about 100 ft. long with glowing portholes in its side.

The object, which appeared shortly after twilight and gave off a glow varying in for from red to green, was "explained" by the weather bureau as "an unusual thundercloud formation." which they said appeared "every few years." From their explanation it was evident that records of the bureau, part of whose busines was to observe the sky, included earlier appearances of the same mysterious phenomenon.

It probably had nothing to do with saucers-unless one of these from the earth's interior was in such a hurry to return to home base that it didn't bother to make a North or South Pole entrance-but in Holland, the Dutch government threw up barricades around the mysterious holes which appeared enigmatically in two meadows near the village of Wormer.

The mystery began when residents said they heard "a deafening whistling noise," and others declared they saw a bright red light flashing across the sky. The next morning a farmer found a strange, star-shaped hole, about 17 inches across, in his meadow, and called police. Baffled, the police called government officials and soon hundreds of investigators and experts arrived to investigate the riddle.

Bomb disposal men from the Dutch Army put a long metal pipe down the hole to measure its depth. But the pipe went down, down, down, without reaching bottom. So they added more lengths of pipe, but at 100 ft. had still not found bottom. Experts said the thing which made the hole, whatever it was, had gone through a layer of sand and clay, and that they probably would never get down to it.

As they shook their heads around the hole, another farmer arrived and told them he had a similar hole in his meadow. It had appeared in July, and he had filled it in to prevent his cattle from falling into it.

The government then seized both fields, declared them out of bounds, put up barbed wire and assigned guards to the areas. Various theories were advanced by villagers. Hole No. 2 had appeared on September 17, just four nights after the Russian Lunik had hit the moon, and some people tried to connect the two events. Others, more skeptical, suggested it was all the work of a practical joker (though hardly likely in view of the government's continued interest in the holes).

In Brazil a UFO signaled back to a tower controller at Pampulba airport according to a report which never reached newspapers and was dug up by Norbert Gariety and published in his monthly saucerzine, S.P.A.C.E. (267. Alhambra Circle, Coral Gables. Fla.).

Sighting a light hovering over the city, the controller first thought it might be a balloon, telephoned the Meteorological Institute which advised him none had been sent up. Just then the commander of a Brazilian Air Force B-26 radioed for permission to land, and the controller asked him to look for the light, instructing him how to turn so it would be in view. The pilot maneuvered as instructed, then quickly brought the plane down and confirmed the sighting after landing.

The controller was disappointed because the pilot did not pursue the UFO. He aimed a signal pistol in the direction of the light, giving intermittent signals in green, yellow and red. At that moment the UFO also changed color, from intense white to amber, then to an intense green, and finally back to the original white. Then it darted upward and disappeared.

Now even more interested in the light, he telephoned the pilot who was then in the canteen, criticized him for avoiding a closer investigation. The officer replied that he didn't want to get any closer to the UFO; instead he was glad to get AWAY from it, because it had followed his plane for almost an hour before he reached the airport.

Later he asked the controller for permission to take off without any lights on the bomber, in order to avoid possible further pursuit by the strange light.

About once a month South American saucer researcher Bernardo N. Passion, of Argentina, sends us several pages of UFO activity reported by the press and dug up by his own investigation. Like most sightings, many of them are routine, involving moving lights which change color and shape, disc-shaped things seen from long distances, and so on. To publish all of them would be superfluous and probably uninteresting. However each batch of reports contains a few dramatic sightings which deserve more than mere filing away. This month, for example:

Over Salta last June, residents were first troubled by a mysterious glowing sphere seen traversing the sky from north to south, then even more alarmed by the consequences. Every house light in the area Instantaneously went out, reminiscent of many sightings which have involved the stopping of automobile engines. The blackout lasted only a few minutes, however, after which the power came back on.

Reporter Passion did not state whether an official investigation had been made or what the power company had to say about it.

In September at Tres Arroyos five people traveling in a car viewed two luminous objects, seemingly sphereshaped and looking as if they were "suspended in the sky," to quote the witnesses. One of the viewers, a Senor Alargo, reported that the strange aircraft suddenly moved horizontally and that one of them landed a great distance from the party, then took off and disappeared.

In October at Salta a reporter of a local paper, El Tribune, became puzzled by a powerful ray of light coming through clouds which covered the sky, and called it to the attention of passersby.

In the general opinion of the group which observed the light, it was a ray from the moon, penetrating the clouds-though its brightness seemed to negate that possibility. Then a section of sky cleared, revealing a cone-shaped object hovering in a stationary position. Then the thing moved and went out of sight.

Nor was UFO activity restricted to other countries. In the U. S., as everywhere else, saucers were still puzzling people, though the domestic ones turned up very weird-looking, indeed.

As H. G. Samples, of Alamo, Ga., was doing some work on an apartment house, he heard a queer sound coming from above, and as he glanced upward a bright flash caught his eye.

"I saw a big round wheel, the brightest thing I have ever seen," he reported. "It seemed to be tapered very thin at the edges, and thick in the middle."

We wonder if the odd sound he reported was similar to the saucer "hearing" we reported in the last issue-the utter, paralyzing noise Robert Ward, of Weston, W. Va., heard over his house back in July.

Like Ward, the Georgia witness remarked that "I have never heard such a sound from any motor. It was as if a thousand bumblebees were making a noise all at one time."

The object changed position as it flew at an estimated speed of 30 miles per hour. "It would fly flat (presumably presenting only its edge to the observer-G.B.) and I could not see it; then it would fly upright and I could see it. When it flew upright, the brightness was so strong it almost blinded me."

It changed from "flat" to upright three times before it disappeared to the south. After watching a short time, Samples called to some people living in the house, and they came out and witnessed the same thing. Observing it together, they estimated it was about 30 ft. in diameter and about half a mile from the house. They watched it until it disappeared as a speck in the distance.

Samples added that his wife had seen a similar round object going north about one month before, and that she had also reported the same bee-like sound.

In Cattletsburg, Ky., Mrs. Avery Bentley, 59-year-old practical nurse, recalled a statement by her mother, after she witnessed a strange sky object in the bright moonlit sky:

"Things go on in the sky that people are not aware of," her mother had often told her.

Mrs. Bentley had got up from bed about 1:00 A.M. with an upset stomach, was sitting in the kitchen, taking an alkalizer. As she looked out the window she became attracted to an over-size star which began to move. As she watched in amazement, it turned variously red, blue and green, then took on shapes of a swastika and a four-leaf clover with glowing streamers from the leaves.

She roused her husband and he also witnessed the object, by that time moving slowly toward the west. One of her first impressions had been that two airplanes were involved in a fueling operation, but she discounted that possibility because of the slow movement and the long period of observation.

Maybe the U. S. wanted some more publicity about its long-talked-about flying saucer to steal some thunder from the Soviets, or maybe the picture leaked out accidentally-but anyhow Jack Judges, of the Canadian Broadcasting System, gave the world its first actual photograph of the sometimes hush-hush, sometimes w i d elyblurbed circular flying machine being developed for the Department of Defense by A. V. Roe Ltd.

Although the craft was cloaked in tight security, according to Sir Roy Dobson, chairman of the board of the Canadian aircraft firm, flier Judges found it easy to fly over an enclosure at Malton and get pictures of the saucer, sitting on the ground. The photographs showed an object which appeared to be a spitting image of the classical disc-shaped saucer, complete with a dome in the center, which presumably houses the pilot. A cable is seen running to the saucer from a building and another from a truck-shaped affair, probably a portable generator.

In early April, 1959, the Defense Department had released the biggest blurb on its saucer, suspiciously close to the April 19th announced date for the public testing of Otis T. Carr's home-made saucer at Oklahoma City (See our column in the October, '59, FS). The new announcement, presumably forced out of the U.S. Government and the A. V. Roe official by the appearance of the picture in the press, seemed to be only one in a series of contradictory mentions of the terrestrial saucer.

To get a better understanding of the situation (or probably even more confused than ever) it is helpful to go back a few years and review the history of the project.

The A. V. Roe Canadian saucer had been in the press off and on since February, 1953, when a Toronto Star reporter -broke the story He said that 'a wooden mock-up model of a flying saucer had been completed and that research had been going on for quite a while. In fact a Government scientist had informed him that only two years would be needed to put a working model in the air.

Almost two years went by with no further mention of the saucer. Then C. D. Howe, minister of defense production, visited England and announced that the Canadian saucer project had been abandoned after 34 million pounds (around a hundred million dollars) had been spent on it. He said the saucer was already beyond the drawing board stage, but that it had been nixed because the machine was "not suitable to our purpose," in Howe's words.

The next day, however, he contradicted himself, obviously after pressure from some quarter, explained he should have said that the cost of the project would be 34 million pounds when the work was completed, and that only about one and one-half million pounds had actually been spent. The same day, officials of the Defense Production Department announced that "not a nickel" of federal funds had been spent on the project, and that the development had been financed entirely by A. V. Roe at Malton. Then still another announcement from the department informed the press that about $10,000 had been spent, but by another department of the Canadian Government.

A week - - Patrick Nicholson, Ottawa Northern News correspondent, published an article telling the puzzled public that the work on "Project Y," as the saucer was called, was continuing, regardless of the statements made by Howe in England.

Yet he came up with still another contradictory statement: the expense of the project had been met jointly by A. V. Roe and the Canadian government on a 50-50 basis. Still later in December Howe made another statement to the effect that the p- t had been abandoned because aeronautical experts doubted whether the machine would work. This time the cost of the project was given at around 75 million dollars.

Though no doubt the machine's radical design called for a maximum of security, intrusion of politics made everything doubly confusing. And as the curtain* was drawn on the Canadian saucer, - was generally assumed that the Conservative party,. which came into power about that time, had shelved the project which had been started while the Liberals were in office.

U. S. Air Secretary Donald A. Quarles introduced Act Two of "Project Y," which by 1954 had become a U.S.A.F. project. And the Second Act was just as confusing as the first.

His announcement came with the publication of "Project Blue Book Report No. 14," which said that practically all saucers were the bunk and presented elaborate charts and graphs to "prove" that conclusion. Apparently to dramatize the issuance of the Report, he revealed that the U. S. had taken over the saucer being developed by A. V. Roe, and that. it was a vertical-rising machine powered by jets.

Along with the news he made a statement which many saucerers interpreted as the beginning of a cover-up for future sightings:

"We are now entering a period of aviation technology in which aircraft of unusual configuration and flight characteristics will begin to appear."

He added that the Canadian saucer would be a disk-shaped aircraft, "somewhat similiar to the popular conception of a flying saucer."

Then, no further announcements until 1959, when the Defense Department blubed more news about the saucer, "still under development," after so many years. John B. Macauley, assistant secretary of the Department, told a House subcommittee on science and astronautics that "I've never seen anything like it in all the years I've spent in aviation-and that's most of my life."

However, this time the Department intimated that the machine did not employ jets; Instead propellors pushed air down through openings in the saucer to give it lift, not unlike the British "Hovercraft," which was test flown shortly before-but the "Hovercraft" could fly only a few feet off the ground, on a cushion of air furnished by propellors.

In the October statements, just after the pilot had taken the pictures, Pentagon officials said the "Avrocar," as the Canadian saucer was now dubbed, had flown successfully in restricted tests, presumably tethered to a long cable, and that soon the machine would be tested in free flight.

But the method of propulsion was again altered, this time the Pentagon authorities stating that the Avrocar utilizes a revolutionary new principle invented by the Canadians, though they could not reveal the secret. They did add, however, that the principal was applicable to craft of various sizes.

People who live at Malton and who have heard the noise made by the craft say it is a peculiar sound, of far higher pitch than that made by propeller-driven aircraft or jets.

Meanwhile the Air Force stuck to its familiar tune. In a release to CAP TIMES, official publication of the Civil Air Patrol, the AF said that "After 12 years of sifting thousands of reports of `flying saucers' the Air Force has turned up no evidence that these outlandish machines exist anywhere but in the eye of the beholder."

Sightings had been declining during past few years. The total num-ber reported to the AF in the first six months of 1959 was only half the number reported in the same period of 1958. Of the 143 sightings reported in the first half of 1959, only three, or 2.09 per cent, were carried as genuine unknowns. The rest "turned out to be balloons, aircraft, astronomical phenomena, birds, searchlights and hoaxes."

But still the AF zealously investigated sightings, although its role in handling such matters could be boiled down to' a three-point interest:

"(1) To guard against possible threat to Security of the U.S. (2) To determine the technical or scientific characteristics of any such UFO. (3) To explain or identify all UFO sightings."

The latest statements about the U.S.-Canadian saucer were quite important to saucer enthusiasts who were convinced that the disks had been around much longer than any inventions by known Earth governments. The Pentagon announcement would further convince the man on the street, who easily forgets and don't read the papers very carefully anyway, that with the addition of the A. V. Roe development, all saucers could now be explained away as quite ordinary.

We personally feel that the Space People, or the Inner Earth Peopleor maybe both, possibly with a few dero and earthians thrown in, are just waiting for such a situation to come about: a time when U. S. saucers become so common we won't even notice the Other Ones any more. Then they can slip in and carry out their Evil plans, whatever they may be. Of course some saucers argue that the disk people intend only good toward us, but I personally fear they may have some terrifying plan in mind, for example converting us.

Anyhow, the Avrocar business would give more fire to the contentions of certain researchers that all saucers were U. S. or foreign weapons, including Dr. Leon C. Davidson, a contributor to FS, and who in November announced that he had finished a book-length manuscript, titled "FLYING SAUCERS: WEAPONS OF THE COLD WAR."

The manuscript would be circulated among saucer publications and researchers prior possible publication, Dr. Davidson announced. An outline reaching the writer indicated that it would attempt to prove that saucer-shaped craft have long been flown by the U. S. and that they have been used as a weapon in the cold war, their role having been to frighten and confuse the Communist part of the world.

To us the further news on the U. S. saucer could mean one thing: that while governments, at least our own, have been zealously investigating, chasing and debunking the "real" saucers, they have also been even more zealously copying them. If, as some claim, the U. S. and other governments have captured "hardware from outer space," is it not logical that they have also been copying their means of propulsion?

If, indeed, the U. S., or anyone else, has been trying to duplicate saucers, either captured ones, or ones which have been merely seen, such development projects would indeed be secretones-probably just as secret as our early work on the atomic bomb. Such secrecy would necessarily extend to sightings themselves, and could be responsible for much of the Air Force attitude over the past years.

It is known that scientists have long recognized the possibility that gravity is a thing which can be controlled if only the proper means of doing so can be developed. Ma. Keyhoe and science writers have stated that projects to find such answers are being sponsored by the Government. Can the Avro saucer possibly be the hush-hush finished project developed from such research? Let us indeed hope so.

It would be a development far in advance of the Russian Sputniks and Luniks. It would more quickly change the face of the Earth.

Let us also hope the Soviets aren't ahead of us on this one too!