Page 22 of Flying Saucers Magazine - February 1961

You are a common, ordinary private at a lonely military garrison.

You and your buddy walk guard duty at the top of the fortifications. Everyone else in the fortress is asleep-for it is two o'clock in the morning on a moonless tropical night.

Quiet and peace reigns on this lush coastline of Brazil. It is not a time of war, and you relax in this beautiful place. When the moon is out the ocean is a sea of silver, but row, even though the stars, stretched in an endless canopy, burn fiercely, there is a darkness which oppresses the land and makes your fortress an isolated island where alone there seems to be reality.

Were it not for your companion, there would be only the shooting stars for company.

Suddenly your buddy points at one of the stars which has suddenly burst into attention. It is over the Atlantic, and it is moving. Not like a meteor, but slower-and deliberately.

It is something to relieve the monotony until your realization tells you it is moving on what seems to be a deliberate course, in your direction.

Then your interest, now growing into concern, is quickened, as you determine this is no star at all but some sort of flying object, with people or things in it; though you don't know why you feel there are people or things in it: it is the feeling you get as the panic of the next minutes is somehow previewed within you.

That panic is then directly presaged by the knowledge that the thing IS HEADED DIRECTLY TOWARD THE FORTRESS!

It comes over high-too high for a plane, for it suddenly halts in mid-air. There is a silence, an unbearable silence of suspense-as the thing seems to drift, drift downward, slowly and deliberately, closer and closer above you!

The white glow of its arrival has now deadened to a harsh orange glow, something like a Hallowe'en color. But this is no harmless jacko-lantern. It is a craft of some sort, disk-shaped and big as a Douglas bomber.

You should have alerted the garrison, but you haven't.- Your guns hang limply at your sides as both of you stare at the thing above you, as if mesmerized.

When the circular object is about 150 feet above your fortress it again halts, and it just hangs there.

Nothing else.

Then the low, dull humming noise, changing to a higher pitched whining.

Then hell ...

The heat wave reaches you first like the gentle touch of a warm room, entered from winter. But it grows in intensity and quickly engulfs you. It is not ordinary heat, but a kind of invisible fire that seems to envelop your clothing. It is too late to call for help. You go stumbling about the narrow area, screaming and beating the air around you. As you black out your last nightmarish memory is of overwhelming heat intermixed with blind terror .. .

The one sentry had collapsed, while the other was still running and screaming from one side to another. Finally he slid under a heavy cannon for shelter.

When the noise had reached the living quarters below, the men jumped from their bunks and ran toward their battle stations, not knowing what was happening above, though appropriating to themselves some of the terror of the screams.

Panic soon reigned there too. The lights went out; all electrical circuits were dead. Apparently the fortress' dynamos had stopped functioning. Somebody fumbled for the emergency circuits, but they were dead too. Among the confusion came a nerve-racking jangle-of more than a dozen alarm clocks throughout the place which, though all set for 5:00 A.M., were strangely going off at that moment.

The fortress was conquered by panic; whoever the enemy was, the men were certainly delivered into his hands.

Then suddenly the lights came back on, and the men regained some of their composure. They ran outside to contact the enemy, but found nothing-ONLY A STRANGE ORANGE LIGHT CLIMBING VERTICALLY IN THE SKY AT GREAT SPEED.

The one sentinel remained unconscious; the other still crouched under the gun, crying and mumbling, as if completely mad. The post doctor rushed to the men. Both were badly burned. One suffered from what apparently was heat stroke, and both had second-degree burns over most of their bodies. Hours passed before the less afflicted could recover from shock and relate the terrifying nightmare you have read at the beginning.

Thereafter, as usual, the hush-up. This report, tracked down by medical doctor, Olavo T. Fontes, and given to the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (4740 East Cooper St., Tucson, Ariz.), is not presented here as a mere horror tale, but to explore a very important point made last September by a noted saucer researcher.

"THE FLYING SAUCERS ARE HOSTILE!" That is the title of a lengthy report prepared by George D. Fawcett, based on his more than ten years of gathering UFO evidence. We don't quite agree with George's title, which may give a conclusion stronger than his evidence justifies; but we want to give him a stage where this little-circulated research report can reach the many readers of FLYING SAUCERS for their consideration.

The incident above, which took place at the Brazilian Army Fortress Itaipu, along the coast of Sao Paulo state, near Santos, on Nov. 4, 1957, is only one of 90 reports he lists as involving hostility on the part of saucers.

While other researchers have published magazines, Fawcett has devoted his time to collecting and organizing UFO information into useful reference units. We first heard of him when we joined Albert K. Bender's ill-fated organization, The International Flying Saucer Bureau, back in 1952. At that time Fawcett was on Bender's International Council. Since the closing of that, important organization, Fawcett has carried on his research independently, as he did even then, though remaining constantly in touch with the writer.

For complete details see Fawcett's own article in this issue. (Ed.)

It may be unfortunate that Fawcett does not editorialize in his reports, and that the reader, as a consequence, may not reach a valid conclusion.

Were these near-misses and occasional injuries the result of deliberate attacks by saucers-or were they only accidents, without bad intentions by the saucerians?

With the superior technology demonstrated in these encounters, the saucers surely could have inflicted more destruction than actually occurred. Yet, with such a superior technology, and the advanced intelligence we tend to connect with such, could not the operators of such craft have avoided the damaging contacts with terrestrials?

In the case of the "attack" on the fortress, the business of the saucer must have been something other than agression, else presumably it would have wreaked more havoc than it elected to do. Maybe that business was simple observation, with the side effects unknown to the saucerians. Or maybe they just didn't care.

Finally, in going over some of Fawcett's accounts of contact in the sky, we are led to wonder how many reports, involving mysterious plane crashes which left no survivors (or those which were hushed up) were of necessity not available to the compiler. Maybe such reports, were they available, could shed some light on the perplexing question of why plane accidents definitely occur in cycles.

But what of people on the ground who have complained of being variously frightened, irradiated, sickened, or even burned by saucers? Fawcett includes a bundle of these, too.

Although Fawcett's reports definitely show that people have been injured and killed as a result of encounters with UFOs, we don't believe that a concrete case for overt hostility has been built up. As for near-collisions with airliners, our own planes have near-misses almost daily and sometimes crash into each other; though one would like to believe the saucer people have better radar systems.

Close ground encounters seem to follow a pattern in that these contacts often cause redness of the skin, burns and other irritations, somewhat like, but not necessarily identical to radiation burns. In very rare cases have terrestrials complained of being "rayed" or otherwise attacked; instead it seems the injuries have been caused unintentionally by saucerians who either didn't know or didn't care whether such contacts could be damaging.

Some points are definitely proved by the Fawcett report, however. Whether or not intentional weapons, certain devices, either carried by the UFOs or a part of their propulsion or communication systems, appear to be powerful indeed, and far more effective than any weapon we have invented. If the saucers wished to attack on a large scale, there seems to be very little we could do about it.

Just as the existence of saucers has been proved by an overwhelming number of sightings by reliable observers, we believe this report offers indisputable proof that they also have the technological capability of hostile acts, and possibly the conquering of the earth should they so deign. We believe, however, their moral capability for such acts is yet to be proven.

Some of these reports lead us to a conclusion different from those advanced by both the "hostile saucers" and the "spacemen are here to help us" schools. Maybe the saucerians are here on some strange

business we haven't been able to figure out, and as far as humans go, just don't give a damn about us. If we get in their way, too bad; if we stay out of their way, well and good.

But whether or not they have any hostile design (more than 10 Sears of mass appearances have to the contrary tended to indicate that they have not), their capability of such behooves us, I believe, to keep our eyes continually on the heavens.

THE END