On Wednesday, October 4, 1967, at 10 o'clock, I was driving my rented car on the Long Island Highway and, about 20 miles from New York, I suddenly noticed a large luminous sphere streaking across the sky parallel to the course of my car. I drew attention to it, because over the past two years I have seen something similar many times in different places. There was something strange about the crystalline white glow of this sphere, which was brighter than any star. At the top of the sphere, I noticed a fire reflecting a red glow and flickering slightly, which was especially noticeable against the background of the sphere's steady glow. Although Kennedy Airport was nearby, these were not the lights of a landing plane - too often I watched cars boarding and taking off on my many trips to be mistaken.
When I reached Huntington that evening, I saw many cars parked on the road, and a crowd of people on the side of the road, staring in wonder at the sky. I noticed several police officers among them.
It turns out that a mysterious sphere that overtook my car on the road joined four others here, and they hovered soundlessly at a low altitude, sometimes bouncing in the air like huge glowing puppets controlled by invisible threads.
"What do you think it is?" - Some elderly gentleman turned to me.
I shrugged my shoulders; "Obviously, this is a UFO - an unidentified flying object."
"I've never seen anything like it before," he muttered with a dazed look, "and always thought it was nothing more than idle speculation."
I nodded silently and walked towards my car. I still had a long way to go today, and many problems haunted me. In general, since I started working on flying saucers, I seem to have had nothing but problems.
A few miles south of Huntington, in the tiny hamlet of Melville, another man was preoccupied with the same problems. The day before, on October 3, 1967, Philip Buckhead, a space computer scientist with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's degree in philosophy, was summoned outside late by two teenagers, one of whom was his fourteen-year-old son Donald. Excited, they pointed out to him a strange car hovering almost over the trees, only a few yards away.
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“The disc-shaped object with a silvery or metallic sheen was illuminated,” Buckhead later said, “strange rectangular lights, constantly blinking, spun from left to right at its bottom. Another light source came from the top, but not blinking. There was no noise from any engine operation."
The object disappeared behind the ridge of a hill, and Buckhead rushed into the house for binoculars. Then he and several other people went in search of the mysterious object.
After driving a little along the nearest road, they again found the object and watched it until it was out of sight, Buckhead tried to find out if the object had red and green distinctive lights that even all experimental flying machines are required to carry. But if the subject did, Buckhead didn't notice.
After a half-hour telephone conversation with Suffolk Westhampton Beach, Long Island, Buckhead and the two boys returned to the site and scanned the area with hand torches.
“It smelled strange there,” Buckhead told me. - This smell occurs when burning some chemicals or electrical wiring. In addition, in this area gravel and sand were kind of scattered."
Since this sighting was officially announced only a month later, very few people, including the villagers, knew about it. But, as Mrs. Buckhead informed me, a few days after this event, some very strange phone calls began in their house. The phone rang, although, as it turned out, the local station did not connect anyone to it. Moreover, the phone continued to ring even when the receiver was lifted. Buckhead's phone bill was much larger than in previous months.
We may add that in 1967 Melville, like Huntington, became the site of frequent and unexplained power outages. But for Philip Buckhead, there is no longer any doubt about the existence of unidentified flying objects. He knows for sure that they exist.
How long has this been going on?
History prefers fantasy to facts. The legend survives. while truth, as if consumptive, dries up and fades. We teach our children that Christopher Columbus is a hero, carefully hiding his many mistakes and failures. Of all the possible causes of the Great Fire of Chicago on October 8, 1871, we choose the most absurd about a half-milked cow, Mrs O.
Leary overturning a kerosene lamp. In reality, the fire was caused by a huge ball of fire that swept over several states, wreaking death, destruction and chaos on a scale that humanity did not see until the terrible air raids of the Second World War. (In the fourth chapter of his book Mysterious Fires and Fires, researcher Vincent C. Keddis described cases of spectacular but threatening fireballs that swept over the states of Iowa, Minnesota, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Dakota at night. That terrible night, there were 1,500 people killed in Green Bay alone. Four times as many people were killed in another city in the same state, Pestigo and Chicago.) After thousands of years, perhaps Hitler will be remembered as a somewhat eccentric soap maker. And stubbornno matter what, man's attempts to break into space may be an addition to the old story of Icarus flying too close to the Sun on his wax wings. We are more passionate about our own interpretation of great events than the events themselves. For generations, we carefully but persistently changed the facts until the story began to sound the way we want it.
And if you believe in the authenticity of, perhaps, slightly embellished events accompanying humanity throughout its long history, you will have to agree that unidentified flying objects have always existed. The historical legends of every country and every people, including even the completely isolated Eskimos, are literally filled with cases of mysterious and inexplicable celestial phenomena.
How plausible is our story, in which myths and reality, merging, form a single picture?
Several great religions are grounded in the foundations of the Bible. For 2,000 years, billions of people have accepted the Bible as the undeniable truth. However, the Bible gives different and sometimes contradictory interpretations of the same cases, including the circumstances of the life and death of Christ, although all of them are believed to be described by eyewitnesses. Which text in the Bible is correct? Believers say that everything. Unbelievers, on the basis of differences and contradictions in the texts, question the very existence of Christ.
Like most UFO researchers, I have read the Bible carefully several times. From the point of view of what we know about flying saucers today, many biblical texts about heavenly phenomena not only receive a new interpretation, but are also confirmed by some events in our reality.
It's just that in those ancient times, these events received a religious interpretation - all heavenly phenomena and catastrophes were attributed to Almighty God.
Today we kneel before the altar and if we do not know or cannot understand something, we attribute it to our ignorance. In general, the same game, only with slightly changed rules.
We no longer run to church at the sight of mysterious unearthly objects in the sky, but turn either to the nearest air base or to astronomers. In the old days, priests could tell us that we had sinned, and therefore the Lord sent us a vision in heaven. Today, our educated leaders say that we are either wrong or crazy, or both. The next time we see something in the sky, we will be silent.
But these damn things appear over and over again. Or maybe they don't disappear at all?
The first photograph of an unidentified flying object was taken back in 1883 by the Mexican astronomer Jose Bonilla. On August 12 of that year, observing the sun from his observatory in Tsacatecas, the scientist was stunned by the appearance of a whole array of incomprehensible circular objects that slowly floated in the area of the solar disk. Bonilla counted 143 objects, and since his telescope was equipped with a newfangled device called a camera, he was able to photograph some of them. After the development of the photographs, it became obvious that the cigar and spindle-shaped objects clearly visible on them were some kind of solid bodies, but clearly not heavenly. With the conscientiousness of a scientist, Professor Bonilla wrote a scientific account of what he saw, calculating mathematically that the objects passed at an altitude of about 200 thousand miles above the ground, and, attaching photographs,sent the report to the editors of the French magazine ASTRONOMY. Without a doubt, his colleagues read the report, but since they could not explain anything, they chose to forget about it and get down to more real - the calculation of the rings of Saturn.
Five years before Professor Bonill's amazing observation, a Texas farmer named John Martin reported seeing a large, circular object sweeping across the sky at great speed. Talking to a reporter for the Devinson newspaper DALY NEWS, Martin compared the object he saw to a plate.
This happened on Thursday, January 24, 1878. His neighbors, who nicknamed Martin after that, probably something like "Mad John", could not have known that John Martin was not the first and certainly not the last one to see things like that.
In April 1897, thousands of people in the United States of America saw huge "airships" over their cities and farms. Many witnesses stated that they met and talked with the pilots of these "airships". The NEW YORK HERALD, April 12, 1897, reported that a Roger Pack, Illinois kiosk named Walter McKeney had taken two photographs of the cigar-shaped ship and quoted him as saying: “I read about the airship the other day, but thought it was all fake."
As reports of dirigibles continued to flood into the newspaper offices and many witnesses swore under oath of their veracity, the publishers naturally turned to the most significant scientific authority of the time, Thomas Edison.
“I can assure you that this is all pure fiction,” Edison announced on April 22, 1897. “I have no doubt that airships will be built in the very near future, but … it is completely impossible to imagine that someone would build an airship while keeping it in secret. When I was little, we often glued colored paper cans, filled them with gas and let them fly into the sky. They could fly through the air for several days. I believe that someone in the western states is continuing these wonderful games.
If ever an airship is built, it will not have the shape of a balloon. It will be a mechanical structure lifted into the air by a powerful but very light motor. No one has invented such a motor yet, but we never know what might happen next. You can wake up tomorrow and hear about some invention that will give us a new direction in our work, as was the case with X-rays. Then you can talk about something specific. Personally, I do not engage in inventions of flying ships, as I prefer to devote my time to objects of commercial value, and an airship will be just a fun toy at best."
However, forty-one years later, a young man named Orson Welles (Subsequently, a famous actor and film director. - Ed.) Allowed himself to disagree with Edison's opinion. On October 30, 1938, the radio show based on the novel by H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, opened with almost prophetic words from Orson: “We now know that at the beginning of the 20th century our world was closely studied and carefully observed by a mind as mortal as the mind of man, but much more powerful,”announced Wells's clear voice. - We now know that while a man was busy with his various affairs, he was subjected to a study so thorough that it can be compared with the study of creatures under a microscope by us, swimming and multiplying in a drop of water. With boundless self-righteousness, people crawl up and down their planet,absolutely confident in their dominant position on this small spinning shard, thrown away by the Sun, which, by design or by chance, was given over to man by the mysterious darkness of time and space. And at this time, through the immense space of the cosmos, beings who stand above us with reason, as we ourselves stand above animals, beings with a mighty, cold and merciless intellect, looking at our Earth with envious eyes, slowly but surely hatch their plans against us. "slowly but surely hatching their plans against us. "slowly but surely hatching their plans against us."
Until recently, no serious attempt was made to unearth and investigate newspaper reports of "airships" that appeared in the press in 1897. And even now this work is being done only by a small group of enthusiastic ufologists. Meanwhile, startling conclusions can be drawn from these old reports, and many of the keys to solving the mystery are hidden in them. Ufology is only now beginning to take some form of imprecise science, breaking through the disorganizing bedlam of skepticism, counterversions and diametrically opposed opinions.
According to the most popular theory, flying saucers are born and grow up on some other planet and from time to time they pay us visits just to drink our water and soak up our sun. However, all the numerous data at our disposal, unfortunately, completely refute this pleasant interpretation of events.
Thunder and lightning
When lightning strikes, it exists for tenths of a second, and then for a few seconds the thunder that follows it is heard. We know that lightning generates thunder, and we do not separate these two concepts. However, in the twenty-three years of UFO counterversion there has been a tendency to pay more attention to thunder than to what precedes it. Thus, the thunder turned into something obscure and vague. For many years, skeptics have forced ufologists to spend huge efforts to prove that the witnesses really saw something, almost not interested in what exactly they saw.
The escalation of the problem was that the witnesses who saw, according to them, "Solid" objects, rarely could give their detailed description, which would make it possible to compare them with other observations. Thus, basic data about objects were often filled with confusing contradictions that debunk rather than confirm existing explanations and hypotheses. But in all these contradictions there is, it is true, a deeply hidden commonality, which we will dwell on in detail in the following chapters.
In the first chapter, we presented 22 typical reports of object observations.
Most of them were luminous and behaved in strange, unusual ways.
A huge part of the objects was perceived as "soft", they were luminous or transparent, translucent, changed shape and size, suddenly disappeared and reappeared. Very rarely, to observers, these objects seemed solid, and even less often - metal. Observations of the so-called soft objects constitute the absolute majority, represent a real phenomenon and deserve the most careful study. The alien alien theory is also completely untenable. This important issue and its negative impact on the understanding of the problem will be analyzed in detail by us.
According to the Air Force intelligence service, which processed materials about UFO phenomena from 1947 to 1949, it is completely impossible that any foreign power or even an alien civilization could launch such an armada of flying machines into the Western Hemisphere that did not suffer a single accident., each of which would immediately reveal the entire operation, not to mention the fact that the gigantic program for the construction of such machines could not go unnoticed, as well as the place of their basing. And, interestingly, the Air Force intelligence service has never questioned the reliability of witnesses! Still, after all, both pilots and entire crews of ships, including high-ranking officers, more than once saw unidentified flying objects during the Second World War, about which they sent a large number of technically superior reports to military intelligence.
But the problem remains unchanged: what did all these people see? The general behavior of all observed objects clearly indicated that they were paraphysical (i.e. not of solid material). They swept through the atmosphere at incredible speeds without generating any phenomena associated with overcoming the supersonic barrier. They demonstrated tremendous agility, completely denying all laws of inertia. Like ghosts, they suddenly appeared and also suddenly disappeared. Since there was no way to prove their paraphysical nature, Air Force specialists took the path of least resistance, putting forward the hypothesis that could be most easily accepted by the public - the hypothesis of a "natural phenomenon." This hypothesis turned out to be very convenient, since the reference to meteorites, glowing gas, meteorological balloons and other phenomena satisfied everyone,except for those witnesses who personally observed these phenomena. The few reports of observations of "solid" objects, which the Air Force experts could not squeeze into the framework of their convenient theory, caused only a puzzled shrug on their part.
The head of the Air Force's BLUE BOOK project, Captain Edward Rappelt, wrote his own book, Reports of Unidentified Flying Objects, where he openly discussed all the information he had at his disposal. This book, published in 1956, is still the best reference on the subject.
The explosion of public interest in UFOs in 1947 prompted an inevitable reaction from scientists, researchers and writers. Working independently of each other, they quickly assessed all observations and, albeit slowly, developed a theory of the paraphysicality of these objects. Unfortunately, the idea of alien aliens gained a very strong emotional right to life, and numerous amateur enthusiasts quickly jumped on the alien hypothesis based on very superficial evidence and pseudoscientific speculation. Their belief in their favorite hypothesis grew and was fueled by the appearance of “contactees - people who announced their meetings with pilots of unidentified flying objects and even flew with them to other planets.
It may seem ridiculous, but after the appearance of the "contactees" a united army of UFO enthusiasts was divided. Some accepted the "contactees" completely, others, on the contrary, denied all the stories of the "contactees", concentrating their activities on attempts to collect and analyze evidence of the reliability of evidence that UFOs are machines of some kind of supercivilization with the appropriate methods of the technological process of their creation. The gap between the two camps of enthusiasts, growing from year to year, gave rise to an even greater chaos of counterversions.
In the old days, when the Air Force was relatively free to transmit UFO information, Captain Rappelt provided significant assistance to Donald F. Keehou, a retired Marine Corps major, supplying him with numerous official reports for writing books and magazine articles. And the Pentagon spokesman for the BLUE BOOK project, Albert M. Chop, went so far as to even allow himself in an advertising eulogy on the cover of Keehou's book published in 1953, in particular, to declare: “We in the Air Force know Major Keehou as responsible and honest journalist. His continued work with the Air Force to investigate the phenomenon of unidentified flying objects has put Major Kihou among the leading civil authorities in this type of investigation.
All observation reports and other information provided by the author have been verified and transmitted to Major Kihou at his request by the Air Force's Technical Intelligence Department.
The Air Force and the investigative agency it created, called Project BLUE BOOK, are aware of the findings of Major Keehou, who believes the "flying saucers" to be aliens. The Air Force has never denied this possibility exists. Some people consider them to be a strange and completely unknown natural phenomenon, but if the reports at our disposal about the surprisingly accurate, controlled maneuvering of these "saucers" are correct, then there is simply no other answer to the question except "alien"."
In general, the entire Rappelt book leaves the impression that his investigation is aimed at cramming the hypothesis into an "alien" framework, but in January 1953, a commission made up of representatives of the highest scientific authorities and leaders of the Central Intelligence Agency, considered Rappelt's conclusions and rejected them. Instead of an impressive announcement that the "flying saucers" were aliens, it was decided to accustom the public to the idea that all this is nothing more than natural phenomena, misinterpreted known objects, etc.
The Air Force stopped issuing any information, and by special order, Air Force personnel were prohibited from taking part in any discussions on this topic. It was these measures that gave rise to the rumor that exists to this day that such censorship was established by the unidentified objects themselves.
But the government has established a special department to find out the true nature of this phenomenon!
A brilliant man on the West Coast, Dr. Mead Lyon began his own study of UFOs in 1947 and soon dug up little-known aspects of contact. By 1950 he had privately published several books explaining the paraphysical nature of these objects and the parapsychological elements of contact syndrome. However, fans of the alien version rejected all his theories, continuing their fruitless attempts to prove their own.
In Great Britain in 1948, a UFO Research Unit was created within the Royal Air Force, led by Lieutenant General Messi. In 1944, Chicago-based publisher Ray Palmer began publishing a series of fictional stories focused on UFO problems in his magazine AMEIGIN STORI (Amazing Stories), and was soon bombarded with thousands of letters from people claiming to have seen such objects themselves, and more than once.
Palmer later co-published the magazine FATE (Rock) and devoted his entire life to studying this problem.
In the early fifties, new researchers began to punch the way for the paraphysical concept. In 1950, the English publicist Gerald Heade published his book "Are we being watched from another world?", Where, having checked all the pros and cons in the alien theory, he derived the concept of a "bee", suggesting that objects appearing above the Earth are robot observers of some super-powerful civilization. Another famous English writer, Arthur Clarke, who became interested in UFOs in 1953, wrote several articles where he noted that all the data speaks for the paraphysical nature of these objects and their dissimilarity with aliens.
But if there really is a turning year in ufology, then it is 1955.
This year's "Secret" has been widely and repeatedly covered by highly qualified researchers. Many who study the UFO phenomenon, having familiarized themselves with the extensive documentary material, gave up dealing with this issue, believing that the mystery was finally solved. A smaller part held out until, to their own satisfaction, they received confirmation from published evidence. Then they gave up to deal with this issue, and the resulting vacuum was filled with all sorts of "cultists", or even simply mentally abnormal types, more interested in the problems of "cloak and dagger" and anarchic possibilities arising from the establishment of government censorship.
Interest in UFOs in the UK was fueled by a new government investigation, conducted in secret for five years - from 1950 to April 24, 1956. A spokesman for the Royal Air Force told the press that the investigation into the matter was completed, but its results will be hidden from the public. so as not to generate further counterversions, not to mention the fact that these results cannot be adequately explained without divulging some "secrets of state importance." This cryptic statement hardly satisfied anyone, but shortly thereafter, Air Marshal Lord Dowding, the man who led the Battle of England in 1940, delivered a public lecture in which, openly discussing the paraphysical aspects of the phenomenon, stated that the inhabitants UFOs are immortal, can become invisible to the human eye,take human form and be completely unnoticed to be and work among us. It was a bone thrown by UFO enthusiasts, who, however, did not know what to do with it next. As for the "cultists", the early statements of the marshal, who shared the views of fans of the "natural phenomenon", still circulated among them.
Harold Bilkins, a renowned English researcher and writer, highlighted the paraphysical aspects of the phenomenon in his book Uncensored Flying Saucers, published in 1955. At an early stage of research, Bilkins came to the conclusion that UFOs were intent on hostile intent, but later, better understanding the paraphysical factors of the phenomenon, he changed his views.
Between 1954 and 1957, astrophysicist Maurice C. Jessup published a series of books full of historical correlations and abstruse theories about the paraphysical side of the phenomenon.
The essayist for CORENIT, R. de White Mailer, spent years collecting a huge amount of factual material to support his paraphysical conclusions before submitting to thousands of his readers his 1955 book, which he aptly titled Take It With You. But despite the unfortunate title, the book comprehensively reveals the essence of the phenomenon.
By far the most important one-off contribution to the study of the UFO problem was made by the Air Force with the publication of SPECIAL REPORT 14 in BLUE BOOK. The report, in fact, was a statistical report executed by computers at the Institute. Bettelle commissioned by the Air Force. It contained 240 maps and graphs showing the geographic distribution of observations and other critical data. This was a one-of-a-kind statistical review, but SPEC 14 was rejected by many as “just another camouflage” due to the main conclusion that there is no evidence or even evidence of an unearthly origin for this phenomenon. When I finished my own statistical review, I was amazed that my data was confirmed by the materials of SPECIAL REPORT N14. It was amazing: an objective check showed that UFO enthusiasts were wrong,and the Air Force experts were right.
Any conscientious research must obey the basic rule: the working hypothesis taken as a basis must be confirmed by all experimental data. The paraphysical theory meets this criterion, the alien theory does not. UFO enthusiasts solved this problem by selecting only those cases that seemed to confirm the alien version. For this reason, ufologists abandoned most of the real cases, which, in their opinion, should have led to different conclusions. But as soon as the process of selecting information began, the problem became even more confusing, and the mystery, instead of being dispersed, became completely impenetrable. The press published specially selected cases, and publicist writers, when selecting materials for their books and magazine articles, had no idea aboutthat most of the data was deliberately hidden.
After the information explosion in 1955, dark times came for ufologists.
Specialists of the Air Force have almost ceased to be interested in the phenomenon, explaining all the cases they proposed to them exclusively as a natural phenomenon. This behavior of the Air Force soon led UFO enthusiasts to the conclusion that "the Air Force is hiding the truth," and much of the literature published after 1955 was devoted to the scandalous topic: on what basis is the government hiding the truth from the people? As professional researchers and writers grew cold towards UFOs, the quality of the published literature dropped significantly, the books were filled with pseudoscientific concepts and amateur interpretations. Various UFO enthusiast camps wasted time and energy swearing at the Air Force and each other.
Serious research in 1955-1966. very little has been done.
But at any period there are real researchers who are able, regardless of the thunder that is heard in the midst of UFO enthusiasts, to deal directly with lightning. This was Wilbert B. Smith, a communications engineer for the Canadian Department of Transportation, appointed in 1954 to lead the Canadian semi-official MEGNIT (magnet) project to study the NLO problem. By this time, Smith had acquired an excellent reputation among UFO enthusiasts. and they were delighted with his appointment. As the years passed, Smith began to realize that the fastest way to solve a problem was through the study of contacts. In some cases, he did succeed in obtaining scientific information from the contactees, which Smith was able to verify and confirm in his laboratory. Late in life (Smith died of cancer on December 27, 1962.) he gave several lectures and wrote detailed notes on what he was able to learn and understand.
“For the first time in my life,” Smith observed in 1958, “I began to recognize the inner unity of physics and philosophy. Substance and energy are facets of the same diamond, and in order to properly assess them, you need to look at the diamond itself."
But fans of the alien version did not want to give up. They didn't even want to hear about any philosophy or energy. They loved to talk about the Venusians and the conspiracy of the highest levels of the Air Force against the country.
And, perhaps, it is precisely because of such sentiments that most of Smith's scientific materials are still, unfortunately, not published or discussed.
Another engineer, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became interested in "flying saucers" in 1953. After retiring in 1954, he and his wife toured the country, during which, asking witnesses, he listened to the inevitable tales of contacts. The name of this engineer is Bright Reeve. Like all of us, he began his activity with a hidden hope of receiving confirmation of the alien version. Reeve thought with the same physical criteria as all engineers and scientists. But getting deeper and deeper into the essence of the problem, Reeve, like Smith, was forced to turn to philosophy and metaphysics. As a result, in 1965, he published the book "The Birth of the Cosmic Point of View", in which, after long and careful research, he came to the conclusion that UFO sightings themselves do not have much significance.being part of a large-scale paraphysical phenomenon.
Kenneth Arnold, a private airline pilot whose sighting of a UFO on June 24, 1947 sparked another wave of public interest, studied the problem for several years and in 1955 made a public statement that he believed the objects were some form of living energy but not by spaceships.
In 1957, Ray Palmer began publishing a magazine called FLYING SOSEZ (flying saucers). In its first issues, Palmer hinted to readers that he knew some important secret, which he would later share. In 1958, he made public his conclusions that UFOs are not aliens from some other planet, and offered as an alternative a complex theory of a secret civilization associated with humanity by paraphysical and parapsychic ties. Palmer stubbornly adhered to his theory and, in addition to his own journal, published a series of articles in several other publications. Despite a widespread campaign against him, over the course of the twelve-year struggle, Palmer managed to not only retain his original 4,000 subscribers, but also acquire 6,000 new ones.
As an opponent of the alien point of view, Palmer stayed away from the main ufological stream.
Dr. Leon Davidson, a physicist who took part in the atomic bomb project, became interested in UFO problems in the early fifties. Due to his social status, he managed to obtain permission from the Air Force to view photographs and films. Davidson began investigating especially confusing contact cases, and his trained brain quickly discovered the hoax. Like other objective researchers, he came to the conclusion that all the contradictions in the stories of contactees are not deliberate lies, but "twists" of perception of contactees. Dr. Davidson suggested that they all underwent some kind of hypnotic process, but could not find an acceptable paraphysical explanation. Instead, he unexpectedly accused the Central Intelligence Agency of deliberately orchestrating all of these incidents in order to maintain the Cold War environment in the world. Only a small percentage of the data could lead to such a conclusion, so this statement by Davidson can be considered completely unfounded.
For many years, Al Chop, an Air Force Information Officer, happily borrowed his name to advertise the activities of the National Aeronautical Phenomena Investigation Committee (NSCVF), headed by Major Kihou. But in 1966, first in personal correspondence with Kihou, and then in several radio speeches, he announced that he no longer believed in the reality and materiality of flying saucers. Chop explained such a drastic change in his views in a very original way: "I once believed in Santa Claus."
Many of the earliest UFO researchers, whose educational and intellectual level is above average, came to the same conclusion after years of independent study of the problem. Some of them, for example, Dr. Donald Menzel, an expert in astronomy at Harvard University, believe that people, of course, observe something and try to explain this "something" based on the level of their scientific knowledge. Menzel was inclined towards the idea of mirages and towards the theory of aerial inversion.
Two authorities among ufologists - Ivan T. Sanderson, a renowned anthropologist biologist, and Dr. Jack Valley, an astronomer and computer expert at NASA - studied alien theory for many years, but eventually became supporters of the paraphysical hypothesis.
What is the paraphysical hypothesis, which is the main theme of our book? This hypothesis was best formulated by Sir Victor Gedall, Marshal of the Royal Air Force, who took an active part in the UFO investigation conducted by the KVAF in 1950-1955. On May 3, 1969, during his public lecture at Sexton Hall in London, Sir Victor emphasized: “Of course, it is possible that UFO pilots may be inhabitants of some other planets, although there are no logical prerequisites for such a statement. If the nature of UFOs is paraphysical (and, as a consequence, they usually remain invisible), then they, rather, can be the creatures of the invisible world of our own planet, rather than the creatures of the paraphysical sphere of any other planet in the solar system …
Suppose UFOs are paraphysical, capable of reflecting light like ghosts.
Let us also assume, based on the testimony of numerous observers, that they become visible when they move from one position to another at ultra-high speeds. Then it follows from all that has been said that, while remaining visible at the time of movement, they do not dematerialize when the movement stops, but simply their mass becomes transparent due to their diffusion nature and etheric substance … Observational data confirm their paraphysicality, which increases the likelihood of their terrestrial origin, and not an alien … The astral world of illusions, which is well known from imaginative faces and from sermons, is jam-packed with spirits prone to various tricks. One gets the impression that some of them are eager to demonstrate their power to us, others - to teach moral lessons … All these representatives of the astral world are very likelythey sincerely appeal to human consciousness, sometimes pursuing special goals, perhaps urging us along the path of technical progress, and sometimes they simply amaze simpletons with a goal that is known only to the devil."
I must say that the judgments of Sir Victor are more difficult to believe than many of the tales of various UFO-cultists, and if you are not familiar with the vast occult and religious literature, then the reasoning of the Marshal will remain incomprehensible to you. And in essence, his words mean that the UFO phenomenon is in reality some kind of cosmic nonsense in our understanding, a joke, if you will, coming from invisible creatures who throughout our history have enjoyed confusing us. We will follow the manifestation of their activity from the dawn of our history to the present day.
Not so long ago, the state publishing house issued an annotated bibliographic reference "UFOs and Related Issues" prepared by the Library of Congress for the Scientific and Technical Research Department of the Air Force. In preparation for this work, senior bibliographer Miss Lynn E.
Ketos has read thousands of books, articles and publications on this topic. In her preface to the 400-page handbook, she writes: “Most of the UFO literature published to this day borders on mysticism and metaphysics.
It is filled with phenomena such as telepathy, automatic book writing, spiritualism … Many of the UFO reports published in the press are reminiscent of ancient incidents involving the intrigues of demons and other similar phenomena that have long been known to theologians and parapsychologists."
Dr. Edward W. Coundon, a physicist who led the Air Force-funded UFO research team at the University of Colorado, was badly criticized for spending some of his time testing contactor counterversions. The fierce anger of the "cultists" fell upon him when, in a closing report published in January 1969, he once again emphasized the incompatibility of his conclusions with the alien hypothesis. His team of scientists was unable to find any evidence of the unearthly origin of UFOs. But this myth was so deeply embedded in UFO literature that it was difficult to crush.
In April 1969, Dr. Coundon, speaking at the Congress of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, said: “Some of the UFOs may appear to be aliens. This assumption can be conditionally accepted. However, some writers go so far as to claim this hypothesis as fact. If one ever succeeds in obtaining evidence for such a hypothesis, it would be a scientific discovery of the first magnitude, and I would be happy to make it. But we did not find any evidence, which is evident from our report … We concluded that it is not advisable to continue the study of UFOs using the methods that have been done so far, i.e. in the form of interviews with people who have seen something strange. The difficulty lies in the fact that it is impossible to deduce an objective regularity, relying on cases that were observed very rarely and for a short time,not to mention the ever-present tendency of witnesses not to report their sightings for a long time … From this we concluded that it is scientifically unproductive to study UFOs in the traditional manner. However, unlike the general opinion, we are not going to stop studying the issue. Perhaps there was a need to create a National Magic Agency in order to conduct a large and long-term study of all these issues, including a hypothetical purely scientific study of UFOs,”Dr. Coundon concluded, not without irony.there was a need to create a National Magic Agency in order to conduct a large and long-term study of all these issues, including a hypothetical purely scientific study of UFOs,”concluded Dr. Coundon, not without irony.there was a need to create a National Magic Agency in order to conduct a large and long-term study of all these issues, including a hypothetical purely scientific study of UFOs,”concluded Dr. Coundon, not without irony.
In real cases with UFOs, it is necessary to take into account the most seemingly incredible aspects. This includes numerous stories about ghosts and spirits, about strange psychopathic aberrations, about the invisible world around us, which from time to time invades our real world, about predictions and soothsayers, about gods and demons. This is a world of illusions, a world of hallucinations, where everything unreal seems absolutely real and where reality itself is distorted by strange forces that, it would seem, can manipulate time, space and all known physical laws. And these forces are completely beyond our understanding.
Almost everyone who eventually came to understand the true nature of this phenomenon immediately gave up studying it, since it became clear that it was completely impossible to articulate what they understood and to present the incredible as probable. And they were not silenced by the highest ranks of the Air Force or by CIA agents as the "cultists" believe. No! They remained silent because of the terrifying, shocking shock caused by the realization that man is not alone on our small planet, that humanity is only a tiny part of something immeasurably larger.
This something is the basis of all beliefs on Earth, from ancient myths of Greece, India and China to modern myths about friendly Venusians.
This something often shows hostility to humanity, inspiring by no means only innocent childish pranks, but also terrible world catastrophes. This phenomenon has driven many people crazy, but he sometimes shows amazing care for people. The cosmic balance system seems to be already considered an indisputable fact. We have irrefutable evidence that many were seriously injured and even killed by flying saucers. But we have evidence that the inhabitants of the plates directly intervened in human affairs, preventing terrible disasters.
Many flying saucers appear to be nothing more than a disguise to distract attention from the real phenomenon. They, like numerous Trojan horses, have been sent to our forests and fields. We dream of their patronage and the benefits of some kind of supercivilization in heaven. But while the monumental, long-haired Venusians chat graciously with lonely itinerant salespeople and farm wives, numerous spinning lights and metal discs are busy doing something in the forests of Canada, the deserts of Australia and the swamps of Michigan.
Before we try to find answers, we must learn to ask questions.
We must thoroughly understand their nature, and our own.
From the book: "UFO: Operation Trojan Horse", John Kill