Alien Base: The Evidence for Extraterrestrial Colonization of Earth: Continuing Contacts
While some extraterrestrials in the 1950s and 1960s dropped by occasionally delivering doom-laden lectures to hapless contactees, most seemed determined to avoid any contact. Whatever their agenda, they continued to evince as much interest in rivers, lakes, seas and oceans (the ‘hydrosphere’) as they did in drier lands. This should not be surprising, given that the hydrosphere constitutes nearly three-quarters of planet Earth. ‘Having been a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm, I always was a firm believer in UFOs because of radar,’ Sir Mark Thomson, now a company chairman and private pilot, informed me in 1995. ‘Even 30 years ago, military radars were sufficiently reliable and sophisticated as to be able to determine whether an object was a UFO, a weather balloon, an aircraft — or somebody’s imagination!’
Sir Mark went on to relate an incident that occurred circa 1963, when he was a Royal Navy lieutenant flying twin-jet Sea Vixens, in the aircraft carrier HMS Victorious:
During one foul night in the Indian Ocean an ‘object’ approached the carrier task force at extremely high speed and executed some extraordinary manoeuvres physically impossible for any known man-made machine.
Although I was not a witness to the incident, I did learn that the object was tracked for some time by numerous radars in several ships.
Other naval encounters occurred in 1963, some especially interesting ones involving unidentified submarines. According to former British naval intelligence officer and biologist the late Ivan Sanderson, sometime in that year the US Navy conducted a series of exercises off the coast of Puerto Rico to train personnel in the detection and tracking of submarines. More than five surface ships were involved, including the aircraft carrier USS Wasp, the command ship, as well as several submarines and aircraft.
Sanderson learned that a sonar operator on a destroyer reported that one of the submarines had broken formation in an apparent attempt to pursue an unknown underwater object. Similar reports came in from all the other ships and from the sonar-equipped aircraft. According to one of Sanderson’s sources: no less than thirteen aircraft (including submersibles and aircraft, one must suppose) noted in their official logs that their underwater tracking devices had latched on to [a] high-speed submersible. All of which is said to have immediately been reported to COMLANT [sic] in Norfolk, Virginia. At this point, all the reports become somewhat vague and obscure. Various numbers of people, in various numbers of ships, are alleged to have observed or heard the sonar blips caught by their own operators, and all to have concurred in the fact that this object was being driven by a single [screw] at more than 150 knots . . . Thus, the object recorded above beat anything that we can do at the present stage of our technological development, by nearly four times in speed.
Sanderson also learned that the unknown submarine was tracked for four days as it manoeuvred, including to depths of 27,000 feet.
(The greatest measured depth in the Atlantic Ocean is the Puerto Rico Trench, found just north of that island, at 30,246 feet, about which more later.) Yet another incident said to have occurred at sea in 1963 is reported by Dr Jacques Vallee, the distinguished UFO researcher, who learned that a US Polaris nuclear-powered submarine interrupted its lengthy submerged mission in the Atlantic to surface while all personnel were ordered to remain below.
A few superior officers went up to the tower. They are said to have come back down with three humanoid bodies in clear plastic bags. The sub dived again and rallied to the East Coast at top speed. The [submarine] had accomplished none of its stated objectives, which included the test firing of several missiles. As for the beings, they looked like shaved monkeys. Perhaps they were indeed monkeys, recovered from a classified space experiment.
Perhaps so. Unfortunately, Dr Vallee could not provide me with details that might help determine if that was or was not the case. Given the highly secure and single-purpose nature of the operations of ballisticmissile-armed nuclear- powered submarines of this period (and later), it seems odd indeed that such a mission would have been interrupted and, in effect, aborted in the manner described by Vallee. Only events quite exceptional would have led to such a change in the normal pattern of those operations.
We return now to cases involving contact with extraterrestrials where, in contrast, the witnesses have provided an abundance of details, the better to verify the purported encounters.