The True Story of the Worlds First Documented Alien Abduction: Admiral Herbert Bain Knowles
It was through Betty’s friend Lauri D’Allessandro that the Hills met Rear Admiral Herbert B. Knowles and his wife, Helen. They were invited guests at a buffet luncheon at their home in Eliot, Maine. The invitation stated that Admiral Knowles was a member of NICAP’s board of directors. Initially they were apprehensive about attending the gathering, but Mrs. Knowles assured them that all of the guests who would be present were knowledgeable about UFOs. She added that many of those in attendance had also experienced UFO encounters. The Hills were reluctant because they were at- tempting to normalize their lives and return to their prior interests. Their civil rights activities were in- creasing and they were firmly commit- ted to the promotion of social justice is- sues. However, the possibility of acquiring additional information about UFOs was intriguing, and they decided to attend.
Rear Admiral Knowles had retired from an outstanding career in the military. Born in Maine in 1894, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1917, as an ensign. He served in the submarine service during World War I, aboard the early R-boats in the Orient. After the war, he taught at the Naval Academy in the engineering department.
During World War II, he commanded several submarines before taking command of The USS Neches and the USS Heywood, troop transport ships. Onboard the USS Heywood, he landed troops for an amphibious assault in the Tulagi, Guadalcanal area, in August of 1942. The Heywood repelled frequent air attacks and shot down an enemy plane while shuttling troops and supplies. She also evacuated wounded American troops and Japanese captives. After The Heywood underwent repairs in January, 1943, Knowles carried fighting men in an amphibious as- sault on Attu, Aleutian Islands.Then, he returned the Heywood, with nearly 500 wounded veterans, to San Francisco before transporting occupation troops to Kiska.1 Next, he was given command of transport in the South Pacific and his flagship was the USS Monrovia. It was an attack transport that carried 55 officers and 1,352 enlisted men. Rear Admiral Knowles retired from military service in 1947 after decom- missioning the Naval Station at Port- land, Maine. In his retirement he joined the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena and served on its board of directors. As a result of his interest in UFOs, he became interested in Mrs. Frances Swan, a contactee who lived near his Eliot, Maine home. She claimed that she was communicating telepathically with two extraterrestrial civilizations that were orbiting Earth. He became a curious reader of the “contactee” accounts that were published in the 1950s, including books by George Adamski, Orfeo Angelucci, Dino Kraspedon, and Brian and Helen Reeve. (Betty inherited all of these books upon Admiral Knowles’s death.)
In a letter dated January 14, 1980, Helen Knowles recalled the 1954 period when Mrs. Swan came to her door to inquire about how to ad- dress a letter to the Department of Defense. She wrote, “Herbie not only helped her out, but personally endorsed her letter after he read it. Then, because its contents were of vital national importance, he addressed a personal letter to Washington, which brought a group of departmental ‘top brass’ to our home.”
An office memorandum from the director of the FBI dated August 2, 1954, informs us that letters were mailed to Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who forwarded the information to the Secretary of Defense. Copies were sent to the Army, Navy, and Air Force. A letter also went to President Dwight Eisenhower. The letter spoke of telepathic communication that Mrs. Swan was channeling via automatic writing from the commanders of two alien space ships. According to Mrs. Swan, the ships, which were 150 miles wide, 200 miles long, and 100 miles deep, carried 5,000 150- to 200- foot-long mother ships. Ship M-4 was allegedly commanded by “Affa,” who hailed from the planet Uranus. The commander of the second ship, L-11, came from the planet Hatann and was named “Ponnar.” Mrs. Swan stated that these telepathic communications with Affa and Ponnar were for the purpose of protecting the planet Earth from destruction caused by the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb, which disrupt the magnetic field of force that surrounds the earth. They stated that if these magnetic fault lines are breached, it would affect the entire universe. Their stated purpose was to repair the fault lines in the Pacific Ocean that were in immediate danger of breaking.
According to the office memorandum, Mrs. Swan stated that when- ever she was having contact with the people in outer space, she would get a buzzing sound in her left ear to indicate that they were “on the line.” She complained that since the initiation of contact on May 27, 1954, she had no control over the transmission of messages the people from outer space were communicating to her. The painful and annoying buzzing sound in her ear would come at all times of night and cause her to lose sleep. This occurred until an arrangement was made to schedule communications at 8 in the morning, noon, and 6 in the evening seven days a week.
According to the FBI memorandum, when Washington’s top brass visited Mrs. Swan at her modest, middle-class home on July 24–26, 1954, they found a woman who allegedly was receiving messages through thought control from “outer space.” They noted that she could engage in automatic writing for four or five hours at a time, without becoming fatigued.
The content of these messages was allegedly far in advance of Mrs. Swan’s education or training. Seemingly, Affa and Ponnar could use Mrs. Swan’s eyes and ears to see and hear through the use of a mechanical device. All conversations were said to be relayed to the people in outer space. One of the top brass stated that when he asked a question, even before Mrs. Swan had a chance to relay it, she began writing the answer down on paper. The “top brass” also heard buzzing sounds in their ears, but were not able to receive transmissions or messages. The aliens stated that the trans- missions were related to flying saucers, life on other planets, life in the hereafter, prophesies in the Bible, the location of their own planets, and their reasons for being here.
The FBI memorandum stated that the agents were “looking for proof” and wanted to attempt contact with the men from outer space. Mrs. Swan indicated that they could communicate on any frequency, provided that they notified her first. Then, she would advise the people in outer space and they would accommodate the level of frequency. The official government representative stated that he could make no commitment as he did not know how far the Navy would go. However, he indicated that he wanted to schedule an experimental contact, through high frequency, on August 1, 1954. On that date, the spaceship was reportedly going to come within 100 miles of the Earth to facilitate communication. The G-man also inquired about the possibility of making physical contact with the people in outer space. This was agreed to as long as the protection of the space people could be guaranteed. The space commanders indicated that 5,000 “bells” or “flying saucers” would “appear in force, in close proximity, over many nations around the world in late August of 1954.” The Naval intelligence contact experiment failed to produce the desired result. They were not able to establish psychic contact with the space commanders under Mrs. Swan’s guidance. In the end, the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Bureau of Aeronautics took no official action in the matter due to the paranormal nature of Mrs. Swan’s communication with the space people. Her letters were added to the “crank file.”
Astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallee, Ph.D., referenced in his book, Forbidden Science, some “extraordinary notes taken from a classified report” that J. Allen Hynek, Ph.D., Air Force consultant to Project Blue Book shared with him in confidence. The report was written by an extremely competent Air Force officer, Colonel Robert Friend, who held the rank of major when he was responsible for Project Blue Book. It told of a meeting at a CIA office in Washington of July 9, 1959, under the direction of Arthur Lundahl, seven CIA officers, and a representative from the Office of Naval Intelligence. Three days prior to the July 9 meeting, Naval Intelligence officer Commander Larsen had discussed the Frances Swan/Naval Intelligence contact experiment of August 1954 with Lundahl and CIA officer Neosham, at the CIA. They encouraged Commander Larsen to repeat the experiment, and this time he was successful. He received a message from Affa, who instructed the three to look out the CIA window. All three men observed a circular object with a darker center and lighter outer rim. Neosham phoned the Washington airport radar and was informed that “electromagnetic signals were unaccountably ‘blocked’ in the direction in question.”
In 1980 Mrs. Knowles wrote, “I have been encouraged to pick up the pieces and put them together in a book, stressing the log that we kept at the time, together with extremely pertinent scientific data handed us by the lady who received messages from outer space and not understanding them at all.” Kathy contacted Herbert Knowles’s sister to inquire about the location of the log and book. She reported that Helen had never written it. Further, the log seems to have been lost after Mrs. Knowles’s death.
In the true spirit of scientific investigation, a courageous Canadian government official, Wilbert Brockhouse Smith (1910–1962), had taken an interest in Frances Swan. He may have learned about Mrs. Swan through Admiral Herbert Knowles, with whom he had a close personal relationship.
Born in Lethbridge, Alberta, Smith was a Canadian radio engineer. He graduated from the University of British Columbia with a B.Sc. in electrical engineering in 1933 and an M.A. in 1934. He was an electronics ex- pert who invented a high-speed radio direction finder used in World War II, a new type of voltmeter, and a re- generative noise filter. At the outset of his career he worked to improve the technical side of broadcasting facilities in Canada, and was involved in the formation of the Canadian Association of Broadcast Consult- ants, which often advised the Federal Department of Transportation. He was also a liaison between the DOT and the Canadian Radio Technical Planning Board. In 1939, he joined the Federal Department of Transportation. He engineered Canada’s monitoring service during World War II, and in 1947, took charge of establishing a network of ionospheric measurement stations.
On September 15, 1950, Smith made discreet inquiries through the Canadian Embassy staff, when he attended a North American Broadcasting conference in Washington, D.C. Lt. Colonel Bremmer, a military attaché, arranged an interview with Dr. Robert Sarbacher, an electrical engineer and guided missile scientist, who was a consultant to the U.S. Research and Development Board. Sarbacher claimed that prior to his conversa- tion with Smith, he was briefed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base about the recovery of material from a flying disk that crashed in the western United States. In the 1980s, Stanton was the first UFO researcher to locate, talk to, and meet with Sarbacher. Sarbacher confirmed that he had spoken to Smith in 1950, and that Smith’s notes and memo were accurate, and not hoaxed. Smith’s archives contain handwritten notes referring to the content of his discussions with Sarbacher.
For a two-week period between committee meetings and at night, he met with Major Donald Keyhoe, USMC retired, an aviation journalist and author of UFO books, who in 1957 took the helm of NICAP. He told Keyhoe that he and a group of Canadian government engineers and scientists were unofficially experimenting to use the electricity of the ionosphere for propulsion. Later, after he obtained clearance to discuss the project with Keyhoe, he told him that Canadian scientists had been working for some time on the Earth’s magnetic field. He added that if their initial conclusions were correct, they offered an explanation for the interesting properties that have been reported in connection with the flight characteristics of UFOs.