THE ULTIMATE SECRET – RUMORS OF THE INCREDIBLE
The stories began to circulate in the late 1940s. They were so fantastic that even those willing to seriously consider the possibility of extraterrestrial visitation responded with
incredulity.
In fact, no more than a couple of weeks after Kenneth Arnold’s sighting ushered in the UFO age, the first such story hit the press. On the afternoon of July 8, 1947, a New Mexico paper, the Roswell Daily Record, startled the nation with a report of a flying saucer crash near Corona, Lincoln County, northwest of Roswell, and of the recovery of the wreckage by a party from the local Army Air Force base. Soon, how¬ ever, the Air Force assured reporters that it had all been a silly mistake: The material was from a downed balloon.
Though this particular incident was quickly forgotten, rumors of recovered saucers and, in addition, the bodies of their alien occupants, became a staple of popular culture—and con games. In 1949 Variety columnist Frank Scully wrote that a “government scientist” and a Texas oilman had told him of three crashes in the Southwest. The following year Scully- expanded these claims into a full-length, best¬ selling book, Behind the Flying Saucers, which claimed that the occupants of these vehicles were humanlike Venusians dressed in the “style of 1890.” But two years later True magazine revealed in a scathing expose that Scully’s sources were two veteran confidence men, Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer. Newton and GeBauer were posing respectively as an oilman and a magnetics scientist in an attempt to set up a swindle involving oil-detection devices tied to extraterrestrial technology.
To serious ufologists, including those who suspected the government wasn’t telling everything it knew about UFOs, crash stories were farfetched yarns of “little men in pickle jars.’ A person with such a story got a chilly reception when he or she passed it on to anyone but fringe ufologists. In 1952 Ed J. Sullivan of the Los Angeles-based Civilian Saucer Investigators wrote that such tales “are damned for the simple reason, that after years of circulation, not one soul has come forward with a single concrete fact to support the assertions. . . . We ask you to beware of the man who tells you that his friend knows the man with the pickle jar. There is good reason why he effects [sic] such an air of mystery, why he has been ‘sworn to secrecy’— because he can’t produce the friend—or the pickle jar.”
Nonetheless, rumors persisted. In 1954, after President Dwight Eisenhower dropped out of sight while visiting California (sparking a press- wire report that he had died), it was alleged that he had taken a secret trip to Edwards Air Force Base (AFB) to view alien remains—or, as another version had it, to confer with living aliens. A soldier with the Air Force confided that in 1948 he and other soldiers were dispatched to a New Mexico site to dismantle a nearly intact craft, from which an earlier party had removed the bodies of little men. In Europe it was said that the Norwegian military found a saucer on a remote North Atlantic island of Spitsbergen, or maybe it was the German military and the island was Heligoland. On May 23, 1955, news¬ paper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen wrote, “British scientists and airmen after examining the wreckage of one mysterious flying ship are convinced that these strange aerial objects are not optical illusions or Soviet inventions but are actual flying saucers which originate on another planet.”
Over Chesapeake Bay on the evening of July 14, 1952, the pilot and copilot of a Pan American DC-3 had a much-publicized encounter with eight plate-shaped UFOs. 1 he next morning, as they waited to be interviewed separately by Air Force officers, the two agreed to ask about the crash rumors. Subsequently, the copilot, William Fortenberry, raised the question, and one of the interrogators replied, “Yes, it is true.” Pilot William Nash forgot to ask until afterward, when he and Fortenberry met together with the officers. Nash recalled, “They all opened their mouths to answer the question, whereupon Maj. [John H.| Sharpe looked at them, not me, and said very quickly, ‘NO!’ It appeared as if he were telling them to shut up rather than addressing the answer to me.” Later Nash met a New York radio newsperson who claimed the Air Force had briefed him and two other reporters (one from Life magazine) about its recovery of a crashed UFO.
“EXPLAINING” UFOs
Most UFO reports turn out to have conventional explanations. Typically, IFO (identified flying object) sightings are of stars, planets, meteors, balloons, advertising planes, optical illusions, and hoaxes. Skeptics argue that the remainder of the reports could probably be explained if additional information were available. This argument sounds logical but is in fact demonstrably false. Between 1952 and 1955 the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, a think tank that does classified analytical work for the U.S. government, studied Project Blue Book’s collection of UFO reports.
The Institute established that the unexplained sightings were fundamentally different from both explained sightings and those sightings with insufficient information for evaluation. Moreover, the “unknowns” came from the best- qualified observers, the sightings were of longer duration, and the unknown objects seldom bore any resemblance to their conventional counterparts.