Part 19
Although these stories are told in the first person, purportedly as fact, they perhaps should not be called hoaxes, for they can deceive only the credulous who want to believe that supermen from other worlds are hovering near to save our troubled planet. With no suspense, little characterization, and ludicrously bad science, these naïve accounts are fiction of such poor quality that they would be rejected by even the most hard-pressed editor of fantastic tales. Whether from Venus, Mars, Saturn, or the planets of other solar systems, these gods from the machine all look just like human beings and either speak the colloquial language of the contactee or communicate by thought transference. Their physical appearance, clothing, tastes in food, habits of thought, and ethical values usually seem indistinguishable from those of the citizens (whether American, French, or Brazilian) who report the visitors.
_The “Contactees”_
One man who supposedly was privileged to make contact with visitors from space was Daniel Fry who, while strolling in the New Mexico desert on the evening of July 4, 1950, noticed a flying saucer that had apparently just landed. When he approached and started to touch the ship, he suddenly heard a voice speaking in friendly caution: “Better not touch the hull, pal, it’s still hot.” The voice, he discovered, belonged to an extraterrestrial being in a mother ship that was hovering some 900 miles above the earth. The craft on the ground needed no crew, for it was a “remote-controlled cargo carrier,” sent down to collect samples of the earth’s atmosphere. Communicating by mental telepathy, the spaceman revealed that, although he came from a remote planet, his ancestors had been earthmen who had migrated from the island of Lemuria in ancient times (see _Chapter_ II). Strangely enough, although the visitor’s first remark had shown a remarkable command of contemporary English, he did not know what a roller coaster was! He took such a fancy to Fry that he invited him to enter the cargo craft and treated him to a quick flight to New York and back, a round trip of 4000 miles completed in half an hour![X-3]
A contactee whose experience offered variations on the basic theme was Truman Bethurum, a construction worker. According to his story, he happened to be looking for sea shells in the Nevada desert sometime before dawn one morning in July 1952 when he encountered a flying saucer and its friendly crew. The captain was a female, a “queen among women,” whose attractive costume included a bright-red skirt, a black-velvet short-sleeved blouse, and a black beret with red trim[X-4]. Though the grandmother of two, she was so beautiful that at their first meeting Bethurum was speechless. Obviously trying to put him at his ease, she smiled and said encouragingly, “Speak up, my friend, you’re not hexed.” During the following months, he says, they had several meetings and eventually, at her invitation, he accompanied her on an enjoyable visit to the saucer’s home base, the planet “Clarion.” Being placed directly behind the moon and apparently moving in a parallel orbit, this heavenly body has entirely escaped the notice of earthly astronomers[X-5].
George W. Van Tassel, operator of a commercial airport, resort, and guest ranch in California (for some reason most of the better-known contactees seem to be Californians), allegedly made contact with space beings of a more ethereal type. Their saucers traveled on power produced by the “transmutation of hard light particles into soft light particles,” and a typical vehicle was 1500 feet in diameter, 300 feet thick, and carried a crew of 7200. Why they needed so much room--more than 70,000 cubic feet per spaceman--remains a mystery, for both the ship and its occupants were made of pure light. The mother ships remained thousands of miles above the earth at substations from which they sent out their “ventlos,” or flying saucers, to patrol the earth and try to improve conditions here. Speaking through Van Tassel, the visitors sent many messages such as that of June 28, 1952:
“Salutations. My identity is Qel, 72nd projection, 15th wave, realms of Schare [a saucer station in space]. We are passing over your cone of receptivity, 172 thousand miles above you. Our center requests that I inform you. You will see more of us if you watch the skies.”
Several times the spacemen threatened, if opposed, to launch thousands of saucers per second against the earth. In January 1953 they warned that they had three substations in space ready to release 500,000 saucers each; two months later, in March, they informed Van Tassel that they now had 3½ million saucers in operation around the earth. Somehow or other, this armada of UFOs seems to have remained invisible to both the United States Air Force and the public[X-6].
Whether such tales are delusions, fantasies, or hoaxes may be impossible to determine. Some contact cases, however, undoubtedly contain elements of fraud. At worst, the witness may be deliberately inventing the whole story from start to finish; at best, he may feel so certain of the reality of his experience that he feels justified in manufacturing evidence to convince possible skeptics. No matter what his motives, when he tries to add verisimilitude to his narrative by fabricating proofs, he joins the company of hoaxers[X-7].
In the Maury Island case (see _Chapter_ II), the witnesses offered alleged fragments of a disabled spaceship, which turned out to be chunks of slag. The scoutmaster in Florida exhibited singed hair on his arm and a scorched cap to prove that he had suffered from the heat rays of a landed flying saucer (see _Chapter_ VII), and the grain salesman in Nebraska bolstered his tale of the Saturnian ship by pointing to shallow cracks in a dry river bed and oil smudges on the grass (see _Chapter_ IX).
A contactee who provided “proof” of his story was Howard Menger, who specialized in describing visits to the moon. In the moon cities, he said, he met many earth scientists who enjoyed a delightful, relaxed existence. The lunar natives use no money, are born without appendixes, and for entertainment play a game very much like baseball. In science they are way ahead of us: using saucers equipped with “self-contained gravity” and propelled by “processed free energy,” they transported him from earth to moon in only two hours[X-8]. As a trophy of his visit, Menger brought back a lunar potato. This remarkable vegetable was supposed to have five times the protein content of an ordinary American potato, but unfortunately it was not available for analysis. As soon as he returned, he said, he had turned it over to the United States Government, and the government was keeping it top secret[X-9].
_Adamski’s Travels_
Perhaps the best known of the contactees is George Adamski, who on the night of November 20, 1952, in the desert of Southern California, supposedly met and talked with the pilot of a vehicle that had just arrived from Venus. Conversation was no problem; both men simply used telepathy and sign language when words failed[X-10]. In the years since then Adamski has reported many other pleasant chats with visitors from Mars and Saturn as well as Venus, and has allegedly made several journeys in their spacecraft, including an aerial tour of the moon. On this trip he observed with surprise that the moon’s hidden side contained fertile country abounding in lakes, rivers, vegetation, and prosperous cities with people strolling along the sidewalks[X-11]. He was not at all disconcerted when the Russian photographs of the moon’s far side showed no trace of these delightful features. Obviously, said Adamski, the Russians had simply retouched the pictures before releasing them to the world, in order to deceive the United States and to conceal the vegetation, trees, and buildings of the space people who had their bases there[X-12].
[Illustration: _Figure 15._ Top, schematic drawing of Adamski’s Venusian saucer. Bottom, schematic drawing of chicken brooder.]
Clearly aware of possible skepticism, Adamski did not ask the public to accept his experiences on his unsupported word; as evidence, he offered various photographs showing cigar-shaped objects, a rocky hillside with a white blob on the horizon, and the drawing of a person apparently clad in coveralls--without the book’s explanation no one would ever suspect that he came from the planet Venus. One of the best-known pictures he published showed a bell-shaped “spaceship” with circular openings near the top and three large balls on the bottom for landing gear. By an interesting coincidence, this craft closely resembles a well-known type of chicken brooder, whose three infrared bulbs at the base look very much like the “landing gear” of the alleged spacecraft (see Figure 15). When skeptics doubted Adamski’s claim that he had traveled from Kansas City, Missouri, to Davenport, Iowa, by flying saucer, he displayed one of the most unusual items ever called upon to prove the existence of spaceships: his uncanceled railway ticket, for which he requested a refund![X-13]
_Photography and the UFO_
Those who believe in flying saucers have long hoped to obtain a good clear photograph that would establish their existence once and for all. Many “UFO” pictures show vague specks and blurs whose interpretation is limited only by the imagination of the viewer. Of the many pictures taken in good faith and offered in evidence, none shows an indubitable spaceship. Most of them are genuine photographs showing indistinct images of jet planes, birds, balloons, and other objects normally in the sky. They are puzzling only until they are compared with similar photographs of known jet planes, birds, balloons, and other normal objects; then their identity becomes obvious.
Trick photography has often been called upon to prove the reality of the incredible--fairies, ectoplasm, ghosts--and it has also played a part in the history of flying saucers. While the most detailed contact stories have usually come from the United States, for some peculiar reason the best of the faked pictures have come from Europe and South America. A widely publicized photograph supposedly taken at Taormina, Sicily, in 1954 shows four men standing on a bridge and apparently gazing at two UFOs soaring overhead [X-14]. The deep shadows cast by the men and the bridge railing show that the sun was shining brilliantly, but the objects in the sky, which look like the inverted covers of teapots or sugar bowls, show only faintly shadowed areas. Stranger yet, the shady side of one UFO is on the left, that of the other UFO on the right. The men on the bridge have their heads tilted at such an angle that they could not possibly have seen the objects pictured, but are obviously looking at the hill in the background instead of at the sky. Even a casual inspection exposes this picture as a crude fake (see Plate VIa).
An even cruder fake was offered as evidence to Dr. Menzel in South Africa in the summer of 1962. The optimistic photographer insisted that he had snapped a genuine saucer on the wing, even though the circular object shown in the print was an unmistakable hubcap, the Chevrolet trade-mark clearly legible.
_The Isle of Lovers Hoax_
Some photographic hoaxes are more cleverly executed. In May 1952, a few weeks after _Life_ magazine had alarmed the world with its article “Have We Visitors from Outer Space?”[X-15], the Brazilian weekly picture magazine _O Cruzeiro_ published startlingly clear photographs of an alleged flying saucer[X-16]. According to the accompanying story, a reporter and a photographer on the staff of the magazine on May 7 had visited Ilha dos Amores, an island not far from Rio de Janeiro, to do a feature assignment. Late in the afternoon, at a moment when the photographer just happened to have his camera pointed at the sky, the reporter suddenly called his attention to a passing UFO. During the minute or so the object was in view he obtained five pictures which, along with the reporter’s eyewitness story, were released to the public on May 17. If the editors actually believed in the reality of the saucer, the ten-day delay before informing the world of its visit is remarkable. The magazine has never admitted that the photographs were a hoax, but they inspired doubt even in sympathetic investigators[X-17].
The UFO appears in a dull sky above a mountain peak. In the first picture the object looks like a jet plane surrounded by an exhaust haze and, with a little imagination, might be called a Saturn-like object. In succeeding pictures it resembles the lid of a teapot, or the bottom view of a rubber stopper for a sink. A study of the shadows quickly reveals the fraudulent nature of these photographs: the dome on top of the “saucer” casts its shadow to the right, while the trees and mountains in the foreground cast their shadows to the left. The picture could be authentic only in a peculiar world in which the sun shone from the west on objects on the ground, but shone from the east on objects flying in the sky!
_The Trindade Island Saucer_
The most famous of all purported photographs of a UFO, the Trindade Island saucer, also came from Brazil. First published in Brazilian newspapers on February 21, 1958, the pictures showed dark mountain crags looming against an overcast sky. Above one peak appeared a startling image (much like the _O Cruzeiro_ saucer of 1952) resembling the planet Saturn--a flattened sphere banded round the middle by a dark line that extended like a platform beyond the curved sides. According to the accompanying news stories, the UFO had flown over the island of Trindade and had been observed by the officers and crew of a ship of the Brazilian Navy. The pictures, taken by a photographer on board, had been examined and supposedly pronounced genuine by Navy experts before being released to the press. Since a responsible military organization and a major world government thus seemed to accept the photographs as proof that flying saucers actually existed, the incident raised a storm of official inquiry both in Brazil and abroad. Then, within a few weeks, the storm abruptly subsided. Although no explanation was given, the object in the pictures was obviously considered no threat to our planet’s security (see Plate VIb).
Although saucer enthusiasts regard these pictures as genuine evidence for the reality of UFOs, careful study of the facts strongly suggests that this case, which rocked the Brazilian Government and created a short-lived but world-wide saucer scare, was merely an unusually skillful hoax[X-18].
At first glance, the circumstances of the sighting seemed to be entirely clear and straightforward[X-19]. Trindade is a barren, mountainous island of about six square miles, about 600 miles from the coast of Brazil. Abandoned after the end of the Second World War, the island remained deserted except by sea gulls until October 1957, when the Brazilian Navy established an oceanographic post and a meteorological station there to carry out its research for the International Geophysical Year (IGY). To facilitate the oceanographic studies, the Navy also converted a training ship, the _Almirante Saldanha_, into a floating laboratory equipped with scientific apparatus and photographic darkroom. With a crew of about 300, the ship routinely traveled between Rio de Janeiro and Trindade Island on its duties for the IGY.
A major function of the meteorological station was the launching and tracking of weather balloons; they were painted red, inflated with hydrogen, and carried radio transmitters. Launched each morning, they were tracked by radio and optical devices to show the movements of the winds in the upper atmosphere. At a certain point (when the balloon burst, or at a prearranged signal) the balloon released a bag of scientific instruments which, attached to a parachute, floated to the ground to be retrieved.
The Trindade station began operation in November 1957. Almost immediately, UFOs were reported over the island. (Brazil had not been immune to the flying-saucer epidemic that had begun in Texas early that month [see _Chapter_ IX], and sentries at Itaipu Fort, near Santos, on November 4 had reported a UFO that knocked out the lights and electric plant.) With weather balloons going up daily, parachutes floating down at odd times, and sea gulls cruising over the island, the advent of other “saucers” was inevitable. During November and December several UFOs were reported by workmen, none of whom were trained observers. Although neither Captain Bacellar, the commanding officer at the station, nor his officers saw any unidentified objects, he radioed Rio to report the incidents and investigated each story. Some he found to be false, some were based on mistaken identification of gulls and balloons, and in others the evidence was inconclusive.
Early in January 1958, when the _Almirante Saldanha_ arrived on schedule at Trindade, it had on board several civilian guests who were to collaborate in various aspects of the research. Among them was Almiro Barauna, a professional photographer. After several days at the island, the ship prepared to leave for the return trip to Rio on January 16. Shortly after noon Barauna was on deck with his camera, waiting to film the departure. The sky was thinly overcast, the sea was rough, and waves dashing against the ship and the rocky shore created a noisy background.
According to the news accounts printed several weeks later, Captain Viegas, of the Brazilian Air Force, suddenly shouted “_Olha o disco!_ [Flying saucer!]” Hearing the shout, Barauna peered at the sky and saw a luminous oval object moving swiftly toward the island. Officers and crewmen on deck also observed the UFO, he said, and interfered with his aim as they ran about excitedly. Nevertheless he managed to take six shots of the UFO as it approached the island, disappeared behind a mountain peak, reversed direction and reappeared at a lower altitude, retraced its course, and vanished with incredible speed against the horizon. The unknown had arrived and departed in a period of about twenty seconds.
According to the news stories, the photographer had retired to the ship’s darkroom under the supervision of an officer to develop the negative, and found that four of the six exposures showed the mysterious object. He was not able to make prints, he said, because the darkroom supplies unfortunately did not include any photographic paper. However, he did exhibit the negative, and the officers and crewmen who examined it allegedly agreed that it showed the same Saturn-like UFO that had flown over the island. After the return to Rio he made prints and enlargements and turned them over, together with the negative, to the Brazilian Navy.
The question of authenticity arose immediately. Called down to Intelligence headquarters for an interview, Barauna underwent a four-hour interrogation concerning the pictures. During the questioning he was asked, “If you were going to make a flying saucer appear on a negative, how would you proceed?” He replied, as he later told a reporter, “_Comandante_, I am an able photographer, specialized in trick photography, but I could not produce one that would withstand close and accurate examination.”[X-18]
In spite of this modest disclaimer, some of the photographic evidence clearly suggested fraud, and a strong difference of opinion developed among government officials. Some accepted the pictures as a genuine record of a flying saucer; others pronounced them fakes. For several weeks the incident was kept secret, but when eventually someone took the prints to the President of Brazil, further concealment became impossible. Yielding to the persuasion of certain military advisers and newsmen, and against the advice of the Naval Ministry, he released the pictures to the press.
[Illustration: PLATE V
_a._ Pinched lightning, August 1961. This is believed to be the first photograph of a pinched lightning discharge. (CHAP. IX)]
[Illustration: PLATE V
_b._ Ball lightning, Lincoln, Nebraska, August 30, 1930. (CHAP. IX)]
[Illustration: PLATE VI
_a._ Trindade Island UFO, January 1958. (CHAP. X)]
[Illustration: PLATE VI
_b._ Taormina, Sicily, UFOs, 1954. (CHAP. X)]
[Illustration: PLATE VII
_a._ UFO at Boulder, Colorado, February 6, 1959. (CHAP. XII)]
[Illustration: PLATE VII
_b._ UFO over Norway, July 24, 1957. (CHAP. XII)]
[Illustration: PLATE VIII
_a._ Images produced by lens defects, Hamilton, Ohio, steel plant. (CHAP. XI)]
[Illustration: PLATE VIII
_b._ Ghost images produced by internal reflections in lens system. (CHAP. XII)]
_The Brazilian Naval Ministry_
The photographs were published on February 21, five weeks after they were taken. Since the President had apparently accepted them at face value, the Naval Ministry was obviously in a difficult position; through an unofficial spokesman it issued a statement notable for its lack of enthusiasm:
“On the morning of January 16, 1958, over the island of Trindade, the crew of the school ship _Almirante Saldanha_ sighted an unidentified aerial object for a few seconds. A civilian who was aboard the ship took some pictures of the object. The Navy has no connection with the case, and its only connection with the occurrence was the fact that the photographer was aboard the school ship, and came back with the ship to Rio.”[X-20]
On the same day another Navy spokesman released a similar unofficial statement to _O Globo_:
“The news about a flying saucer sighted over the Island of Trindade was received here with utmost reserve. There will be an investigation to verify the authenticity of the sightings and photos. No officer or sailor from the N.E. _Almirante Saldanha_ witnessed the event.”[X-20]
Immediately an international furor broke out. Were these pictures indeed proof of extraterrestrial spaceships, or were they a hoax, with the Brazilian President and the Brazilian Navy as victims? Who were the witnesses, and exactly what did they report? In the United States, high officials asked for copies of the pictures. An editor of _Look_ magazine asked Dr. Menzel to fly to Brazil to evaluate the evidence, but later canceled the plan when the Rio office advised that the photographs were generally considered fraudulent. Public excitement in Brazil became so great that on February 23 the Naval Ministry released an official statement, distinguished by its air of caution, which concluded:
“Clearly this Ministry will not be able to make any pronouncement concerning the reality of the object seen because the photographs do not constitute sufficient proof for this purpose.”[X-18]
The day after the pictures were published the _Almirante Saldanha_, which had been lying outside the harbor at Rio, received orders to sail. Not until February 24, when the ship docked at Santos, did newsmen have a chance to interview the officers and crewmen who allegedly had observed the Trindade saucer and could support Barauna’s story. None of them, it turned out, had actually seen the object.
The Assistant Naval Attaché of the United States, who was then in Santos in connection with the visit of the U. S. Coast Guard cutter _Westwind_, visited the Brazilian ship to collect information about the Trindade saucer, but with little success. The commanding officer stated that he had not seen the alleged UFO; he had seen the pictures but refused to express an opinion on their authenticity; he stated that his secretary might have seen the UFO but the secretary, when questioned, preferred not to discuss the matter. The executive officer said that he had not been on deck at the time of the sighting, but that other persons might have seen the object.
During the next week arguments for and against the authenticity of the photographs filled the Brazilian papers, and _O Globo_ published deliberately faked views of a “flying saucer”--a china plate tossed into the air. A federal deputy in an official note to the Naval Ministry deplored their amazing failure to procure sworn statements from the officers and crewmen who were reported to have witnessed the UFO.