AS THE SECOND HALF of the twentieth century began, three things experienced strange news emphasis. Two practically did not exist for The New York Times. The third, which did not actually exist at the time for anybody, was featured for months in this great newspaper as well as all others.
The two that had practically no news value to The New York Times were numerous reports of the presence of flying saucers over our mainland, and the birth of Ingrid Bergman's baby in Italy.
The third item had not been verified as anything more than a terrifying nightmare, and many of the scientists who were expected to turn it into a reality were not sure that it would work if, and when, made. That was the hydrogen bomb. But to the newspapers, without exception, the unmade bomb was un fait accompli.
It is hard to believe that to all people living in the spring of 1950 this thermonuclear monster was already a reality, while to the majority flying saucers, either from here or elsewhere, remained the stuff' of which dreams are made.
A bomb which might destroy fifty times as many persons as did the atomic bomb released over Hiroshima, in the process of construction, was of course news. But it certainly had less reality in 1950 than the stockpile of stories about flying saucers in our atmosphere and possibly on our soil.
Such a story, if true, might well be among the greatest stories told since the creation of the world. It would seem that, if a choice had to be made, almost any government surviving on deficit-spending or lend-lease, or even on the sweat of its people, would decide to budget millions for studying interplanetary space ships, rather than to spend the same amount making bombs which could contribute nothing new to man's knowledge and understanding of this world or any other.
Yet given such a choice, at least one government chose to close down a Project Saucer after two years of researching on a modest budget and report that its Air Force had traced most reports of unidentified flying objects to:
Its unidentified spokesman briefly explained that the project had been established two years previously at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio, headquarters of Air Materiel Command.
"Since that time" [January, 1948] "some 375 incidents have been reported and investigated," the report concluded. "Assisting special investigators were scientific consultants from universities and other governmental agencies."
No names of investigators, consultants, or colleges were mentioned. Indeed between that brief dismissal and a fairly long report of six months previously which, despite its length, left 34 of 375 incidents still unsolved (even to the Air Force's satisfaction) the 34 unsolved mysteries were closed out without any explanations whatever. If they were ever solved at all they remained top secret to all but the military.
Yet hardly had Project Saucer's final press release been printed when a series of reports on flying saucers began bombarding newspapers from every corner of the Western World. As the government's project was closed, the bearers of these tidings had nowhere to go except to their local newspapers.
There had been an entente cordiale between the press and the Department of Defense to ignore these stories during the two years of the Air Force's official inquiry. But when the Air Force pulled out, the floodgates opened. Some newspapers continued to throw flying saucers into their wastebaskets. Others broke down under the persistent barrage of reader reports and reader interest. By Easter time every radio commentator of any standing, every comedian, every legislator, every televisable personality, even The New York Times, had had his or her say. Walter Winchell was sure he had had it first and that the missiles were from Russia. Henry J. Taylor had tried his hand twice. His version was that the saucers were American, not Russian. He assured his listeners his elaborate radio accounts of the authenticity of flying saucers contained only half the story, and when the rest was released by the armed forces it would be good news tonight. In fact, he sounded more like Gabriel Heatter than Henry J. Taylor. David Lawrence threw all the prestige of his U. S. News and World Report behind the believers in the reality of flying saucers and said they were "a revolutionary type, a combination of helicopter and a fast jet plane." Even the President had to be dragged out of his Key West retreat to blow that one down. Eleanor Roosevelt had interviewed Captain Jack Adams and First Officer G. W. Anderson, two veteran pilots of the Chicago and Southern Airlines. They reported the flying saucer they had seen over Arkansas, which they insisted was not a visitor from another planet but a secret experimental type aircraft and not jet-propelled either. Walter Kieran said he wished Drew Pearson would confirm the story and get it over with. "I'm willing to believe it," he added. But a week before Kieran's broadcast Drew Pearson had confirmed it. Fulton Lewis, Jr. had aired his version. Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Fibber McGee and Molly, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Amos 'n' Andy, and, of course, Jack Benny had also kicked the saucer around. Everybody, including Jimmy Durante, had got into the act.
But the real inside story had been missed by all of them. It happened on March 8, 1950, in Denver, Colorado. On that day at 12:30 P.M. 350 students of the University of Denver skipped lunch to hear a confidential scientific discourse delivered by what the press described later as "an unidentified middle-aged lecturer."
He delivered what was probably the most sensational lecture about this earth or any other planet since Galileo said, "It moves!" He gave the whole inside story of a flying saucer which he said had landed within 500 miles of where he was now talking, and he described the space ship and its personnel in such detail that the undergraduates and faculty members left the lecture room with their heads spinning.
Such is the nature of man's distorted sense of curiosity, however, that who the lecturer was soon began to overshadow what he had said. He, not the flying saucer, became the mystery that had to be solved by the students first.
It was recalled some hours later that the lecturer had been escorted by one George T. Koehler of 315 Franklin, Denver 3, Colorado, a staff member of an independent Rocky Mountain radio station, with the call letters of KMYR. It was commented upon by those faculty members who attended the lecture that Koehler never introduced the lecturer by name to anybody. (But the lecturer later explained to me that the professor whose job it was to guard the speaker's anonymity in his introduction certainly knew who he was.)
Before beginning the main body of his talk, the lecturer explained that he would purposely have to leave out certain names, dates, and places, and must not be asked about them, as some of the scientists were working on security projects, and therefore were not free to talk even about such flying saucers as they were reported to have examined personally. With that even the professors got out their notebooks.
He talked like a faculty member who knew how to time his well-considered words so that the scribbling students would not fall off at the first turn. He spaced his revelations, which at the end of the lecture were described as "startling," "sensational," "spellbinding," and "electrifying," by the majority; and "absurd," "ridiculous," and "unbelievable," by the minority.
In actual figures his lecture, which took 50 minutes, left about 40 per cent of his audience still with their mystery. The lecture was arranged for students of a basic science class, on the condition that it was not to be publicized. But from a group of 90 students, the gathering had grown, by grapevine, to a capacity audience. Professors of astronomy and engineering, as well as their students, piled in. There wasn't even standing room only.
The negotiations between the faculty and the spokesman for the lecturer took months to arrange, as the speaker wasn't keen about being "evaluated," but when the science students voted 100 per cent to hear the lecturer, he acquiesced. Of these, 80 per cent said, after the lecture, that they were "impressed." By a show of hands 60 per cent indicated they believed the man knew what he was talking about, that he obviously was a member of the group of scientists he described as having examined space ships which had landed on this earth from, in all likelihood, another planet. More, they believed the mystery man of science had the best answer to the secret of propulsion behind these flying saucers and that it was neither combustion nor jet.
Another poll taken later reduced the college-bred believers in this staggering story from 60 per cent to 50 per cent.
This was considerably higher than the over-all credence in flying saucers. According to a nation-wide survey by the United Press, one out of every four believed the objects were real ships. Actually 26 per cent believed they were and 8 per cent weren't sure. The rest agreed with the Air Force spokesman who said they were hallucinations, mass hysteria, or hoaxes. These would include those members of the University of Denver faculty who thought their speaker's performance was at best a very good act. It would also include those who suspected it was a hoax played on the fair name of a proud university. But all agreed that the mysterious stranger talked as plausibly, as conservatively, and as scientifically as Einstein, Oppenheimer, or Busch might have talked if placed in the position of presenting equally sensational revelations to an equally skeptical audience.
After the mysterious scientist had been plied for fifteen minutes with questions, George Koehler cried: "Great Scott, we have to get out of here! You have only twenty minutes to catch your plane!"
With that, the pair hurried out of the building, climbed into a high-powered car and drove off.
The conversation piece on interplanetary travel had set up such a chain reaction that within the hour members of the faculty, students, newspaper editors, and radio commentators were trampling all over each other in their mad haste to violate a confidence. Within two hours they in turn were being questioned by Air Force Intelligence officers.
The first thing the investigators wanted to know was what was the man's name. Nobody quite knew. One freshman remembered he had been referred to as "Great Scott" just before he and Koehler took off. A faculty member recalled introducing him to another as "Mr. Sears," and being corrected; but he couldn't remember what the man said his name was.
"I think he said it was `Newton' or maybe that he was a friend of Newton."
"You mean the Mayor of Denver?"
No, they were sure he wasn't the Mayor of Denver.
"You mean a man can lecture at the University of Denver and not be identified at all?" the military demanded.
The faculty didn't quite mean that, certainly not in the face of all loyalty oaths, witch-hunting, and security taboos which were bogging down what was left of their academic freedom, but the man had been vouched for by Koehler and, after all, he only had talked harmlessly on a fascinating subject about which man had speculated for hundreds of years.
"Harmlessly?" the military repeated. "How do you know the subject is harmless? Did anybody get the number of his car? Or overhear what hotel he was stopping at?"
Well, one auditor remembered that Koehler did say that the man had to catch a plane in twenty minutes.
"Did he say to where?"
"No," the informer remarked, "but Koehler would know." "Oh, Koehler!" the investigator cried in disgust.
Why that? Well, for months it seems Air Force Intelligence as well as editors-from Publisher Ken Purdy of True who was out on a limb because he had proclaimed in giant type "FLYING SAUCERS ARE REAL," down to an unby-lined reporter on The Kansas City Times-had been badgering Koehler about details concerning flying saucers. Actually Koehler had none firsthand. He told them so. Purdy rushed Donald Kehoe out to Denver from Washington to get the story. Money was no object. But Koehler said he had no firsthand information. So, incensed, they threw the book at him. One Kansas City reporter who hadn't met Koehler, called him "Coulter" and said it was all a hoax. An A.P. feature writer who hadn't met Koehler either, repeated the fallacy. Kehoe picked it up on the bounce and repeated it, too. Koehler called them the sort of names which would be out of place here, since this is not a modern novel.
No one would believe him, least of all Air Force Intelligence, whose members acted as if they were quite sure Koehler had a pipeline into the very cabin of a flying saucer which was reported by some to have landed somewhere in the Great American Desert, and was further reported by others to have been dismantled by the very souvenir-hunting military of which Air Force Intelligence was an integral part. Were the military Dick Tracys seeking information or were they trying to bottle up all who had the same information they had? Were they fearful that their own experiments in space ships would leak without delivering a counterpunch. When an army investigator turned up at Station KMYR on the hunt for flying saucer data, Koehler decided to record their conversations.
On a subsequent visit from another officer representing Operation Hush-Hush (which presumably had supplanted Project Saucer) Koehler was surprised when at the end of the interview he was ordered to surrender the reel. "We know you have been recording these interviews," the officer told him. "Now hand them over."
Caught off guard, Koehler said he'd have to consult the station's owner before handing over company property to anybody. "If it's for reasons of security" [the magic word], "by all means," the proprietor agreed.
Koehler left the conference, explaining he'd have to have the engineer rewind the recordings, which happened to be on tape. Having also learned how to handle government bureaucrats from their own double-talk, Koehler went to the engineer's booth and with his back to the military winked at the technician and then ordered, "Fix up the recordings for the gentleman."
He sure fixed them. In rewinding the spools the engineer demagnetized the wire, completely wiping out all recorded conversations as if a wet sponge had been rubbed over a chalk mark on a blackboard. Thus when played back later by the exultant espionage officers the result was exactly nothing. So when in the pursuit of the mystery man of science who had lectured at the University of Denver the Air Force Intelligence boys cried, "Oh, Koehler!" they were practically adding under their breaths, "We could wring that bird's neck!"
What they did instead was to summon all passenger lists of commercial planes out of Denver on March 8, from 1:30 P.M. On. They combed these to see if any scientists whose names had ever come up in relation to the late Project Saucer had defied an unofficial directive for all scientists remotely connected with defense (and that about included everybody with a B.S. degree) to button up about flying saucers. The manhunt got nowhere.
out, or did they believe the flying saucers were being hurled like boomerangs from behind the Kremlin wall?
Months before this tempest in a university teapot the Air Force had announced that Project Saucer, which it had set up at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, in January, 1948, had been ordered closed by the end of 1949. The preliminary report issued in April, 1949, had discarded 341, remember, of 375 reports which had been investigated since a businessman in Boise, Idaho, had reported that in the summer of 1947 while flying his private plane he had sighted nine saucer-like objects which shot through space at a speed too fast for him to compute.
Of the remaining 34 case histories concerned with flying saucers the Air Force officers could find no satisfactory answers. Seemingly they could not ascribe these to hoaxes, hallucinations, and sure-fire devices of nobodies hungry to see their names in newspaper headlines. Nevertheless, despite these unsolved mysteries, the Air Force announced late in December, 1949, that the whole project had been shelved and as far as its investigators concerned flying saucers were a myth and the belief in a form of mass hysteria in which it was taking no further
were them part.
Despite this shunting of strange disk-like objects sweeping the sky at tremendous speeds to the file-and-forget file by the Force, persons who reported
objects whirling through our themselves playing host soon espionage echelon of the military on local levels. Newspapermen and others in the know laughed at the idea that Project Saucer had been closed. Some even openly printed their derision. The Pentagon didn't bother to deny that their saucerian inquiry had gone underground and was now operating under another name.
Koehler had been one of many private citizens who had had a brush with a counterespionage body. But having been an old professional football player on the Chicago Bears before he got into the selling end of radio, he was not one to take a roust
Air to newspapers any unfamiliar wide open spaces often found thereafter to members of the
The mystery man of science hadn't left town on any plane from Denver that day.
Scarcely had Air Force Intelligence swallowed the bitter pill of a lost suspect when flying disks began flying around like an August festival of moths around an arc light.
Within the week Mexico City; Los Angeles; Durango, Colorado; Mazatlan; Dayton; Gering, Nebraska; Orangeburg, South Carolina; Lima, Peru; and even the Chilean Navy were reporting saucer-shaped objects in their skies. Most of the stories were one-day wonders: streamer headlines one evening, watered down or reduced to hearsay the next. But here and there a story showed surprising staying power.
Surprising, too, was the double standard of identity maintained in these matters. Every citizen who thought he saw a flying saucer had to turn in a report that left no doubt about who he was, where he was, and the alcoholic content of his blood for one week before and one week after he had observed "a silver-like saucer whizzing through space." But in two years of sitting in the reviewing stand, the Air Force rarely identified so much as one officer or civilian technical adviser it had used to blow down these ever-increasing reports.
Even in the case of the University of Denver lecturer, it would not permit him to enjoy the same anonymity which it claimed for itself. The faculty and students were pledged not to publicize what they had heard but to evaluate it for what it was worth to them as science students. The speaker told them to disregard all but what he said. For this reason he was not introduced by name or by his degrees.
One of the things the lecturer said was that the first flying saucer found on this earth was discovered by his colleagues within 500 miles of where he was talking right there in Denver. This didn't send the science students scurrying into the field in all directions, as it should have if they had any feeling for research. It sent some to newspaper offices and the rest spent the afternoon lying on the lawn and gazing at the sky. By the
next day the horizontal scanners had increased to nearer one thousand students.
That behind all this smoke was no fire whatever continued to be the unyielding premise of the Air Force High Command, officially, though its officers continued to hop around like chameleons on a scotch plaid, unofficially. Outwardly the Air Force took a detached position in the Christmas season of 1949 and maintained it unperturbed right through the Easter sunrise services of 1950, even though warned by men of high standing in the electromagnetic branch of science that these alien objects in our skies were known for years to pile up in heaviest numbers in January, February, and March. Judging from the piling up of newspaper reports, the scientists were certainly right in their calculations and the weary Air Force spokesmen were wrong.
The second phase of the University of Denver story was either to find the name of the lecturer who might, for all the faculty knew, be an agent from Moscow, Idaho, or to find a "patsy" to blame for the affair. While this was going on, a report came in from Santiago, Chile, quoting Commander Augusto Vars Orrego, head of the Chilean Antarctic Base, as saying that several explorers under his command had photographed flying saucers. The commander denied the possibility of optical illusions because the pictures, he insisted, corroborated what was observed. Whether these would be published depended on his superiors in the Chilean Navy, he told the United Press. So far they haven't been.
This report had scarcely found its place in the line of march before another report out of Santiago from the country's meteorological observatory added that "a spheroid celestial body" (astronomical slang for flying saucer) had been sighted at an estimated height of 18,000 feet. It supposedly crossed the sky in an east to west direction. It remained, according to the naval astronomers, in the sky from 10 A.M. to 1 P.M., and then disappeared. It was observed by thousands.
As Chile is outside the boundaries of the U. S. Air Force Intelligence, this one elicited no comment from the Pentagon.
Brigadier General Rodriguez Cardenes, chief of the Mexican Air Corps, added his disclaimer, indicating that the good neighbor policy was not dead when it came to reciprocal agreements on press releases of this sort. It was getting so that pilots, navigators, and others trained to observe objects in the sky were not keen about reporting their observations any longer to Air Force Intelligence. There were too many kickbacks. To observe was to be suspect; to know was to be guilty. It was a crazy situation for America to find herself in, but there it was.
Most persons in responsible posts learned to take the official position as if it had all the force of a directive. Almost to a man you could bank on such persons accenting the positive, if the Pentagon was going that way, or adding their ridicule if the trend was downhill.
In the midst of positive reports from here, there, and everywhere, Dr. Gerard P. Kuiper, professor of astronomy at the University of Chicago, laughed at the idea that the pilot of the saucer reported in Mexico was a small man, but suggested that pilots of space ships could be smart bugs or small plants because that's all, in his opinion, the planet Mars could produce at present.
This sort of smart-alec rebuttal couldn't possibly receive an official rebuff at the time because it was in the "right" direction. Moreover, it sort of set the party line for other astronomers.
Off the record you could find dissenting opinions from astronomers whose standing was just as high as Kuiper's. Many kept an open mind on the issue. Some believed the objects were flying saucers but were still at a loss as to their origin. A few favored one planet or another as a possibility. But from Kuiper's whimsy you'd think that everybody had agreed the space ships were from Mars. Who said they were from Mars? Orson Welles? The ghost of the long dead R. A. Locke? Or was this a device of the military, a negative approach, to condition us to further revelations later involving Mars?
Though no Air Force officer has been known to have written on the subject, True magazine managed to get two Navy men to
As for things at the Denver level their investigators were too busy tailing that mystery man of science to bother with scuttlebutt from the Chilean Navy.
The same day, unfortunately, for those on the negative side of the debate, the director of the Tonantzintla Astronomical Observatory in Mexico reported photographing a flying saucer. The photograph didn't turn out any too well, but the newspaper Excelsior printed it nevertheless. Luis Enrique Erro, director of the observatory, said it was photographed on March 2 when the strange circular object crossed the Mexican sky.
Then on March 9, Roy L. Dimmick, Los Angeles sales manager for the Apache Powder Company, the sort of man who would be welcome on almost any jury, started a veritable stampede of disk jitters when he reported the wreckage of a flying saucer picked up near Mexico City. It had a dead pilot on board. The space ship measured 46 feet across, he said, and the pilot measured 23 inches.
"American military men have viewed the strange object," Dimmick testified, "but for military security reasons the entire matter has been kept very hush-hush."
The next day Dimmick dropped back to what the military call "a previously prepared position" and said he hadn't actually seen the space ship personally but had talked to two important men-one from Mexico and the other from Ecuador-who had. One had given him a strip of metal from the saucer. It looked like aluminum, but wasn't of a metal known to this earth, he added. This had a familiar ring. I've handled some of that stuff, too.
"I think the government ought to make its position clear," Dimmick complained. "If it doesn't want to discuss these things for reasons of security, why not say so?"
But the Air Force was not saying anything of the sort. The saucers were "a mild form of mass hysteria." (Except in cases like Dimmick's. He would fall, I suppose, according to their rigid classifications, into either the group suffering from hallucinations or the perpetrators of hoaxes.)
break loose from the corral during this era. Donald E. Keyhoe, a former Marine pilot, and Robert E. McLaughlin, a commander still on active service, wrote about flying saucers they had seen or had heard about. The articles were long on sound and fury, and while it might be harsh to say they signified nothing, that was more because of poor writing rather than poor material. True was not the first in the field by any means. I was at least ten weeks ahead of True with articles in Variety, and Fate was ahead of me by a year. But mine was not a rewrite. I used material never previously printed by anybody anywhere Fate, the Post, and True included.
Much of this was subsequently reprinted from Variety in papers as widely scattered as Boston, Buffalo, Kansas City, and Los Angeles, and a good deal of it has been released over one radio station or another.
During most of these exposes, Air Force Intelligence maintained a weary silence in the face of aerial observations which had turned the peoples of all countries from discussions of the cold war to hot speculations about flying saucers.
As for Denver, and its mysterious lecturer of March 8, 1950, the music went 'round and 'round. Someone remembered that a tape recording had been made of the scientist's talk and that it probably was stashed away at Station KMYR where Koehler worked. Koehler's employer permitted a group of Denver businessmen to listen to the recording so that they could better understand the ridiculousness of all the espionage and counterespionage on the Denver campus.
By then the Chancellor, who had been out of town when the lecture was delivered, was sounding off. He issued a directive to his faculty. They would have to screen speakers more carefully in the future. An anonymous writer on The Denver Post liked this approach to the problem. So he tried his editorial hand at rebuffing anonymity among visiting lecturers. His rebuff had all the moral force of pots calling kettles black.
In the audience of leading citizens at the radio transcription was a reporter of the same Denver Post. He broke the story anew in a Sunday edition. This brought the Army Air Force Intelligence into the picture again. Finally Koehler said he could take the third-degree stuff no longer.
"The name of the mystery scientist is Edgar B. Davis!" he cried.
It was agreed by all who heard it that this was a nice honest sounding name.
But who was Edgar B. Davis? The hunt started out anew.
At the very hour, however, when Denver was listening to a recording of the lecture, several persons in Hollywood were listening to a tape recording of the same lecture. It was taken from the original tape recording. In Hollywood it was heard in the private home of a doctor and his wife who had been a graduate nurse and a former airline hostess. The recording was in the custody of a geophysicist, a man known to me for years.
All were unquestionably astounded by the revelations and even more so by the fact that the voice on the tape and the one of the geophysicist were almost beyond a shadow of a doubt one and the same voice. Of course, since the flying time between Denver and Los Angeles is only a matter of six hours his presence in both places in the same day could not be advanced as conflicting testimony.
But on March 17, Denver's faculty, student body, press, and Air Force intelligence officers were pretty well convinced they had identified the lecturer who had had the temerity to write the bad words "Flying Saucers For Beginners" on their cloistered walls.
Four students, as well as Barron Beshoar, Denver's bureau manager of Time-Life Incorporated (a gate-crasher to the lecture incidentally), were sure from Denver Post photographers that the man was Silas Mason Newton, president of the Newton Oil Company, amateur golf champion of Colorado in 1942, graduate of Baylor University and Yale, who did postgraduate work at the University of Berlin, a man who had never made more than $25,000,000 nor lost more than $20,000,000, the
The main story told that fully half the town's population was still certain the morning after that it had seen space ships or some strange aircrafts-hundreds of them-zooming through the skies on the previous day. The estimates ran from several to more than five hundred. "Whatever they were," the writer reported, "they caused a major sensation in this community which lies only a 110 air miles northwest of the huge Los Alamos Atomic installation."
The objects appeared to play tag high in the sky. At times they streaked away at almost unbelievable speeds. One triangulation estimated the speed at 1,000 miles an hour, and guessed the saucers were about twice the size of a B-29.
The newspaper office was deluged with calls from persons who saw the objects and wanted some explanation of their origin. Most observers described the space ships as silvery discs, and a number agreed one was red in color.
Clayton J. Boddy, a former captain of the engineers of the American Army in Italy, was just one of the number who testified as to what he saw. He was one in fact among those who thought there appeared to be about five hundred of them. His account was confirmed by Joseph C. Callioff and Frances C. Callioff, grocers from Antonito, Colorado, and Robert Foutz, and John Burrell of Farmington. The Callioffs were in Farmington inspecting sites for a proposed new store in their chain, and they contributed the opinion that the saucers seemed to be flying in formation.
Harold F. Thatcher, director of the Farmington unit of the U. S. Soil Conservation Service, was the one who made the triangulation. Not an engineer, he had engineers working under him and knew how to make a rough triangulation of an object. He laughed off the idea that the sky might have been full of pieces of cotton fuzz floating around. "I was not sighting on any cotton," he said. The cotton theory was a contribution of a state patrolman named Andy Andrews.
The first reports of flying saucers were noted at 10:15 A.M. and for an hour thereafter reports kept streaming in.
rediscoverer of the Rangely oil field, patron of the arts, and man of the world generally. In brief, a man of substance as well as science and as American as apple pie.
One student later admitted he remembered the lecturer and knew who he was all along because he had caddied for him at the Lakewood golf course many times. But he hadn't spoken up before because he understood there was to be no publicity. Hadn't the subject matter been announced as confidential, he wanted to know?
This tempest in a university teapot, cooked up to make modesty appear as scandalous and tattletelling as a virtue, was all but obliterated from even The Denver Post by a wire story out of Farmington, New Mexico, on the afternoon of March 17. The sky, it appeared, had been cluttered with flying saucers for three days. But on St. Patrick's day in the morning half the town reported saucers in the sky. Some saw hundreds, none saw less than nine.
Farmington is an oil town of 5,000 persons. Its citizens are given more to looking down than looking up. Their living is way down there in the bowels of the earth in the San Juan Basin of northern New Mexico, close to the Colorado line; within, significantly, that 500 miles of Denver the lecturer referred to.
The town has one newspaper, the Farmington Daily Times. On one ear of its front-page masthead it proclaims, "Our Mission-Truth; Our Faith-New Mexico." It was established in 1884, a long time before Air Force Intelligence, and its reputation for veracity in the community is good.
So when on the morning of March 18 it ran an eight-column banner headline proclaiming "Hugh Saucer Armada Jolts Farmington," it was reporting the news as the entire staff and most of the town's population saw it. Clayton J. Boddy, the paper's business manager, and Orville Ricketts, the associate editor, had a hand in it, but the story was actually written by Walter Rogal, the managing editor.
The second large-scale sighting appeared at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
The first report that one of the saucers appeared red came from John Eaton, a real estate salesman, and Edward Brooks, a garage employee. Brooks had been a B-29 tail-gunner, and was the first to discount the objects as that of modern aircraft. They were "too maneuverable" he said.
John Bloomfield, another garage employee, said that they traveled about ten times faster than jet planes and frequently made right-angled turns. "They appeared to be coming at each other head on," he added. At the last second one would veer at right angles upward and the other at right angles downward."
"From the ground they appeared about the size of a dinner plate," said Marlow Webb, another employee. "They flew sideways, on edge and at every conceivable angle. This is what made it easy to determine that they were saucer-shaped."
No one reported seeing any vapor trails, or hearing any engine noises.
In general the town accepted the phenomenon calmly enough. Except for a few isolated reports there was no indication of Air Force's tired old trinity-hallucinations, mass hysteria, and hoaxes.
As to whether the objects were from another planet or some new craft of American design, the town's opinion was divided. At 11:15 A.M. the clearest view and reports of the largest number of saucers came into the Farmington Times. By 11:30 all had disappeared.
Nearby Las Vegas reported that at 11:35 observers caught a glimpse of the saucers. Twelve postal employees witnessed one that sailed till noon. One employee was Robert Hilgers, a lieutenant in the naval reserve. He said the object was very high in the sky, "probably twenty miles."
The Las Vegas Daily Optic gave the Farmington story an eight-column streamer too. "SPACE SHIPS CAUSE SENSATION" it proclaimed.
All previous official explanations in the Air Force stockpile, that these things could be kites, balloons, reflections, debris from atomic bomb tests at nearby Alamagordo, wind-blown merry-grounds, suggestibility, hallucinations, mirages, and postwar psychoses didn't seem to cover the Farmington revelations. A whole town couldn't be seeing things.
Without knowing it, that Farmington fish story had come awfully close to landing a whale, because it was in that general direction where it all started in the spring of 1948 when a colleague of the lecturer of the University of Denver tempest got a hurry call to fly to New Mexico. This colleague (I shall call him "Dr. Gee") had been in government service on top secret defense projects for seven years and had played a part in 35,000 experiments on land, sea, and air, involving 1,700 scientists. He was still on call and getting pretty tired of these consultations, which at government salaries represents a loss to a man much in demand by industry.
But this time he was too thrilled to be tired. It took him only three hours to fly from Denver to his destination. There on the ground, having gently pancaked to earth, seemingly without having suffered a scratch, he saw the first flying saucer ever known to have landed on this planet.
Not long afterward I heard about it, first from that University of Denver lecturer and later from the lips of Dr. Gee himself. "I don't believe a word of it," I remember saying at the time, but tell me more about it. What did it look like? Where was it found?"
The scientist told me but he also told me so many other things that I had forgotten the name of the town. He explained about magnetic fault zones particularly in Oregon and on the Mojave Desert and how the pilots of these ships seemed to be as curious about them as bees about honey. He said he was checking to see if this curiosity was a likely source or had any connection with the propulsion behind their ships. He told me he suspected they had mastered secrets of flying, which we were only now seeing most dimly.
I kept my own counsel for months. But when others less well informed began sounding off in all directions about flying saucers, I thought it was about time that I told the world if nothing more than proof that I knew more than I had read in the papers.
In fact the night the Denver Post was exposing Scientist X and the Farmington citizens were exposing Operation HushHush, I was dining in Hollywood with the man all Denver was hunting for. He had just talked to George Koehler in Denver by long distance. Koehler had worked for him and had married his nurse. The Farmington report had set Denver uproar, Koehler told him.
"Do you remember my telling you," Scientist X said hung up, "that the first flying saucer was found on a ranch twelve miles from Aztec?"
I remembered when he reminded me "Yes," I said, "I remember now."
"Well," he said, "Farmington is only twenty-eight miles from that ranch. In fact they flew over the exact place where one of their number had fallen a year ago."
"I wonder why they keep scouting that area?" I asked. "Is it a tribute to the saucer that failed to come home or to show that they have mastered the particular fault zone that grounded an earlier patrol?"
"I covered that in my Denver lecture," he said. "Weren't you paying attention?"