ALL THROUGH the saucerian sky-writings the Forteans must have sat around in their seminars grinning like contented cats. Thanks to the painstaking researches of their dead master, they could claim they foresaw Project Saucer and the reign of error.
In the Books of Charles Fort (Holt, 1941), which consists of The Book of the Damned, Lo, Wild Talents, and New Lands, all merged into one monumental volume of 1,125 pages (indexed), Fort has recorded thousands of examples of wild talents in our skies, some running back as far as three hundred years.
As Fort held that "if it's plausible, accept it at least temporarily" and that "nothing is of itself complete but is part of a continuous operation," this should make space ships from another planet very easy for the Fortean Society to accept-at least temporarily. For did he not say also if one temporarily accepts their existence one facilitates their arrival?
He listed strange tales which pure science rejected from 1597 to 1932. But he really didn't get going at his best until 1819. From there on the reports increased in numbers until they hit their top stride after the Civil War and in 1883 reached a peak
of 32 listings- -a record, incidentally, smashed to smithereens in the first four months of 1950 when 109 airborne oddities were listed.
By 1931 the depression had hit strange bodies in the skies as well as starved bodies on this lowly earth. Fort listed only 19 that year. The next year he tabulated a mere half dozen, and after that no more was heard from this amazing statistician of the sandlot sciences.
He died on May 3, 1932, at the Royal Hospital, the Bronx, and presumably sent no more reports from where he went from here. But in his 58 years on this earth he gathered a lot of odd flowers from the field of science and some were surely daisies.
That he could not have lived to have listed some of the reports that followed in the wake of each rumor of a flying saucer as the first half of the twentieth century whirled into the second must be recorded with great regret. His commentaries would have deflated even the Pentagonic witch-hunters who were detached temporarily from grand strategy and assigned to Air Force Intelligence, there to flay every citizen who thought he saw what he saw.
As for the scientists the military hired to evaluate what neither quite understood, Fort would have had a better time with them than he ever had with their forebears who explained everything unusual in terms of the commonplace. "The Wessex Explanation" he used to call it.
Before science admits a flying saucer has been found on earth and proved up all the gossip that has gone before, it probably will do what it did with the stories of stones from the skies, which Fort reported early in his parade of scientific novelties.
These were reported to have belted the earth shortly after the Prussians took their cannon home from Paris in 1877. Through Monsieur Lavoissier, a member of the French Academy, it was absolutely proved that a stone had not fallen, because there are no stones in the sky; therefore one could not fall from there. What had happened, according to M. Lavoissier, was that a flash of lightning had struck a stone on the ground and the peasants had assumed the stone had fallen.
In time, meteorites, stones, and space ships were reported to have fallen, and, like the stones, some scientists thought they might have been debris dropped by a hurricane from elsewhere and possibly hit by lightning when tossed out of the cyclone.
This was in line with the Wessex Explanation. By that Fort meant any attempt to interpret the enormous in terms of the minute, to localize the universal, to give a cosmic cloud absolute interpretation in terms of "little dusty roads and lanes of Wessex."
What rest and satisfaction Air Force Intelligence would have found if it could have cleared up all its cases, with the expression "absolutely identified," was not a yen unusual to the Air Force. To many minds, according to Fort, absoluteness, or the illusion of it, was the universal quest. When chemists identified substances that had fallen in Europe as sand from the African deserts, this put minds at rest which would otherwise have been disturbed by interplanetary prowlings and invasions.
"The only trouble is that a chemist's analysis," wrote Fort, "which seems so final and authoritative to some minds is no more nearly absolute than is identification by a child or description by an imbecile."
That he described electricity as "born as a parlor stunt," did not mean he was against Dr. William Gilbert or electricity. When Dr. Gilbert rubbed a rod with the skin of a cat, and made bits of paper jump from a table, he thrilled perhaps forty per cent of his seventeenth-century listeners, and set up an opposition of sixty per cent. The majority, as in all ages, did not look on this magic for what it was so much as to where it might lead. "Witchcraft," to quote another Fortean proverb, "always has a hard time until it becomes established and changes its name."
He did not look upon all scientists as beneficent beings. He knew too well that every scientist who upheld a new idea brought upon himself abuse from other scientists. Or to use his own
words: "Science has done its utmost to prevent whatever science has done."
He was partisan to the industrial scientist and the good he had done as opposed to the academic or aristocratic scientist who was living on the repute of industrial science. He compared them to a good watch dog and the fleas upon him.
"If the fleas too could be taught to bark," he wrote, "there would be a little chorus that would be of some tiny value. But fleas are aristocrats."
Throughout his works, you will find scores of observations upon cylindrical-shaped bodies that have appeared in this earth's atmosphere. Some too were torpedo-shaped or cigar-shaped. He suspected that many of these, traveling super-geographical routes, had been driven into this earth's atmosphere.
He wrote: "From data, the acceptance is that upon entering this earth's atmosphere these vessels have been so racked that had they not sailed away, disintegration would have occurred: that, before leaving this earth, they have, whether in attempted communication or not, or in mere wantonness or not, dropped objects, which did almost immediately violently disintegrate or explode. Upon general principles we think that explosives have not been purposely dropped, but that parts have been racked off, and have fallen, exploding like the things called `ball lightning.' "
He exposed, more than berated, people like Professor Lawrence Smith and Sir Robert Ball, who stated that nothing could fall to this earth unless it had been blown up from some other part of the earth's surface. These, in brief, belonged to the same school which among Air Force Intelligence today believe there's no such thing as an object having external origin. The notion of things dropping in upon this earth from without is as unsettling and as unwelcome to them as children blowing fish horns during a symphony concert.
Fort offered for acceptance, "as something concordant with the spirit of the twentieth century," the expression that beyond this earth are other lands, just as one time beyond the Mediterranean were other seas, and, though the minds that run Air Force
Intelligence would have denied it if they had formed a part of Caesar's imperial guard, far to the west of the Roman Empire were other lands. Some of those other lands have since become the Americas, where men who fly planes at 1,000 miles per hour scoff at men who suspect others from other lands can fly 186,000 miles per second. This, oddly, is slower compared to Air Force jet planes than Air Force jets are to Caesar's marching legions, for if his centurions could do 30 miles per day a jet could do 8,000, and that, in a month, would be 240,000 miles, while Caesar's soldier was walking off his first 1,000 miles. It is therefore more plausible to believe in 1950 that flying saucers can travel 186,000 miles per second than it would have in Caesar's time been to believe anybody could ever travel 1,000 miles per hour.
Fort thought, as to most of his data concerning things flying throughout atmosphere, that the super-things really had no more interest in this earth than have steamship passengers in the bottom of the sea. Now and then there may be a passenger with such a keen interest "but circumstances of schedules and commercial requirements forbid his investigation of the bottom of the sea."
This concession to the curious traveler naturally led Fort to concede that there may have been super-scientific attempts to investigate phenomena on this earth from above, "perhaps by beings from so far away that they never even heard that something somewhere asserted a legal right to this earth."
I had intended to bedazzle doubters by trotting out Fort's first, second, third, fourth, and fifth teams, just as Notre Dame on the gridiron has overwhelmed many opponents by the show of mere numbers, but I have decided to transfer his kind of impressive chronological parade to an appendix.
Well, one measures a circle beginning anywhere, according to Fort. That I suspect does not conflict with the Hollywood saying, "Let's drop the romancing and cut to the chase."
This chase would take us from Fort and 1932 up to Kenneth Arnold and June 24, 1947, when the story of super-vehicles that have traversed this atmosphere really got down to cases.
Arnold is the young man who saw nine flying saucers, flying in formation at 9,.500 feet and going from north to south, heading toward Mt. Rainier, Washington. He was flying from Chehalis to Yakima He was married, had a wife and two children, aryl his own landing field which adjoined the Bradley Air Field, Eoise, Idaho. His pilot's license was 333487; his plane's national certificate, No. NC-33355. It was a single-engine job, designed for high altitude performance.
While en route to Yakima, he looked around for a lost Marine transport, believed to have disappeared on the southwest side of Mt. Rainier. He didn't find it, though subsequently it was fcund.
The weather was crystal clear and as he headed back to his course a bright flash reflected on his plane. He turned and observed nine odd-looking aircraft, moving in a diagonal line as if linked together. For a moment he assumed they were a new type of jet planes, but then he observed they hadn't any tails. They dipped in and out among the mountain peaks at terrific speed. He deduced that the chain was about five miles long, and the time it took the formation to pass from the southern edge of Mt. Rainier to the northernmost crest of Mt. Adams was one minute and forty-two seconds.
The objects held almost constant elevation. They flew like geese, the fastest geese he'd ever seen. He estimated their speed at 1,200 miles per hour.
Disturbed, he went back hunting for the lost Marine plane. After fifteen or twenty minutes he became so disturbed al the thought of those flying disks that he took a last look at Teton Reservoir and then headed for Yakima.
When he landed, he reported to the general manager o' the Central Aircraft Company, who, Arnold felt, didn't quite believe him. Then he talked to Sonny Robinson, a former Air force pilot, who later employed his talents in "dusting operations" around Pendelton, Oregon. That's a job of spraying fruit trees from planes.
"What you observed," Robinson said, "is some type of jet or rocket-propelled ship that is in the process of being tested by our government, or it could even be by some foreign government." As soon as his story became public knowledge, Arnold received telephone calls, letters, telegrams, and communications from all over the world, and not one person transmitted ridicule.
"The only disbelief," said Arnold, "was what was printed in the papers."
He invited open investigation by the FBI and the Army. Up to the time he presented his findings to Fate, the little magazine which opened its first number in the spring of 1948, with Arnold's insistence that he did see the flying disks, he said that no interest was evidenced by either the FBI nor Air Force Intelligence at the time. The subsequent interest of the Air Force is a matter of record, for Air Materiel Command Intelligence admitted in its preliminary report that Project Saucer really began with the interest aroused by Kenneth Arnold's story.
Fate really went all out on flying saucers in its Volume 1, Number 1, and if anybody was in the field before the little pocket magazine from Evanston, Illinois, I have not been able to find any evidence of it. The scientific manner in which it checked its own accepted data was in the highest tradition.
As Arnold's flying saucers were thought by some to resemble a military craft known as a doughnut, Fate's editor, Robert N. Webster, turned John C. Ross lose on the Arnold report. Ross had access to military research bases, notably the Guided Missile Center at Point Mugu, California, and the two rocket testing centers at Muroc, California.
At that time, which was the winter of 1947-1948, Ross didn't believe we had an aircraft that ever reached the speed of 1,200 miles per hour. Nor did he believe we had a power plant capable of propelling any aircraft that fast. Nor missiles that could keep a close formation, and certainly none that were doughnutshaped. In fact he didn't believe that there were any supersonic aircraft in this country or any other at the time.
But we did have missiles which had attained a speed in excess of 1,200 miles per hour, Ross admitted. In fact, the bazooka and the German V-2, he said were capable of 3,000 miles per hour.
We had at the time aircraft that were manned by pilots, and even missiles, that roughly resembled a doughnut in shape, but these had no speed approaching sound, which at sea level is 760 miles per hour. One was the rocket-propelled Bell XS-1 and another was the Douglas D-558, a transonic jet plane.
Three other types might be mistaken for doughnut-shaped craft, if seen from a distance, but they too lacked the speed indicated by Arnold. One was the NIM, built by Northrop, but it was propeller-driven, which automatically limited it to subsonic speeds. Another, N9N, which were designed to carry one person, had a sixty-foot wing spread, and was limited to training pilots for B 25's. A third, was an MX-324. This was rocket-driven, but was a failure because it could not develop enough thrust. A fourth was the XP-79. This was jet-driven, and closely resembled the Northrop planes in that it had big and broad wings with no tail. This one was called the Flying Ram and could do 500 miles per hour. The subsequent B-25's and B-49's were propeller-driven, which would take them out of circulation when it came to traveling 1,200 m.p.h.
As for the Vought V-173 and the XF5U-1, these too were propeller-driven and looked like huge, flat saucers. They were the ones previously discussed in this volume (see Chapter 6) as the source of David Lawrence's subsequent "discovery" in 1950.
The nearest to Arnold's description in speed was a Jaeger P-13 designed by Alexander Lippisch, for the Luftwaffe. It was intended to fly at 1,500 miles per hour, and Lippisch estimated it might reach 2,200 m.p.h. It was powered with a ram jet engine and had no moving parts. The air entered the front of the engine, was run into the combustion chamber by the terrific speed of the plane itself, mixed with air and fuel in the combustion chamber, ignited, and blasted out of the rear. The wings went so sharply back that it could easily be confused with a saucer, but so far as we, the people, beyond the confines of Air Force classification are concerned, this plane has never been announced as completed and flown. Nevertheless, it is the only one that fitted Kenneth Arnold's description as to speed and configuration.
In subsequent articles Fate covered just as thoroughly the case of Lieutenant George Gorman, who had a dog fight with a flying disk over the Fargo, North Dakota, airfield. To Lieutenant Gorman's story, it added those of Lloyd D. Jensen, and H. E. Johnson, both CAA controllers at the control tower of the Fargo field, and Dr. A. E. Cannon, an optician who saw the object, and watched the dog fight from a private plane through his binoculars.
This is a more elaborate report than the Digest offered us by the Air Materiel Command Intelligence and left us with the conclusions that the F-51 which Lieutenant Gorman was piloting was outdistanced at 400 miles per hour and also outmaneuvered, that he attempted to crash the object which might have resulted in his own death, but fortunately failed.
In that spring, 1948 issue Fate carried another article. It was entitled "The Mystery of the Flying Disks." From reading it, the only conclusion to be arrived at is that the mystery was no mystery except to the fabricators of mysteries attached to the Air Force. The article contained a more elaborate presentation of the Crisman-Dahl controversy. This was a year before the Air Materiel Command's Digest portrayed these men as perpetrators of a "hoax." In fact, for one dollar, taxpayers could have got far better reports from Fate than they ever got for the millions expended on Project Saucer. Not only that, but they could have got the desired information a year sooner.