THE UNANIMITY with which magazines of larger format sought to brush off little Fate's claims to priority in the matter of being the first to record the presence of disks flying above our native land has been little short of a conspiracy in restraint of credits.
The Saturday Evening Post ran two articles in the spring of 1949. They were entitled "What You Can Believe About Flying Saucers," and they were signed by Sidney Shallet, an old New York Times Washington correspondent.
A year later Roy Palmer, who had acquired control of Fate and had once edited Amazing Stories, wrote a piece entitled "Space Ships, Flying Saucers And Clean Noses." In it he told how he had fed Sidney Shallet material for Shallet's Post articles. He also told of an interview with Stuart Rose, associate editor of the Post, some time after the Post articles had appeared.
I asked Rose about this. He replied he didn't know Palmer and had never heard of Fate.
I checked the references to Fate in the Post. There they were: on page 139 of the April 30, 1949 issue of the Post. What's the
score now? Don't editors know what goes into their own magazines any longer?
In his articles Shallet accepted the assurance of the highest officers of the Air Force that they had nothing concealed up their sleeves. He quoted General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, then chief of staff, General Carl Spaatz, retired chief, Lieutenant General Lauris Norstad, Lieutenant General Curtis E. LeMay and Colonel H. M. McCoy, all high among the Air Force brass at that time.
Their opinions bunched together and their evaluations reevaluated, the substance of this parade of desk pilots was that they did not believed flying saucers existed. Most of them had noticed strange objects flying around, which turned out to be, according to them: (a) a reflection of a ground light, (b) reflection of a star on a cloud, (c) a glint of sunlight from the canopy of one P-51 into the eyes of a pilot of another P-51, (d) a certain type of aluminum-covered radar-target balloon then in use and (e) an "iffy" remark from General Spaatz to wit: "If the American people are capable of getting so excited over something which doesn't exist, God help us if anyone ever plasters us with a real atomic bomb!" In brief, an answer to logic and observation with a fright wig, and a ridiculous non sequitur if I ever read one.
Among the scientists only two of any substance were quoted. One was Professor Joseph A. Hynek, the Ohio State astrophysicist who was back in the subsonic age of propulsion, and may still be there for all I know. The other was Dr. Irving Langmuir, a Nobel Prize winner in physics and, like most Nobel Prize winners, immediately thereafter an authority on everything. He was the assistant director of General Electric's research laboratory at Schenectady, New York. He was also a member of the Air Force's scientific advisory board, according to Shallet, though not announced as such in any Air Materiel Command press handouts I ever saw. Shallet said Langmuir had "spent a lifetime debunking what he called pathological
science." Asked what he would advise the Air Force to do about flying saucers Shallet said Langrnuir snapped, "Forget it." The snapper sounded as if Langmuir had picked up even his dialogue from the high command. I could almost see, in my pathologically scientific way, the two civilians ending their interview with a snappy salute.
Do you think the Post was paid off in gratitude by the military for telling its millions of readers at the end of ten thousand words to forget the whole thing? Au contraire. It was crossed up in the tradition of the Pentagon which seemingly holds all Americanos as Prussian Junkers used to hold their peasant class, except when its officers come around for a congressional handout.
Between the two issues of the Post, which in substance said there was nothing to the flying saucer story, the Air Materiel Command released a digest of its preliminary report, which in substance said there were a lot of things still unexplained about flying saucers and it would try to explain them before its next report came out. Nice teamwork. What happened to Combined Operations? It worked well among press, radio, and the high command on D-day. Too bad the combination was lost in the postwar era.
Next among the added starters after the Post was Variety. But perhaps it would be a mark of politesse to make way for the claims of others on the theory that guests should be served first.
On April 7, 1950, David Lawrence in his nationally syndicated column struck back at the White House and the Pentagon for their repudiation of his United States News and World Report feature, which revealed the Navy had flying saucers. In his column Lawrence quoted Ken W. Purdy, publisher of True for added support.
"You are correct in saying that flying saucers exist," Purdy told Lawrence. "Of course they do and I think no one can properly write this story without reference to the fact that we made the first statement in December, 1949."
The "of course" is that no one can properly write the story who says anything of the sort. Weeks before True got on the newsstands with its Donald E. Keyhoe feature, Variety had run two features of mine-the first as early as October 12, and the second on November 27. Mine, however, contained material never before released, though frequently used and garbled since.
But using similar source material, which Fate, the Post, and True did, it's incredible that the last two could be ignorant of the prior scoops of the first.
True deserved a lot of credit for bravery under ire. It must have known that in going out on a limb with the simple declarative sentence "Flying Saucers Are Real" it would annoy the Pentagonic party liners no end. The magazine had to employ a retired Marine pilot to front for the story, because obviously no Air Force member would touch it with a ten-foot pole. True tapped Donald E. Keyhoe, a Naval Academy graduate who had flown in active service with the Marine Corps and had been a balloon expert for a while. Between wars he had aided in the exploitation of the plane which Admiral Byrd used to fly over the North Pole, as well as having a hand in Charles Lindbergh's public relations after the latter returned from his solo flight to Paris in 1927. For a period Keyhoe also had been chief of information for the aeronautics branch of the Department of Commerce.
True said Keyhoe's article was the most important it had ever published, was "utterly true" and "could document every occurrence reported." Eight months of investigation were claimed to be behind the contribution. Among its conclusions were:
1. That our planet has been under systematic observation for 175 years, with a greater intensification since 1947.
2. That three types of transports have been used: Type I, a small pilotless, disk-shaped job, equipped with some form of television or impulse transmitter; Type II, a large disk-shaped ship, perhaps 250 feet in diameter operated on the helicopter principle; and Type III, a cigar-shaped wingless craft "operated in conformance with the Prandtl theory of lift."
True didn't believe the ships were operated by any means of propulsion unknown to us but that the operators were 225 years ahead of us in their thinking even so. This ruled out the likelihood of their being designed by today's aerodynamic engineers.
"An important magazine," Keyhoe wrote (obviously referring to the Post) "published two strangely inconclusive and contradictory articles, stated to have been prepared with the cooperation of the Air Force purporting to dismiss disks as of no basic significance."
Keyhoe then sought to give his own interpretation, at great length, of the Mantell case and from there went into the practicality of building flying saucers on this earth, powered by atomic energy or "the energy that produces cosmic rays."
He also quoted from the Air Materiel Command digest that "the chance of space travelers existing on planets outside the solar system is very much greater than the chance of space-traveling Martians."
A recapitulation of unsolved disk sightings followed, as well as rocket propulsion and such items, ending on an Air Force quotation: "The saucers are not a joke."
Scarcely had Keyhoe's opus, which was "one-tenth inspiration and nine-tenths perspiration," to quote an old phrase of Thomas Edison's, got off the presses when the Air Materiel Command proceeded to follow its regular behavior pattern. It gave True a head start of 24 hours and then slugged not only True but, like an asp biting itself, its own previous preliminary report as well. The saucers were not only a joke to the Air Force by now; they were the product of hallucinations and mass hysteria as well.
Rebuffed from above, True's staff scattered to all parts of the country, seeking aid and comfort and hoping to find some authority superior to Air Force Intelligence, to take the magazine off the limb. By March it had got nothing better than another member of the naval arm, this time a commander on active service, Robert McLaughlin, to support the reality of space ships around this earth. Commander McLaughlin told
how he had run across a flying saucer while assigned to getting weather data from the upper atmosphere 57 miles northwest of the White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico.
A crew of four were checking on a balloon with a theodolite and a stop watch. A strange object crossed their path. It was elliptical in shape, about 105 feet in diameter, flying at an altitude of about 56 miles. It was moving at about 1,800 m.p.h. High powered binoculars showed no exhaust trail, no stream of light, nor other evidence of propulsion as we know it.
"I am convinced," McLaughlin was convinced, "that it was a flying saucer and, further, that these disks are space ships from another planet, operated by animate, intelligent beings."
It didn't seem fantastic to him for earth-born mortals to explore other planets. "Why then should it be fantastic, for Martians, say, to visit us?" he wanted to know.
It may not have seemed fantastic to him but between the time of his observations and their publication in True, the armed forces had been merged under the Department of Defense and naval opinion had been moved far down from the head of the table.
Commander McLaughlin got orders to report for sea duty. Naive to all nuances as well as the direct rebuffs which had come to those who tried to play ball with the Pentagonic specialists in negation, Henry J. Taylor, an eminent radio commentator heard from coast to coast over American Broadcasting Company's network, thought he would add chapter and verse to the story. He told his listeners that the real facts were good news for the nation. Flying saucers were actually of two types and both were top secrets of our armed forces. The experiments were started on June 25, 1947, and have been expanded ever since.
One type was a disk that whirls through space, Taylor revealed, halts suspended in air, soars to 30,000 feet or more, drops to 1,000 feet and then usually disintegrates. These are harmless, pilotless disks varying from two to 250 feet in size.
The other object is the Flying Phantom, the XF5U, jet-propelled.
These words, said the commentator, are stenciled on the back of every real saucer in case it doesn't disintegrate: "Anyone damaging or revealing description or whereabouts of this missile is subject to prosecution by the U. S. Government. Call collect at once."
The Air Force of course denied the whole Taylor story. So there was no good news that night.
Taylor's revelations and Lawrence's overlapped in fact, but both were slapped down by official denial. In Lawrence's case, however, even the President had to be trotted out to back up the defensive halfbacks in the Pentagon. His press secretary, Charles Ross, said it was extremely unlikely that there would be a secret weapons project not known to the President.
I have pointed out elsewhere that the naval and air force aides of the President issued statements that were so far off in their timing that if they had been directing the atom bomb that dropped over Hiroshima it might have hit MacArthur in Manila. It took Brigadier General Robert L. Landry, the President's Air Force aide, all day to prepare a statement. When released at Key West, the statement miscalculated the official opening and closing of Project Saucer by three months.
But official errors weren't even getting the rebuff of a correction from the major metropolitan dailies in those days. In fact, except for a small town paper here and there, nobody bothered to take the military to task for the kind of slipshod journalism that would get a police reporter fired.
Only the night before Taylor went on the air with what he assured us was only a hint of the good news which some day it would be a joy to tell in detail (because the saucers, he assured us, were 100 per cent American), Walter Winchell told his listeners in North and South America and all the ships at sea that the flying saucers were real all right but they were not the inventions of Uncle Sam. They were uninvited imports from Uncle Joe.
As Russia at that time had no official spokesman other than Uncle Joe and Uncle Joe was not talking to Walter Winchell, there was no official denial of the Winchell "scoop" from the Kremlin.
In fact for a novelty there was no official denial from a Pentagon spokesman either. It was a Sunday night and possibly all the official and unofficial spokesmen were sleeping off the fatigue of a hard afternoon at golf. I doubt if many of them missed Winchell's broadcast because they were at vespers.
Sidney Shallet, reflecting the official opinion in his Post articles, wrote that if the Russians were experimenting with supersonic aircraft and guided missiles Air Force Intelligence, "which painstakingly sifts all reports," would like to know how they do it and, what's more to the point, how they get home without being seen by more people? Up to that time, Shallet said, Air Force Intelligence "did not have so much as one loose nut off any unexplained object."
If they found one I suspect they would have sent it to psycho instead of to the magnetic research engineers.
In the main the United Press played up the saucers and the Associated Press played them down. Ed Creagh, AP staff man operating out of New York, released a long one on April 2, 1950, that was so full of holes he might have done better if he had stayed in bed.
It was entitled "Things In The Sky." Whether they were myths or military secrets, optical illusions or invasions from Mars, Creagh said he didn't presume to judge but as his story developed he seemed inclined to take the party line of the armed forces and dismiss the subject as so much moonshine.
Creagh didn't identify any member of the armed forces by name and a spokesman for the other side, using the same cloak of anonymity, said it was about time the military identified themselves and took the war-of-words out in the open. "Otherwise people will hang it on to Creagh and say he is the one who is passing out so much moonshine."
One of the irate opposition closely identified with the magnetic research engineers who had examined at least three grounded flying saucers gave me a tape recording which chided Creagh plenty for being chumped by some faceless spokesmen of the Air Force. He particularly took Creagh to task for taking one state highway patrolman's word against 5,000 citizens of Farmington, New Mexico. The copper said that the hundreds of saucers 5,000 persons reported as flying over Farmington were pieces of cotton.
"If Mr. Creagh," the tape-recorded statement in my possession revealed, "had ever been in the vicinity of Farmington, New Mexico, he would have known there is no cotton grown within a thousand miles of that town." Instruments checked the cop's "pieces of cotton" as they scooted across the sky from horizon to horizon in three seconds. That's at the rate of 100 miles per second or 6,000 miles per hour. No piece of cotton about the size of a quarter could travel that fast, even to a person suffering from hallucinations. To put 5,000 persons in that category is placing too much faith in a cop's untested sanity or vision."
Then Creagh related what he called "an exploded yarn" about a space ship from Mars, manned by little men.
"When was it exploded," the spokesman for the magnetic research engineers wanted to know, "and who exploded it? Come on, Mr. Creagh, let's have your facts. Don't just make statements of this kind without naming the explosive and who setoff the fuse."
There were at least 3,000 words to this recording, but I'm afraid I'll have to get on to the rest of the added starters without using them.
Edward R. Murrow, ace commentator of the Columbia Broadcasting System, though a late starter, supervised a roundup on flying saucers that had all the documentary believability, though none of Westbrook Van Vorhee's sepulchral tones, of time marching on. He covered the controversy from Kenneth Arnold to President Truman, which means he covered it from 1947 to 1950.
Murrow prefaced the roundup by saying that none of the CBS staff had ever seen a flying saucer, though a large percentage of sane and reliable persons reported they had. He talked with Kenneth Arnold in Boise, Idaho, by telephone and recorded Arnold's testimony on tape in New York. Arnold, remember, was the businessman who had been flying his own plane for six years and was the first to report nine flying saucers near Mt. Rainier.
"The slight `beep' you will hear," Murrow said, "is required by law to let both parties know the conversation is being recorded." This put the wire tapping on an honorable level.
Murrow's version of Arnold's story cleared up one point. It revealed how the objects happened to be called "flying saucers" in the first place. It was all due to a misquotation by the press.
"When I described how they flew," Arnold explained to Murrow, "I said they flew like you'd take a saucer and throw it across the water. Of course the newspaper misunderstood and misquoted that too. They said I said they were saucer-like. What I said was they flew in a saucer-like fashion."
The press reduced all this to "flying saucers" and thus began a phrase that may never die.
After recording Arnold's story, Murrow cut in everybody from the top brass in Washington and astronomers at Harvard down to the man and woman in the street. Some of the voices were real, some were simulated, but the things they said were quoted from their own statements.
Murrow, soft voiced and assuring, revealed a few things about the Captain Mantell story that were new, too. It had been often recorded than Mantell was a Kentucky National Guard pilot, which of course is no disgrace, but actually he was a combat veteran of the Normandy invasion, with 3,000 flying hours behind him, before he chased either a flying saucer or the planet Venus to the disintegration of his ship and himself.
Paul Kerby, commenting on the catastrophe, remarked that a pilot of that experience represented a terrible loss to the nation and certainly somebody should be held responsible if he lost his life chasing a craft known to the Pentagon but unknown to
Mantell. If he died chasing a space ship from another planet, the only ones (with the exception of the crew of the space ship itself) who could be held responsible would be those who denied such things existed without knowing at all what they were talking about.
Murrow of course didn't go into the thing as deeply as this. After all, radio survives by skating very deftly over rather thick ice, and hardly scratching its surface. He touched on Project Saucer and said its findings, compiled in two thick volumes, had been "declassified" and released for public study, though most of us have never seen anything beyond a 22-page Digest released by the Air Materiel Command. He had some voice from the Pentagon giving the old tired trinity-hallucinations, mass hysteria, and hoaxes. Was that the same voice that told California newspapermen that we had no supersonic jets, long after everybody had got tired of seeing them whiz around in excess of 800 miles per hour?
But the cutest cut-in on Murrow's program was a woman who was interviewed near the end of the program. Asked what she thought of flying saucers, she replied that there must be lots more to the story than the people are getting. She said it all reminded her of the New York World correspondent who telegraphed from North Carolina back in December, 1903 that Wilbur Wright had just flown 250 yards in a plane near Kitty Hawk. The reporter got fired for wasting telegraph charges.
Murrow made no such direct statements about flying saucers. He left a vent in his saucer, however, and in consequence was not fired for wasting wire charges. Time, as they say around Rockefeller Center, marches on and as it marches commentators become convincingly cautious.
So far none of the added starters had done much more than march the various stories up the hill and march them down again, and then exit, noncommittal and smiling. It remained for Time to assume the role of dragon slayer.
An old hand at biting the hand that feeds them, Time's course on flying saucers could be charted in advance. Dynasties have descended from dragons. In fact in many places it's still a mark of aristocratic pedigree to have descended from dragons. The same is true of course of dragon slayers.
In Iran, Verethraghna slew Verethra. In India, Vritrahan slew Vritra. In England, St. George slew the dragon. In New York, Time slew the flying saucer.
Sometimes in these myths a descendant slays the sire. Is it too much to expect that in the Luce dynasty that Life or Fortune, children of Time, may one day do as much for the well-cloaked snipers of Time?
The Time formula is to pick the brains of original researchers and then, by snapping a sarcastic whip in the last few paragraphs, slay the dragon of the week. It had its whole staff out as a sort of collection agency on the flying saucer story in April, 1950.
Fritz Goodwin, chief of its Los Angeles news bureau, came to see me on April 7 to see what I could contribute to my own liquidation. As I was deep in this book at this time, and rushing to meet a deadline myself, I wasn't very keen about joining a cannibalistic feast where crows fed on crows. I asked him what angle Time was going to take on the roundup story? He said he didn't know. Maybe he didn't, but I knew. I told him they would build the whole thing up and just before the end they would blow it all down; which is just about what they did in their April 17 issue.
Not quite sure they were big enough to slay the dragon alone, they called on Rear Admiral Daniel V. Gallery, who at one time had been in charge of the guided missile program operating at the White Sands Proving Ground. It was from there, remember, that Commander Robert McLaughlin reported to Admiral Gallery that he had seen a flying saucer. The Admiral, 3,000 miles away in Washington, thought a proper answer was to ask McLaughlin, what kind of whisky he had been drinking in New Mexico? Between two graduates of Annapolis this sort of humor didn't seem too far off protocol. But McLaughlin persisted, wrote pieces about it and in time found himself in command of the destroyer Bristol, where apparently he hasn't seen a flying saucer since.
,,if you look back about 500 years ago," said Admiral Gallery, by way of dismissing the whole subject to the aid and comfort of Time "you will find that the people of England had a period of hysteria when everybody was seeing flying dragons in the sky. We are now going through the modern version of flying dragons."
Admiral Gallery should have gone further back than 500 years. Didn't St. George have it out with the dragon, and St. Michael with Satan? And how about the old serpent of the Apocalypse? The Chinese could fill any book with such combats. He may not believe anybody slew a dragon anytime in recorded history, let alone 500 years ago in England, but in Africa in the spring of 1950, Howard Hill, drew an arrow that went 27 inches through the hide of an elephant. Anybody who could kill an elephant with such a weapon could have killed a dinosaur and a dinosaur is not far removed from a dragon.
I was not burned by the hot breath of a dragon, nor ridiculed by the Time dragon slayers, as were David Lawrence, Henry J. Taylor, and, by implication, Walter Winchell. In quoting the Department of Defense as saying: "None of the three services or any agency in the Department of Defense is conducting experiments . . . with disk-shaped objects, which could be the basis for the reported phenomena." Time was fellow traveling on the old party line. This has been the Pentagon's story for a long time. Nobody believes it, least of all those who release the handouts. But the statement was supposed to take care of Taylor and Lawrence at any rate. In another sentence the release added: "There has been no evidence to the activity of any foreign nation." That took care of Winchell who said they came from Russia.
Thus three top journalists were brushed off by some unidentified Pentagonic personality in one swoop. Time joined the wolf pack of official scoffers.
As for myself, though interviewed by their Hollywood manager, and photographed by one of their staff, I came out practically unscathed. All the roundup said of me was: "Henry Holt announced a `serious' book on flying saucers by Variety's columnist Frank Scully."
Under the circumstances, you'd think I would be discreet enough not to go around slaying dragon slayers. But I'm looking into the future, and I don't need a crystal ball to tell me that I won't come through the next occasion unscathed. Like the moon, I'm due for capture. But like the prophet, who was not without honor, save among his own kind and his own kin, I'm not missing at least this opportunity to say: "I told you those birds couldn't be trusted."
Did it ever occur to Time or the Pentagonians to ask each other this question: The Navy is sure that the saucers observers saw were not theirs. The Army was sure the disks weren't theirs. The Air Force knows they have none in the skies. The Department of Defense doesn't believe they are the work of a foreign power. All three ridicule the idea that they are from another planet. But they are around. Doesn't that strengthen the suspicion that either somebody, is lying, ignorant, or both?
Little Quick in its May 1 issue threw the harassed high command a hint. In its predictions it said:
"The high command will have to make its denials stronger to stop flying saucer rumors. The Pentagon is full of officers who don't know what to believe."
The only amendment I could offer would be the substitution of whom for what to believe. Long ago I wrote, "If the Pentagon tells you flying saucers are here, don't believe them. If they say they are a myth, don't believe them. Just don't believe them. Believe me."
I find I have been so hospitable to the wayward and conforming members of the press that there is practically no space left for Scully's heretical findings as published in Variety in 1949 and 1950.
Well, that's the price a good Samaritan has to pay for granting asylum to strangers and maybe truth is served better that way.