Des soucoupes volantes pilotées par des équipages de 3 pieds de haut avaient-elles vraiment atterri sur Terre ? C'était la question. Voici comment True et M. Cahn ont trouvé la réponse.
Durant 4 mois, sur 4500 miles et à travers 5 états de l'ouest, j'ai suivi la trace de visiteurs de la planète Vénus.
C'était une affectation fantastique. L'histoire que je devais déterrer si j'y arrivais était la plus étrange dont n'importe quel journaliste pouvait rêver qu'on lui confie. Si je trouvais les vénusiens, I couldn't interview them, even if I knew how to speak their language. For they were dead, those strange little beings, from unknown causes—half of their number crisped by heat to a dark brown color.
They's come out of the sky in flying saucers. My job was to bring their story down to earth.
I got it—their full inside story. And though I didn't find the dead Venusians, I uncovered some rather fantastic living characters...
On the crest of the wave of public excitement about flying saucers in the spring of en came news from the West that topped any of the hundreds of saucer reports that had been recorded up to that time. Newspapers everywhere printed and reprinted the rumor that, in Denver, several businessmen had been shown pieces of metal, small gears, and a curious little radio set. These things, it was said, had been taken from a fallen flying saucer.
The metal was an unknown stuff that defied analysis. The gears—well, they looked like ordinary gears. The tube-less radio set, however, was really something; it beeped every fifteen minutes, exactly on the quarter hours, with a single brief ethereal tone-note that was seemingly a signal from outer space.
That much was in the public prints and on the nation's broadcast channels. What I didn't know the was that two TRUE writers already investigating the matter were meeting oddly evasive resistance. In Denver, Donald Keyhoe was having no luck inducing a man named Koehler, who apparently had knowledge of the intriguing objects to produce them for inspection. In California, Richard Tregaskis was permitted by Frank Scully, columnist for the theatrical newspaper Variety, to finger for a few moments a small disk of nameless metal that was part of the same saucer loot and to listen—but no questions, please—to a tale of a fallen saucer secretly seen and examined by anonymous scientists. The information that Koehler and Scully shared—they checked on each other by telephone—belonged to them, they made clear; they would divulge only so much and no more; their sources absolutely had to remain unidentified and protected; Scully would write it his own way or not at all. In short, take it or leave it. On such arbitrary terms, the pick was obvious. Fallen-saucer stories weren't, in fact, new even at that time. Back on July 9, 1947, only two weeks after private-flier Kenneth Arnold had alerted the nation with his nine disks seen skipping "saucer-like" near Mt Rainier, Southwest newspapers headlined that a captured disk that had fallen on a New Mexico ranch was a dud. That one, when delivered to the Eighth Army Air Force, was identified as a tinfoil-covered reflector from a weather balloon.
Les soucoupes volantes et True TRUE was the first publication to discuss flying saucers logically and comprehensively. In January 1950 the memorable article, The Flying Saucers Are Real, announced our reasoned conclusion that they were interplanetary in origin. Four articles in subsequent issues detailed important new sightings. The U.S. Air Force meanwhile dismissed the saucers as misinterpretations, hoaxes, or hallucinations. |
The ravaged and its collection of parts persisted in unverified versions through the spring and summer of 1950. Then, on September 8, it came alive with a bang.
On that date, the publishing firm of Henry Holt & Company, Inc., released upon a saucer-hungry world a 230-page book by Frank Scully entitled Behind the Flying Saucers. In it, Scully, vouched for by his publisher, unburdened himself of his secret. There wasn't just a single fallen saucer, but three of them. Four, actually, if you wanted the one that got away.
Scully categorically announced—no ifs or buts or maybes—that he was in contact with personages of high standing who had not only seen the three stranded saucers, but examined them closely, and that beyond any question the craft were from a planet other that Earth, presumably Venus. They carried full crews of perfectly formed little men, about three feet tall, all dead on or shortly after arrival. The corpes were taken away by the Air Force, which appropriated the saucers; Scully implied that, after some were dissected, most of the little men received indecent unburial in jars of pickling fluid.
The first space ship landed east of Aztec, New Mexico. Having watched it in the upper atmosphere as it approached, the Air Force had been able to calculate its landing place closely and they got there pretty quick. They sent out a rush call for a group of eight scientists, specialists in secret magnetic research, headed by a top authority in that field of study, a man whom Scully could refer to only by the initial pseudonym "Dr. Gee." The excited scientists came a-flying. It was from the lips of Dr. Gee himself that Scully, much later, heard the details.
The ship was whole practically unmarred, having evidently made a gentle pancake landing. For two days, the scientists hovered around at a safe distance, testing with Geiger counters and photographing. Then they closed in. There seemed to be no visible door to the cabin-like structure in the depressed center of the saucer. Through a broken porthole window—the only apparent damage to the ship—they could count sixteen bodies of little men. Probing inside with a long pole, they hit a knob on the opposite wall, and a door flew open. The scientists entered.
They carried the little bodies out and laid them on the ground. Dressed alike in a dark-blue uniform garment, the saucerians, despite the measurements of 36 to 42 inches, were no misshapen dwarfs; they were as normal in appearance and well-proportioned as any earthling. The only thing wrong with them was that their skin seemed to be charred a very dark chocolate color, as if their bodies had been subjected to much heat.
The ship next received the scientists' attention. There was no engine or other means of propulsion. Dr. Gee deduced that it has operated with utilizing the earth's magnetism, gaining motion by crossing the magnetic lines of force. The controls appeared to be the buttons on a an instrument board. The scientists decided not to try pushing the buttons because they didn't know what would happen.
The material of the ship puzzled them. Very light—two or three men together could lift one side of the saucer which measured 99 99/100 feet in diameter—il looked like aluminium but wasn't. In the laboratory it would prove to resist 150 tests and 10,000 degrees of heat in scientific efforts to determine its composition. Dismantling the ship turned out to be a problem. There were no rivets, bolts or screws, and its structure defied $35,000 worth of diamond drills. After a long study, it was found to be assembled in segments, fitted in grooves and pinned together around the base. Disassembly disclosed a gear completely encircling the bottom of the cabin that fitted a gear around the saucer base. Evidently the saucer rim spun around the cabin—not for any aerodynamic lift or thrust, Dr. Gee surmised, but as a sort of gyroscopic balancing device.
There were other intriguing matters—little watchlike time-pieces in the crew's clothing that measured off a 29-day magnetic month, food wafers that amply nourished laboratory guinea pigs, and heavy water for the crew's liquid intake. But the crucial factor—the means of magnetic propulsion—Dr. Gee was not to have to opportunity to solve, then or later.
The second saucer landed near a proving ground in Arizona. Its door stood open when it was found and its sixteen dead crewmen were not burned or browned. The scientists concluded that they had died after the door was opened, from the sudden exposure to Earth air in the cabin which was probably either vacuumed or pressurized to the atmosphere of their planet but not ours. This ship was smaller that the first, measuring 72 feet in diameter.
The third ship alighted in Arizona's Paradise Valley, right above Phoenix, and it was different from the others in being only a 36-foot two-seater and having a three-point landing gear consisting of steel balls rolling in sockets. One little man lay half out of an escape hatch; the other still sat in a bucket seat before the control board, his head slumped on his chest. Both dead. They brought the total toll to thirty-four.
Several other saucerians were more fortunate—or the lesson of their predecessors' deaths had been learned. These visitors arrived in a fourth saucer which members of Dr. Gee's research group came upon, lying empty, near a government proving ground. The scientists returned to their car for cameras and equipment and as they approached the ship again they saw several little men hop into the saucer, which instantly disappeared—not flew away, but vanished as if it had dissolved into air.
Where had the saucers come from? Operating on magnetism, which is an effect of electricity—which travels, like light, at a rate of 186,000 miles a second—they could have made short work of the trip from any of the nearer planets in our solar system. Which one? Dr. Gee decided Venus. In agreement with one school of thought among astronomical researchers, he felt there was more likelihood of human habitation on Venus than on Mars. The little men's size pointed that way, too; if they had come from Mars, they would probably be three or four times as large as people on Earth.
It was exceedingly interesting to the doctor that the diameters of the saucers were exactly 99 99/100, 72 and 36 feet, that the measurements of the large ship's cabin were 18 feet across and 72 inches high and that its top projected 45 inches above the level of the disk edge, which was elevated 27 inches from the saucer base line, and that the cabins and disk slant of the smaller ships were in relative proportion to the figures for the large ship. For all these measurements were divisible by 9. That indicated to the scientists that the Venusians used a mathematical method, not unlike ours, known as the "system of 9's."
But the doctor and hip group were to have little chance of pressing their inquiries further. The Air Force took over the ships and sent them presumably to the government laboratories at Wright Field at Dayton, Ohio—except the little ship, which rested for awhile in the doctor's laboratory and then was dismantled and sent to join the others. The doctor and his colleagues had hoped, in time, to work out a plan whereby they could make certain tests with the different push buttons on the intrument boards and so gain clues to the secret of magnetic propulsion. When he next saw the instrument board of the large ship, it had, to his amazement and chagrin, been broken up and all of the inner workings torn apart. Since Air Force souvenir hunters had already lifted a number of items, he said, he grabbed a few things himself—not as trophies, but to use for research. All he had to show for his labors on the saucers was a tubeless radio receiver about the size of a cigarette package, some gears, some small disks, and other items that could be cariied in the pocket.
Shortly thereafter, in july 1949, Dr. Gee separated himself from the government service. For the tremendous work he had done as leader of a billion-dollar magnetic detection research program that, during the war had knocked out the Japanese submarine menace, he had received $7,200 a year. He quit to turn his knowledge to the use of industry where he could make a more profitable income. As a specialist in geomagnetics, he became a consultant to a wealthy oil man, himself a geophysicist, who was using instruments of his own design to make a micro-wave survey of the underlying formations of the Mojave Desert. The oil man was an old friend of Frank Scully; through him, Scully heard something of the fallen saucers and came to meet Dr. Gee on at least two occasions when the scientist talked freely of the saucers to the oil man and Scully—this was in the fall of '49—and on a later visit brought along the tiny radio, the gears, and some photographs.
Came the beginning of 1950 and, in the opinion of Scully, the reign of "error" and repression: the Air Force put its Project Saucer underground, denied everything, and by so doing set up between the people and the government a double standard of morality. Security became a dread threat. Scientists knew better than to talk. Furthermore, scientists have to have government-controlled materials for research, which might not be made available to those who refuse to cooperate.
But Scully, in possession now of the data, would have none of this bureaucratic muzzling which, he said, stiffles free inquiry and breeds fear. Though "Dr. Gee's" identity had to be safe-guarded, neither Scully nor the oil man was so bound, though the latter, being involved with the goverment on some top-secret deals, had to tread carefully.
To test public receptivity to the saucer revelation, the oil man-geophysicist appeared as an anonymous guest lecturer before a University of Denver elementary-science class on March 8, 1950, escorted by George T. Koehler, who is a salesman for Denver radio station KMYR. The lecturer told in detail of Dr. Gee's findings and drew some blackboard diagrams. News of the lecture leaked, of coure, beyond the cloistered walls, and the how-come of university sponsorship raised a local tempest that blew off the lecturer's cloak of anonymity. His name was Silas M. Newton. The important thing was that 50 percent of his listeners were convinced by his lecture—a considerably better figure than the 26 percent of the people questioned in a nation-wide public-opinion poll who believed that flying saucers were real.
Frank Scully then wrote his book, acknowledging the role of Newton but shielding Dr. Gee, and setting forth everything that these two eminent men had told him about the captured saucers and the little men from Venus.
The book sold some 60,000 copies at $2.75, was digested by a magazine of large circulation, reprinted and widely sold as a paper-bound 25-cent volume, and discussed in newspapers abroad. It affected, in some degree, one way or another, the thinking of millions of people.
The fact that it was a loudly bad book was beside the point. Reviewers' opinions ranged from amusedly tolerant to stinging, a few reaching indignation. With a pitchman's shallow glibness, Scully garbled scientific concepts, contradicted himself in details, and committed rudimentary errors that would shame a high-school freshman. Yet the impact of his staggering story and its basic implications were there.
Unless... this was a gigantic joke? Frank Scully's last previous literary prominence, aside from his weekly column of comment in the show-business Variety, was the authorship of a book called Fun in Bed, a harmless collection of anecdotes, games, and other amusing trivia for convalescents. But if Behind the Flying Saucers was tongue-in-cheek humor, it was in pretty bad taste. It accused military officials of our government of being a pack of liars and blackmailers. That wasn't funny.
Then... was it a hoax? Granting, in a chapter in his book devoted to them, that scientific hoaxes of all sorts had
been pulled off in the past and present, Scully specifically stated in
his earnest-sounding preface, "...I have never participated in the perpetration of a hoax on flying saucers.
"
And his publisher, the long-established and reputable firm of Henry Holt & Company, saw fit to preface Scully's preface with a note of the own at the beginning of the book
that said, "...we are as convinced as any thoughtful publisher can be that Mr. Scully has approached his subject with probity and has interpreted the
facts and figures given him with care and caution.
" In view of the demonstrably low quality of some of Scully's facts and figures, whatever moved the editors of Henry Holt
& Company to make such a statement is beyond understanding. But Webster's Dictionary defines "probity" as: "Tried
virtue or integrity; moral and intellectual honesty; rectitude; uprightness.
" If Holt took the trouble to go on
record as saying that their author approached his subject with moral and intellectual honesty, certainly there must be
something to it.
The fascinating Case of the Little Men from Venus couldn't be laughed at and it couldn't be ignored. There remained the vital question, bigger than ever:
Was it true?
If it wasn't, then a great many honest people were being diddled, deceived, and deluded. If it was, then one of the greatest stories in the world was being somethered. Either way, a public service would be accomplished by finding out the truth.
A newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a magazine, TRUE, particularly wanted to know. And that we where I, as a special reporter, came into the picture.
Aside from Scully, there were two people dealt with in the book who could definitely clear up the question, if they wanted to or could be persuaded to.
One of them was Silas M. Newton, the oil man, from whom Scully had originally heard the story.
The other was the mysterious Dr. Gee, the superscientist who confirmed it and was forced into anonymity and silence, Scully implied, by the threat of government interference with his supply of essential research materials.
The first move, however, seemed to be to talk things over with Scully hilmself.
At first glance, Frank Scully is a reassuring person. He is a large, friendly man of striking appearance. He is keenly aware that in profile in rather resembles a Stuart portrait of George Washington. His hair is cloud-white and his complexion ruddy. His voice, particularly when he is excited, which is often, is high and harsh and loud enough to do credit to a train caller.
He lives in a middle-aged, comfortable, stucco home that grips the hillsides on one of the old residential sections above Hollywood. There is nothing particularly remarkable about the house except perhaps the fire-red color of the front door and the confusion inside. The Scully home is oustanding as being one of the world's worst place to try to conduct a calm, careful interview.
Traffic in the Scully living room usually consists of two or more of the five Scully children, ranging from college to cradle ages, their friends, two poodles, Mrs. Scully, who is necessarily a fast-moving and harried person, Scully himself, and a woman of all work. At times even Scully's piercing voice failed to carry over the bedlam.
The Scully household, if a little difficult on the interviewer, is otherwise normal and commonplace. It seemed incongruous as a center of flying-saucer knowledge.
Sitting in his easy chair and holding the baby in one arm while fended off poofles with the other, Scully told me very much the same sotry about the saucers that he set down in his book.
Although the oral version was not one whit clearer, it was considerably more vehement, particularly the portions dealing with government officials who deny the existence of the saucers.
As he talked, Scully gave me the impression that he had only the vaguest idea of what he was talking about but he believed every word he was saying.
With very little prompting, he supplemented his story with letters he had received in response to his book. Some of
them denounced him; others praised him mightily; one asked with superb naivety, "I hear your story is a hoax.
Please write and tell me if you are a hoax.
" Hundreds of them spilled over the desk in his cluttered study,
sample proof of the impact of his book. Some of the letters contained pictures.
At one point Scully hauled out a pair of photographs supposedly taken by an amateur astronomer. Certainly they were taken by an amateur photographer. They were murky views of the sky bordered at the bottom by what seemed to be the roof of a small building. One of the prints showed a jagged streak across the sky as if someone fumbling around in the darkroom had spilled something on it by mistake. The other has a large blot on it.
Scully eyed the two photographs somberly. "There's a perfect
control factor,
" he said pointing vaguely at something in the pictures. "Saucers, most likely, both of them. I
get this sort of thing all the time.
"
Since nothing in either picture was comprehensible, it was a little hard to get what Scully was driving at. He said that the negatives could be produced for inspection. I thought privately that inspecting them harldy seemed worth the effort. Even if the negatives were unaltered, they wouldn't prove anything.
Nor, for that matter, would Scully.
Stoutly maintaining that he was pledged to secrecy, he refused to name his chief source of information, Dr. Gee. He had promised Dr. Gee not to reveal any more of the story than he had set down in his book, and by God, he wasn't going to break that promise. If the government cracked down on Gee, it wasn't going to be Scully's fault.
Nor would he produce any of the objects taken from the saucers—the little radio, the gears, or the disks of unknown metal. Scully claimed that all this material was now out of his hands.
As for his one other source of information named in the book, Silas M. Newton, Scully was very cagey about producing him, either. Scully had written that Newton was "one of the great geophysicists of the oil industry, with a
record of successful exploratory operations that was surpassed by none... a great athlete in his college years... a
golf champion... the man who rediscovered the great Rangely oil field in Colorado... a patron of the arts...
" Newton had set up an independent oil company in Denver, of which he was
still president. He was a very busy man. Scully told me, and was continually traveling on important, secret,
government business. His Los Angeles telephone number was unlisted. Scully would not divulge it nor would he say where Newton lived.
And thus ended my first interview with the author of Behing the Flying Saucers. Getting behind the saucers would have to wait: I was going to have trouble enough, it appeared, getting behind Frank Scully.
For maybe a week of intermittent contacts, Scully and I played games, with me trying to find out where Newton was and Scully trying to keep me from it and neither of us letting on to the other what we were really doing.
While we were politely scrimmaging I tried a kind of end-run play, but it didn't work. I figured that since Newton was such a big man in the oil business I should be able to get to him by finding someone else in the oil business who knew him. I telephoned Curtis Johnson of General Petroleum; Basil Kantzer of Union Oil; Frank Morgan of Richfield and C. W. March and Harry Godde, both of Signal Oil & Gas.
None of them had ever heard of Silas Mason Newton.
What with Scully's description of the man and the trouble I was having finding him, I began to imagine Newton as a secret power, a kind of shadow man, a sort of Sir Basil Zaharoff of the oil industry.
In the face of Scully's relunctance to produce him, I might even have begun to doubt that Newton existed, if it hadn't been for one factor. That factor was Mrs. Scully.
Mrs. Scully is the kind of thoroughly likable, wholesome person of whom you have no doubts. She had joined in several of our conversations and she not only backed up everything Scully said about Newton and Dr. Gee but she talked about having discussed flying saucers with them herself. It was absolutely impossible to think that Scully could have persuaded his wife to discuss conversations with imaginary people. Mrs. Scully had definitely talked with someone. The question was, who?
Suddenly I found out. One afternoon Scully casually announced that Newton would be at Scully's home that evening after dinner. If I cared to drop over, I would be most welcome.
It was a round for Scully, and the easy way he won it made me feel like a suspicious bumpkin.
Silas Newton is short and compact in build. He looked, on the night I first met him, like a conservative businessman turned just a shade Hollywood.
His pale sharkskin slacks were not too pale, his blue suede loafers did not have 2-inch crepe soles, the hand-picking on the collar of his light sport shirt was restrained, his tweed sport coat didn't look as if it had to be curried each morning. The expensive-looking gold watch on his wrist was held there by a plain, expensive-looking leather strap.
Although he is in his sixties, Newton looks considerably younger. He has the sort of face you'd expect to find on a midle-aged elf-tanned, deep-seamed, high-browed and crackling with good humor.
It developed that, like Scully, Newton had never seen a saucer. But he retold the stories Dr. Gee had given him in a firm, convincing voice. He flung scientific terms around in a kind of barrage. Unfortunately, they were the same scientific terms Scully had used in his book, the same saucer stories, and the same little men, with nothing added. But coming from Newton himself, they sounded good.
Newton was, in general, the epitome of culture, wealth, and good breeding. He wasn't too fat off what you'd expect from the pedigree Scully had given him: graduate of Baylor University and Yale, postgraduate scholar at the University of Berlin.
Silas Newton is short and compact in build. He looked, on the night I first met him, like a conservative businessman turned just a shade Hollywood.
His pale sharkskin slacks were not too pale, his blue suede loafers did not have 2-inch crepe soles, the hand-picking on the collar of his light sport shirt was restrained, his tweed sport coat didn't look as if it had to be curried each morning. The expensive-looking gold watch on his wrist was held there by a plain, expensive-looking leather strap.
Although he is in his sixties, Newton looks considerably younger. He has the sort of face you'd expect to find on a midle-aged elf-tanned, deep-seamed, high-browed and crackling with good humor.
It developed that, like Scully, Newton had never seen a saucer. But he retold the stories Dr. Gee had given him in a firm, convincing voice. He flung scientific terms around in a kind of barrage. Unfortunately, they were the same scientific terms Scully had used in his book, the same saucer stories, and the same little men, with nothing added. But coming from Newton himself, they sounded good.
Newton was, in general, the epitome of culture, wealth, and good breeding. He wasn't too fat off what you'd expect from the pedigree Scully had given him: graduate of Baylor University and Yale, postgraduate scholar at the University of Berlin.
Silas Newton is short and compact in build. He looked, on the night I first met him, like a conservative businessman turned just a shade Hollywood.
His pale sharkskin slacks were not too pale, his blue suede loafers did not have 2-inch crepe soles, the hand-picking on the collar of his light sport shirt was restrained, his tweed sport coat didn't look as if it had to be curried each morning. The expensive-looking gold watch on his wrist was held there by a plain, expensive-looking leather strap.
Although he is in his sixties, Newton looks considerably younger. He has the sort of face you'd expect to find on a midle-aged elf-tanned, deep-seamed, high-browed and crackling with good humor.
It developed that, like Scully, Newton had never seen a saucer. But he retold the stories Dr. Gee had given him in a firm, convincing voice. He flung scientific terms around in a kind of barrage. Unfortunately, they were the same scientific terms Scully had used in his book, the same saucer stories, and the same little men, with nothing added. But coming from Newton himself, they sounded good.
Newton was, in general, the epitome of culture, wealth, and good breeding. He wasn't too fat off what you'd expect from the pedigree Scully had given him: graduate of Baylor University and Yale, postgraduate scholar at the University of Berlin.
The scientific terms he was using so freely reminded me of something. Gingerly I brought up an error in Scully's book. In describing the preliminary examination by Dr. Gee's
group of the first saucer that landed, Scully had written: "They
studied the ship from a distance for... two days, bombing it with Geiger counters, cosmic rays, and other protective
devices.
" In the more scientific reveiws of his book, Scully had been severly taken to task for that description, and in
particular the Geiger-counter bombardment which is about like saying that a doctor took a patient's temperature by
bombarding him with thermometers. I mentioned the slip to Newton.
"You have to overlook things like that,
" he said. "Frank, here, is not a scientific man and he did that
book in an awful hurry. If I could have checked the proofs with him I could have caught a lot of errors like that one
that made him look pretty bad. But I was too busy, see, with the top-brass on these government projects to help Frank
out.
"
After sparring with Newton for maybe a half hour I got down to the proposition I had in mind.
A fully authenticated announcement that space ships were landing on Earth should have a very healthy effect on humanity after the shock wore off. If nothing else, such an announcement would probably stop the Korean war in the interest of global solidarity and that alone would be worth any risk Newton and his scientists might be taking in breaking the story.
As a public service, then, would Newton give me the whole flying saucer story—names, photographs and everything Scully had to leave out of his book to protect Dr. Gee?
Newton thought the proposition over soberly.
Then he gave his decision: he agreed with myidea, but he wasn't sure that the time was right for such an announcement. At the moment, he and Dr. Gee would have to sacrifice too much if they told all they knew. I received the impression there was something else involved in the story of the flying saucers that Newton couldn't even hint at.
Certainly he would take up the matter with Dr. Gee. If it sounded at all reasonable to the doctor, Newton didn't see any reason why he couldn't arrange for me to see some of the things taken from the saucers while the final plans for releasing the story were being made.
Newton said he happened to be working at the moment on an oil-storage problem for the "big-brass" near San Francisco. If he got the go-ahead from Dr. Gee, he would meet me there in a week. And he would bring along some of the gears, the disks of unknown metal and maybe even the little radio if Doctor wasn't still experimenting with it.
We wet in the dignified Palm Court restaurant of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Scott Newhall, an old friend of mine and Sunday editor of the Chronicle, came along to see what I had dug up so far. Newhall wasn't taking the thing very seriously and by this time I couldn't blame him. Scully and Newton had begun to affect me that way. But we had to play it straight. One good laugh and Newton and whatever he had to show would be gone. And there was still just a chance that the man actually had the greatest story of all time.
The meal cost $18.20 plus tip but it was worth every cent of it. Newton was in fine form.
He nodded to the waiters, who all seemed to know him. He conferred with Adolphe, the maitre d'hotel, about an important message he was expecting. And he talked saucers.
Gleaming silver ships from the chill reaches of the heavens smoked through the Palm Court that evening to the accompaniment of the hotel's sedate string ensemble. Bureaucrats in Washington were damned for withholding the story from the public. Dr. Gee and his astonishing accomplishments with microwave equipment in the oil fields under Newton's supervision loomed across the background of the conversation.
Newton was expansive. Smiles sprang out of the deep furrows in his tanned cheeks. He was confidential. Squint lines puckered around his pale eyes. But everything he said, though fresh to Newhall, was the same thing that I'd heard before. Not once did he divulge anything that wasn't already made public in Scully's book.
As Newton talked I noticed more and more an odd little habit. He kept tossing in the word "see" when there was no point that required emphasis. Only if you considered that he might be using it as a stalling device while thought up the rest of his story did Newton's "see" habit make any sense.
"This saucer thing, see. It would keep me going twenty-four hours a day if I'd let it. I'm just swamped. I've got
my own business to attend to, and this goddamned high-brass, see, they're after me all the time on these contracts for
the military.
"
I was a strange habit for a man so attuned to the genteel splendor of the Palace Hotel.
I began to notice that Newton had another strange habit for a man of his background. At this stag dinner, the more he talked, the more he swore. By the time he really got his gauge up he sounded like a mule skinner on Saturday night. It wasn't quite in keeping with what I had always expected of an old Yale man, and Newton had made quite a point of his degree from Yale. I decided that either I didn't known anything about Yale men or Newton's manner of speaking had simply been colored by his years in the oil fields—Colorado's huge Rangely, which Newton modestly noted he had discovered after it had been abandoned by the major oild companies; the rugged wastelands of Wyomings; the Mojave where his crews even now surveying hidden deposits of natural gas.
In the middle of a discussion of magnetics, Newton glanced over his shoulder furtively. Then he suddenly leaned over the table and fished a smudged and wrinkled handckerchief out of his coat pocket. Its corners were tied together and it bulged promisingly.
Newton slowly undid the knots, guarding the handkerchief with his hands and glancing around the room to be sure no one was watching.
For the first time in the evening he stopped talking, methodically working on the knots.
When he finished with them he held the corners of the handkerchief together and looked at us.
"You ever see anything like this?
" he asked quietly and dumped the contents of the handkerchief on the table.
The presentation couldn't have been more impressively nonchalant.
Four metal objects lay on the smooth tablecloth. Without a word from Newton they seemd to be touched with star dust.
I felt my stomach give a lurch and stop working on the roast beef I had just eaten.
Two of the objects were gears, fine-toothed and about the size of pocket watches. The other two were disks, dull-finished and about the size of a nickel. Here at last were the disks of unknown metal.
Newton scooped up his treasures quickly, as if he were afraid they might suddenly disappear, and put them back into the handkerchief. Then, one by one, he brought them out for us to examine closely.
The two disks were identical. There were no marks on them except tiny surface nicks and scratches. They felt incredibly light. The metal had a powdery-looking finish that did not come off with rubbing.
Newhall and I looked at each other. Neither of us felt much like laughing now.
The gears were not alike. One had a tiny gear fitted into the center of it. The other was solid and on a shaft. Newton held it and tapped it with his knife. A clear, faint, high-pitched tone blended with the music of the string ensemble. Surprisingly enough, holding the gear in your hand didn't have any dampening effect on the ringing note.
"It's magnetized,
" Newton explained. Just by way of experiment
I touched the gear to the steel blade of my knife. There didn't seem to be any magnetic attraction between the two
pieces of metal. Newton couldn't explain that, but he said Dr. Gee had
once explained it to him.
Both of the gears were blotched and stained.
"Acid,
" said Newton. "We've subjected them, see, to 150
tests in our laboratories. Listen to that note.
" He tapped the gear again. "That's the note 'A' on the
piano.
One of the gears was unmarked except for the stains. The other had a small fat arrow inscribed on it in outline. The arrow pointed toward a figure that looked very much like an ordinary 9. Newton had no explanation for these inscriptions.
He did, however, have some other things that might be interesting. They were in his room, he said confidentially right upstairs.
Newton's room, although it was one of the Palace Hotel's small accomodations, looked exactly the way you might expect the hotel room of a busy, wealthy oil executive to look.
A saddle-leather suitcase lay open on the luggage rack. Across it lay a folded geological map-expensive, authentic.
An honest-looking old-fashioned valise slouched in one corner of the room, its baggy leather sides scuffed and scarred; a veteran, no doubt, of countless trips into the rugged, dusty oild lands.
Newton began talking immediately. His story, titied up for family consumption, centered around Dr. Gee and his colleagues whoe achievements apparently kep Newton in a perpetual state of wonder.
"Doctor is down there right now in our laboratories, see, along the south side of the airfield there at Phoenix. You know the place. Those buildings that used to be the big government top-secret laboratories. Our people are in there neow.
"Funny thing, I was down there only a couple of weeks ago going over some problems, see, and I run across a great
big thick goddamn pile of blue prints.
"I said to Doctor, I said, 'What in the hell is all this stuff?' And he said, see, 'Why, those are the detailed
prints on the air-flow system for the B-36.'
"He's been working on all that top government stuff for the big-brass and I never knew a thing about it.
"These scientific fellows, see. You can't tell what they're going to turn up with next. here he has these
absolutely top-secret plans laying right there on top of the desk."
There were other top-secret items Newton's men had developed while working on his petroleum-surveying equipment.
Newhall was sitting on the bed, trying to look nonchalant. I was sitting on the edge of a big easy chair. Things were once more getting to the point where I didn't dare look at Newhall except out of the corner of my eye. As far as I could see, Newhall was making a detailed study of one of his shoes. Newton was talking, fast and steady, as if he'd just found out they were going to slap on a speech tax in the next ten minutes.
Doctor, it seems, had developed a magnetic fog, rain, and darkness-dispelling screen which, fitted to the windshiled of an airplane, literally turned night into day and enabled a pilot to see throught the sloppiest kind of weather.
Newton dropped his voice to a confidential whisper. "One of the
biggest companies in the country, see. They're testing this right now. Absolutely top-secret. You'd know the name of
the company in a minute if I mentioned it.
" He peered around the room to make sure no uninvited ears were
listening. "You know Norden, the bombsight people? Well, they're testing this thing right now.
"
Newton hauled out a slim, clear rod.
"Looks exactly like Lucite, doesn't it? Well, it isn't. Better than Lucite. Flexible, shatterproof, and it
positively will not burn.
"Doctor, see, made this revolutionary plastic stuff for the military. Made it right out of Perelite, a volcanic
ash. Cheapest material in the world. There's whole hills of it. The military is using this stuff for cockpit canopies
on planes because it won't burn.
"
And then there was the magnetic disintegrator.
Of course the big-brass was working on it. But there were problems. The disintegrator, briefly mentioned in Scully's book, was so all-destroying that split-second control of it was a vital factor.
It has taken better than a year, Newton said, just to work out the mathematics necessary to make certain the disintegrator would only operate in a one ten-thousandth-of-a-second flash.
Even so, in that brief moment, the disintegrating beams had shot out twenty miles and spread a swath of total destruction on the desert proving grounds two miles wide.
The big-brass planned to set a chain of these disintegrators around the United States and point them skyward to form an impenetrable screen of destruction through which no enemy planes could pass.
But there was a hitch in the plan. The beams of the magnetic disintegrator, if left on, would reach out and destroy the universe.
And then there was the big flying saucer Newton's men thought they had located, crashed in a swamp outside of Memphis.
"The captain, see, I can't tell you his name, was flying along one night testing this magnetic windshield screen
for Norden when he saw this thing circling. It went right down into the swamp.
"My people got a fix on it and as soom as the rainy season ends down there we're going in and take a look at it. I
can't tell you any more about it except, of course, it's probably one of the cigar-shaped saucers and probably a
thousand feet long.
"
Newton fished into an expensive-looking, hand-stitched brief case and slid out a bundle of 8x10 pictures. He held them face down in his lap while he reminisced about the days in the oil fields, the beginnings of the Newton Oil Company in Denver, and the great days of rediscovering the Rangely oil fields after they had been abandoned by all the major oil companies as worthless.
The pictures were held in his lap, still face down. I know perfectly well that he was giving them the oild build-up treatment, but still it was working. It got so bad that I had a hard time keeping myself from reaching over and grabbing them away from him.
Finally he held one of them up, its back to Newhall and me, and looked at it for a long moment. Then he turned it around slowly. It was a fuzzy shot of some desert real estate.
"You see that?
" said Newton, gravely. "That's where the
first saucer landed.
"
He turned over two or three more prints of the same sort of thing.
"These will be very historical photographs someday,
" he said. "It's too bad I am not allowed to let you
look at them closely.
"
Then he started to slide them back into his brief case. As he did, he paused and looked at us slyly. Then he slipped one picture up from behind the others and immediately slid it back again. From what I could see in that instant, it looked like a picture or a large beach umbrella on its side.
"You didn't see anything, did you?
" Newton asked, winking. He
had never been more correct, but the implication was that he had just permitted a glimpse of a photograph of a flying
saucer.
Newton grew reflective. There just might be, he thought, the barest chance that he could persuade Doctor and his people to reveal the whole story. Perhaps, after all, it might be advisable, particularly if the thing that crashed in the swamp turned out to be a cigar-shaped saucer.
"You know,
" Newton mused dreamily, "a lot of people would
pay a dollar to see a thing like that.
"
Then, suddenly, Newton announced that he had to whisk off to Washington for a conference with the big-brass.
Newhall and I stood up. "It's been a very interesting evening, Mr. Newton,
" Newhall said, his voice straining for self-control. "You'll
be hearing from Cahn here. We'll talk the whole thing over and see what we can work out with you.
"
There were the usual polite remarks, with Newhall and me looking down at the carpet, and then we were out in the hall.
Newhall and I managed to hold it until we got down the corridor and in front of the elevator. There was non longer any question about it—the time had comme to laugh, and we let go. When we could talk again, we tried to figure out what Newton was up to. It was a safe bet that he wasn't as closely in touch with the cosmos as Frank Scully would have had his readers believe. But he was up to something. Was the whole thing, Scully's book and all, a titanic piece of ballyhoo aimed at the day when the big cigar-shaped saucer opened for business on the midway at Palyland-at-the-Beach?
I decided the next move was to go to Denver, Newton's old stamping ground, look over the Newton Oil Company, and follow up a few other leads from Scully's book.
In building up Silas Newton as an authority on flying saucers, Frank Scully provided a respectable academic setting by devoting the whole first chapter of his book to a description of the lecture that was given at the University of Denver on March 8, 1950. The chapter heading is "Le Mystère de l'Université de Denver," the mystery being that the man who gave the lecture was known only as "Scientist X" until Thor Seversen, covering the event for the Denver Post, identified gim, several days after the talk, as Newton. My first move in Denver was to hunt up Seversen.