Communion: A True Story (29 page)

That there are deep secrets connected with the area of unidentified flying objects cannot really be denied. In the 1970s Senator Barry Goldwater was denied access to secret documents concerning apparent research into UFOs being conducted at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. The National Security agency has gone all the way to the Supreme Court to protect some of its documents about the disks.

The book
Clear Intent
by Lawrence Fawcett arid Barry J. Greenwood contains legitimate documents obtained under the Freedom of. Information Act that make it essentially impossible to contend that government personnel have not, at the least, had some very strange experiences over the years. It is essential reading because of its coherence and its clarity.

Fawcett and Greenwood prove that some extraordinarily strange things have happened, and that the government has kept these things secret.

In 1966 a "Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects" (the Condon Report) was undertaken at the University of Colorado. When it was issued in 1969. the Condon Report was instrumental in causing me to lose what small interest I had in flying disks and related phenomena. I read the preface, and saw that the project leader apparently thought that there was nothing of interest going on. From that I concluded that flying saucers weren't real and forgot about them.

Recently, I read the Condon Report more carefully and discovered that the internal conclusions are at variance with Condon's preface! His putting his thoughts at the front had the effect of hiding the actual realities of the report. It clearly states that a significant percentage of flying disk cases remain unexplained.

At the inception of the Condon Report, Robert Low, the business administrator of the University of Colorado at the time, wrote to his superiors the following memo: Our study would be conducted almost exclusively by non-believers who, although they couldn't possibly prove a negative result, could and probably would add an impressive body of evidence that there is no reality to the observations. The trick would be, I think, to describe the project so that, to the public, it would appear a totally-objective study, but to the scientific community, would present a group of non-believers trying their best to be objective but having an almost zero expectation of finding a saucer.

At the outset of the project. Condon told a public meeting: "It is my inclination right now to recommend that the government get out of this business. My attitude right now is that there is nothing to it. But I'm not supposed to reach a conclusion for another year." That is an unsound position to take at the inception of a study. Upon saying that, he should have resigned as project director.

Many of the scientists who participated in the study disagreed with London, especially after they saw the data. Some resigned in protest. One of them, Dr. David Saunders.

published a book about it called UFOs?
Yes!
a few weeks before London announced his negative conclusion in November 1964.

The Condon Report ended the public interest of the United States government in the whole subject of unknown flying objects. Subsequent to the government's turning away from study in this area, very quietly the number of cases of people being taken by the visitors seems to have begun to rise.

Scientists nationwide have responded to the government's public position by refusing to take the matter seriously. Many people of the highest reputation have been sucked into this stance.

When the policy of denial was instituted, I doubt if anybody ever dreamed that the visitors would one day start marching into the homes of America in the middle of the night.

But it appears that this may be happening. If so, then the public has ended up on the Front line. And the visitors are not only entering our homes, they are entering our brains. And we do not know what they are doing to us.

It is not possible for there to be a more provocative or intimate intrusion. If, as seems clear, we cannot control the visitors in any way, then we human beings must create among ourselves a community of support. The only lasting damage I can find has not to do with any direct side effects of the visitors' activities, but with people being isolated with their experiences because of the indifference or incomprehension of competent scientific professionals.

The fact that respected public institutions such as the government and the scientific and medical establishments do not. consider this a real problem hurts people, and hurts them badly. The lack of social support irrevocably isolates them when they need help the most.

When they read false debunking stories or see others like themselves made the butts of jokes in the press, they are in effect assaulted a second time by their own society.

Cornell University professor Dr. Carl Sagan has stated many times that there is no evidence that unidentified aerial objects-and presumably visitors exist. To be precise, there is no publicly acknowledged physical artifact. The large body of encounter memories. some heavily freighted with imagination, others more sparse, amount to an artifact of
something
.

And there is a substantial body of carefully authenticated photographic evidence of the devices themselves that is very hard to refute in any way except on an emotional level. Of course, there are also liars who claim contact, and faked photographs — some of them skillfully faked.

It appears that there is more than a shred of evidence that there are visitors here, and that they are doing something that involves its. It is also obvious from their secrecy that they want very much to hide. Can it be that the government is inadvertently helping them do this, or even that they have somehow compelled it to act as it does? Certainly the combination of visitor and government secrecy has led to profound public confusion. We do not know what is going on There is no publicly available reason to conclude that our earth is the object of visitation, or to support any of the other hypotheses that have been advanced. Indeed, any such assertions would be premature.

Maybe the visitor experience is what happens when the human mind looks into the mirror

. . . and discovers that its own reflection is not only real but fearful to see.

Something is here. But what? And from where?

We come at last to the essence of the mystery.

Ancient Future

The first instance of an official attempt to explain flying disks, oddly enough, is not American. In Japan, General Yoritsune observed while on maneuvers that there were mysterious lights swinging and circling in the southern sky. The visitation continued through the night. In the morning the general ordered a group of scientific investigators to determine what had caused the strange disturbance. After consultation they announced that "it was only the wind making the stars sway." They are to be forgiven the profundity of their confusion, for the date of this occurrence was September 24, 1235, 751 years ago.

More recently, the distinguished Harvard astronomer Dr. Donald Menzel, in his 1953

book
Flying Saucers
, explained that a major sighting, carried out by professional observers with good equipment, was "an atmospheric lensing effect." According to navy physicist Dr.

Bruce Maccabee, critical errors were made by Dr. Menzel in comparing his own tensing theory with the data reported observers. Specifically, the angle at which the observation took place was too great to allow Tensing, even under Dr. Menzel's hypothesis. However, in his discussion of the sighting, Dr. Menzel did not mention the angle actually reported but assumed it was one at which it might have been possible to observe lensing.

The observation I refer to occurred at 10:30 A.M. on April 24, 1949, and was made by Mr. Charles B. Moore and a group of U.S. Navy trainees observing a weather balloon with a theodolite. Mr. Moore observed both an unidentified object and the balloon at the same time.

He noted the azimuths and elevations of the object as it moved, and it was noted that the azimuths changed by about 190 degrees during the sixty-second sighting, and that the central angle between the initial and final sightings was 120 degrees. This information was filed with the Navy Special Devices Center.

I found that Dr. Menzel's description of the sighting in
Flying Saucers
is not the same as in the report. He claimed that what the observers saw was a mirage of the balloon, appearing at first above the balloon and moving straight downward until it was below and to one side of the balloon. But the report clearly states that the object appeared at first so near the balloon that Mr. Moore initially thought it was the balloon. The balloon remained in place while the object moved off to the north.

Dr. Menzel was well aware that a mirage cannot appear at a large angle away from the object that is the source of the mirage. In the appendix to
Flying Saucers
, Dr. Menzel calculated that the largest angle between the balloon and its mirage would be no greater than one fourth of a degree. But Moore's measurements were far different from that: To make the mirage theory stick, Moore's measurements would have had to have been off by about a hundred degrees. Nowhere in his book did Dr. Menzel mention the actual sighting angles reported by Mr. Moore.

Seven hundred fifty years, and it's still "the wind making the stars sway." That is much of the explanation that has been offered for flying disks and related phenomena by those who are emotionally or intellectually unable to admit the reality of the mystery. It is not because they are bad scientists, not at all. To a degree some of them may be shaking hands with elements of the intelligence community that have hidden information about the phenomena, but this is mere conjecture at this point. A far more compelling reason for this irrational behavior is suggested by a paper presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969 by Dr. Robert L. Hall, professor of sociology at the University of Illinois:

"We might describe the body of scientific knowledge accepted at any given time and the people who bear that knowledge as constituting an unusually strong belief system which resists inconsistent items of knowledge even more powerfully than a layman defending his political beliefs .... The very strength of our resistance to the evidence on UFOs suggests to me that there is clearly a phenomenon of surpassing importance here."

Since that paper was delivered there has been added a new element, which is that of scientifically educated people with Fundamentalist Christian religious beliefs. These

"scientists" have joined forces with the debunkers, even founding official-sounding 'skeptics'

groups" that have Creationist motives.

The Institute for Creation Research has stated, "To date there is not one iota of real evidence in either science or the Bible that intelligent beings were either evolved or created anywhere in the universe except on earth. In any case, it is the planet earth which is the focal point of God's interest m the universe. There is no need to look, because there couldn't be anyone out there." The banality of this position makes it more pitiful than frightening, but there are competent scientists, such as Drs. John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, who recently published a brilliant book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, which elegantly states a similarly unsound case, albeit from a much more intellectually substantial viewpoint than that of Creationism. The weakness of even the most sound "man-centered" case is our striking lack of samples from which to extrapolate predictions. We have one sample, and one only: this planet. If we could observe conditions on, say, a few million planets, we might be able to make more viable predictions, as we would then have a sample base comprising at least a small proportion of the probable planetary matter in the universe.

As the emotional charge of the debunkers and Creationists diminishes the impact. of their position. so the paucity of samples reduces the vitality of more coherent man-centered arguments.

The truth is that we do not and cannot know the actual condition of life elsewhere in the universe because we are presently too ignorant of conditions outside our own immediate solar neighborhood. However, judging from the amount of evidence available, it may be possible to expand our knowledge simply by taking the flying disk and abductee phenomena seriously.

We may or may not find visitors, but we would certainly find a body of data so compelling and multidimensional in its complexity that merely stating useful hypotheses about it is going to be a major challenge not only to the physical and behavioral sciences but also to the science and art of language.

This matter is a garden of luminous weed through which only a fool would dash yelling any doctrine at all, whether it be that of the Creationist and debunker or that of the UFO true believer. Even to approach the idea of the visitors, it is necessary to study a whole history of tall stories, bizarre tales, and — just possibly —truths.

It is our American habit to assume that there is something irrelevant-even a little silly-about the past. Our relationship to former times is expressed as nostalgia, not history.

When our government first started studying "flying saucers" in the late forties, it never even occurred to anybody official to consider having a look at the past.

Here are two stories:

In the little town of Merkel, Texas, on April 26, 1897, a group of people going home from church at night allegedly saw a heavy object dragging along the ground. They followed it until it bounce across a railroad track and caught on one of the rails. It was an anchor, tied to a rope. When they looked up, they saw an "airship" with lighted windows and a headlight on the front brighter than the light of a locomotive. Ten minutes passed, and soon a man was seen coming down the rope. He was small, and wearing a blue sailor suit. When he saw the people he cut the rope and the ship sailed off into the night, leaving the anchor behind.

The small beings I first saw were dressed in dark blue coveralls. This is not a unique description of the visitors' garb; perhaps it is a sort of night uniform. But then there are the kobolds, dwarfs who stalked the mines of medieval Germany and gave their name to the mineral cobalt . . . and cobalt blue. Why? They wore dark blue coveralls, too.