Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel (14 page)

Fortunately, there have not been any verifiable reports of human mutilations in UFO flap areas, but there have been several rather mysterious deaths. Some were apparently caused by lightning, but others resulted from
concussion,
distinguishable by bleeding from the nose, mouth, and ears.

The 1973 UFO wave followed the basic patterns. As in earlier flaps, the key witnesses were schoolteachers. Decoy manifestations (such as the now-famous Pascagoula, Mississippi case involving two fisherman) diverted the press and generated more “outer space” propaganda, just as the sheriffs of the Midwest went hunting for “rustlers” and “devil cultists.”

The UFO phenomenon also picked up in other places, such as South America and Scandinavia. Mystery submarines reappeared in the Norwegian fjords in November, driving the Norwegian Navy bananas. New HITI (holes in the ice) turned up in several Swedish lakes in Jan. ’74, prompting new official investigations. It was all very hush-hush.

In 1973, there was a sharp increase in cases in which UFO witnesses received mysterious red marks on their neck, on the major nerve just below the ear. Persons suffering such marks usually have absolutely no memory of the period when they acquired it. They simply see a strange light or object approaching their car and then – zap – the next thing they know, they are home in their own bed, wondering if it was all just a dream.

CHAPTER 6

THE FLYING SAUCER EVIDENCE EVERYONE IGNORES –
SAGA
MAGAZINE, JUNE 1973

Somewhere in California, the U.S. Air Force maintains a warehouse full of carefully catalogued scraps of metal, and at least one completely intact flying saucer. In that same warehouse, there are several glass tanks of formaldehyde containing the bodies of a group of tiny humanoids retrieved from a UFO that crashed in the Southwest in the late 1940s.

At least, that’s the story that’s been handed down by some American ufologists for the past 25 years. And, like a great many popular flying saucer beliefs, it’s all fiction. It was originated partly in a newspaper hoax first published in Mexico. It was given immortality by humorist Frank Scully in his 1950 bestseller
Behind the Flying Saucers.
Scully first heard the rumor from an oilman who said he had gotten it straight from a flying saucer pilot. Later, after Scully’s sources had been tracked down and exposed by other reporters, he publicly repudiated the whole thing. But the rumor goes marching on; the Air Force still receives letters from newcomers to the UFO scene demanding the truth about those pickled spacemen. When Air Force public relations officers reply that there is no substance to the rumor, the UFO enthusiasts howl, “Coverup!” and accuse the government of keeping evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial flying saucers from the public.

A far more bitter truth is the sobering fact that the UFO enthusiasts and their organizations have overlooked a mountain of evidence themselves, often suppressing such evidence because it doesn’t conform with their dogged belief in extraterrestrial visitations. If they had systematically collected all the physical materials dropped from flying saucers in the past 25 years, they would now have their own warehouse full of proof.

The problem is most of the debris found in the wake of UFO sightings and landings turns out to be rather ordinary – largely aluminum, magnesium, and silicon. These are common earthly materials. The UFO enthusiasts have been looking for, and expecting, something far more exotic.

Unfortunately, after all these years of research, study, and investigation by thousands of people and scores of scientists operating outside the Air Force and government, there is still no evidence to back up the notion that flying saucers come from outer space.
There is, on the other hand,
considerable evidence that real UFOs are of earthly manufacture and are piloted by normal human beings
(excluding those landings and contacts that seem more in the nature of psychic or psychological phenomena). What’s more, there is evidence that persons who dress and look like us (and probably
are
earthlings) are often engaged in collecting UFO artifacts, arriving on the scene before the original witnesses have had a chance to tell anyone about what they have just seen.

Today, it’s popular for ufologists to speculate that the CIA is responsible for some of these mysterious events. But the CIA didn’t come into being until 1947, and these strange Men in Black (MIB) were busy 50 years before that, during the UFO waves of 1896-97 and 1909!

Shortly after a UFO landing in Wales in May 1909, a clerk reported that he had seen five “foreigners” at the site, taking measurements and snapping pictures (UK
Daily Mail,
May 20, 1909). There have been thousands of similar stories since then. They have produced an elaborate lore and inspired acute paranoia among many ufologists. No one has yet managed to resolve the simple basic question: who are these “foreigners” and what is their purpose and interest?

These mystery men show a peculiar penchant for visiting isolated areas in northern Canada, Alaska, South America, and other out-of-the-way places. Usually, investigators stumble across their trail rather accidentally, and then labor to find an acceptable frame of reference for them. The CIA takes a good deal of the blame today, even in Spain.

A number of Spanish ufologists are convinced that the CIA is playing games with them, trying to interfere with their contacts with an interplanetary race from
Ummo.
In case you have never heard of Ummo, it is supposed to be a planet revolving around a star called “Wolf 424,” about 14 light-years from earth. The Ummoans have been leading persistent Spanish investigators on a merry chase for several years.

The Ummoans have supplied us with some first-rate physical evidence, neatly embossed with their symbol. They even correspond with Spanish ufologists, stamping the pages of their letters with the symbol. This may sound ridiculous, but the whole story is quite bizarre and impressive.

On Feb. 6, 1966, a circular flying object made a brief landing near the village of Aluche, a suburb of Madrid. It was seen by a group of soldiers at an ammunition dump, and by several civilians as well. As it took off and flew overhead, the witnesses reported seeing a large symbol on the belly of the saucer. It resembled two curved lines with a straight line between them. The sighting was widely publicized in Spain at the time. (And, of course, that was the year in which widespread sightings in the U.S. were making headlines.)

Sixteen months later, on June 1, 1967, another saucer-shaped object bounced at treetop level over the Madrid suburb of San Jose de Valderas. Again, this was a multiple-witness event with unrelated people reporting the object from several different positions. Like the Aluche saucer, this one bore a large symbol on its underside – two curved lines with a straight line between them.

Symbols have been observed on UFOs before and since, but this is one of the rare cases in which the same symbol has appeared in two different incidents. A wide variety of markings (crosses, squares, semicircles with arrows in them, Greek-like letters, etc.) have been seen only once over the years.

Two of the people in San Jose de Valderas had cameras and snapped photos of the object. One set of negatives was later turned over to the photo editor of the newspaper
Informaciones.
The other photographer, Antonio Pardo, sent his pictures to Marius Lieget, author of a book on flying saucers. The photos show a standard saucer-shaped object with wide rim in the center. The symbol is clearly visible in one picture.

About three miles from San Jose de Valderas, the object landed near a restaurant called La Ponderosa. Its flight had been seen by a large number of people, including the students of Convent College. When the local people went out to investigate, they found three rectangular marks in the soil, forming an equilateral triangle with sides measuring about 18 feet. They also found a number of small metal tubes scattered around the site. Antonio Pardo later claimed he bought one of these tubes from a local boy. The boy told Pardo he had opened it with a pair of pliers, and found it contained a liquid that quickly evaporated. It also contained two green plastic strips, each stamped with a symbol like the one seen on the saucer.

A few days later, the people in the area received printed circulars offering a reward of 18,000 pasetas (about $260 at that time) for each tube forwarded to one Henri Dagousset at a post office box in Madrid. The circular contained a photograph of one of the tubes and details of its size. Later efforts to locate Dagousset failed. So the mystery remains: who was he, and why was he offering such a large sum for the tubes?

Pardo’s tube was submitted to the Spanish National Technical Institute for Aeronautics and Space Research. Their analysis stated the tube was made of “nickel of an extraordinarily high degree of purity.” The plastic was polyvinyl fluoride. It was not available commercially, but the Dupont Company in the U.S. was then making small quantities of polyvinyl fluoride for
missile
nose cones! No one else was manufacturing the stuff. So how did these samples of a classified material end up in a field near Spain?

Nickel tubes of high purity have another use. They are an important component of the machinery used to handle fluoride gasses in the manufacture of fissionable materials for our atomic
missiles
and bombs.

Although two Spanish ufologists, Rafael Farriols and Antonio Liobet, found many reliable witnesses to the overflight and landing of the object, Antonio Pardo became something of a mystery man. After he sent the photographs and tube to Lieget, he seems to have vanished.

In the aforementioned landing in Wales in 1909, the occupants of the strange flying machine left behind a mess of junk including a spare part for a tire valve manufactured in France, but not distributed in Wales. Apparently this was a ploy to lead the witnesses into thinking they had seen a French flying machine (aeronautical historians reject this possibility).

But the mystery guests overplayed their hand. On May 7, 1909, Egerton S. Free of Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, England, reportedly saw a long, sausage-shaped dirigible hovering about 60 feet above the ground. When his wife checked the spot, she found a steel and rubber bag, five feet long, weighing 35 pounds. It was stamped with the words “Muller Fabrik Bremen,” so when free discussed his sighting with newspapermen, he automatically speculated that the mysterious dirigible had come from Germany.

A few days later, two strangers, “foreigners,” appeared at the Free estate, studied the beach where the object had hovered, and closely examined the area.

“The men hovered about my house persistently for five hours,” Free said in an article in the
East Anglian Daily Times,
May 18, 1909. “When the servant girl set out to church, she heard them conversing in a foreign tongue. Finally they came up to her, one on each side, and one of the men spoke to her in a strange language. The girl was so frightened that she ran back to my house, and would not again leave for church.” (We are indebted to British researcher Cal Grove for uncovering this report, and about 30 others from the year 1909.)

Incidentally, the steel and rubber object was eventually identified as part of a target used by the Royal Navy for gunnery practice.

A subtle variation of this particular game was repeated many times in the U.S. and Europe during the 1960s. After a rash of sightings in the area, a conventional weather balloon would conveniently turn up in some conspicuous spot. (One was even found on the front lawn of a small-town mayor in Ohio.) The police and newspapers would pounce on the balloon with glee and announce that the mystery had been solved. But in investigating many of these weather balloon cases, we had to conclude that the balloons were deliberately planted. By whom? Perhaps by whoever planted the tire valve in Wales and the gunnery target in Essex.

Perhaps UFOs have been using the old “crippled submarine” tactic over these many years. That is, they have been dumping all kinds of extraneous garbage across the landscape to confuse and mislead us, just as our submarines released oil and debris in WWII when under attack. The fact that so much of this UFO debris consists of ordinary earthly materials has led many investigators to erroneously label authentic UFO sightings and landings as hoaxes. The “hardware boys,” as the evidence-seeking ufologists are called, have been blindly seeking exotic, non-earthly materials and rejecting everything else.

One of the first pieces of evidence was “a large wheel made of aluminum, about three feet in diameter, and turbine in shape” that was dropped rather deliberately at the feet of a farmer in Pennfield, MI, in April 1897. According to the testimony of George Parks, published in the Detroit
Evening News,
April 15, 1897, he and his wife observed “a very bright object that appeared to be about 100 feet from the earth and swiftly approaching.” It made a humming sound and dropped the wheel as it passed overhead. There was a massive wave of sightings of strange flying machines throughout the U.S. that year. Since it is illogical that any “spaceship” constructed by a “superior technology” could travel all the way to this planet and then fall apart so easily, we can only assume that such incidents have been very deliberate.

Since 1897 it has been a common practice for UFOs to discharge mundane materials at their landing sites. The 1909 French tire valve was just the beginning. In more recent times, these drops have consisted of more sophisticated materials.

Frequently a major UFO sighting with multiple witnesses will be followed by a series of weird manipulations designed to discredit the witnesses and cast doubt on the whole event. The record shows that even official investigators for the U.S. Air Force were often taken in by such manipulations in the 1950s, and this undoubtedly contributed to the government’s “negative” stance. For example, Air Force investigators discredited an alleged UFO landing at Glassboro, NJ in 1964 because they found a small quantity of potassium nitrate at the site. Although there were holes in the ground, identical in size and shape to the holes found at other landing sites, and the surrounding trees were damaged, the Air Force decided that the existence of potassium nitrate – commonly used in explosives – was proof of a human hoax. But similar chemicals have been found at other sites around the world.