The UFO Singularity (11 page)

Liebson would go on to receive an award from the U.S. Navy that involved another wartime technology that allowed improved ability to perceive exotic technologies in our midst. This, of course, involved the use of radar systems. Prior to the war, the major countries in both the Allied Nations and the Axis Powers had worked toward perfecting radar technologies similar to those in
use today, with countries such as Canada and Australia developing their own during the conflict.
²³
Though we can say that certain varieties of radar
did
exist prior to the Second World War, it cannot be refuted that the technology would not be perfected until this very demanding period in our modern history.

Indeed, we see that an argument has begun to appear where, in the event that at least some UFOs did represent technologies that were not created on Earth during or immediately after the war years, humankind may simply have lacked the sophisticated applications necessary to observe them effectively prior to World War II. Maintaining this same line of thought, we might just as well say that the emergence of another kind of devastating technology during this period—atomic weaponry—might have caused our once-dim and uninteresting planet to have shone like a brilliant beacon through space, thus calling attention to a new race in the universe capable of harnessing the power of the atom. Based on this, we might also consider that any advanced technological society similar to us, had they become aware that a more primitive culture elsewhere in the universe had begun experimenting with atomic weaponry, might take interest in such dangerous new Earthly affairs.

But there are problems with leaping to the conclusion that the technology in question must have been extraterrestrial in nature. Rather obviously, when UFO reports began to be called into question seriously by scientists in the late
1940s and early 1950s, humankind had not yet managed to escape Earth’s own atmosphere. In other words, having not yet succeeded in reaching outer space, Occam’s Razor would again favor the notion that, because these exotic vessels are seen flying through the skies, they must come from outer space. Whenever possible, as philosopher Bertrand Russell and others have paraphrased, we seem to build constructions within our minds from known entities, which are then substituted in place of those things that remain unknown. Quite simply, we knew what UFOs were capable of, but we didn’t know
where
they were from, so we began leaping to conclusions that have permeated and stereotyped the serious study of unidentified objects in our skies ever since.

Considering all the available potentials, whether UFOs were from here on Earth or from outer space, it is clear that they began to rise to prevalence as a cultural phenomenon during and immediately after World War II. Thus, the work of novelist Mack Maloney managed to garner my attention, following the publication of an interesting non-fiction offering in 2011 called
UFOs in Wartime.
Mack’s general premise with this book was that UFO sightings and activity seem to increase during military conflicts. But exactly why is this the case? If it were for military purposes, thinking back to the reports of Foo Fighters and strange objects witnessed during World War II, and these strange craft were of terrestrial origin, why would they not have intervened in various aerial battles? Indeed,
a majority, if not virtually all reports of World War II Foo Fighters place these strange objects well enough out of reach, as if they had merely been interested in
observing
our military activities. Does this lead us back to the premise that UFO craft must have been alien in origin?

Perhaps not. Again, with regard to exotic (or seemingly exotic) technology coming to fruition during the Second World War, the premise that these might have been some kind of highly advanced Nazi technology has always seemed to remain a plausible, though also somewhat elusive possibility. During a conversation I had with Maloney in early 2012, I asked him exactly what his feelings were regarding a possible source behind reports of UFOs with regard to a link to Nazis and advanced propulsion methods they may have been developing for aircraft. In Maloney’s opinion, this was unlikely for five primary reasons
²⁴
:

1. There are no instances where Foo Fighters were reported firing on American or British bombers or other aircraft.

2. Much the same, there are no reports of these unidentified craft firing on grounded soldiers or ships at sea.

3. By 1943, dwindling resources in Nazi Germany would have made it unlikely that they could have obtained the kinds of supplies needed to construct advanced aircraft along the lines of purported Foo Fighters.

4. Had the Nazis been producing advanced saucer-shaped or other kinds of advanced aircraft with anti-gravitational capabilities, the Allies would have discovered an operation following the war on par with America’s Manhattan Project. Little, if any evidence for an operation of this magnitude was ever found.

5. At the end of the war, German scientists were distributed between Russia and the United States. Those that came to America, such as Werner Von Braun, worked closely with NASA and the American space program. It would seem highly unlikely that German rocket scientists, had they been aware of advanced propulsion methods during the War, would not supply this information for the eventual efforts toward entering outer space.

“My final point,” Maloney said, “is that, if the Germans had this kind of incredible super weapon technology, then why did they lose the war?” Indeed, if technology existed that could have presented the Nazis with such an advanced ability to outmaneuver enemy aircraft, it does not seem likely that this technology would be used so ineffectively in combat. On the other hand, we cannot discount the stories of Foo Fighters altogether; the truth seems to be lost to us someplace between two primary facts: that while Foo Fighters may have existed, they did not appear to be of known human origin.

Let us consider the previous statement entailing objects of
known human origin,
once more, and this time
perhaps more carefully. Indeed, we are reasonably certain that humans during the 1940s were not involved in the production of aircraft that could account for the Foo Fighter reports. Alternatively, we have explored earlier in this chapter the possibility that
secret
advanced technologies might occasionally undergo development as a result of private industrial interests. However, the idea that any private agency could have garnered the resources needed for this in the midst of a global conflict—in addition to somehow managing to carry on a secret, highly advanced (and thus, very costly) project such as this
behind the scenes
—seems almost ludicrous. Thus, it begins to become clear why scientists in the post-war years were so eager to commit to belief in an extraterrestrial source. After all, these things couldn’t be our own, could they?

“So if not Nazi technology,” I asked Mack during our discussion, “what were they?”

“I don’t know. I think that when I first started doing the book
UFOs in Wartime,
I really didn’t know, and I guess that I was just thinking along the lines of extraterrestrials, like everyone else. Since doing the book, doing the research, and just talking about it now for the last three or four months, I’m really coming around to a different idea.”

“What else could they be?” I asked. “What’s your theory?”

“My theory now is that these things represent time travelers from our own future, who are coming back to see history as it’s being made.”

Maloney admitted that he was hardly the first to come to this sort of conclusion. However, this idea nonetheless seemed most likely, to him, due to a number of criteria it could potentially explain:

You obviously have a technology, somewhere, that created these Foo Fighters, that demonstrated these unbelievable characteristics like flying incredibly fast, appearing and disappearing, and so forth. If
you
had that kind of technology, then why would you choose to ride 100 feet off the wing of a Lancaster bomber as it’s bombing Berlin in the middle of the night, with anti-aircraft fire going on all around you, night fighters, and all the confusion and utter chaos of combat? Why would you do that, unless you wanted to be there to see history as it’s being made? That theory fits in a lot of holes with regard to what UFOs are, and frankly, I think it fills in more holes in the puzzle than the “little green men from Mars” theory. That’s what I’m leaning towards, is that they
are
time travelers from our own future, coming back to see history as it’s being made.

Admittedly, this idea is where a lot of people tend to get lost when it comes down to offering
plausible
theories as to what kinds of technology could be behind the UFO enigma. Modern physics remains in a skeptically fueled game of tug-o-war over the issue of whether literal travel through time could even be possible (as we began to outline already in the previous chapter). But the theory has
nonetheless proven to be an attractive one among many in the field. Recall again Whitley Strieber’s notion from earlier that the figures from his own abduction experiences might have been time travelers—and humans, no less—assuming the disguise of extraterrestrial visitors.

For all we know, a humanity several decades—or perhaps even several
centuries
—from now might appear quite alien to us. In fact, if the kinds of changes anticipated by the futurists of today do indeed occur, there may also be little need for any kind of “disguises,” either. We, as the humans of today, are painfully bound to the limits of our perception as biological entities. The “humans” of tomorrow, having mastered the integration of machinery and advanced synthetic sciences into the very fabric of our species, may not only
look
very different, but could also be freed from the bounds of natural limitation that our biology imposes. These humans may have mastered technologies that, though existent, remain in their infancy today, ranging from genetic hybridization between different animal species, to functional telepathy and other psychic abilities. These future humans—or
homo mechanicus,
to borrow the name bestowed on them by my colleague Dr. Maxim Kammerer—might be an entirely new species, of sorts—the direct result of an intelligent race that had taken evolution into its own hands. Beings such as these may indeed be capable of seeing past the illusions that space and time place before humans today, and their visions, as well as perhaps their abilities to
manipulate
their reality, could present circumstances that you or I
would have great difficulty understanding, whether that may involve direct manipulation of the flow of time, or other wild and frightening prospects.

Albeit somewhat within the framework of an extraterrestrial model, the astute Dr. J. Allen Hynek seemed to describe almost
perfectly
such an advanced civilization decades ago:

I hold it entirely possible that a technology exists, which encompasses both the physical and the psychic, the material and the mental. There are stars that are millions of years older than the sun. There may be a civilization that is millions of years more advanced than man’s. We have gone from Kitty Hawk to the moon in some seventy years, but it’s possible that a million-year-old civilization may know something that we don’t.… I hypothesize an “M&M” technology encompassing the mental and material realms. The psychic realms, so mysterious to us today, may be an ordinary part of an advanced technology.
²⁵

Although that advanced technology may not exist here among us today (at least in an accessible way), it could very well be that parts of what we perceive now as some variety of alien technology are, in fact, something of our very own.

They are the playthings, in a sense, of our eventual progeny.

I’ll give you the facts—all of the facts—you decide.

—Edward J. Ruppelt,
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects

T
he year 1973 was pivotal in history for many, especially in the United States. The floodgates that had been holding back the Watergate scandal surrounding Richard Nixon and his staff began to break open, and by late March the last remaining U.S. soldiers involved in the prolonged and murky Vietnam conflict had finally returned home. The World Trade Center, which in the post-9/11 world of today will remain an icon of American perseverance in times of trouble, was first opened to the public in April of that year. Summer would follow, bringing with it one of the longest full solar eclipses of the entire millennium, bathing the Earth in darkness for more than seven minutes. And only a few months later, in November, NASA would launch the 84-day
Skylab 4
mission, consisting of three astronauts propelled toward the orbiting Space Station on a Saturn IB rocket.

November 1973 would also prove to be a pivotal time in the lives of a handful of youthful commuters, who had been traveling along a lonely stretch of highway late one evening among the rolling hills of Georgia’s Piedmont Plateau. Though incredibly, although the circumstances here
did
involve some variety of advanced aircraft, one thing is certain: No Saturn rocket, or any other kind of well-known manmade vehicle, can account for what was seen.

It was just after midnight on a Sunday in late November, and 20-year-old Mike Reese was driving north along Highway 23/42 toward his home in Forest Park, just south of Atlanta, Georgia. Mike’s wife, his sister, Pam, his newborn daughter, and Pam’s two young girls were all with him in the car—a 1963 aquamarine Dodge Polara with a push-button transmission—returning together from a weekend visit with his wife’s parents in nearby Monticello. Having just passed the town of Jackson, a light fog had begun to drift through the valley, and the chilly night air had kept them awake as they peered across the landscape, growing ever nearer to their next junction, a little town called Locust Grove. From here, they had planned to take the short Bill Gardner Parkway over to Interstate 75—a regular route for them—and one they would follow the rest of the way home. Though they were making good time, work would arrive very early tomorrow for Mike, who at the time had a job with the Georgia Division of Transportation.