by Colin Wilson
About to disappear behind clouds, it changed to orange again, it was moving very fast, and without sound.
Michalak now saw that the craft on the ground was changing colour, from red to grey-red, then light grey, then to the colour of ‘hot stainless steel, with a golden glow around it’.
There was an opening in the top of the craft, and a brilliant purple light, which hurt his eyes, poured out. Then he felt wafts of warm air, smelt burning sulphur, and heard a whirring noise like a small electric motor running very fast. There was also a hissing sound, like air being sucked into the craft. A door stood open in the side.
By now his fear and astonishment had subsided, and he concluded that it was an American space project, and that someone would appear at the door at any moment. He went close to it, and heard muffled voices above the rush of air. He called to ask if they were having trouble but received no reply. He tried calling out in Russian, German, Italian, French and Ukrainian. Still receiving no reply, he approached closer, placing green lenses over the goggles he was wearing (to avoid chips of flying quartz), because the light hurt his eyes.
He stuck his head inside the opening, and saw a maze of lights—beams of light like a laser light show (although he did not use this image), flashing randomly. When he withdrew his head, the door closed, and another ‘door’ dropped down from above. He touched the craft, and found it was hot enough to burn his glove.
Then, very quickly, the craft tilted, and he felt a scorching pain in his chest. As it took off, his shirt and undershirt burst into flames. He tore them off and threw them on the ground. Meanwhile, the craft changed colour, then disappeared. Michalak vomited and passed out several times as he struggled back to the main road.
This was Michalak’s story, and Craig went to investigate it two weeks later. A friendly taxi driver told him that Michalak had been in hospital, although Craig understood he was at home. Apparently he had been out in a helicopter to try to locate the site of the UFO landing, without success.
Craig met Michalak, and felt he was genuine and sincere. He saw the burnt undershirt, and photographed remains of burns on Michalak’s body, and also studied Michalak’s sketch of the craft—a typical flying saucer, with a dome on top and curved underside. And Michalak finally agreed to try to locate the site of the landing.
The next day they drove eighty-five miles out of Winnipeg, then off the highway to an abandoned gravel pit. Michalak proceeded to lead them, and often pointed out spots where he had chipped off rock with his hammer. Craig said that he got the impression Michalak was pretending to search rather than really searching. Finally, Michalak said he could not find the site that day, and would try another day. Craig suggested he should at least try a little longer. Michalak agreed, but was unsuccessful. Craig felt that, although Michalak talked as if he was leading them deep into the bush, they were really exploring the same area about two miles from the gravel pit. Finally, they gave up. Craig interviewed witnesses who had seen Michalak when he reached the highway, and men who manned a fire-watch tower; no one had noticed any UFOs that Saturday. And, after two or three more unsatisfactory days investigating this and other UFO reports, Craig went home.
Michalak had promised to telephone if he located the landing site, but he never phoned. Craig heard at second hand that he had finally located it. In a booklet he later published, Michalak said that when he had finally located the site, he also found the remains of the burnt shirt and a six-foot rule he left behind. A large circle of burnt grass, visible on a photograph of the site, left no doubt that something had landed there. Cracks in the rock on which the UFO landed showed traces of radioactivity. But Canadian officials told Craig that the radioactive material was similar to uranium ore from a nearby valley. Craig decided that it had probably been planted, and that the case was not worth pursuing.
Who can say whether he was right or wrong? Anyone who reads Craig’s account can sympathise with his feeling that he was wasting his time. He was quite obviously doing his best. If Michalak had located the site, he might have been more convinced.
On the other hand, why should Michalak have concocted the story? Even if he received his burns in some other way—by some accident—it is still hard to see why he claimed he had received them from a UFO.
Craig obviously felt that Michalak was reluctant to take him out to try to find the site of the encounter. But is that so strange? Surely anyone would prefer to go alone to try to locate the site—and then take witnesses there after it had been located. It is always embarrassing to do things under the gaze of other people—particularly an official ‘investigator’. The sheer desire to produce results may be counterproductive.
As to Craig’s impression that Michalak was crisscrossing the same site, about two miles from the road, it was probably correct. If Michalak felt that it was somewhere in the area, then he would obviously keep on looking there.
What is clear is that, as a member of an official committee, it was not Craig’s business to believe or disbelieve—simply to look for evidence. And, while he was in Winnipeg, this evidence was not forthcoming. He had every right to be unconvinced.
As to why Michalak should have concocted a false story, Craig would undoubtedly reply by relating the curious and instructive story of Major Y.
One day, two photographic slides were delivered to the Condon project office in Boulder, both of the same UFO. One was small and the image rather blurred, but the other was the best picture of a flying saucer they had seen—flat-bottomed, with a dome on top. It was brick-red in colour.
It had, apparently, been taken eighteen months earlier by an air force officer engaged on his last official flight before he retired. If this was genuine, it proved the existence of flying saucers beyond all doubt.
Major Y, who took the photograph, was apparently of the highest reliability. He had taken off in July 1966, intending to take some photographs of the mountains in western Utah, so had his camera with him. His copilot was studying a navigation problem when the UFO appeared off their wing, looking as if it was flying in a great arc to survey the plane. Major Y snapped a picture, then took another a few seconds later as it came closer, in the centre of his windscreen. It all took only a few seconds, and the copilot did not even look up.
But why, Craig wondered, had Major Y not reported it at the time, as he was obliged to under air force regulations?
Another puzzling point was the numbers on the slide mountings (which the developer had added). The ‘first’ picture, the blurred one, bore the number 14, yet the second one was labelled 11. Was Major Y mistaken about the order in which they were taken? And had he taken another two in between?
Craig and a colleague went to call on Major Y, now in a responsible civilian job, at his home in Denver. It was a beautiful house, and Major Y’s wife quite obviously believed that the photographs were genuine, and seemed slightly offended that the investigators wanted to ask questions that implied doubt.
The major himself seemed a decent man, honest and reliable; it seemed unlikely that he had any reason for faking the photographs. Craig asked if the major had told the copilot what he had seen. The major said that he told the copilot that he had just photographed something, and the copilot had replied, ‘That’s nice’. The major then said he asked the copilot if he had seen the object he had just photographed, and the copilot said he hadn’t.
So the copilot ought to be able to verify that Major Y had photographed something.
But why had Major Y not reported what he had seen? There were two reasons: first, he did not want to be ridiculed; and second, he had been piloting the plane without authorisation—he had been removed from flight status.
Craig asked about the misnumbering of the slide mountings, and the major said that most of the slides from that roll had been misnumbered when they were developed.
Other slides were produced from the same roll of film. It had been developed in December, nearly six months after the UFO photograph had been taken. The major and his wife expl
ained that they had taken the remaining photographs on the roll during a drive across the Rockies, after his retirement. They had also taken some photographs of a big snowstorm in October 1966.
Craig was not entirely happy. Would not a man who had just photographed a UFO shout at his copilot, ‘I’ve just photographed a UFO’? And would he wait six months before getting the film developed?
Back at the project office, Craig examined the photographs more closely. Each frame of such a roll is numbered before it leaves the factory. And the numbering on these frames left no doubt that the UFO pictures were taken later than the October snowstorm pictures—that is, months after the major’s retirement.
Craig tried to arrange a second interview with the major, to press him further, but the major was elusive—very busy with the garden. Finally, Craig asked him over the telephone about the misnumbering on the films. The major admitted that he did not even know that the slides themselves were numbered. Asked about how this discrepancy could have occurred—how the UFO pictures were numbered later than the snowstorm—he said that he might well have got mixed up about the rolls.
The fact that the major was unaware that the films themselves were numbered explains why he had thought he could get away with two fake UFO photographs. But it did not explain why such an apparently reliable and mature man had decided to perpetrate the hoax. Craig never found out, for after he returned the photographs—with a request for further explanations—he never heard from the major again.
Craig goes on to describe his experience with Jim and Coral Lorenzen, the founders of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO). They told him that they actually possessed a fragment of a flying saucer, a piece of magnesium far more pure than any then being created in any Earth laboratory. It came from a town called Ubatuba, near São Paulo, in Brazil. A man and his friend had been fishing on the beach when, it was claimed, a UFO swooped down at an incredible speed towards the sea. But, just before it hit the water, it managed to turn, and flew upwards. Suddenly, it exploded, showering fragments that looked like sparks from fireworks. The man and his friend picked up many fragments that had fallen on the beach, and they were as light as paper. The fisherman wrote an account of his experience to a newspaper columnist in Rio de Janeiro, although his signature was illegible.
Jim and Coral Lorenzen came into possession of one of these fragments, and sent it for analysis which, they said, revealed that it was incredibly pure magnesium.
The Lorenzens agreed to lend their sample to the Condon Committee. Craig had it analysed in a laboratory; but alas, it was not as pure as magnesium produced by the Dow chemical company.
Later, Craig came upon a report on the same sample from another laboratory—apparently made for the Lorenzens. It said that the magnesium was not at all pure—in fact, less so than commercially manufactured magnesium. And he was saddened to read, in a book by Coral Lorenzen, the comment that ‘it was not possible to determine whether the detected impurities were in the electrodes (used for analysis) or in the sample’. That, he felt, was just wishful thinking. Understandably, his opinion of the Lorenzens and their UFO research organisations took on a negative tinge.
The Lorenzens also told him that there was a strong piece of evidence in favour of a ‘close encounter’, in the form of a bent arrow, fired by a man called Donald Schrum at an alien ‘robot’.
The encounter, Craig learnt, had taken place in a remote wooded area called Cisco Grove, California, on 4 September 1964. Schrum had been out hunting with two friends, and had been separated from them. As dusk came on, he lit a fire, hoping they would see it. A light appeared in the sky, and Schrum thought it might be a helicopter, out looking for him. He climbed a tree, then saw a domelike disc with a flashing light on it. Some dark object fell to the ground. In the moonlight he saw some kind of craft land nearby. Then two small figures, dressed in silver suits, came out of the woods, and stood looking up at him. Later, a stocky creature, which seemed to be a robot, joined them; it had large red eyes and a slitlike opening for a mouth.
They seemed—to his relief—unable to climb. He tried lighting his cap, which was greasy with hair oil, and threw it down at them; that seemed to worry them. So Schrum went on lighting items of his clothing and dropping them down.
It seemed the robot’s mouth was not for eating. It would drop open like a trap and emit a puff of smoke, which would spread like mist; when it reached Schrum, he lost consciousness. Fortunately, he was wearing a long belt, with which he attached himself to the tree. The siege went on all night, and the creatures were joined by a second robot. After one of these periods of unconsciousness, Schrum woke up to find that his attackers had left. When he finally rejoined his companions, one of them said that he had also seen the flying object.
Understandably, Roy Craig felt this was too silly for words. It sounded like an episode from a child’s comic. But it seemed that the bent arrow was one of three that Donald Schrum had fired at the creatures, and so provided evidence of some sort.
First, Craig looked in an ephemeris to see what the moon had been doing that night; in fact, there was no moon. As to the arrow, with its tip bent at a right angle, he concluded this had been bent by a blow from the side, rather than by impact with a robot’s chest. Disgusted with the whole bizarre story, he made no attempt to contact Schrum’s hunting partners, but decided to forget the whole thing.
Now Jacques Vallee, who recounts the story in Passport to Magonia, agrees that it sounds unbelievable. But that, of course, is one of the basic problems about UFO encounters—at times, they sound as if they had been deliberately concocted to create incredulity. But if we dismiss the story as some kind of fantasy, we are left with the usual baffling problem: why did the witness invent anything so preposterous? Schrum did not seek publicity; the Lorenzens heard the story from Jacques Vallee and Allen Hynek, who had failed to persuade another investigation team, Project Blue Book, to take it seriously. If Schrum was lying for the fun of it, why did he not make his lie more believable?
This problem of what might be called ‘deliberate unbelievableness’ occurs again and again in UFO literature. Craig was lucky he was not asked to investigate the Sutton farm siege of 1955, one of the most outrageous examples of sheer absurdity in UFO history—it would surely have made him resign from the committee in disgust. The siege took place in Kentucky during the night of 21 August 1955, during which a family named Sutton, and married visitors named Taylor, stayed awake trying to hold off little shining men, who somersaulted backwards whenever struck by a bullet, with a noise like a shot being fired into a pail. One creature climbed on the kitchen roof; struck by two bullets, it fell—then floated forty feet and landed on a fence, and walked away. During a break in the siege, the whole family—eight adults and three children—fled in two cars to Hopkinsville, Kentucky, seven miles away, to summon the police. But the police could find nothing, and left—whereupon the siege resumed, with the shining men, three feet tall, peering in at the windows. They finally left at dawn.
It certainly sounds like a hoax—only one member of the group claims to have seen the UFO that brought the aliens, although a neighbour later said he saw its lights. Yet the whole family undoubtedly piled into two cars in the middle of the night to get the police, and undoubtedly did a lot of shooting. Those who have studied the case are unanimous in agreeing that something really happened that night; eleven people had no reason to lie.
The little shiny men did not even look like the ‘greys’ who feature in so many abduction cases. A sketch based on witnesses’ reports shows them as having huge, floppy ears, long sticklike legs and arms that came almost to their feet. Only one witness said she had not seen the goblins, and that was because she was too scared to look up.
Any reader of Craig’s book can see why he ended as a total unbeliever. As case after case failed to provide the solid evidence he hoped for, he must have become increasingly convinced that the whole thing was a tissue of illusions and deceit. I must admit that, even
when I had reached only the halfway mark, I felt much the same.
The problem with this state of mind is that it induces a kind of irritable impatience that is the reverse of open-mindedness. And I have only to turn to Coral Lorenzen’s book Flying Saucers (1965) to see what has gone wrong with even as honest an investigator as Roy Craig. She begins by describing how, when she was nine years old (in 1934), a friend pointed out a white object in the sky, which she thought was a parachute. Coral Lorenzen says she thought it was more like an open umbrella without ribs, and that it was travelling in a leisurely manner with an ‘undulating’ motion.
On 10 June 1947—now a young married woman—she was sitting on her back porch looking for meteors when she saw a tiny ball that rose quickly and vanished among the stars. In fact, June 1947 was a month in which dozens of reported sightings occurred, the most famous of which was Kenneth Arnold’s on 24 June. And there were many more sightings after this, which she lists and describes. The most impressive is described in a letter from a Mrs. King, who was leaving Mombasa at the end of June when she saw a huge, cigar-shaped vessel as long as the ship, which travelled alongside them for a few moments, then sped away, shooting flames from its rear.
Now clearly, Coral Lorenzen is in a totally different frame of mind from Roy Craig. She did not say to Mrs. King: ‘Come on, prove you saw it’. She has seen one—perhaps two—herself, and then gone on to collect hundreds of sightings and interview dozens of witnesses. She doesn’t need to be convinced that UFOs exist. She wants to know what they are, and what they want. She is half inclined to believe that they intend a mass landing, and that their intentions may not be entirely friendly. But her attitude throughout the book is one of intelligent questioning. There is no suggestion of a cultist, for whom flying saucers have become a kind of substitute for religion.