by Colin Wilson
And, quite obviously, she and Roy Craig are never going to agree, simply because their minds are on completely different tracks.
Craig was never to find the answer he was looking for, and—to do him justice—hoping to find. But this is partly because, by the time he was six months into his investigation, he had become so wearily cynical that he was convinced there was very little to investigate.
The disadvantages of this attitude can be seen clearly in another of Craig’s cases, that of Patrolman Herb Schirmer.
On the night of 3 December 1967, at about 2:30 a.m., the twenty-two-year-old ex-marine was on the edge of Ashland, Nebraska, when he thought he saw a stalled truck at an intersection of Highway 63. When he turned his spotlight on it, he was staggered to see that it was a UFO—a football-shaped object on three tripod-like legs, with red lights on it. Seconds later, it took off. He returned to the station, and wrote in his logbook: ‘Saw a flying saucer at the junction of Highway 6 and 63. Believe it or not!’
One thing puzzled him. It was now 3:00 a.m., and it took only ten minutes to get from the spot where he had seen the UFO to the station. What had happened to the other twenty minutes? He felt sick, and had a tingling sensation all over his body. There was also the odd fact that he had a red welt on his neck.
Schirmer began to suffer nightmares. He woke up trying to strangle his wife, or to handcuff her. He also had a ringing noise in his ears.
His sighting came to the attention of the Condon Committee, who asked him to come to their headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. There he told his story of the football-shaped UFO. The committee was particularly interested in the missing twenty minutes, as well as in the welt on his neck and the tingling sensation he had experienced.
‘They really hammered me on those missing minutes’.
The committee decided to try the effect of hypnosis, and a professional psychologist swung a pendulum back and forth in front of his eyes. After a while, the psychologist asked him if there was more to tell, and Schirmer said yes.
Craig’s account is not as clear as it might be. He is obviously bored with the whole thing, and suspects that Schirmer was only pretending to be hypnotised. Instead of quoting a transcript of the session, he merely mentions that Schirmer said he had been taken on board, shown the propulsion system of the craft, and that it was from another galaxy, whose inhabitants were friendly. This, says Craig dismissively, is ‘typical UFO lore’. And the psychology professor who did the hypnosis admitted that he personally believed that extraterrestrials are conducting a survey of the Earth. The implication is that the psychologist asked leading questions that prompted Schirmer’s replies.
Craig has no more to say about the case, except that he would like to see physical evidence of a landing, rather than witness a hypnotic session, where the interviewer may merely be stimulating the subject’s imagination or responsiveness to suggestion.
What he does not go on to tell us is what happened next: that Schirmer went back home, and was soon promoted to head of the department, becoming Ashland’s youngest police chief. But as the headaches continued, until he was ‘gobbling down aspirin like it was popcorn’, he quit the job.
It seems that the psychologist at Boulder had not told him what he had revealed under hypnosis, and he badly wanted to know. Therefore he contacted Eric Norman, a writer on flying saucers, who advised him to go to a professional hypnotist. On 8 June 1968, with Norman and the author Brad Steiger present, Schirmer was hypnotised by Loring G. Williams, and regressed to the day of the encounter.
Now he told how, when he switched on his spotlight, the object had flown over to him, and how its occupants had approached his car. One of the beings produced a device that enveloped the car in green gas.
When he tried to draw his revolver, the alien pointed a rodlike device at him, which paralysed him. And, soon after that, something was pressed against the side of his neck, which left the red welt.
The being asked, ‘Are you the watchman of this place?’ Then it pointed at a power plant and asked, ‘Is that the only source of power you have?’ He was also asked about a nearby reservoir. He gathered that the visitors wanted to charge up the power units of their spacecraft.
Next he was invited to come on board. A circular doorway opened in the bottom of the craft, and a ladder appeared. Schirmer noted that the ladder and the interior of the craft were unusually cold—an observation that tends to recur in abduction cases.
In a large control room, Schirmer observed video consoles which showed areas outside the ship. He was told that the ship was a small observation craft, made from pure magnesium, and that it generated a force field around itself when landing. He was also told that they had bases on Venus and other planets, as well as underground bases on Earth at one of the poles, and on the coast off Florida. All this was communicated in a kind of broken English, and the voice seemed to come from the creature’s chest area.
The crewmen were between four and five feet tall, and wore silvery uniforms, with an emblem of a winged serpent on the right breast. They wore helmets with antennae sticking out of the left side. They looked at Schirmer with unblinking eyes, and he did not notice if they were breathing.
The ‘leader’ also made the interesting admission that the UFO inhabitants want to puzzle people, and to confuse the public’s mind. Schirmer said, ‘They put out reports slowly to prepare us . . .’.
The leader was pushing buttons as he spoke to Schirmer, and he felt signs of headache. He was told that they were putting things in his mind, and that they always did that with everyone they contacted.
Contactees, he was told, were chosen at random, because they happened to be in a lonely place, or sometimes because they were the son or daughter of someone who was already a contactee. (This was 1967, long before Budd Hopkins and others began to suspect that abductions sometimes occurred repeatedly in families.) The ‘aliens’ had been observing Earth for a long period of time, and felt that if contactees slowly released information about what had happened to them, it would somehow help the aliens.
They had a programme called breeding analysis, in which some humans had been involved. He saw a kind of logbook on a table, but said that the writing was more like ‘the stuff we see in movies about Egypt’ (i.e., hieroglyphics).
Schirmer was told, ‘Watchman, one day you will see the universe’. He was also told that he would be contacted twice more in his life. The being then told him, ‘I wish that you would not tell that you have been aboard this ship . . . You will not speak wisely about this night’.
And, the next thing Schirmer knew, he was watching the spacecraft take off, with no memory whatsoever of what had happened since he first saw it.
We can see why Craig felt dubious about the case—particularly in the light of his negative experiences so far. But we can also see that the whole story is a great deal more plausible than Craig lets on. He dismisses it all as possible suggestion by the hypnotist, ignoring the fact that Schirmer went back to the police station twenty minutes later and logged the sighting. The tingling sensation, the headaches and nightmares that followed suggest that something had happened during that twenty minutes, and that Schirmer was affected by radiation.
When Schirmer went home after the first hypnotic session, he became police chief, and yet resigned from a good job because of the headaches. This again suggests that he is not inventing the story for the sake of attention. Finally, his need to know what happened led him to a second hypnosis, when so much interesting information emerged—much of it anticipating things suggested by Budd Hopkins twenty years later—that it provides clues to many other abductions, and possibly to the motivation of the aliens in general. For all these reasons, the Schirmer case seems obviously genuine, and Craig’s refusal to take it seriously demonstrates the danger of developing a negative attitude.
Was Craig never convinced by any of his witnesses? Only in one case—an air force colonel, Lewis B. Chase, who encountered a UFO when he was commanding a B-57 on
18 September 1957. They took off from Forbes, Texas, at night, and flew down the coast over the Gulf of Mexico, then towards the Fort Worth–Dallas area. Over Jackson, Mississippi, Chase saw a ‘real bright light’ coming towards them at about their own altitude. He told the crew to prepare for evasive action. The light came on at what Lewis called an ‘impossible closure rate’, so fast that the colonel had no time to react as it crossed the nose of the aeroplane. He asked the copilot if he saw it, and the copilot replied cautiously, ‘I did if you did’. Then they joked about having seen a flying saucer. The radar operator soon said that he had picked it up again, staying abreast of them about ten miles away—at about 425 miles per hour. The colonel tried slowing right down, then accelerating to top speed; still it stayed alongside—although now visible only on radar. The colonel called Fort Worth–Dallas, and they told him they could see both of them on the ‘scope’.
The invisible UFO now shot ahead of them. Then its light came on again—‘it was huge—not a small ball of fire’. Chase increased speed again, and had almost caught up when the light went out. The plane made a turn—at that speed taking about thirty miles to do so—and they saw the UFO again. Again they tried to close in, and again the UFO vanished—this time, even off the scope.
They decided it was time to return to base. Now the UFO again appeared on scope, and followed them for miles. They finally lost it over Oke City.
Chase and his copilot were deeply impressed by its ability to vanish, then appear elsewhere, as if it had instant ‘relocation ability’. The copilot and radar operator verified Chase’s story, and the radar operator commented, ‘Two different people were tracking on radar sets, two people were watching it visually, and I was watching it electronically . . . Whenever we’d lose it, we’d all lose it. There were no buts about it. It went off!’
Craig’s team tracked down the original report in the Blue Book archives, and Craig toyed with a few explanations, such as an optical mirage. But he has to admit that they all failed to fit the facts, and that this UFO seemed genuine.
In February 1968, the Condon Committee began to run into trouble when two of its members, David Saunders and Norman Levine, decided that Dr. Condon was engaged in a kind of cover-up. They had found an office memorandum from Robert Low, one of the project’s organisers, which seemed to demonstrate that the whole exercise was designed to pull the wool over the eyes of the public. Low had written:
Our study would be conducted almost exclusively by nonbelievers 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 the image of a group of nonbelievers trying their best to be objective but having an almost zero expectation of finding a saucer.
(from Craig, UFOs: In Insider’s View, 1995)
Craig had actually found this memorandum, and shown it to Levine. And Saunders and Levine had shown the memorandum to a critic of the Condon Committee’s methods, Dr. James McDonald, himself a ‘believer’; as a result, Saunders and Levine were fired. They then decided to publish their own ‘rival’ report, and asked Craig to join the mutiny. Craig declined. He pointed out that Low’s memorandum did not represent the views of Dr. Condon, and that, in any case, Low had never had any power to set an agenda for the committee. Condon had agreed that all views would be fairly represented in the final report.
In fact, the publication of the report in January 1969 was a disaster. John Fuller, the author of a book about a UFO ‘flap’ at Exeter, New Hampshire, in the mid-1960s, wrote a devastating article for Look magazine, called ‘The Flying Saucer Fiasco’, with a subtitle: ‘The Half-million Dollar Cover-up on Whether UFOs Really Exist’. Craig still feels that all this was unfair and unjustified. Condon was an honest man who did his best. The unfortunate Bob Low, who had only been expressing his own sceptical view (which he had no power to impose on anyone else) became a public scapegoat, and saw his world collapse around him; he was virtually sacked. The book itself, which according to Newsweek would be ‘an automatic bestseller’ was a flop. Condon became the subject of endless cartoons—one showing him being kidnapped by little green men, while a friend shouts, ‘Tell them you don’t believe in them’. And the name ‘Condon Report’ became a synonym for an official cover-up, a whitewash.
Craig’s book makes it very clear that this was unfair, and that everyone did his best to be honest and unbiased. But he does admit that changes made in the introduction to his chapter on the physical evidence for UFOs, by the editor Dan Gillmor, enraged him by incorporating ‘a cynical attitude which was not mine’.
What becomes quite clear is that a project like the Condon Committee investigation was simply the wrong way to reach an unbiased conclusion on UFOs. Most of the investigators claimed to be open-minded and unprejudiced. But they were men like Craig—decent, hard-headed and simply disinclined to believe that UFOs were real. And, after they had all encountered fiascos like Craig’s owl incident, they were no longer unbiased, but strongly inclined to be dismissive.
Yet Craig himself encountered at least two cases that he found convincing. One was the B-57 incident with Colonel Chase, the other a sighting at Beverley, Massachusetts, in which three women saw a strange object, which came down right over their heads—a flat-bottomed metal disc about the size of an automobile, with glowing lights around its top. Two policemen also saw the object, and verified this to Condon and Norman Levine.
The ‘alternative report’, by David Saunders, came out under the title UFOs—Yes!—Where the Condon Committee Went Wrong. Craig points out that this also contained a certain amount of nonsense—for example, mentioning the Ubatuba magnesium sample as a convincing proof of the reality of UFOs, without mentioning the laboratory analysis which showed that it was not as pure as the Lorenzens said it was. But, from the publishing point of view, the alternative report was not a great deal more successful than the original. It seemed the public did not want Condon in any form. Condon died in 1974, five years after his report was published, saddened by the hostility of scientific colleagues, and baffled that his attempt to arrive at an honest conclusion about UFOs had ended in such disaster.
4
THE LABYRINTHINE PILGRIMAGE
OF JACQUES VALLEE
As I read Roy Craig’s book, it slowly became clear to me why there is such a deep reluctance to take UFOs seriously. I think most of us are perfectly willing to concede that they may exist. But we also feel that, whether they do or not, they are never likely to impinge on our personal lives.
Now this could well be a major error. Ever since that early wave of sightings in 1947, their number has gone on increasing. To begin with, UFOs were merely distant objects seen in the sky, which might or might not have been weather balloons, helicopters, or some other terrestrial object. Cranks and imposters increased the sense of scepticism by describing how they had met the occupants of flying saucers and been taken on trips to the planets. It all sounded like harmless lunacy.
Then the abduction reports began, and became increasingly difficult to dismiss. And now that abduction reports run into thousands, and come from all over the world, it becomes clear that this is something we would be stupid to ignore. This is no longer a story that cannot possibly affect the rest of us, like the Loch Ness monster or the Abominable Snowman. This could conceivably affect the whole human race.
Of course, it may simply go away. But, if past decades are anything to go by, the phenomenon will keep on demanding our attention until it finally gets it.
Craig’s section on J. Allen Hynek underlines the point. Craig refers to him as one of the ‘casualties’ of the Condon Report. And, in Craig’s sense, this was undoubtedly true. For Hynek, once the official mouthpiece of the sceptics, slowly became convinced that UFOs really exist, and that to try to ignore them or dismiss them would be dang
erously short-sighted.
Hynek was a curious figure. An astronomer and an expert on artificial satellites, he became involved in investigating UFOs in 1948, as astronomical consultant to the US Air Force. His job was to examine reports of flying saucers, and to apply his specialist knowledge to determine how many could be dismissed as sightings of the planet Venus, lenticular clouds, reflections due to ‘temperature inversions’, and so on. He admitted later, ‘I had joined my scientific colleagues in many a hearty guffaw at the “psychological postwar craze” for flying saucers . . .’. And when he was asked to act as consultant for the air force, he saw it as a ‘golden opportunity to demonstrate to the public how the scientific method works, how the application of the impersonal and unbiased logic of the scientific method (I conveniently forgot my own bias for the moment) could be used to show that flying saucers were figments of the imagination’.
Hynek also tells a story about how, at a reception for astronomers in 1968, word spread among the guests that lights performing strange manoeuvres in the sky had been spotted. The astronomers joked and bantered about it, but not one went outside to look.
Such indifference is, of course, by no means unusual; it is part of the human condition—as demonstrated, for example, on 21 August 1955, when Billy Ray Taylor went into the farmyard of his friend Elmer Sutton to get a drink from the well, then rushed back and told everyone that he had just seen a UFO landing in a nearby gulch. Far from being excited, the assembled company was not even curious enough to go outside and look. Half an hour or so later, the ‘siege of the Sutton place’ at Hopkinsville—described in the previous chapter—began.
Hynek demonstrated ‘how the scientific method works’ in March 1966, when eighty-seven female students of Hillside College, Michigan, observed a light the size of a football hovering over a swampy area; it approached the women’s dormitory, and apparently reacted to passing cars. The next day, five people, including two policemen, saw a large glowing object over a swampy area. Allen Hynek, now the astronomical adviser to the official study of UFOs, Project Blue Book, went along to investigate, and suggested at a conference in the Detroit Press Club that the ‘UFOs’ might be swamp gas. (Swamp gas was very unlikely in March.) A howl of derision went up around the nation, and Hynek acquired a reputation as one of the ignoble instruments of an official cover-up. One UFO writer, John Keel, even declared that Hynek had been ordered to dismiss the sightings as swamp gas, on pain of being fired by the air force. This is almost certainly untrue. But Hynek suddenly became the man UFO enthusiasts loved to hate—although, oddly enough, the swamp-gas incident turned him into the best-known ufologist in the United States.