The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  57

  Unidentified Flying Objects

  “Flying Saucers” have undoubtedly been the great mystery of the era that followed the Second World War, and theories to explain them have ranged from the belief that they are superior beings from another planet (or another dimension) to the suggestion that they are some kind of supernatural occurrence, allied to ghosts. Among intellectuals the most popular theory is that of Jung, who suggested that UFOs (unidentified flying objects) are “projections” of the unconscious mind, which is a polite, scientific way of saying that they have no more objective reality than the pink elephants of a dipsomaniac. But most of these Jungians choose to ignore – or are unaware of – Jung’s later retraction of this view; he told his niece not long before his death that he had come to accept that UFOs are real objects.

  The story of modern sightings began on 24 June 1947 when a businessman named Kenneth Arnold was flying his private plane near Mount Rainier in Washington State; against the background of the mountain, he saw nine shining discs travelling very fast – he estimated their speed at a thousand miles an hour, far beyond the speed of which any aircraft was capable at that time. Arnold said they were flying in formation, like geese, and that they wove in and out of the mountain peaks; he later compared their flight to a “saucer skipped across the water”. So UFOs came to be referred to as “flying saucers”.

  Arnold’s story was widely reported in the American Press, for he had a good reputation and was taken seriously – he had been out searching for the wreckage of a lost plane at the time he made the sighting, and obviously had no reason to invent such a story. Four days later, two pilots and two intelligence officers saw a bright light performing “impossible manoeuvres” over Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, and in Nevada on the same day another pilot saw a formation of “unidentified flying objects”. As these and other sightings were reported the Press began to give prominence to stories of flying saucers, and by the end of that year there had been hundreds of sightings – a number that soon grew into thousands.

  In January of the following year, 1948, an “unidentified object” was spotted in the sky above Godman Air Force Base in Kentucky. Three F-51 Mustangs were diverted from a training exercise to investigate, and one of these, flown by Captain Thomas Mantell, had soon outdistanced the other two. The radio tower received a call: “I see something above and ahead of me – I’m still climbing.” “What is it?” “It looks metallic and is tremendous in size”. Then he announced: “It’s above me and I’m gaining on it. I’m going to twenty thousand feet”. But these were the last words Mantell spoke. Later that day the remains of his plane were found ninety miles away from the base.

  The story was a sensation – “airman destroyed by flying saucer”. The Air Force announced that what Mantell had mistaken for a flying saucer was actually the planet Venus – a story that seemed, to put it mildly, unlikely. But then, the Air Force had shown the same confidence ten days after Arnold’s original sighting when it had announced that Arnold had been “hallucinating”.

  It was obvious that the newspaper publicity was causing a certain amount of hysteria, and that many people thought they had seen flying saucers when they had only seen weather balloons or aircraft tail-lights. But was it conceivable that thousands of people – in fact, millions – could all be mistaken? For by 1966, a Gallup Poll revealed that five million Americans had seen flying saucers. And some of these sightings were at close quarters. A few days after Arnold’s original sighting, the SS Llandovery Castle sailed from Mombasa en route to Cape Town. At about eleven one evening a Mrs A.M. King, of Nairobi, was on deck with another woman when they saw what appeared to be a bright star approaching the ship. Then a searchlight switched on, illuminating the sea about fifty yards from the ship. They saw an object made of steel and “shaped like a cigar cut at the rear end”. It was about four times as big as the ship, and was travelling in the same direction; soon it vanished at a great speed, flames issuing from the “flattened” end.

  Yet in spite of an increasing number of reports of this type, and thousands of “sky sightings”, the Air Force continued to insist that UFO sightings were hoaxes, mistakes or downright lies. An official investigation, known as “Project Sign”, began in September 1947, and later became known as “Project Blue Book”. One of its advisers was the astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who began as a skeptic, but was soon convinced by the obvious truthfulness of witnesses that UFOs were a reality. But the Air Force remained adamantly skeptical. By the mid-1960s the belief that it was involved in a cover-up became so persistent that in 1965 the Air Force itself ordered that a new scientific panel should be set up; Edward U. Condon, a well-known physicist, was appointed head of this panel, and it was sponsored by the University of Colorado. But when the panel issued its report in 1969 it was obvious that the scientists of the University of Colorado had reached the same conclusion as the Air Force investigators – one newspaper headline summarized the findings of the 965-page report in the headline: “Flying Saucers Do Not Exist – Official”.

  One basic problem was that many of the sightings were too preposterous to be taken seriously; the whole field of investigation had become a happy hunting-ground for cranks. In a book called Flying Saucers Have Landed a Polish-American named George Adamski claimed that in 1952 he and a number of other saucer enthusiasts drove into the California desert – their route dictated by Adamski’s “hunches” – and saw a huge cigar-shaped object in the sky. With a camera, Adamski wandered off alone, and saw a flying saucer land half a mile away. He hurried to the spot, and found a flying saucer, and a small man with shoulder-length blond hair, who identified himself in sign language as an inhabitant of the planet Venus. Then he flew off in his space craft. His friends had witnessed the encounter from a distance, and later signed notarized statements to this effect. In a second book, Inside the Space Ships, Adamski told how he had been taken for a trip in a flying saucer – called a “scout ship” – with his Venusian acquaintance, plus a man from Mars and a man from Saturn. On this occasion they flew into space and went on board the mother ship. On another occasion Adamski was taken to the moon, where he saw rich vegetation, including trees, and four-legged furry animals. He was also shown live pictures of Venus on a television screen, and saw that it had cities, mountains, rivers and lakes. Adamski died in 1965, four years before the moon landings, but three years after a space probe – Mariner II – had swept past Venus and revealed that it has an atmosphere of sulphuric acid gas, and that the surface is too hot to support life. But such small setbacks left Adamski unmoved – he was always able to claim that a mere space probe was less reliable than real Venusians – and he spent the final years of his life happily lecturing to audience of UFO enthusiasts all over the world.

  Adamski’s friend Dr George Hunt Williamson, who had been one of the witnesses of Adamski’s original “contact”, achieved a similar celebrity. In a book called The Saucers Speak, he told of how he had originally made contact with the inhabitants of flying saucers by means of automatic writing, and how later, a radio operator (whom he calls Mr R.) was able to establish direct contact. The “space men” were from the planet Mars, which they called Masar, and they explained that the earth was in grave danger of destroying itself. “Good and evil forces are working now. Organization is important for the salvation of your world.” These space intelligences had been observing the earth for seventy-five thousand years, and were now prepared to save the world by revealing all kinds of astonishing secrets about Life, God and the Creator’s place in the Divine Scheme. In a book called Secret Places of the Lion Williamson revealed some of these secrets – he claimed he had found them in a great library in a lost city high in the mountains of Peru, where a Master teacher, a survivor of the Elders, still lives and works. (This Master is thousands of years old – he lived on earth in the days when giants still roamed the planet.) This library (the author thanks one of the monks for translating its ancient records) reveals that the Star P
eople came to earth eighteen million years ago (long before man appeared), and ever since then have been helping man to evolve. Their records are held in tombs and secret chambers, and one of their spaceships is at present hidden in the base of the Great Pyramid, which was built 24,000 years ago (and not a mere 4,500, as Egyptologists believe). These Star People were continually reincarnated as the great leaders and prophets of mankind, so Tiyi, the wife of the pharaoh Amenhotep III, later became the Queen of Sheba, Nefertiti, Queen Guinevere (wife of King Arthur) and Joan of Arc, while the Egyptian crown prince Seti became Isaiah, Aristotle, the apostle John and Leonardo da Vinci. The Secret Places of the Lion is a history of earth according to the ancient records, and is admittedly excellent value as historical entertainment. But the reader could be forgiven for thinking that Williamson decided that if Adamski could get away with it, then so could he . . .

  In 1960 there appeared in France an extraordinary book called Morning of the Magicians, by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier; it became an instant best-seller, and was translated into many languages. It discussed various “mysteries” – alchemy, astrology, black magic, mysterious ancient artifacts and the Great Pyramid – but its main argument is that much “lost knowledge” was brought to our planet by visitors from outer space. It discusses, for example, the so-called Piri Reis maps, dating to the sixteenth century, which show Antarctica (although it was not discovered until three centuries later), and also show a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska – a bridge that vanished thousands of years ago, giving way to the Bering Strait – and argues that such maps prove that the earth must have been surveyed from the air more than two thousand years ago. It is also full of inaccuracies – for example, describing Piri Reis (who was a Turkish pirate who was beheaded in 1554) as an American naval officer of the nineteenth century. But it caused widespread excitement, and seemed to justify the increasing number of “ufologists” who believed that the “saucers” had been appearing for centuries, and that they are even described in the Bible (as the fiery chariots of the prophet Ezekiel, for example).

  But it was in 1967 that the “ancient astronaut theory” finally reached a worldwide audience, in the form of a book called Memories of the Future, translated into English as Chariots of the Gods? (One newspaper serialized it under the headline “Was God an Astronaut?”) Its author, Erich von Däniken, borrowed liberally – and without acknowledgement – from predecessors like Williamson, Bergier and Pauwels, but presented his own “evidence” with a certain individual panache. His argument consists basically of the assertion that various ancient monuments – the Great Pyramid (naturally), the Easter Island statues, the Mexican pyramids, the megaliths of Carnac and Stonehenge – must have been erected with the aid of space men, because their technology would have been beyond the skills of the builders to whom they are attributed. It is full of misinformation – for example, he manages to multiply the weight of the Great Pyramid by five, and cites “legends” from the Epic of Gilgamesh which are simply not to be found in that work. Most of his major arguments proved to be faulty. He insists that the Easter Island statues were too big to be erected by natives; but the explorer Thor Heyerdahl persuaded modern Easter Islanders to carve and erect a similar statute in a few weeks. He asserts that the pyramids had to be built by ancient astronauts because the Egyptians had no rope – but pyramid texts show the use of rope. What Däniken claimed to be a picture of a man taking off in a space ship on the Palenque funerary tablet in Guatemala was shown by scholars to be a typical Mayan religious inscription, full of their basic symbols – birds, serpents and so on. He cites the mysterious Nazca lines on the plains of Peru as examples of structures that could only be understood when seen from the air, and suggests that they were giant runways for space craft – he even has a photograph of an aircraft “parking bay”. But the lines are drawn on the pebbly surface of the desert, and would be instantly blown away if an aircraft tried to land on them. The “parking bay” turned out to be a detail from the leg of a bird – its knee – and was hardly large enough to park a bicycle. Däniken insisted that this was a mistake made by an editor; but he has allowed it to stand in subsequent editions of his book.

  The mistake about the desert surface seems typical of Däniken’s cavalier attitude to facts. Another can be found in Gold of the Gods, where Däniken offers a photograph of a skeleton carved out of stone, and wants to know how ancient sculptors knew about skeletons in the days before x-rays – overlooking the fact that every graveyard was full of them. It is also in Gold of the Gods that Däniken claims to have been taken into an underground city where he examined a secret library with books made of metal leaves. His companion, he said, was an explorer named Juan Moricz. When Moricz flatly denied the whole story Däniken hastened to concede that he had invented the underground library, but insisted that in Germany authors of popular non-fiction works are permitted to use certain “effects” – that is, to tell lies – provided they are merely incidental and do not touch the facts . . . And in spite of these embarrassments, Däniken continued to publish more books, each one of which, he claimed, helped to establish his astronaut theory beyond all possible doubt.

  Understandably, then, the increasing flood of books by “ufologists” aroused most serious investigators to fury or derision.

  Yet there were notable exceptions. J. Allen Hynek, as we have already observed, was part of Project Blue Book, and the evidence he studied finally convinced him that, no matter how many cranks, simpletons and downright liars managed to obscure the facts, these facts unequivocally indicated the real existence of flying saucers, and even of “space men”. It was Hynek who coined the phrase “close encounters of the third kind” meaning encounters with grounded saucers and “humanoids” and he begins his chapter on such encounters (in The UFO Experience, A Scientific Enquiry): “We come now to the most bizarre and seemingly incredible aspect of the entire UFOs phenomenon. To be frank, I would gladly omit this part if I could without offense to scientific integrity . . .” And he goes on to consider a number of cases which, although they sound preposterous, were too well-authenticated to be dismissed. One typical case will suffice.

  On 11 August 1955 a flying saucer was seen to land in farming country near Kelly-Hopkinsville, Kentucky. An hour later members of the Sutton family were alerted by the barking of the dog to the presence of an intruder near their farmhouse, and saw “a small ‘glowing’ man with extremely large eyes, his arms extended over his head”. The two Sutton men fired at him with a rifle and shotgun, and there was a sound “as if I’d shot into a bucket”, and the “space man” turned and hurried off. When another visitor appeared at the window the rifle was again fired and they ran outside to see if the creature had been hit. As one of them stopped under a low portion of the roof a claw-like hand reached down from it and touched his hair. More shots were fired at the creature on the roof, and although it was hit directly it floated down to the ground and hurried away. For the next three hours the eleven occupants of the house remained behind bolted doors, frequently seeing the “space men” at the windows. Finally, they all bolted out of the house, piled into two cars, and drove to the nearest police station. Police could find no signs of the spacemen, but as soon as they were gone the creatures reappeared. The next day a police artist got witnesses to describe what they had seen; the pictures that emerged was of tiny creatures with round heads and saucer-like eyes, and arms twice as long as their legs.

  The family was subjected to a great deal of harassment as a result of their story; but serious investigators who questioned them had no doubt whatever that they were telling the truth.

  Perhaps the most famous case of a “close encounter of the third kind” was that of Barney and Betty Hill. In September 1961 they were returning through New Hampshire from a holiday in Canada when they saw a flying saucer apparently in the process of landing. Two hours later they found themselves thirty-five miles from this spot, with no recollection of what had happened in the meantime. Eventually they cons
ulted an expert in amnesia, Dr Benjamin Simon, who placed them under hypnosis; the Hills then described – independently – what had happened. They had been taken aboard the “saucer” by a number of uniformed men who looked more or less human (Barney said they reminded him of red-haired, round-faced Irishmen), subjected to a number of medical tests or experiments – skin and nail shavings were taken, and Betty Hill had a needle inserted into her navel – then they were hypnotized and told to forget everything that had happened. Allen Hynek himself was later present when Barney Hill was placed under hypnosis, and was allowed to question him. He ended by being convinced of the genuineness of the experience.

  What has been called the “ultimate in contact stories” happened to Antonio Villas-Boas, a 23-year-old Brazilian farmer. On 15 October 1957, Villas-Boas claims that he was ploughing his fields when an egg-shaped UFO descended in front of his tractor. He tried to run away, but was grabbed by “humanoids” in tight grey overalls and helmets, and carried into the saucer. The space men communicated with sounds like yelps or barks. Villas-Boas was stripped naked and washed, then a blood sample was taken. After this a beautiful naked woman – about 4 foot 6 inches tall – came into the room. She soon induced Villas-Boas to make love to her, although he says that she had an off-putting way of grunting at intervals that made him feel he was having intercourse with an animal.