by Mack Maloney
Then the story gets even better.
“Saddam gave the aliens sanctuary, so that they couldn’t be captured by the Americans,” the scientist claimed. “Nobody can reach the citadel Qalaat-e-Julundi at night. They say that the aliens created ‘watchdogs’ for Saddam. The aliens took ordinary desert scorpions and used their bioengineering to grow them to giant size. Scorpions of a cow-size! They are wonderful watchdogs: they blend in with the desert, swiftly and silently move on their warm-blooded prey for a decisive attack. Luckless intruders just hear some strange sound from behind, then a pincer crushes their necks, another pincer crushes their legs. Death comes almost immediately.”
It’s a crazy tale — and possibly created solely to keep the highly superstitious Iraqis away from a legitimate military installation located in the old fortress of Qalaat-e-Julundi.
But what’s interesting about this account is that much of it, along with the mysterious Russian colonel’s UFO shoot-down story, was reported, quotes included, in Pravda, the onetime official newspaper of the Soviet Union.
And while the Pravda of the old Moscow regime doesn’t exist now as it did then, it is still a media outlet in Russia. A bit sensationalistic, but still highly read.
As one Russian journalist who didn’t want to give his name explained to us: “Pravda today is sort of ‘yellowish.’ They don’t have any correspondents’ network or stringers. They are sensation hunters and usually compile secondhand news from the Internet.
“However, that does not mean what they write about is not true.”
20
The Grand Puzzle
Among his fellow UFO researchers, the late Richard Hall was known as the “Dean of Ufology.”
Best described as a critical-minded proponent, his 1964 book The UFO Evidence is considered one of the best ever written on the subject. Simply put, Hall believed that UFOs were extraterrestrial and that the U.S. military was deceiving the American people when it came to what they knew about them.
According to his obituary, published in the Washington Post, in a 1966 paper, Hall wrote: “Ninety-seven percent of the nibbles a fisherman feels on his line may be caused by his line snagging on rocks or seaweed or by wave motion. But that doesn’t prove there are no fish in the ocean.”
These are more than just wise words for describing the UFO mystery; there are numbers that bear them out. By the time the U.S. Air Force officially closed Project Blue Book in 1969, it had collected reports on about 13,000 UFO sightings. At least 700 of them — a significant number — were labeled unexplained.
However, when factored in that much of the activity at Blue Book from 1952 onward was devoted to whitewashing UFO sightings, that 700 figure has got to be regarded as being very, very low.
More numbers. Polls in the United States say forty million people have either seen a UFO themselves or know someone who has. Eighty million U.S. citizens believe Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials.
Several thousand UFO sightings are reported each year. Several hundred thousand have been documented over the past half century or so.
But because only a fraction of people who actually see a UFO report it, this means the actual number of UFO sightings since the early 1950s is in the millions.
Something is happening. True, there’s a lot of clutter and a lot of noise. But all these sightings cannot be illusions, birds, airplanes, weather balloons, reentry vehicles or the planet Venus. And all it takes is for one of them to be true — because then, in a way, they all become true.
But how do we get to the truth?
The UFO enigma is so important that it demands to be placed in the hands of objective, apolitical, purely scientific-minded people whose goal must be to simply tell us what we’ve been seeing all these years. What are these things that have been flying around our skies, watching our wars, tampering with our doomsday weapons, and quite possibly altering the course of human events by, for example, appearing in the sky in the shape of a cross?
More than $10 billion was spent to build the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland in an effort to re-create the first few microseconds of the Big Bang. NASA has spent billions on satellites, space probes and earthbound listening stations, all in its search for the secrets of the universe and the possibility of life different than ours among the stars. One would think the same type of earnestness, dedication and curiosity would have been directed to solving the question of UFOs.
Instead, the job was given to the U.S. military — and considering the results, or the lack of them, that might go down as one of the worst decisions in history.
We were fooled at first. When the U.S. Air Force set up Project Blue Book in 1951, people were led to believe it would be a vast scientific institute like Fermilab, or Los Alamos, or Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In reality, it was never more than one office and four people, two of whom were secretaries, all under orders to lay low and not to make waves.
More numbers — and this time they have dollar signs attached to them. During the 1950s, the Pentagon spent hundreds of billions of dollars on defense. Yet at one point, Captain Ruppelt’s Blue Book was so impoverished it didn’t have enough money to even read over all the sighting reports it was taking in.
The Pentagon cheapened out when it came to studying UFOs. The institution that historically overspends on everything chose to nickel-and-dime this very important matter. Why? There’s only one answer. They did it because they never intended to do a good job in the first place. In fact, the goal all along was to do the worst job possible.
As J. Allen Hynek said in 1972 in Fate magazine: “It became patently clear to me as the years passed that no Blue Book case had been given the ‘FBI treatment.’ That is, no case was followed through until every possible clue or bit of evidence was obtained, as is standard procedure in kidnapping, narcotics rings and bank robbery cases.
“Quite the opposite attitude was taken by Blue Book. When a case did appear to have a likely misperception explanation (and hence should have been excluded from further UFO investigative effort) Blue Book often spared little effort in phone calls, interrogations, etc., in order to pin it down to a planet, a refueling mission, or some other natural occurrence. Thus they set their dogs to catching simple chicken thieves but ignored potentially far more important prey.”
The supreme irony is that finding out what UFOs are might not be that hard. UFOs are not like quirks, quarks and quacks. They are not as elusive as the Higgs boson particle. They are not things that one has to build a $10 billion supercollider to take snapshots of, pictures that last for one billionth of one trillionth of a second before they disappear.
Just the opposite. UFOs are all around us. There’s a reason that millions have been reported over the years. The misconception is that UFOs don’t want us to see them, but the evidence indicates the reverse is true.
The scareships gliding over the British landscape, their searchlights turned up to high? The ghost planes waking up the frozen Scandinavian tundra, their engines roaring, their searchlights also ablaze? The foo fighters tagging along on 800-plane bombing raids? The ghost rockets flying by the hundreds every day? Huge saucers over Korea? A dozen saucers over the White House?
These are not the actions of an entity that is hiding or being secretive. We might not know what they are, but it’s clear they have no problem letting us know that they are here. That is the grand puzzle.
But every puzzle has a solution. So, when will the UFO question finally be solved?
Stan Gordon, the man who has dutifully kept the Kecksburg mystery alive all these years, told us in an interview: “When the ‘powers that be’ make the decision, or when circumstances occur that can’t be hidden away.”
When we asked Richard Haines, the NASA expert who turned his talents to studying UFOs, the same question, he went right to the point. “We’ll know when ‘they’ want us to know.”
Keith Chester, who’ll be forever known as the man who finally told the whole foo fighters story, told us: “It wil
l take undeniable evidence of extraterrestrial visitation for the whole world to witness for this riddle to be truly solved.”
Jerome Clark, aforementioned author of numerous UFO articles and books, took a more existential view:
“Science has largely ignored the UFO phenomenon,” he told us. “Leaving the issue to military agencies, civilian researchers, and debunkers. The UFO problem is not inherently unsolvable, however, and while sometimes science is slow to take up complicated, troublesome issues, it does get there eventually. I believe that by the middle of the 21st century learned people will start to look into this phenomenon and finally make up for the lost opportunity we had back in 1948.”
We hope Clark is right. We also hope he’s off his timetable a bit and that we get some answers before 2050.
Most important, though, when the serious study of UFOs begins again, no matter who champions it, who pushes for it, or who pays for it — we hope, this time, they don’t put the U.S. military in charge.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The following books, articles and websites were invaluable to me while writing this book. I urge all to look into the UFO question more deeply by reading these and other works.
Chester, Keith. Strange Company: Military Encounters with UFOS in WWII. Anomalist Books. San Antonio. 2007.
Clark, Jerome. Strange Skies: Pilot Encounters with UFOs. Citadel Press. New York. 2003.
Clark, Jerome; Farish, Lucius. Article, “The Mysterious ‘Foo Fighters’ of World War II,” in 1977 UFO Annual.
Clark, Jerome. The UFO Encyclopedia, Second Edition: The Phenomenon from the Beginning. Two volumes. Omnigraphics. Detroit. 1998.
Cooper, Gordon; Henderson, Bruce. Leap of Faith. HarperTorch. New York. 2000.
Good, Timothy. Need To Know: UFOs, the Military, and Intelligence. Pegasus Books. New York. 2007.
Hall, Richard, H. (ed.) The National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) The UFO Evidence. Barnes and Noble Books. New York. 1964.
Hastings, Robert. UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites. Authorhouse. Bloomington. 2008.
Kean, Leslie. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. Harmony Books. New York. 2010.
Keyhoe, Donald E. Flying Saucers: Top Secret. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. New York. 1960.
Pflock, Karl, T. Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe. Prometheus Books. Amherst. 2001.
Randle, Kevin, D. Invasion Washington: UFOs Over the Capitol. HarperTorch, New York. 2001.
Ruppelt, Edward, J. The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Filiquar-ian Publishing.
Vallee, Jacques and Janine. Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma. Ballantine Books. New York. 1966.
Vallee, Jacques. Anatomy of a Phenomenon: UFOs in Space. Ballantine Books. New York. 1965.
Wyatt, John, “The Hobart Incident,” AUFORN Special Report, Issue 34, April 2003.
www.colinandrews.net/UFO-MiltonTorres.html
www.mtpioneer.com/March-Malstrom-UFOs.html
www.nickpope.net/rendlesham-forest.htm
www.nuforc.org
www.ufocasebook.com
www.ufoevidence.org
tvufo.tripod.com/id116.html
www.allsupernatural.net/aliens/ufo/story/136/ufo-attack-n-vietnam-1968/
www.alien-ufos.com/ufo-alien-discussions/22198-ufo-reports-during-vietnam-war.html
files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/e3c51170ec1a.jpg
www.unsolvedmysteries.com/default.asp?action=ndate
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Scandinavian ghost fliers of 1933–34 baffled the military and citizens alike.
All illustrations by Mike Dominic
Allied aircrews saw many strange flying machines during World War II. They were eventually dubbed “foo fighters.”
Although the U.S. Air Force claimed only “crackpots” saw flying saucers, dozens of UFO sightings by American pilots during the Korean War forced a change in policy.
America’s “other” missile crisis: UFO incursions plagued U.S. ICBM bases throughout the 1960s and ’70s.
Rumors persist that an American jet fighter shot down a UFO during the first Gulf War.
In possibly the most dramatic UFO photo ever taken, anti-aircraft batteries fire away at an unknown object caught in searchlights above Los Angeles on the morning of February 25, 1942.
Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Why did UFOs haunt the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt throughout its three decades of service? Was it because the ship was the first U. S. Navy aircraft carrier to carry nuclear weapons?
Photo by U.S. Navy
Cruise missile technology wasn’t perfected until the 1980s, and the first cruise missiles weren’t used in combat until the 1990s. So why were cruise missiles like this spotted over Sweden in 1946?
Photo by U.S. Navy
A rare RB-47 shown in flight. Full of electronic countermeasures gear and other radar detection equipment, in 1957, one of these reconnaissance bombers was relentlessly stalked by a UFO over Louisiana and Texas for more than an hour.
Photo by U.S. Air Force
One of the first U.S. Air Force jet fighters to carry both a pilot and a radar operator, the F-94 Starfire was an unwitting player in several UFO incidents during the 1950s, including the especially baffling Haneda Case.
Photo by U.S. Air Force