Operation Trojan Horse: The Classic Breakthrough Study of UFOs

by John A. Keel

  Already we can arrive at one disturbing conclusion based upon these basic factors of behavior. If these lights are actually machines operated by intelligent entities, they obviously don’t want to be caught. They come in the dead of night, operating in areas where the risks of being observed are slight. They pick the middle of the week for their peak activities, and they confine themselves rather methodically to the political boundaries of specific states at specific times. All of this smacks uneasily of a covert military operation, a secret build-up in remote areas.

  Unfortunately, it is not all this simple. The first major UFO flap in the Midwest took place in 1897. There’s something else going on here. If secrecy is “their” goal, then both our newspaper wire services and our government have happily been obliging them. What are the reasons? And, more important, what are the pitfalls? If strange unidentified flying machines are operating freely in our midst, I wonder if we can really accept what Secretary of Defense McNamara told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on March 30, 1966: “I think that every report so far has been investigated,” he said. “And in every instance we have found a more reasonable explanation than that it represents an object from outer space or a potential threat to our security.”

  The newspapers of March 9, 1967, quoted Dr. J. Allen Hynek as dismissing a number of the March 8 sightings as being the planet Venus. But I worry about the report of two Erie, Pennsylvania, policemen, William Rutledge and Donald Peck, who said they watched a strange light over Lake Erie for two hours on Wednesday, August 3, 1966. It appeared as a bright light when they first noticed it at 4:45 A.M. It moved east, they said, stopped, turned red, and disappeared. A moment later it reappeared and was now a bluish white. They watched it until 6:55 A.M. As the sun came up and dawn flooded the sky, the object ceased to be a mere light. It became a definite silvery object, possibly metallic, and finally it headed north toward Canada and disappeared.

  Could all of these other strange lights in the sky also be silver metallic objects when viewed in daylight? If so, then we can forget about all of the theories of swamp gas, meteors, plasma, and natural phenomena that have been bandied about by the skeptics for so many years.

  2

  To Hell with the Answer! What’s the Question?

  At 8 P.M. on Wednesday, October 4, 1967, I was driving a rented car along the Long Island Expressway about twenty miles outside of New York City when I noticed a large brilliant sphere of light bouncing through the sky on a course parallel to my own. It caught my eye because I had seen many such lights in many places for the preceding two years. There was something special and very familiar about the crystal-like purity of its whiteness, and it was brighter than any star in the sky. On top of it I could make out a second light, a smaller fiercely red glow that flickered slightly in contrast with the steadiness of the larger sphere beneath it. Although Kennedy Airport was nearby, I knew that this was not the bright strobe landing light of an airplane. I’ve seen many of those, too, in my travels.

  When I reached Huntington, Long Island, that night, I found cars parked along the roads and scores of people, including several police officers, standing in the fields staring at the sky in wonder. The enigmatic light that had “followed” me was joining four others overhead. All were low, hovering silently, slowly bobbing and weaving like illuminated yo-yos tethered to invisible strings.

  “What do you think they are?” one elderly gentleman asked me.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” the man muttered, marveling that such things could be. “I always thought they were just so much nonsense.”

  I nodded and got back into my car. I had a long way to go that night and many problems on my mind. I seem to have had nothing but problems since I got into the flying saucer business.

  A few miles south of Huntington, in the tiny hamlet of Melville, another man had problems. The night before, on October 3, 1967, Phillip Burkhardt, an aerospace computer systems engineer who holds a bachelor of science degree in mathematics and a masters in philosophy, was alerted by two teenagers, Shawn Kearns, thirteen, and Donald Burkhardt, fourteen, his son. They called him outside his home on Roundtree Drive to look at an odd machine hovering just above the trees a few yards away.

  “It was disk-shaped,” Burkhardt said later. “It was silvery or metallic white in color and seemed to be illuminated by lights—a set of rectangular-shaped lights that blinked on and off and seemed to be revolving across the lower portion of the object, from left to right. Another light emanated from the top but was not blinking. There was no noise such as an engine would make.”

  The object dropped down behind the crest of a ridge, and Burkhardt returned to his house to get a pair of binoculars. Then he and several others set out to find the thing again. They drove to a nearby road, spotted it, and watched it as it flew out of sight. Burkhardt tried to determine if the object was running the legally required red and green lights that even experimental craft must display. If it did, he couldn’t see them.

  After phoning the Suffolk Air Force Base in Westhampton Beach, Long Island, and answering questions for half an hour, the scientist and the two boys returned to the area of the sighting and examined the ground with flashlights.

  “We detected a peculiar odor,” Mr. Burkhardt noted. “It was comparable to burning chemicals or electrical wiring and confined to the immediate area… a sand and gravel-covered clearing.”

  Because this sighting was not made public until a month later, few people outside of the immediate vicinity knew of it. But within days after the incident, Mrs. Burkhardt told me, they began to receive a series of peculiar phone calls. The phone would ring, but there would be no one on the other end. Sometimes the phone would continue to ring even after the receiver was picked up. Also, the Burkhardt phone bill began to show a puzzling increase over the previous monthly average.

  Melville, we might note, had frequent and inexplicable power failures throughout 1967, as did Huntington. For Phillip Burkhardt, unidentified flying objects are no longer a controversial subject or a matter of belief or disbelief. He knows they exist.

  How Long Has This Been Going On?

  History prefers fantasy to fact. Legend endures while truth coughs up blood, which dries and fades. We prefer to teach our children that Christopher Columbus was a hero and have buried his glaring faults. We choose to pass on the nonsense that the Great Chicago Fire of October 8, 1871, was ignited when Mrs. O’Leary’s discontented cow kicked over a lantern, and we forget that that fire was actually caused by a gigantic, still-unexplained fireball that swept low across the skies of several states, destroying dozens of communities and creating a kind of death and havoc which would not be seen again until the great fire raids of World War ll.[1]

  A thousand years from now Hitler may be remembered as a somewhat eccentric manufacturer of soap. And man’s clumsy, stiff-legged attempt to leap into space may merely supplement the older tale of Icarus flying too close to the sun on wings of wax.

  We are more enthralled with our interpretations of great events than with the events themselves, and we gingerly alter the facts generation after generation until history reads the way we think it should read.

  If you want to believe the fancy-ridden scribes who have painstakingly recorded their versions of man’s long history, you may be ready to accept the fact that unidentified flying objects have always been up there. Certainly the histories and legends of every country and every race, including the isolated Eskimos, are filled with stories of inexplicable aerial happenings.

  How valid is our history, and where is the point that history and myth intermingle and become one?

  Several great religions have been founded on the contents of the Holy Bible. Millions of people have accepted it as truth—as the Gospel—for the past 2,000 years. Yet the Bible gives us several different and contradictory versions of the same events, including the life and death of Christ, all purportedly written by eyewitnesses and all of them different in many significant details. Whi
ch is the true account? The devout accept them all. Few believers would reject the existence of Christ because of these differences.

  Unlike most UFO researchers, I have read the Bible carefully several times. In view of what we now know—or suspect—about flying saucers, many of the Biblical accounts of things in the sky take on a new meaning and even corroborate some of the things happening today. They were given a religious interpretation in those ancient days when all natural phenomena and all catastrophes were blamed on a Superior Being.

  Today we kneel before the altar of science, and our scientific ignorance receives the blame for what we do not know or cannot understand. The game’s the same, only the rules have changed slightly.

  We no longer run to the temple when we see a strange, unearthly object in the sky. We run to the Air Force or to the learned astronomers. In ancient times the priests would tell us that we had sinned, and therefore God was showing us signs in the sky. Today our learned leaders simply tell us that we are mistaken—or crazy—or both. The next time we see something in the sky, we keep it to ourselves.

  But the damnable things keep coming back anyway. Maybe they never went away.

  The first photograph of an unidentified flying object was taken back in 1883 by a Mexican astronomer named Jose Bonilla. He had been observing the sun from his observatory at Zacatecas on August 12 of that year when he was taken aback by the sudden appearance of a long parade of circular objects that slowly flitted across the solar disk. Altogether he counted 143 of the things, and because his telescope was equipped with a newfangled gadget called a camera, he shot some pictures of them. When developed, the film showed a series of cigar- and spindle-shaped objects which were obviously solid and noncelestial. Professor Bonilla dutifully wrote up a scholarly report of the event filled with mathematical calculations (he estimated that the objects had actually passed over the earth at an altitude of about 200,000 miles), attached copies of his pictures and sent the whole thing off to the French journal L’Astronomie. His colleagues no doubt read it with chagrin, and because they could not explain what he had seen, they forgot about the whole business and turned to more fruitful pursuits—such as counting the rings of Saturn.

  Five years before Professor Bonilla’s embarrassing observation, a farmer in Texas reported seeing a large circular object pass overhead at high speed. His name was John Martin, and when he told a reporter from the Dennison, Texas, Daily News about it, he made history of sorts by describing it as a “saucer.” The date of his sighting was Thursday, January 24, 1878. His neighbors probably called him Crazy John after that, never realizing that he was not the first, and certainly would not be the last, to see what had been up there all along.

  In April 1897, thousands of people throughout the United States were seeing huge “airships” over their towns and farms. Scores of witnesses even claimed to have met and talked with the pilots. According to the New York Herald, Monday, April 12, 1897, a news dealer in Rogers Park, Illinois, took two photographs of a cigar-shaped craft. “I had read for some days about the airship,” the news dealer, Walter McCann, was quoted as saying. “But I thought it must be a fake.”

  Because so many people were coming up with airship stories, and many of them were even signing affidavits swearing to the truth of what they had seen, newspapermen naturally turned to the greatest scientific authority of the time, Thomas Alva Edison.

  “You can take it from me that it is a pure fake,” Edison declared on April 22, 1897. “I have no doubt that airships will be successfully constructed in the near future but…it is absolutely impossible to imagine that a man could construct a successful airship and keep the matter a secret. When I was young, we used to construct big colored paper balloons, inflate them with gas, and they would float about for days. I guess someone has been up to that fine game out west.

  “Whenever an airship is made, it will not be in the form of a balloon. It will be a mechanical contrivance, which will be raised by means of a powerful motor, which must be made of a very light weight. At present no one has discovered such a motor, but we never know what will happen. We may wake up tomorrow morning and hear of some invention which sets us all eagerly to work within a few hours, as was the case with the Roentgen rays. Then success may come. I am not, however, figuring on inventing an airship. I prefer to devote my time to objects which have some commercial value. At the best, airships would only be toys.”

  Forty-one years later, however, a young man named Orson Welles disagreed with Edison. The opening lines of his historic “War of the Worlds” broadcast on October 30, 1938, were almost prophetic: “We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own,” Welles’ sonorous voice declared. “We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood, which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of time and space. Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool, and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”

  Until the last few years no real effort was made to dig out and examine the many published accounts of those 1897 “airships.” And even now the work is being done by a small, dedicated band of ufologists. There are great lessons to be learned from those early incidents, and many interesting clues scattered among the accounts. Ufology is just now beginning to come into being as an inexact science, and the field is a disorganized bedlam of egos and controversies and divergent opinions.

  The most popular theory is that the flying saucers are born and bred on some other planet and that they visit us occasionally to drink our water and bask in our sun. But all of the available evidence and all of the patterns indicated in the now-massive sighting data tend to negate this charming theory.

  The Lightning and the Thunder

  When a bolt of lightning lashes across the sky, it exists for only a fraction of a second, but it is often followed by a deep rumble that can persist for several seconds. We know that the lightning produced the thunder, and we do not separate the two. However, during the nearly fifty years of the UFO controversy there has been a tendency to pay more attention to the thunder than to the sightings that precipitated the noise. In a way, the thunder has drowned out and obscured the cause. For years scientists and skeptics questioned the reliability of the witnesses, forcing the UFO researchers to expend inordinate effort trying to prove that the witnesses did, indeed, see something instead of trying to ascertain exactly what it was that was seen.

  The problem was escalated by the fact that the witnesses to seemingly solid (“hard”) objects rarely produced details which could be matched with other “hard” sightings. Thus the basic data—the descriptions of the objects seen—were filled with puzzling contradictions that weakened rather than supported the popular explanations and hypotheses. But there are actually definite hidden correlations within those contradictions, and we will be dealing with them at length in future chapters.

  In Chapter 1 we outlined twenty-two typical reports. Most of these were of luminous objects that behaved in peculiar, unnatural ways. The great majority of all sightings throughout history have been of “soft” luminous objects, or objects that were transparent, translucent, changed size and shape, or appeared and disappeared suddenly. Sightings of seemingly solid metallic objects have always been quite rare. The “soft” sightings, being more numerous, comprise the real phenomenon and deserve the most study. The scope, frequency and distribution of the sightings make the popular extraterrestrial (interplanetary) hypothesis completely unten
able. These important negative factors will also be explored in depth further on.

  Apparently the U.S. Air Force intelligence teams realized early in the game (1947-49) that it would be logistically impossible for any foreign power, or even any extraterrestrial source, to maintain such a huge force of flying machines in the Western Hemisphere without suffering an accident that would expose the whole operation, or without producing patterns which would reveal their bases. There was never any real question about the reliability of the witnesses. Pilots, top military men, and whole crews of ships had seen unidentified flying objects during World War II and had submitted excellent technical reports to military intelligence.

  The real problem remained: What had these people seen? The general behavior of the objects clearly indicated that they were paraphysical (i.e., not composed of solid matter). They were clocked at incredible speeds within the atmosphere but did not produce sonic booms. They performed impossible maneuvers that defied the laws of inertia. They appeared and disappeared suddenly, like ghosts. Because there was no way in which their paraphysicality could be supported and explained scientifically, the Air Force specialists were obliged to settle upon an alternate hypothesis that could be accepted by the public and the scientific community. Dr. J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer and AF consultant, suggested the “natural phenomena” explanation after finding they could successfully fit most of the sighting descriptions into explanations of meteors, swamp gas, weather balloons and the like, to everyone’s satisfaction—except the original witnesses. This left them with only a small residue of inexplicable “hard” sightings, which they shelved with a shrug.