Operation Trojan Horse: The Classic Breakthrough Study of UFOs

by John A. Keel

  That night Mr, Tillinghast was not “aloft.” Reporters found him and extracted this statement from him:

  I was out of Worcester last night. Where I was is my own business. It may be that I flew over the city, but that is my own business, too.

  When I said recently that I had flown from Boston to New York and returned, I said nothing but what was true. I have an airship which will carry three or four persons and will make the speed I claimed for it—that is, about one hundred twenty miles an hour.

  When I get ready, I shall speak fully and not until then.

  The Mysterious Shed

  An unnamed “staff correspondent for the United Press” was reportedly arrested for trespassing when he tried to get to the bottom of the Worcester mystery. Following up rumors, he visited the estate of John B. Gough, six miles outside of the city, and there he discovered a shed more than 100 feet long concealed in a dense woods.

  The widely published UPI dispatch revealed the following:

  Fourteen men in the employ of the Morgan Telephone Company of this city were at work there on some secret occupation. Paul B. Morgan, head of the telephone company, is a close friend of Wallace E. Tillinghast, who is supposed to be the inventor of the mysterious flying machine… Morgan has been interested in aviation for several years, and two years ago he spent $15,000 trying to perfect a machine invented by a Swedish aviator. The Swedish invention, however, proved unsatisfactory and was abandoned… John D. Gough, on whose estate the shed was found, is an old-time temperance lecturer and is friendly with Tillinghast and Morgan. His place is near West Boylston.

  The secrecy maintained at the Gough estate and the careful manner in which the shed discovered today is being guarded lends new weight to the belief that a marvelous ship has been constructed. The correspondent was taken before the justice summarily today, and the swift manner in which he was prosecuted for trespassing is believed to have been employed as a warning to others who might attempt to invade the secrecy of the airship plant.

  There were many more sightings of brilliant lights apparently under intelligent control over Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts on December 24, and the “searchlight” was frequently described by the many witnesses.

  Reporters from New York and Boston converged on Worcester and tried to interview Mr. Tillinghast, but he fell silent again. All they could learn was that “Mr. Tillinghast is a businessman of good standing in Worcester. He is an experienced mechanic and has invented several devices which are the foundation of the company of which he is vice-president. He has made a specialty of airships for eleven years, he says.”

  The Providence, Rhode Island, Journal remarked: “Tillinghast is absolutely incommunicado. The notoriety that has followed him since the mysterious lights were seen has seriously interfered with his business and with his homelife. He has not been permitted an hour’s peace. At his office there are constantly two or three persons who want to know something. At the door of his place of business and at his home he is closely watched by mysterious men. When he is home, his telephone rings constantly. As his wife has only recently recovered from an illness, the constant clangor is not conducive to his good nature.”

  “… closely watched by mysterious men!”

  A member of the Aero Club of New England, J. Walter Flagg, managed to obtain an audience with the elusive inventor, and he later told reporters that Mr. Tillinghast had not only repeated his claims of the September flight to Boston and back to New York, but that “he had done far more wonderful things.” These “far more wonderful things” were not defined.

  The good citizens of Worcester were understandably upset by all of the furor, and a committee from the local Board of Trade was organized to confront Tillinghast and demand proof of his claims. He responded through a spokesman, one William Hunt. On December 30, Hunt told reporters in Boston that the marvelous Tillinghast machine would be publicly displayed at the Boston Aero Show planned for the week of February 16-23, 1910.

  Sightings in the New England states ceased. The ten-day wonder became a memory. So far as we have been able to learn, no Tillinghast machine was displayed at the Aero Show. He slipped back into oblivion, and the contents of that 100-foot shed on the Gough estate were never revealed.

  On the basis of what we know, we can draw some parallels between the 1896 flap in San Francisco and the 1909 events in New England.

  Just before the San Francisco wave, an impressive mystery man visited lawyer Collins, a prominent attorney, and made a seemingly rational claim. He had invented a wonderful new airship and wanted Collins to handle the patent problems. When the UFO flap broke in the area a few days later, Collins, in good faith, told the press that there was no mystery. His client had perfected an airship and was probably testing it in the San Francisco area.

  The wave came and went. The “inventor” disappeared. No patents were ever filed. The great new invention was lost to humanity, and tinkerers like the Wright brothers and Count Zeppelin were obliged to perfect crude machines that were in no way as remarkable as the objects seen in California.

  In the summer of 1909, a new airship flap began in New Zealand and northern Europe. And an even bigger wave was planned for New England that December. The planners had enjoyed considerable success with their California “mystery inventor” ploy and therefore decided to use the same gimmick again on a somewhat more sophisticated level.

  Here is my theory. Sometime in the fall of 1909, Mr. Wallace E. Tillinghast, one of the most prominent and reputable members of his community with a track record as an inventor, was approached by a man or a group of men who offered to take him for a ride in a marvelous new “secret” aircraft. Mr. Tillinghast was a man of science, and he was far too curious to reject such an opportunity. He went to an isolated field and climbed aboard the machine he found there. His hosts kept their promise and flew him around the countryside, perhaps even to Boston and back.

  When they landed again, the pilots of the machine offered a proposition to Mr. Tillinghast. They struck a bargain (which they had no intention of keeping), and perhaps they offered him a large interest in the profits from their flying machine, provided he did exactly as they ordered during the next few months. They explained that they needed a responsible, respectable man to front for them while they ironed the bugs out of their invention. They appealed to his ego, saying that they were interested only in giving their airship to the world, and they didn’t care if he took full credit for it. After the machine was fully tested, they promised, they would turn it over to him, and he could make all the arrangements for manufacturing more of them. He could also claim full credit for inventing it. They, the real inventors, would happily remain behind the scenes.

  Mr. Tillinghast accepted the proposition, visions of glory dancing in his brain. The machine had been proven to him. He was convinced of the reality of the trip he had taken. When reports of mystery airplanes started to filter into the press in early December, his mysterious friends called upon him and told him that it was time to disclose the existence of the invention. Tillinghast dutifully appeared before the reporters, revealed that he had already made a number of flights, and that the invention would be fully unveiled at an appropriate time in the near future.

  We can only guess at the contents of the shed on the Gough estate. Perhaps it was completely unrelated to the whole business. Or perhaps it housed special communications equipment supplied by the Morgan Telephone Company for the real “airship inventors.” Mr. Morgan also had a known interest in aviation. He might have also been approached by “them” and was involved in the same deal as Tillinghast.

  Whatever the case, thousands of people throughout New England observed UFO-type phenomena that Christmas week, and most believed that they were watching the wonderful invention of a local man. The objects flew orderly patterns over specific geographic points and performed maneuvers, which automatically ruled out convenient natural explanations. Morgan and Tillinghast were never given the promised model to back
up their earlier claims. Like so many of the modern UFO contactees, they were used.

  The 1910 Sightings

  “Three huge lights of almost uniform dimensions” appeared over Huntington, West Virginia, early on the morning of Friday, December 31, 1909. A farmer named Joseph Green thought they had fallen on his land, but a thorough search failed to find any trace of them.

  Then at 9 A.M. on Wednesday, January 12, 1910, thousands of people saw an unusual flying machine passing directly over Chattanooga, Tennessee, at great altitude. The chugging of an engine was clearly heard. That same night an airship passed over Huntsville, Alabama, traveling at high speed, according to the reports.

  At 11 A.M. the next morning “a white dirigible balloon” reappeared over Chattanooga, heading from south to north. It was again seen the following day at noon, this time coming from the north and heading southeast.

  The most interesting sightings of 1910 took place directly over New York City that summer. They are significant because of their similarity to the sightings of Scandinavia in 1934, which we will discuss shortly.

  At 8:45 P.M. on Tuesday, August 30, 1910, “a long black object” flew low over the island of Manhattan, accompanied by the sound of an engine. Hundreds of people stared upward in amazement as the object approached Madison Square and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company tower. The New York Tribune (August 31, 1910) reports: “The vague bulk, as it came into nearer view, took on the semblance of a biplane. It swung past the tower, then turned and described one graceful circle after another around the illuminated structure, its outlines standing out clear in the lights from many windows.”

  It flew off toward the Flatiron Building and then returned again to Madison Square, where it circled again, swooping down so low that “it seemed to brush the top of the trees.”

  The next night (Wednesday) it came back again at 9 P.M. and performed the same maneuvers, circling Madison Square in view of hundreds of people lounging in the park on that warm summer night. “Persons who saw the flying mystery differ as to the number of lights it carried. Some say it carried two red lights, others lean to the three-green theory.” The few known pilots in the New York area had not been aloft that night. It was unlikely that any pilot of the period would have even considered attempting a night flight to perform hazardous low-level maneuvers directly over the city. In fact, pilots avoided Manhattan even in the daytime.

  The identity of the mystery flier of 1910 was never determined. The description of a long black biplane does not fit any of the flimsy craft then performing Sunday demonstrations in fields and meadows on Long Island and in New Jersey.

  South Africa: 1914

  There was a good deal more to the flaps of 1909-10, but we can’t hope to cover everything here. The year 1913 also produced a series of important sightings all over the world, and a European ufologist, Edgar Sievers, has done extensive research into the wholesale UFO sightings that took place from Cape Town to Pretoria in 1914. The powerful “headlight” of a cigar-shaped object is supposed to have sprayed over the plains of South Africa nearly every night that summer. One farmer reported coming upon a landed aircraft on the veld near Greytown, Natal. Two of its occupants, he said, were pailing water from a stream. Sievers dug into the old records and found there were no airplanes of any kind in South Africa at that time. Only three or four flimsy, short-ranged biplanes existed on the entire continent.

  From New Zealand to Boston, from Arkansas to Sweden, from Russia to South Africa, our mysterious aviators plied the globe. All of this happened long before any known nation had truly conquered the air, fifty years or more before the advent of the high-flying U-2 spy planes and the man-made satellites.

  Were these unknown “biplanes” and “dirigible balloons” space probes from some distant planet, or were they machines operating from hidden bases or a “hidden world” much closer to home?

  7

  Unidentified Airplanes

  Conventional prop-driven airplanes with discernible wings and tails are an integral part of the UFO mystery. Although international law requires all aircraft to bear identifying markings and license numbers on their wings, tails, and fuselages, none of these mystery airplanes bothers to comply. They are usually a dull gray or black and display no insignia of any kind. Often they are seen flying very low at night in UFO flap areas, and the pilot’s cabin is usually brightly illuminated. Customarily, conventional planes flying at night do not have brightly illuminated cockpits because it would interfere with the pilot’s night vision.

  These pirate aircraft have been busy all over the world since 1896. At 2 P.M. on the afternoon of Monday, July 22, 1968, one of them appeared in the clear skies over the airports of San Carlos de Bariloche, outside the city of Bahia Blanca, Argentina. It circled the field lazily at an altitude of 200 feet, apparently preparing to land. Innumerable witnesses, including pilots, police officers, and airport employees, paused in whatever they were doing and watched. The arrival of an airplane at a busy airport in broad daylight was hardly an earth-shaking event—but there was something very odd about this one. Something very odd, indeed.

  All of the witnesses later agreed that the plane had an unusually long fuselage and that its delta wings seemed far too short to support a craft of its size. Furthermore, it moved very slowly—too slowly to stay aloft. One of the fundamental rules of aerodynamics is that the shorter an airplane’s wings are in comparison to its overall size, the faster it must go to maintain lift.

  The airport control tower made an effort to contact the plane by radio but received no reply. Then a green light was flashed at it, signaling permission to land. The giant machine continued to lope around the field. When it reached the end of runway 28, it suddenly rolled over on its axis, completing a 360-degree turn in remarkably little space. Astonished viewers on the ground studied it through binoculars and could find no markings or insignia except for three small black squares and one large one on its fuselage. None of the airport employees could identify the make or design of the plane. They had never seen anything like it before, even though they were familiar with everything from Constellations to U-2s. It seemed to glide rather than fly and made only a slight hissing noise. After a few minutes, it picked up speed and shot away to the southeast.

  Argentine authorities were never able to identify this stranger or explain the incident. The newspaper La Razon carried the story on July 25, 1968, and it was investigated by Miss Edith Greinert for England’s Flying Saucer Review. The Bahia Blanca sector of Argentina was beset by a wide variety of UFO sightings, landings, and alleged contacts throughout 1968.

  Whole formations of unidentified delta-winged craft have been seen over the United States. At least one case was given careful study by the U.S. Air Force. Project Blue Book Report No. 14 lists as “unidentified” the following incident: “A naval aviation student, his wife, and several others were at a drive in movie from 2115 to 2240 hours [9:15 to 10:40 P.M.] on Sunday, April 20, 1952, during which time they saw nine groups of objects fly over. There were from two to nine objects in a group, and there were about twenty groups. The groups of objects flew in a straight line except for some changes in direction accomplished in a manner like any standard aircraft turn. The objects were shaped like conventional aircraft. The unaccountable feature of the objects was that each had a red glow surrounding it and was glowing itself, although it was a cloudless night.”

  A government official in Washington, who must remain anonymous for obvious reasons, recently told me about a sighting he had made while living on Long Island in 1957. His dog had started to bark and howl one night, he said, and he stepped outside in time to see a huge delta-winged aircraft passing swiftly overhead in total silence. It was surrounded by an eerie reddish glow. He had never seen anything like it before and decided to call the local Air Force base. He reported what he had observed, and the next day an officer called him and asked for additional details, admitting that several other people had reported seeing the same thing. (Except for a
few experimental types, delta-winged aircraft were very rare in the 1950s.)

  UFO enthusiasts and their organizations are largely concerned with unusual configurations, such as disks and flying sausages, but the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) has received one especially intriguing “mystery airplane” report that they have investigated as thoroughly as possible. The witness voluntarily submitted to a lie detector test, answering questions conceived by trained psychologists. His name is William Hertzke, a rancher in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and he passed those tests. A full chapter is devoted to this case in the book UFOs over the Americas by Jim and Coral Lorenzen.

  One morning in October 1965, Mr. Hertzke was horseback riding in a pasture on the Circle Jay Ranch near Calgary when he saw what looked like a small airplane parked on the ground. It was a silver-gray color with swept-back (delta) wings. He estimated that it was about 16 feet long, with a wingspan of about 12 feet, and the fuselage was 4 or 5 feet deep. He rode over to it and examined it cautiously.

  The exterior, he reported, was irregular “like a waffle.” A transparent plastic-like dome covered the cockpit. Through it he could see complicated instruments, a 14-inch “TV screen,” and two small, transparent glasslike bucket seats. There were no visible motors, propellers, or jets, and no insignia or identifying marks of any kind. He saw no sign of life around the object, and his work schedule did not permit him to return to it again later for another look.

  Hertzke’s description, which is much more detailed than we can present here, is most extraordinary. Although the object had a conventional tail and delta wings, its interior and its waffle-like[7] exterior placed it in a class by itself. Apparently it was built for very small pilots, and it flew on some unknown principle that did not require jets or propellers. (Incidentally, conventional sailplanes and gliders have exceptionally long wings, while this object had very short ones.) If you were to glimpse this kind of aircraft passing slowly overhead, you probably wouldn’t even give it a second glance.