Operation Trojan Horse: The Classic Breakthrough Study of UFOs

by John A. Keel

  Still later, when the source of Operation Trojan Horse found it necessary to deploy “eccentrics” over Scandinavia in 1934, airplanes very carefully flew low over the remote, thinly populated villages so the people could see them clearly and have a frame of reference with which they could explain the many strange lights and searchlights in the sky. As with the earlier flaps, the true nature of the phenomenon was carefully hidden from us.

  During World War II, and immediately thereafter, the world’s skies were cluttered with all kinds of man-made aircraft ranging from helicopters to blimps. While thousands of UFOs were noticed and reported, many thousands of others probably were not. Cigar-shaped objects were assumed to be sub-chasing blimps. Strange “eccentrics” were regarded as secret weapons being tested.

  The cessation of hostilities gave the UFO source a new headache. When, for some reason, it became necessary to revisit Scandinavia in 1946, near-hysteria developed. The objects were thought to be Russian rockets. The world was jittery, and the Cold War was just taking shape. If the ghost-rocket transmogrifications were used in other parts of the world, it was possible that they might even have precipitated a new war. A new frame of reference was therefore necessary.

  We were now technologically advanced to a point where some of us, at least, were ready to consider and accept the possible existence of “a superior intelligence with an advanced technology.” We were a setup for the modern myth of extraterrestrial visitants.

  Beginning in 1947, the great “flying saucer” frame of reference was carefully built up by a long series of spectacular incidents and contacts. The whole structure of these events carefully follows the psychological patterns inherent in the earlier flaps. We were seeing no more—and no fewer—anomalous aerial objects in 1947 than had been seen in 1847. We were simply seeing them in a new way. A new game was being played with us.

  Small groups of believers quickly sprang up, even though no one bothered to collect and study the hundreds of UFO reports from June-July 1947 to search objectively for the hidden patterns. These believers immediately accepted the extraterrestrial hypothesis, and they spent the next twenty years advocating the idea. Their research followed a singular line: They labored to prove the reliability of witnesses. This meant that if a police officer or pilot observed an unusual object from a great distance, his report was given precedence over the report of a housewife who saw one land in her own backyard. Some of these cults became obsessed with the search for physical evidence. But their criteria for evidence was very strict. Such evidence had to be nonterrestrial. But this was a vicious circle. If a piece of metal fell from a UFO and proved to be ordinary aluminum, it was discarded. If it proved to be made of a puzzling, unidentifiable alloy, it still proved nothing unless the source could also be proven.

  A new game emerged: the artifact or hardware game. This game is well known in the Irish fairy lore. The phenomenon has always obliged us by planting false evidence all over the landscape.

  The UFO cultists trapped themselves into a hopeless situation almost from the outset. If the UFOs actually were the product of a superior extraterrestrial civilization, then final proof could only come about in one of two ways:

  1. A flying saucer would have to make an error and crash or be captured. Then we would have absolute proof that it existed and was from a superior technology. Since 1947, there have been many rumors of such crashes. Author Frank Scully was told by a contactee type that such a crash had occurred in the Southwest in 1948, and that the Air Force had recovered the object, together with some bodies of tiny humanoids. He published this bit of hearsay, and it has become a major ufological myth. The Air Force still receives letters from people asking if it is true that these bodies are pickled in a bottle somewhere in the AF archives.

  2. The ufonauts must, themselves, come forward with the final evidence by landing in a public place, in front of many witnesses, and by entering into direct communication with the heads of state. There have been many reported landings, but, as with the landings of 1897, all of these have taken place in secluded spots with a minimum of witnesses. The apparent purpose of most of these landings seems to have been to advance belief in the frame of reference, not to provide absolute proof that the frame of reference is authentic.

  After twenty years of this game, it does not seem too likely that such proof will ever be forthcoming. So we must content ourselves with an examination of the actual physical evidence that has been produced at UFO sites all over the world. On the surface, many of these cases seem completely absurd until we search for correlations in other forgotten files. My own criterion is simple enough: If similar events occur in different parts of the world and produce similar details or physical substances, I feel it is highly unlikely that the witnesses in one event could have even heard about the others and could have concocted identical hoaxes. Instead, they were victims of the artifact game.

  We can begin with the puzzle of the anomalous anchors. The following story is from the pages of the Houston, Texas, Daily Post (April 28, 1897):

  Merkel, Texas, April 26—Some parties returning from church last night noticed a heavy object dragging along with a rope attached. They followed it until in crossing the railroad it caught on a rail. On looking up they saw what they supposed was the airship. It was not near enough to get an idea of the dimensions. A light could be seen protruding from several windows; one bright light in front like the headlight of a locomotive. After some ten minutes, a man was seen descending the rope; he came near enough to be plainly seen. He wore a light-blue sailor suit, was small in size. He stopped when he discovered parties at the anchor and cut the rope below him and sailed off in a northeast direction. The anchor is now on exhibition at the blacksmith shop of Elliott and Miller and is attracting the attention of hundreds of people.

  A small man in a blue sailor suit climbing down a rope from the sky. Rather silly, isn’t it? Sillier still, researchers have discovered two identical stories in very obscure historical texts. An ancient Irish manuscript, the Speculum Regali, gives us this account from A.D. 956:

  There happened in the borough of Cloera, one Sunday while people were at mass, a marvel. In this town there is a church to the memory of St. Kinarus. It befell that a metal anchor was dropped from the sky, with a rope attached to it, and one of the sharp flukes caught in the wooden arch above the church door. The people rushed out of the church and saw in the sky a ship with men on board, floating at the end of the anchor cable, and they saw a man leap overboard and pull himself down the cable to the anchor as if to unhook it. He appeared as if he were swimming in water. The folk rushed up and tried to seize him; but the bishop forbade the people to hold the man for fear it might kill him. The man was freed and hurried up the cable to the ship, where the crew cut the rope and the ship rose and sailed away out of sight. But the anchor is in the church as a testimony to this singular occurrence.

  For many years a church in Bristol, England, is said to have had a very unique grille on its doors; a grille made from another anchor that allegedly came from the sky. Around A. D. 1200, during the observance of a feast day, the anchor came plummeting out of the sky trailing a rope. It got caught in a mound of stones, according to the story, and as a mob of churchgoers gathered around to watch, a “sailor” came down the rope, hand over hand, to free it. This crowd succeeded in grabbing him and pushed him back and forth until, according to the Gervase of Tilbury’s account in Otia Imperialia, another rare manuscript, “He suffocated by the mist of our moist atmosphere and expired.” His unseen comrades overhead wisely cut the rope and took off. The anchor remained behind, as in the other stories, and was installed on the church doors.

  Researcher Lucius Farish remarked, “Reviewing the similarities of these reports, one is almost tempted to speculate that someone merely updated the ancient accounts. Yet, a citizen of Merkel, Texas, possessing a copy of the Speculum Regali [or the Otia lmperialia] in 1897 would be fully as fantastic as the reports themselves!”

  A farmer fi
fteen miles north of Sioux City, Iowa, Robert Hibbard, claimed a distressing experience with an anchor-dragging UFO early in April 1897. A dispatch which appeared in the April 5 edition of the Saginaw, Michigan, Evening News stated that “Hibbard’s reputation for truth has never been bad, and the general opinion is that either he ‘had ‘em’ or dreamed his remarkable experience.” The article continues:

  On the night in question, he says he was tramping about his farm in the moonlight.., when suddenly a dark body, lighted on each side, with a row of what looked like incandescent lamps, loomed up some distance to the south of him at a height of perhaps a mile from the ground. He watched it intently until it was directly over his head.

  At this point the skipper evidently decided to turn around. In accomplishing this maneuver the machine sank considerably. Hibbard did not notice a drag rope with a grapnel attached which dangled from the rear of the car until suddenly, as the machine rose again from the ground, it hooked itself firmly in his trousers and shot away again to the south. Had it risen to any considerable height, the result, Hibbard thinks, would have been disastrous. Either his weight was sufficient to keep it near terra firma, however, or the operator did not care to ascend to a higher level.

  On the bank of the dry run, where the farmer finally made his escape, grows a small sapling. Hibbard passed near this obstruction in his flight, and as a last resort, grabbed it with both hands. Instantly there was a sound of tearing cloth and the machine went on with a section of Hibbard’s unmentionables, while Hibbard himself fell precipitately into the run. He related his experience to several neighbors and despite their grins of incredulity, firmly maintains the truth of the story.

  We have only two choices: We can either dismiss all four of these stories as being somehow derivative of one another and pure poppycock; or we can assume that mysterious airships, all dragging anchors, appeared in 956, 1200, and 1897. There are, in fact, a number of other reports in which UFOs were said to be dragging something along the ground. That still doesn’t prove that anchors are standard equipment on some of the objects. If they were using anchors, what could the purpose have been? Could some of the early UFOs have been so primitive that the only way they could hover was by being anchored to the ground? Would spaceships from another world require anchors?

  Physical Evidence

  All kinds of junk have fallen out of the sky throughout recorded history. Ivan T. Sanderson has in his files extensive lists of documented cases going back to Roman times. Ridiculous things such as stone pillars and heavy metal wheels have come crashing out of the blue, and there are countless cases of ice falls—huge blocks of ice, some weighing hundreds of pounds, dropping all over this planet. Charles Fort and others have found reports of ice falls predating the introduction of manmade aircraft, but the popular explanation today, when new incidents occur, is that the ice has fallen from the wings of high-altitude airplanes.

  The flying saucers have been spewing all kinds of trash all over the landscape. In nearly every instance, these materials always prove to be ordinary earthly substances like magnesium, aluminum, chromium, and even plain old tin. Each of these incidents gives the skeptics new ammunition.

  Here again, I feel that these correlated “negative factors” build into a definite positive factor. In other words, the more negative a piece of evidence seems to be, the more positive it actually is.

  We can start with the slag dumped from the sky during the Maury Island, Washington, “hoax” of 1947. Analysis of this material showed it to be composed of calcium, aluminum, silicon, iron, zinc, and other mundane elements. Heaps of this stuff have turned up since in New Hampshire, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and many other places following UFO sightings. It has often been found on hilltops and deep in trackless forests, places where it had to be dumped from the air. And it was found in Sweden in 1946.

  When a wildly gyrating metal disk appeared over the city of Campinas, Brazil, on Tuesday, December 14, 1954, hundreds of witnesses reported that it dribbled a stream of “silvery liquid” into the streets. Government scientists collected some of this stuff, and Dr. Risvaldo Maffei later announced that it was almost pure tin.

  The egg-shaped object that police officer Lonnie Zamora said landed outside of Socorro, New Mexico, on April 24, 1964, left behind a metal-like material on some rocks. It proved to be silicon.

  Silicon substances have frequently been found at touchdown sites. Sometimes it is mixed with aluminum or other materials to form a purplish liquid. Such liquids have been found in New York State (Cherry Creek, 1965) and dozens of other places.

  Witnesses in Texas, Maryland, claim to have watched a shiny disk explode in the air in June 1965. Pieces of it were recovered and were examined at the Goddard Space Flight Center. It proved to be ordinary ferrochromium.

  Another exploding UFO, this one at Ubatuba, Brazil, in 1957, left behind particles that were nothing but pure magnesium. And great quantities of tiny strips of aluminum, with traces of magnesium and silicon, are now being found all over the world. Thousands of people in Chiba, Japan, reported seeing a circular flying object eject a flood of these shreds above their city on September 7, 1956. Piles of it have been found in West Virginia, Michigan, and many other places during UFO flaps. It is frequently found laid out in neatly ordered patterns on the ground where witnesses have seen UFOs hovering. I spent a lot of time investigating these cases in 1967. These strips are almost identical to the chaff dispensed by high-flying Air Force planes to jam radar, yet they do not seem to be related to AF operations at all. The UFO chaff is often found under trees or on porches, in places where it could not possibly have fallen from the sky directly. Quantities of it turned up in a burning field outside of Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1966, simultaneously with low-level UFO sightings.

  Mysterious hollow metal spheres have also been dropping out of the sky all over the world. Three such spheres were found on the Australian desert in 1963. They were about 14 inches in diameter and had a shiny, polished surface. Australian scientists were baffled by them. On April 30, 1963, Allen Fairhall, the Minister of Supply, appeared before the Australian House of Representatives and told them that all effort to open the spheres had failed. The objects were allegedly turned over to the U.S. Air Force, and that was the end of them.

  Other metal spheres have dropped out of the sky near Monterrey, Mexico (February 7, 1967) and Conway, Arkansas (November 1967). The Mexican ball was identified as titanium; the one in Arkansas was stainless steel. Others have been found in Argentina and Africa. They do not seem to be rocket parts, nor would it be possible for a piece of a rocket to go through reentry and land intact as these things have done.

  Smaller colored spheres were found scattered over the French countryside in 1966-67, as if it had been raining balls there. Where is all this junk coming from? Why, the answer is simple: from the same place as the stone pillars and the blocks of ice from earlier times.

  Innumerable cases of contact and landings have been flushed down the ufological drains because of the deliberate “negative” factors. Sincere witnesses have actually been ruined because the amateur UFO investigators have accused them of being liars or worse.

  Consider the case of poor Joe Simonton and his outer-space pancake. It’s a classic of the negative factor.

  Simonton, a sixty-year-old chicken farmer outside of Eagle River, Wisconsin, said he heard a strange sound outside his farmhouse at 11 A.M. on Tuesday, April 18, 1961. He looked out of the window and was startled to see a silvery metallic machine descending in his yard. As he stepped outside, some kind of hatch slid open in the upper part of the object and three dark-skinned men became visible. He estimated that these men were about 5 feet tall and between twenty-five to thirty years of age. They wore clinging dark-blue uniforms with turtleneck tops and had on apparently knitted headgear, such as is worn under crash helmets. All were clean-shaven, and none of them spoke during the brief episode that followed.

  One of them stepped to the hatch, Simonton said, and
held out a shiny bucket-like affair which had a handle on either side, indicating that he wanted the farmer to fill it with water. Simonton took it, filled it from his pump, and returned it to the silent man. He noticed that the interior of the craft was black, “like wrought iron,” and that one man was busy at some kind of instrument panel, while the other was working at what seemed to be a stove. A pile of pancakes sat nearby. Simonton says he gestured at the pancakes, and the man with the bucket turned, picked up four of them, and handed them to him. He then attached some kind of rope to his belt, and the hatch slid shut. Joe Simonton stood with his mouth open, four warm pancakes in his hands, as the object, which had been humming throughout, began to make a sound like “tires on a wet pavement” and rose slowly into the air, moving off to the south.

  At about that same time, an insurance agent named Savino Borgo was driving along Highway 70, about a mile from Simonton’s farm, when he saw what he later described as a saucer rising diagonally into the air and flying parallel with the highway.

  Eagle River is in a thinly populated section of northern Wisconsin, just a few miles south of the Michigan border and surrounded by forests and small lakes. About a month later, on May 25, there was a widespread power failure throughout the area that also affected local telephone service. On February 24 of that year a B-47 bomber had crashed near Hurley, Wisconsin, about sixty miles northwest of Eagle River. Another B-47 crashed on May 2 only two miles from the site of the February accident. The pilot of the second plane was later quoted in the press as saying that, “I felt this weightlessness—I was hanging by my straps,” just before his craft went out of control and headed for the ground. There were numerous other incidents and UFO sightings in the area during that period—which was the “lull” from 1959 to 1963.