What Reviewers Are Saying About
THE GOLDEN AGE OF FLYING SAUCERS
Each chapter is written in an exciting "you are there" sort of perspective that paints vivid pictures in your mind, and reads like fast-paced fiction. There are lots of names and dates and facts included in each account, but they never bog you down. The stories are good enough to keep your interest peaked and your eyes moving across the page.
-- Bill Breyer, Amazon.com Review
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This a good compulation of historic UFO cases and a great little reference book. It's good for the amateur investigator, the student, and as a quick-reference book when trying to recall specific events of famous sightings during various times.
Joseph R. Calamia, Amazon.com Review
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The Golden Age of Flying Saucers delivers the spine-tingling suspense and spookiness every ten year old craves, while masterfully capturing a certain nostalgic "gosh-wow" feeling about the 1950s that every parent with ties to that decade can't help but embrace like a warm, fuzzy blanket. Remember The Day the Earth Stood Still? or Earth VS the Flying Saucers? That's the feeling. Buy this book now!
-- Jack Preston King, Author of Missing Time and Other Stories: 13 Sidereal Crossings
The Golden Age of Flying Saucers:
Classic UFO Sightings, Saucer Crashes and Extraterrestrial Contact Encounters
By Frank G. Wilkinson
Published by New Paradigm Press at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Frank G. Wilkinson
Smashwords Edition, License Notes:
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Permission for use of photographs and written materials from Inside the Spaceships, and Flying Saucers Farewell by George Adamski, as well as from Mr. Adamski's contributed chapters contained in Flying Saucers Have Landed by Desmond Leslie, granted by 2007 copyright © G.A.F. International/Adamski Foundation, P.O. Box 1722, Vista CA 92085 USA. www.gafintl-adamski.com
Dedication: For my own kids and for children everywhere – Keep dreaming about the stars, and someday you'll awaken among them!
Table of Contents
Introduction:
The Golden Age of Flying Saucers
Chapter One:
The Shaver Mystery: Where It All Began
Chapter Two:
The Coming of the Saucers: Kenneth Arnold and the First Great Golden Age UFO
Chapter Three:
Mayhem Over Maury Island
Chapter Four:
RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region
Chapter Five:
Behind the Flying Saucers: How the World's First-Ever UFO Book Told the First-Ever Crashed-Disc Retrieval Story, and Quite Possibly Perpetrated the First-Ever UFO Hoax (or Maybe Not)
Chapter Six
Flier Dies Chasing a Flying Saucer: The Mysterious Death of Captain Thomas F. Mantell, Jr.
Chapter Seven:
George Adamski Meets the "Space Brothers"
Chapter Eight:
Aboard a Flying Saucer: Truman Bethurum and the People of the Planet Clarion
Recommended Reading
Glossary
Appendix: Flying Saucers Year By Year – 1947 to 1953
Introduction: The Golden Age of Flying Saucers
I was raised in a flying saucer family. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, many a weekend found my parents packing a picnic lunch and loading the car for their latest saucer-spotting excursion into the clear-skied desert outside their Phoenix, Arizona home. Born in 1963, I spoke my first words and took my first stumbling steps thrilling to stories of their early UFO adventures – blazing fireballs turning night into day, a giant cigar-shaped cruiser tottering like balanced scales on a mountaintop, a period of missing time before anyone had ever heard of "Alien Abduction"...
Flying saucer stories were like Bible stories in my family: a bright narrative tapestry of strange encounters with a Mysterious Unknown, facts that never quite fit ordinary experience, the ever-present hint of some deeper meaning lurking behind the details, all mixed with the spine-tingling hope that at any moment IT (whatever IT turned out to be) might drop down out of a clear blue sky, make itself finally and unquestionably known , and release us all forever from the confining shackles of everyday reality...
As a pre-teen, most weekends found me at the local public library with my nose in a book, anxiously tracking down those Elusive Answers to Big Questions we all begin to ask at that age – Why are we here? How should I live? Where do we go when we die? Building on my "spacey" heritage, I spent a lot of time digging through the UFO and paranormal sections, working to somehow pull the wild speculations of the 1970s flying saucer flap, the increasingly bizarre reports from the National Enquirer, and my own family history together into a coherent worldview that not only answered the Big Questions, but that might also lead to the promising future I saw reflected in movies like Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, TV's Star Trek, and the many science fiction novels that captivated my, then, almost-teenaged imagination.
That's when I encountered George Adamski's classic narrative Inside the Spaceships. It took me by surprise because, by some strange trick of the Dewey Decimal system, Mr. Adamski's book was not filed in the 001s with the other UFO titles, but rather with the Aviation and Rocketry books, a section of the library I didn't get around to until Junior High. I was 12 when I read this work by America's first and best-known alien "contactee," and it changed my life in a number of ways – not all of them good.
On the upside, the book made it clear to me that flying saucers were real, that extraterrestrial contact had already begun, that beings from beyond earth were as advanced spiritually as they obviously were technologically, and that if we earthlings could just cast off our greed, violence and hunger for power we could live as they did and join their ranks among the stars.
I encountered the downside when I ran home, breathless, the book clutched tight in my fingers, my mind reeling with questions of why we consider UFOs a mystery when so much is already known, why we didn't all treat each other the way Adamski's "Space Brothers" said we should, and most of all, in the 20 years since the publication of Adamski's book (released in 1953 – so now it's been over 50 years!), why had we not already joined the peaceful, Star Trek-like federation of planets awaiting us just beyond the sky?
"Mom!" I shouted as the screened kitchen door cracked shut behind me like gunfire. "Have you heard of this Adamski Guy? Do you know what this book says?"
I quickly learned that even those who have themselves encountered the Mysterious Unknown often doubt the claimed experiences of others. My mother didn't believe Adamski. She said it was a hoax, that I should just forget it.
I most certainly did not "just forget it." My mother's adult skepticism fell like rocket fuel on the fire my 12 year old imagination. I redoubled the intensity of my search, voraciously devouring the works of UFOlogy's greats, from the metaphysical George Adamski (Flying Saucers Have Landed, Inside the Spaceships, Flying Saucers Farewell) to the conspiratorial Donald Keyhoe (Flying Saucers Are Real, Flying Saucers from Outer Space, The UFO Conspiracy) to the sensationalistic Harold T. Wilkins (Flying Saucers Uncensored, Flying Saucers on the Attack, Strange Mysteries of Time and Space) to the humble Truman Bethurum, whose book Aboard a Flying Saucer, told the story of his repeated desert contacts with a UFO crew from the planet Clarion – a story recounted in detail in the final chapter of this book.
Over the course of many years, and eventually decades, of research, I gradually became, as an adult, an accomplished UFO historian, as well as a firsthand investigator of contemporary extraterrestrial encounters. Between early 1997, which was the 50th anniversary of the famous 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, and Halloween 1998, I wrote, edited and published nine fun and informative issues of The Golden Age of Flying Saucers Newsletter, a bi-monthly exploration of the earliest years of the UFO phenomenon. My primary goal in publishing The Golden Age of Flying Saucers Newsletter was to bridge what I, as a UFO historian, had come to see as a disturbing, and even dangerous gap in a lot of people's understanding of the ET contact phenomenon.
People born after 1975 or so tend to identify terms like extraterrestrial, alien, and UFO mainly with the image of the bulb-headed, black-eyed "Grey Alien" abductors made famous by New York artist and amateur hypnotist Budd Hopkins' books Missing Time and Intruders, and horror author Whitley Strieber's Communion and its many sequels. Over the years, the details of the standard "alien abduction" story have been worked out in dozens of popular books, in movies like Fire From The Sky, The Arrival, and Signs, and even such TV blockbusters as The X-Files, Dark Skies, and Steven Spielberg's 2003 twenty-hour SCI-FI Channel mini-series Taken. This scary, 1980's version of alien contact, while not wholly unprecedented in the history of UFO encounters leading up to it, so violates the hopeful, adventurous, exciting spirit of what came before that I've felt driven for more than a decade to do everything I can set the record straight.
I'm not saying that the creepy, gray "intruders" of modern alien abduction lore are not real – thousands, and possibly millions of people around the world certainly claim to have experienced their presence firsthand. But I am saying that such encounters do not, by a long shot, tell the whole story of extraterrestrial contact, which has been going on in a wide variety of forms for over 50 years now.
I am saying, as well, that such unhappy encounters with beings from space, even if they are real, cannot be properly understood outside the context of the UFO contact phenomenon as a whole – a phenomenon rooted in both a fascinating (but not necessarily frightening) mystery and an inspiring call to Look Up! from our petty fears and earthly worries, to think about the universe and what's possible within it in a much larger, more open-minded way, and to embrace a bright vision of Humanity's future among the stars.
That bright vision came most solidly to Earth during The Golden Age of Flying Saucers, a time-period I identify as spanning the years 1943 to 1975. This book explores many of the most important UFO sightings and contact encounters that occurred during that period.
Growing up in a flying saucer family taught me to open my mind to the unexpected, to the surprising, to all the fascinating-but not-yet-explained phenomena taking place in the world around me. A lifetime spent studying UFO sightings and accounts of ET contact has helped me grow into an adult who dreams big dreams, who believes anything is possible, and who Looks Up! to a glorious future for Humankind so far above and beyond the muck and mire of today's headlines that I never, ever lose hope. For me, the bright vision never fades.
Think of this book as a packet of psychic seeds ("star-seeds," if you like), seeds of that bright vision, of enthusiasm and wonder, of boundless hope for the future of our tiny planet floating in an endless sea of stars.
As you read the true stories that follow, water the seeds they plant in your mind with this constant thought: We are not alone. We have never been alone in the universe. More than 50 years of eyewitness testimony strongly indicates that we have not been alone on this planet since at least 1947.
Extraterrestrial contact is not only possible, it is real and on-going. It is happening all over the world, right now. As you read these words, someone, somewhere is sighting a UFO, or even meeting an extraterrestrial. Someone is in contact.
Will you be next?
Chapter One -The Shaver Mystery: Where It All Began
December, 1943: Television writer and associate editor of Amazing Stories magazine, Howard Browne, was handed a letter for consideration by his boss, Senior Editor Raymond A. Palmer. The letter was from one Richard Shaver, an Amazing Stories reader, and it claimed to reveal the hidden truth that a race of degenerate mutant beings called "Deros" existed far below the Earth's surface in a vast and ancient network of caverns, tunnels and subterranean cities. From these underground strongholds, Shaver claimed, the Deros used various advanced mechanical devices called "Mechs," to scan the Earth's surface, project both thoughts and 3-D images into the minds of unsuspecting humans by way of highly specialized "rays," to extract thoughts and images by means of these same rays, to kill or destroy at will, and to protect the secret of their subterranean existence from surface-dwellers at any cost.
Browne, presuming the author to be either a prankster or a madman, tossed the letter into the trash. Editor Palmer, however, recognized the extraordinary nature of Shaver's missive and not only retrieved the letter from oblivion, but went on to publish it in Amazing Stories.
Thousands of letters poured in from readers supporting Shaver's claims with their own stories of Dero encounters. Palmer traveled to Pennsylvania to meet the author in person, and procured reams of material Shaver had compiled on the Deros and their activities. He worked day and night to transform Shaver's ramblings into readable, entertaining prose, and released his first revised installment, I Remember Lemuria, in March, 1945.
HOLLOW EARTH HISTORY
Presaging such contemporary "ancient astronaut" theorists as Zechariah Sitchin, Shaver's I Remember Lemuria revealed that, early in Earth's development, a race of near-immortal, technologically advanced extraterrestrials came to our world, where they were worshiped as gods by our ancestors. These "Elder Gods," as Shaver labeled them, ruled the globe in antiquity, and stories of their exploits form the basis of all our ancient myths, legends and religious beliefs.
But a time came when changes in our sun brought a devastating new radiation to the Earth, dramatically shortening lifespans and causing great physical and mental degeneration among their kind. The Elder Gods abandoned the Earth's surface, creating great underground cities 4 to 20 miles beneath the radiation-bathed crust.
When they eventually found this subterranean quarantine too confining, they decided to leave the Earth altogether. Due to time and transport-space limitations, they left much of their "Mech" behind, sealed away in the deep caverns. They also left behind many of their own people, who subsequently degenerated under the negative radiation, as well as through intensive inbreeding in their underground lairs, into crazed and twisted dwarves, completely lacking conscience or the capacity for compassion. These "degenerate robots," or "Deros," Shaver believed, have inhabited the abandoned caverns for millennia. Driven by their mental degeneration, which developed into a kind of hereditary insanity, they wage a never-ending war against human surface-dwellers, using their "Mech" rays to drive individuals insane, stir up war between nations, and to kill, intimidate or lead astray researchers seeking to expose their dark existence and purpose.
Fortunately for we surface-dwellers, another faction of this same race, labeled "Teros" by Shaver (short for "integrative robots"), managed to avoid their fellows' degeneration by building their cities much deeper underground, where the effects of the bad radiation were negligible. Sane and conscientious, though fewer in number, these "Teros" have taken up arms on our behalf, using their own "Mech" devices to counter, wherever possible, the destructive activities of their crazed brethren.
Issue after issue, Shaver (with ample assistance from editor Palmer) expanded his expose' of the underground world, detailing its structure, the location of entrances, the bizarre ways of its inhabitants, etc. As would Eric Von Daniken more than a generation later, Shaver built his case for the Deros referencing classical mythology, contemporary Native religions, and even Christian history, hinting that at the root of the Western concept of Hell lay ancestral memories of very real and terrifying abductions to underground Dero torture facilities – an eerie precursor to today's UFO/alien abduction lore.
WATCH THE SKIES!
The Shaver Mystery soon caught the public imagination, and Amazing Stories' circulation grew fourfold almost overnight. Shaver's warning reached millions when he appeared on the Long John Nebel radio show. A university roundtable held to determine the scientific validity of his claims ruled that nothing Shaver reported was, at least technically, impossible and, as no evidence of a hoax had ever been presented, his story deserved serious consideration.
But the June 24, 1947 Kenneth Arnold saucer sighting over Mt. Rainier, Washington shifted popular attention to the skies, and the Shaver Mystery soon vanished from both the public mind, and, with the exit of editor Ray Palmer, from the pages of Amazing Stories as well.
In the 1950s, Palmer, then editor of Flying Saucers from Other Worlds magazine, attempted to breathe new life into the Shaver Mystery by shortening the publication's title to simply Flying Saucers, and declaring that UFOs originated from deep inside our own world. He emphasized the fact that Shaver had described disc-shaped Dero flying machines as early as 1945, well in advance of the Arnold sighting.
But the man in the street was looking up, and his attention would not be drawn earthward again until long after Richard Shaver and his Mystery had faded to little more than footnotes in paranormal history.
Chapter Two - The Coming of the Saucers: Kenneth Arnold and the First Great Golden Age UFO Sighting
On June 24, 1947, Boise, Idaho businessman and pilot Kenneth Arnold had just finished an equipment installation job for Chehalis, Washington's Central Air Service when he learned that a lost C-46 Marine transport plane was believed to have crashed in the vicinity of nearby Mt. Rainier. A $5,000 reward was being offered to any person who could locate the wreckage. An experience rough-terrain pilot and Idaho Search and Rescue Mercy Flyer, Arnold decided to delay his scheduled return to Yakima by an hour in order to spend some search time over the mountain. He completed a meticulous ground inspection of his own vehicle, then took to the air.
While making a 180 degree turn over Mineral, Washington, a bright, blue-white flash lit the surface of his airplane. For a moment he believed he had nearly collided with another craft, but the only other plane he could spot was a large DC-4 far off to his left and rear, far too distant to have caused the strange effect.
The flash came again, and this time he was able to determine its direction of origin and follow the flash back to its source. A formation of shining objects were chasing one another over the mountaintops to his left and north, flying very close to the rocky surface in tight formation, traveling at tremendous speed.
They approached rapidly, passing almost in front of Arnold's plane. He counted nine of the objects, crescent-shaped and tailless, as they rocketed along in a peculiar reverse echelon formation, the first craft flying higher than the last. Their erratic flight reminded him of speed boats chopping along on rough water, or the bouncing tail of a Chinese kite. As the formation passed before him flying from north to south, he determined to clock their speed.
The bright flashes continued as the unknown objects rolled and fluttered, tipping their wings toward the sun. They swerved as one in and out of the high peaks between Mt. Rainier and Mt. Adams in a wild game of "follow the leader" before finally vanishing from view.
FLYING SAUCERS
Arnold landed his small plane in Yakima at four o'clock that afternoon. Al Baxter, general manager of Central Aircraft, listened to his story with interest. An eavesdropping helicopter pilot suggested that Arnold had likely witnessed a flight of guided missiles launched from the nearby Moses Lake installation.
In the air again, on his way to finish his flying run in Pendleton, Oregon, Arnold worked to remember more details about the sighting. He attempted to calculate the speed of the objects, but, trying to fly and add at the same time, he came up with such a ridiculously high number that he doubted his own math and decided to wait until he landed to draw any conclusions.
On the ground in Pendleton, he told his story to a group of pilots and curious bystanders, including newsman Bill Bequette, to whom he described the motion of the objects with the now-immortal phrase, "They flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across water." Bequette put the words flying and saucer together for the first time, and within hours the wire service had taken the news of the Flying Saucers to the world.
DISTURBING QUESTIONS
The pilots went eagerly to work comparing Arnold's measurements with the positions and distances of known landmarks, and set the flight speed of the objects at between 1,350 and 1,700 miles per hour – a speed at least twice that of the fastest planes then known. Recognizing that no human pilot could withstand the G-forces of such acceleration, Arnold accepted the notion that what he had seen must necessarily have been either guided missiles, as the Yakima helicopter pilot had suggested, or else some new remote controlled military project.
However, once he returned to his Boise, Idaho home, he received a visit from a concerned Dave Johnson, Aviation editor for The Idaho Statesman, who made it clear that, if the objects Arnold had seen in fact looked and behaved as he had described them, then they were positively not of American origin. Johnson introduced a new element of skepticism about the sighting, and about Arnold's qualifications as an observer. Had he really seen what he thought he had seen? Were his measurements accurate? Was it possible that he had imagined the whole event?
CONFIRMATION!
On July 5, 1947, Arnold was elated to learn of a saucer sighting by United Airlines DC-3 pilot Captain E. J. Smith that seemed to directly confirm the reality of his own encounter. Shortly after takeoff from Boise Municipal Airport, Smith and copilot Ralph Stevens watched five discs flying in loose formation. They called in a stewardess, Martie Morrow, and, without instructing her what to expect, directed her attention toward the objects. "Why there's a formation of those flying discs!" she exclaimed. Another formation appeared, then all the discs fired off toward the Blue Mountains near Pendleton.
This report from so respected an airman as E. J. Smith lent strength to Arnold's testimony, and went a long way toward convincing the world that the flying disc phenomenon was real, and not to be ignored.
Soon the whole country was seeing flying saucers. Arnold received hundreds of reports of similar sightings, and letters of support. He was asked to submit a detailed report of his encounter to the commander of Wright-Patterson Field. A visit from Lieutenant Frank M. Brown and Captain William Davidson from A-2 Military Intelligence of the Fourth Air Force brought the startling revelation that the US Government was as mystified as everyone else as to the nature and origin of the discs.
In the months to come, Kenneth Arnold would become even more deeply involved in the unfolding saucer drama, capturing several discs on film, and personally investigating the famous Maury Island case. With the help of publisher Ray Palmer, Arnold wrote and released The Coming of the Saucers, a first-person narrative of his many experiences at the dawn of the modern UFO era.
Chapter Three - Mayhem Over Maury Island
June 21, 1947, approximately 2:00 PM: Harbor patrolman Harold A Dahl was cruising near Maury Island, three miles off the shore of Tacoma, Washington, along with two crewmen, his 15 year old son, and the family dog, when he spotted six doughnut-shaped objects overhead, hovering about 2,000 feet above the waters of Puget Sound.
He at first believed they were balloons, since they were completely silent and had no motors, propellers or other visible means of propulsion. But their surfaces appeared metallic, a glistening, seashell-like gold and silver color that reflected the sun with a dazzling, jagged brilliance. Each "doughnut" was fully 100 feet in diameter, with large portholes equally spaced around the outside rim. Dark, circular continuous windows lined the inside bottom of each object. Five of the strange constructions were circling slowly around the sixth, which held stationary at the center of the formation, but was losing altitude rapidly. Dahl guessed that the center object was experiencing technical difficulty, and the others had moved in to assist. The whole formation descended to about 500 feet overhead, then stopped abruptly.
Dahl ordered his crew to pull over to the beach, where he took several pictures. After five or six minutes, one of the assisting craft dropped down beside its ailing sister to almost within touching distance. The men on the beach heard a dull thud, like a boot being stomped on damp ground, and the crippled center disc suddenly began spewing out a rain of what Dahl at first thought were newspapers, but which he later identified as small bars of an extremely light white metal.
Almost immediately, a second rain began, this time a shower of near-molten, dark chunks of a metal resembling slag or pumice, which hissed and steamed as they hit the water. The shower was so heavy that, even under cover, Dahl's son was injured and the dog was killed. The hot rain ended and, relieved of its burden, the floundering craft and its companions rose slowly away until they disappeared into the afternoon sky.
The men moved cautiously back to where their patrol boat sat rocking in the still-agitated water. The wheelhouse had been smashed by the falling metal. All attempts to radio port authorities were thwarted by a wall of impenetrable static. After inspecting their crippled vessel for seaworthiness, the men loaded the boat with samples of the strange metal fragments, buried the dog at sea, and turned toward home.
Upon reaching the dock, Dahl related the crew's experience to his superior officer, Fred Lee Crisman. Crisman was clearly incredulous, but took charge of the debris samples and the camera for inspection. The developed film showed the strange aerial vehicles, but the negatives were covered with white splotches, as though the film had been exposed to intense radiation.
A MYSTERIOUS VISITOR
Early the next morning, Harold Dahl received a mysterious visitor at his home. Dressed all in black and driving a shiny, new 1947 Buick sedan, the stranger offered to buy him breakfast in town. Dahl was used to being courted by lumber executives out to purchase logs salvaged from harbor waters, so he accepted the offer gladly, and followed the sedan in his own car to an uptown cafe.
Over breakfast, however, the mysterious man in black proved he was no lumberman. He quickly and accurately described every detail of Dahl's saucer sighting, then finished with this warning: "What I have said is proof to you that I know a great deal more about this experience of yours than you will want to believe. Silence is the best thing for you and your family. You have seen what you ought not to have seen."
The stranger made it clear that, if Dahl loved his family and did not wish to see harm come to them or to himself, he would not tell anyone about his experience.
But he had already told Fred Lee Crisman, who was at that very moment on Maury Island, gathering further samples of debris and having his own encounter with the doughnut-shaped discs. Alone on the beach, a saucer fragment in each hand, Crisman watched a lone disc sweep down from a cloud, make a slow reconnoiter of the small bay as if searching for something, then circle off and vanish again into the clouds.
HOAX!
At the request of publisher Ray Palmer, world-famous saucer-sighter Kenneth Arnold was sent to investigate the story. He brought with him United Airlines Captain E. J. Smith, who, like Arnold, had been a witness to the flying disc phenomenon, and who Arnold trusted implicitly for his reason and objectivity.
From day one of the investigation, things went strange: Upon arriving in Tacoma, Arnold was unable to locate a vacant hotel room – until he called the Winthrop, the fanciest, most expensive establishment in town, to discover that a room had already been mysteriously reserved in his name.
After initial interviews with both Dahl and Crisman, the two investigators were shocked to receive a call from Ted Morello, head man for the Tacoma branch of United Press, informing them that an anonymous "crackpot" had been calling his office all evening with verbatim transcripts of every word being spoken in Arnold's room, including conversations held when no one but Smith and Arnold were present. A search for hidden listening devices turned up nothing.
The next morning, Dahl and Crisman brought samples of the saucer fragments for inspection. The pilots immediately recognized the "light white metal" as ordinary aluminum, likely scrap from a military salvage yard. The darker material they judged to be common slag, or at most, pieces of a large, insulated power tube which had been broken into curved pieces. When they asked to see the photographs, Dahl claimed to have given them to Crisman, who seemed to have misplaced them.
Smelling a hoax, Arnold called in two Military Intelligence friends, Lieutenant Frank Brown and Captain William Davidson, in hopes that their presence might shake the two witnesses up a little and settle the issue once and for all.
Dahl refused to meet with the military men, but Crisman gleefully retold the tale. Brown and Davidson listened intently while passing pieces of the debris back and forth without comment.
Once Crisman was gone, however, they seemed to lose interest altogether, and began to make excuses for their having to leave Tacoma before sundown. Arnold was sure they had determined the story a hoax, and were keeping silent so as not to embarrass Smith or himself. They showed no interest in the box of metal fragments, and had to be coaxed into taking it with them at all.
TRAGEDY STRIKES
By morning, both Brown and Davidson were dead. Their B-25 bomber exploded in midair shortly after takeoff. Based on the anonymous tipster's calls, coupled with a survivor's report that a heavy box had come onto the plane with the officers, as well as official confirmation that "classified materials" had, indeed, been aboard, newspapers were already speculating that the flight had been sabotaged to prevent captured saucer pieces from being analyzed.
The Air Force disagreed, stating that the accident had been caused by a mechanical fault in the plane's left engine. The "classified materials" were merely reports which the officers had volunteered to escort to Hamilton Field.
In light of this tragedy, Arnold and Smith dropped their investigation. Arnold stopped by Dahl's home on his way out of town, to find it deserted. Crisman had vanished from the scene, as well.
Former Project Blue Book head Edward J. Ruppelt, in his Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, writes that soon after the crash, both Dahl and Crisman admitted to perpetrating the hoax. He states that neither of the men were actually harbor patrolmen at all, but merely owned a small salvage boat. The "Man in Black" didn't really exist. The metal fragments were just slag from the Tacoma Smelting Company. The Air Force chose not to press charges because, despite the hoax, the two men could not in any way be tied to the crash of the B-25.
A FINAL TWIST
So the official verdict on Maury Island was hoax, and that's where things stood until 1968, when "hoaxter" Fred Lee Crisman emerged again into public view – this time appearing before a Grand Jury investigation led by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who claimed to have uncovered a pre-Dallas plot involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Clay Shaw, Guy Bannister, David Ferrie and others to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in his city.
Crisman denied having "insider" knowledge of anything, but in a press release dated October 31, 1968, Garrison stated:
"Mr. Crisman has been engaged in undercover activity for a part of the industrial warfare complex for years... in connection with his undercover work for that part of the warfare industry engaged in the manufacture of what is termed, in military language, 'hardware' – meaning those weapons sold to the US government which are uniquely large and expensive."
Before the Grand Jury, Crisman swore he was not a government agent of any kind, in direct contradiction of CIA files subpoenaed for the investigation. The files named Crisman as a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, where he served as a liaison officer with the British Royal Air Force. After the war, he entered a special OSS International Security School, from which he was later transferred to the newly-formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He operated there as an internal security specialist in "disruption" activities, and was connected with the highly classified Internal Security subsection Easy Section, whose very existence was denied by the CIA.
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?
Was it all a hoax, perpetrated on a gullible public by a pair of two-bit salvage men? Was it a CIA plan designed to discredit Kenneth Arnold and his June 24, 1947 saucer sighting? Did Dahl have a genuine encounter with extraterrestrial or secret military flying discs, the investigation of which CIA agent Crisman "disrupted" by intimidating Dahl, and providing investigators with faked evidence and an inconsistent story? What cargo really went down with Lieutenant Brown and Captain Davidson on that ill-fated flight?
In the six decades that have passed since the Maury Island incident took place, none of these questions has been satisfactorily put to rest. What actually took place in the air over that isolated locale in the summer of 1947 remains to this day an unsolved mystery of the Golden Age of Flying Saucers.
Chapter Four - RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region
For four long days before the fateful crash of a flying disc near Roswell, New Mexico, military radar installations tracked a mysterious object as it flitted about in the southern skies, periodically vanishing from radar screens, but always returning. Most UFO historians set July 2, 1947 as the official date of the crash, but it was not until July 4, Independence Day, that the unidentified blip disappeared from radar for good. Two full days before rancher Mac Brazel would alert the local sheriff to the metallic debris littering his field, Roswell Army Air Force officials knew the object was down, somewhere north of town. They had, from their safe radar haven, watched it crash.
William Woody watched the crash with his own eyes. He described a bright white light with red streaks in it, spinning silently and slowly downward. His father joined him in a search for the crash site, but they found highway 285 already blocked by military personnel.
By afternoon, July 5, great flatbed trucks had arrived at the site. Every visible scrap of debris, including the bodies of five extraterrestrial biological entities (EBEs), was loaded up and transported to the base at Roswell. Camouflage experts were brought in to eliminate all traces of the crash from the natural environment.
Within hours of the EBE bodies reaching the Roswell base, town mortician Glen Dennis received a series of strange telephone calls. Did he have a number of small, child-sized coffins in stock? Could they be hermetically sealed? How might badly burned and decomposing bodies be preserved without altering their chemical makeup? Certain some terrible disaster had occurred, Dennis offered to help in any way that he could. He was told the questions were for future reference only. There was no disaster.
Glen Dennis wound up at the Roswell base hospital that day, anyway – in that small community, he was the local ambulance driver as well as the mortician. Called to transport an injured airman for treatment, Dennis found the hospital parking lot blocked by a line of military field ambulances loaded with metallic debris. Some pieces were inscribed with what looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Guessing a plane had crashed, he again offered his help, only to find himself roughly escorted off the base by two MPs. A gruff, red-haired captain warned him:
"There was no crash here. You did not see anything. You don't go into town. You don't tell anybody you saw anything. If you do... somebody'll be picking your bones out of the sand."
THE STRANGE DEBRIS
Meanwhile, Mac Brazel, a Corona, New Mexico rancher, was scratching his head in bewilderment before what would paradoxically become known as the "first site" (the "second site" being the location where the bodies were recovered). His pasture was thick with metallic debris, as far as the eye could see.
On Sunday, July 6, he loaded a box with samples of the strange material and headed for Roswell. Sheriff George Wilcox could not identify the metal fragments, but guessed from Brazel's description of the sheer quantity of debris scattered across his land that a military plane, or even a secret weapon, must have crashed there. He telephoned the Intelligence Officer for Roswell's 509th Bomb Group, Major Jesse Marcel.
Marcel and Captain Sheridan Cavitt drove together to the Brazel ranch. At first light, July 7, they visited the crash site, finding debris spread out over an area approximately three quarters of a mile long, and several hundred feet wide. Samples held over a cigarette lighter would not burn. Pieces as light as a feather could not be broken or cut with a knife. They loaded the truck with debris, and Marcel ordered Cavitt to drive back to the base.
Alone in the field, he then filled a box with the strange material, and raced home to show his family what he was convinced were pieces of a flying saucer. Three decades later, Major Marcel's son, Jesse Marcel, Jr., would undergo hypnosis to more clearly remember that night. He described seeing silver foil which, when crumpled, quickly expanded again to its original, wrinkle-free shape. He remembered I-beams etched with strange, purple writing and different geometric shapes, leaves, and circles. He helped his father load the debris back into the family car. Major Marcel returned to base.
THE PRESS RELEASE
Public Information Officer Lieutenant Walter Haut turned Marcel's report into a military press release, and, on July 8, The Roswell Daily Record broke the story:
The intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment group at Roswell Army Air Field announced at noon today that the field has come into possession of a flying saucer.
Evening papers across the country pulled the story off the wire service and announced the "invasion" to the world. Telephones at the sheriff's office, the Roswell Daily Record newsroom, and RAAF headquarters went crazy with demands for confirmation.
Major Marcel was ordered to fly to Fort Worth, and then to Wright Field in Ohio to meet with a General Ramey concerning the incident. Marcel spread chunks of debris across the general's desk, and demonstrated the material's special properties for the general and his staff.
THE COVER-UP
Ramey took Marcel down a long hallway to have him mark the crash site on a large map. When they returned to the office, the mysterious debris was gone, and the twisted pieces of a weather balloon were laid out on the office floor.
Public Information Officer Major Charles Chashen took two photos of Marcel crouching next to the balloon, and the Fort Worth Star Telegram was fed the now official story that no flying disc had been recovered. In his excitement, the revised account stated, Marcel had merely misidentified one of the hundreds of Project Skyhook weather balloons launched daily from the Roswell base.
A press conference was held, at which several weather officers verified the new version of the story. The crashed disc rumors died almost overnight.
Soon after, Mac Brazel was escorted by military officers to the broadcast booth of KGFL radio, where they waited nearby as he publicly recanted his original version of the crash story. Then they escorted him out.
Frankie Rowe was 12 years old in 1947. Her father, a lieutenant in the fire department, had handled pieces of the debris and had shown them to his daughter. Soldiers came to their house, threatening their lives.
Sheriff Wilcox was warned to keep silent.
It was suggested that Robert Dennis, a fighter pilot and the brother of Glen Dennis, might suffer should the mortician speak out.
THE EBE BODIES
Eager to discover the truth, Dennis contacted a nurse he knew at the base. She agreed to meet him at the officer's club.
"I can't believe what I've just seen," she told him, face pale, her hands shaking. "This is the most horrible thing I've ever seen in my life."
She took out a small prescription pad and sketched one of the "foreign bodies" she had helped autopsy. She described the unbearable stench of the operating theater, the inhuman anatomy of the creatures.
Still shaking, she excused herself to return to the base before her absence was noticed. She was never seen again.
MARCEL SPEAKS OUT
Major Jesse Marcel returned to Roswell and his military career. But many years later, from 1978 until his death in 1986, he finally broke his public silence on the incident, speaking out against the ridiculous weather balloon hoax in which he was compelled by his commanding officers to participate, and making it clear that the debris he gathered from Mac Brazel's field that fateful summer was the remains of nothing constructed on this Earth. "It came to Earth," he told reporters, "but not from Earth!"
Chapter Five - Behind the Flying Saucers: How the World's First-Ever UFO Book Told the First-Ever Crashed-Disc Retrieval Story, and Quite Possibly Perpetrated the First-Ever UFO Hoax (or Maybe Not)
Three years after Kenneth Arnold's June 24, 1947 saucer sighting convinced Americans to Watch the Skies!, the author of the world's first flying saucer book sought, ironically, to direct the collective attention once again to the ground – specifically to the sandy desert floor near Aztec, New Mexico, and two other Southwestern United States locations where interplanetary spaceships were rumored to have landed and to have come into the possession of military officials.
Frank Scully never mentions Roswell or crashed discs, but on September 8, 1950, his book Behind the Flying Saucers captured the American imagination with an early version of a story that continues to haunt UFOlogy to this day: A flying disc is grounded in the desert. Ship and undersized humanoid crew are retrieved by US military personnel. A cloak of secrecy is thrown over the event by order of high-level Washington bureaucrats in the name of "National Security." Sound familiar?
MYSTERY SPEAKER
Scully's tale begins on March 8, 1950, when an "unidentified middle-aged lecturer" addressed 350 students and professors at the University of Denver on the topic of flying saucers, their pilots, and many technical aspects of the vehicles' operation. The lecture had been arranged for students of a basic science class on the condition that the speaker remain anonymous, and that the talk not be publicized. But word got around and, by the time the speaker was introduced (under a false name), the lecture hall was filled to overflowing, every seat occupied, the aisles jammed with students and professors alike, notebooks at the ready to record the torrent of revelations about to rain down from the podium on the sensational topic of alien visitation.
They were not disappointed. The speaker addressed the standing-room-only crowd for 50 minutes, after which he was whisked away through a side exit to catch a waiting flight.
WHAT THE SCIENTIST SAID
The man at the podium spoke slowly and with a powerful command of scientific language. He verified that flying saucers are real, and revealed that four such vehicles were known to have landed on Earth – three of which had been retrieved by military officials and examined in detail by scientists. The bodies of 34 extraterrestrial crewmen, ranging from 36" to 40" in height, had been recovered and stored for study.
The Aztec saucer, on which he had the most detailed information, contained in its construction at least two substances not found anywhere on Earth, ruling out the possibility that the disc might be Russian or American made. The ship used a magnetic system of propulsion, by which scientists estimated the saucer might bridge the 161,000,000 miles between Earth and Venus (the craft's hypothesized planet of origin) in under an hour. The vehicle measured 99.9 feet in diameter, and had a cabin 72" in height – plenty of headroom for its diminutive occupants.
The second captured disc was only 72 feet in diameter, and the last was smaller still, at only 36 feet across. All measurements of and within each ship were found to be divisible by the number nine, a mysterious clue, perhaps, to their creators' system of mathematics.
Sixteen humanoid beings had been removed from the Aztec saucer, their slight bodies burned a deep chocolate brown as the atmosphere inside their ship rushed out through a small hole in one circular window. Sixteen more bodies were recovered from the 72' saucer, but only two from the smallest disc. All of the extraterrestrial visitors were dead when discovered.
The fourth, uncaptured, disc had, like the others, landed on the hot desert sands, but as scientists and military personnel approached it, the ship's crew, still very much alive, scampered frantically back aboard the vehicle. The gleaming disc rose slowly over the observers' heads, then fired off like lightning into the afternoon sky.
Of the three ships captured, none carried any identifiable weapons. All were well stocked with food wafers and water said to be "twice as heavy" as its earthly counterpart. The alien crewmen bunked in hidden sleeping units which retracted invisibly into the walls when not in use.
The mysterious speaker illustrated his lecture with chalkboard drawings detailing the "system of nines" used in all the saucers' construction, as well as schematics of the Aztec disc's interior as viewed from varying angles. Another drawing revealed the magnetic lines of force running between the sun and planets, the presumed "highways" by which the visitors traversed the apparent "emptiness" of interplanetary space.
THE SPEAKER EXPOSED
Soon after the explosive lecture, University and law enforcement officials began working to uncover the speaker's true identity. They discovered that he was not a scientist as he had claimed, but was, rather, Silas M. Newton, a millionaire oilman famous for using microwaves to locate gold and oil deposits, often deep beneath sites long abandoned by his less technologically adventurous competitors. Newton claimed to have received his information from a "Dr. Gee," a magnetics specialist who had personally examined the captured discs as a member of the government's team of experts. While Newton was disappointed that "Dr. Gee" had not been able to grant him a personal peek at the alien spaceships, he did manage to acquire from him several disc-shaped samples of metal and a few tiny gears which "Dr. Gee" had smuggled out as souvenirs of his secret government work.
But in the coming days, these souvenirs would prove the unraveling of Newton's secondhand story.
J. P. Cahn, a reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle, took interest in Scully's book and published several articles on the saucer mystery. He met with Newton, offering $35,000 for his story, but only if the oilman could verify its truth. He asked to borrow one of the metal discs for analysis, but Newton refused. Cahn pulled a switch, pocketing Newton's sample and successfully replacing it with a homemade look-alike.
Newton's metal, which he claimed was 100% pure aluminum with a heat resistance of up to 10,000 degrees, turned out to be aluminum, all right, but low grade and common, with a melting point of just over 650 degrees. There was nothing "unearthly" about it.
Cahn went on to locate the mysterious "Dr. Gee." He was Leo Gebauer, an Arizona electrician who, in Cahn's opinion, had joined in cahoots with Silas Newton to perpetrate a hoax on the University of Denver, on writer Frank Scully, and, through Scully's bestselling Behind the Flying Saucers, on America and the world.
THE STORY THAT WOULDN'T DIE
But the "defrauded" story simply wouldn't die. In 1974, author Robert Carr presented new evidence that a saucer had, indeed, crashed at Aztec, New Mexico. According to Carr, Scully had been right, even if a few of his details had missed the mark. World-class UFOlogist Stanton Friedman would echo this sentiment a few years later in his investigations of claimed UFO crashes at Aztec and the Plains of San Augustin, both desert sites perched precariously close to the now legendary Roswell.
Just how many interplanetary visitors met their sad fate in New Mexican skies? Was the US government shooting them down? Were all the stories simply diluted shadows of the Roswell crash, spun out of the fragmentary and disconnected bits of information that managed to slip past the well-documented Roswell cover up?
More than 50 years after its initial publication, Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers remains an open book, and the search for the truth behind the military retrieval of crashed discs goes on.
Chapter Six - Flier Dies Chasing a Flying Saucer: The Mysterious Death of Captain Thomas F. Mantell, Jr.
At 1:30 in the afternoon, January 7, 1948, the central tower at Godman Air Force Base outside Louisville, Kentucky, received a strange telephone call. The people of tiny Maysville, KY, about 80 miles east of the base had sighted a large, white object with a red light moving swiftly over the town. Soon other communities in the object's path were adding to the alarm. Calls from Owensboro and Irvington contributed details: the craft was circular, 250-300 feet in diameter, and moving westward at great speed.
At 1:45, Godman sighted the object. The spotter, sure he was not seeing an airplane or weather balloon, contacted Flight Operations. The operations officer, accompanied by the base intelligence officer and the base commander, Colonel Hix, soon joined the tower crew. All of the assembled men observed the strange bogey through 6 X 50 binoculars, and agreed that it was not identifiable as any known aircraft.
THE CHASE
2:30 arrived, and the object remained visible. A flight of F-51s came into view as they passed over Godman en route to nearby Standiford Air Force Base. The tower radioed the flight leader, Captain Thomas F. Mantell, Jr., and requested that he engage and attempt to identify the strange visitor. One of the four planes was low on fuel and received permission to continue on to Standiford. Mantell and his remaining wing men turned and began to climb toward the shimmering disc.
At 10,000 feet, Captain Mantell pulled ahead of his companions.
"I see something above and ahead of me and I'm still climbing," he reported. "I've sighted the thing. It looks metallic and it's tremendous size... Now it's starting to climb." Then a few seconds later, "It's above me and I'm gaining on it. I'm going to 20,000 feet."
The two wing men leveled of at 15,000 feet and tried frantically to reach their leader by radio. The F-51s, postwar versions of the famed P-51 Mustang, were not equipped with oxygen, so to fly over 15,000 feet was to court near-certain oxygen deprivation and loss of consciousness.
THE CRASH
Mantell's plane leveled off at 30,000 feet, then plunged into a spiral dive. It crashed on the Franklin, KY farm of William J. Phillips. The flier's watch had stopped at 3:18 PM.
Project Sign, the official Air Force UFO investigation agency at that time, was quick to publicly explain the incident, concluding that Captain Mantell had misidentified the planet Venus. He flew beyond safe altitude limits, blacked out, and plummeted to his death.
UFOlogists immediately countered that Venus had been too dim to be seen at all in the sunlit afternoon, let alone to be mistaken for a "metallic object" of "tremendous size."
But the apparent official certainty convinced newspaper reporters, and the early media speculation that Mantell had been shot down by invaders from another world, or, more conservatively, from Russia, was soon replaced by the official line.
A SILENCED WITNESS
But there was plenty of reason to doubt that line, not least of which was the testimony of Richard T. Miller. At the time of the Mantell incident, Miller was standing in the operations room of Scott Air Force Base, in Belleville, Illinois, listening in on the entire exchange between the F-51 crew and Godman tower. According to his report, Mantell's final transmission was, "My God! I see people in this thing!" Miller also claims to have learned from inside sources that the doomed F-51 had remained airborne for an extended period of time after having run completely out of fuel, a fact no ordinary explanation could account for. According to Miller, the original conclusion reached by Air Force investigators was that Mantell had died "Pursuing an intelligently controlled unidentified flying object." But before this finding could be publicly released, Air Technical Intelligence officers from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base arrived to confiscate all evidence, and to make clear that no deviation from the Venus story would be tolerated.
Another witness, Captain James F. Duesler, examined the Mantell wreckage shortly after the pilot's body had been removed. He was dumbfounded to discover that no damage had been done to the surrounding trees, as would be expected had the F-51 glided into the field, nor was there any furrow in the ground such an approach would necessarily have created. Neither had the nose-heavy craft hit the ground nose-down, the most likely result of a downward, uncontrolled spin. The vehicle, instead, appeared to have simply "belly-flopped" directly into the clearing where it was found, without causing even a fraction of the damage to the airplane or the crash site that should have occurred according to calculations factoring the plane's known weight and estimated speed of descent. Duesler saw no blood whatsoever in the cockpit.
Even beyond this eyewitness testimony, common sense argued powerfully against the notion that Mantell, a highly-experienced military pilot, would risk life and limb chasing the tiny pinpoint of light Venus must have been that afternoon, had it been visible at all.
WHO KILLED THOMAS MANTELL?
Speculation concerning the true culprit behind the tragedy began immediately. Civilian UFOlogists were quick to point out that Venus, even if it had been visible that afternoon, was at least 15 degrees lower in the sky than the reported position of the object. Project Sign offered the possibility that Mantell had seen a Project Skyhook balloon, though no specific launch could be traced to that day. Saucer debunker Donald Menzel wrote that the disc Mantell believed he was pursuing had actually been a "sun dog" or "mock sun" caused by the reflection of sunlight off ice crystals in cirrus clouds of the upper atmosphere. Contactee George Adamski's "Space Brothers" (see Chapter Seven) informed him that the crash had been accidental, the result of the magnetic field of their spaceship encountering the poor design of Mantell's plane.
A little over a year later, the Air Force backed away from its stance of certainty, releasing a revised "official report" on the Mantell incident on April 27, 1949. Penned by none other than future civilian UFOlogist Dr. J. Allen Hyneck, the report framed a vague new picture of the previous year's events in what Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who was, himself, about to enter UFOlogical history as head of Project Sign's immediate descendent, Project Grudge, referred to as "weasel wording." According to Hyneck's report, the object Captain Mantell died chasing was probably Venus, though that was doubtful, as Venus was too dim, so it might have been a balloon. Or maybe even two balloons.
This weak revision placed the question of exactly what, or maybe who, overflew Godman Air Force Base on that gray January afternoon squarely back into the realm of uncertainty and speculation, where it remains to this day. Scarcely mentioned in our modern "Age of the Abductee," the tragic death of Captain Thomas F. Mantell, Jr. remains one of the most compelling cases in UFO history.
Picture Section
A UFO photographed by William Rhodes of Phoenix, Arizona on July 7, 1947. Note the similarity to Kenneth Arnold's description of crescent shaped flying discs in his more famous Mt. Rainier sighting just two weeks earlier.
An early UFO photo taken in Czaplinek, Poland in 1947.
Major Jesse Marcel poses reluctantly before the obvious remains of a common Project Skyhook weather balloon which has been substituted for the actual debris collected at the site of the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico saucer crash. Marcel remained silent concerning his coerced role in the official cover-up until 1978.
April 23, 1950, Redbud Illinois. Photographer unknown.
A saucer photographed by Paul Trent on May 8, 1950 as it hovered over his home in McMinnville, Oregon. The series of photos Trent shot that day have been considered authentic by experts for more than 50 years.
In 1951, more than 100 people witnessed the famous "Lubbock Lights" as they wheeled through the dark night skies over Lubbock, Texas. This photo was taken by eighteen year old Carl Hart, Jr. with a hand-held Kodak camera.
More mysterious bright lights in the sky as photographed on July 16, 1952 by Shel Alpert, a USCG seaman on duty in the Coast Guard Weather Office at the Salem Coast Guard Station, Salem, Massachusetts.
May 7, 1952, Barra da Tijuca, Brazil. While covering a news event for O'Cruzeiro Magazine, reporters Ed Kessel and Joao Martins snapped five shots of this unusual object hovering overhead.
A classic domed saucer photographed by George Stock of Passaic, New Jersey on July 28, 1952.
Numerous UFOs made their presence known by buzzing the United States Capitol building, as well as the White House and Pentagon during the summer of 1952, setting off a wave of sightings that remain unexplained to this day.
Sicily, Italy, December 10, 1954. Photographer unknown.
Extraterrestrial contactee George Adamski posing before an artist's depiction of Orthon, a "Space Brother" from the planet Venus that Mr. Adamski met and conversed with in the California desert on November 18, 1952. Read the complete story of George Adamski's many ET contacts in Chapter Seven. Photograph © GAF Int'l/Adamski Foundation, www.gafintl-adamski.com.
Cigar shaped mothership plus numerous smaller scoutships photographed by George Adamski over Mt. Palomar, California. © GAF Int'l/Adamski Foundation, www.gafintl-adamski.com.
An enormous mothership passing over the moon, photographed by George Adamski. © GAF Int'l/Adamski Foundation, www.gafintl-adamski.com.
A caravan of brightly-lit flying saucers photographed in space by George Adamski. © GAF Int'l/Adamski Foundation, www.gafintl-adamski.com.
Close-up of scoutship photographed by George Adamski. © GAF Int'l/Adamski Foundation, www.gafintl-adamski.com.
Undercarriage of scoutship photographed by George Adamski.© GAF Int'l/Adamski Foundation, www.gafintl-adamski.com.
Scoutship photographed by George Adamski over Silver Springs, Maryland. © GAF Int'l/Adamski Foundation, www.gafintl-adamski.com.
Left Footprint
Right Footprint
Sketches made from footprints left in the sand by the boots of Orthon the Venusian after George Adamski's November 18, 1952 desert contact. These sketches originally appeared in George Hunt Williamson's 1953 contactee narrative Other Flesh – Other Tongues.
Truman Bethurum posing beside a copy of his 1954 book Aboard a Flying Saucer. During the summer and fall of 1952, Bethurum met repeatedly with extraterrestrials from the planet Clarion – including an alluring female ship's Captain named Aura Rhanes -- in the desert outside Mormon Mesa, Nevada and Kingman, Arizona . Read the full story of Bethurum's adventures among the Clarionites in Chapter Eight.