According to the dust jacket, this latest addition to Flying Saucer literature is “A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space Age”. The Flying Saucer book market is deader than a doornail and has been for several years. We can only surmise that this latest piece of flumduddery from the pen of the astronomical dunderhead, Menzel, has been subsidized. Doubleday & Company, Inc., 575 Madison Ave., New York 22 are the publishers and you can get a copy of this illustrated, 300-page opus for only $4.50. I wouldn’t waste a dime on it myself but authority-crazy Americans will hold it aloft in triumph. Donald “Quack Quack” Pretzel has restored the earth to its central and unchallenged place in the universe and there ain’t nobody else around but us chickens!
Doubleday favored us with a review copy and we’re returning the favor. I hope they’re happy when they read it. The thirteen chapters include such headings as: Air-Born UFOS: Balloons to Bubbles; The Spangled Heavens: Stars and Planets; Out of the Sky: Meteors and Fireballs; Living Lights; Panic; Phantoms on Radar; E-M and G-Fields in UFO-Land; Contact!; and so on. Come to think of it, the Benzel-Boyd jiggerypook may have some value at that -- as a handy review under one cover of all the major sightings -- if you can stomach their nauseating conclusions!
For instance there’s the Island of Trinidad sighting covered in Chapter X, Contact! Menzel-Moyd had to spend a lot of time and space knocking this one down because the Flying Saucer photos had been taken by a Brazilian Navy photographer and were publicly released on the authority of President Kubitsohek. For the person who doesn’t want to believe that we humans may occupy an inferior planet in an inferior solar system in one of the minor galaxies, the Boyd-Benzel editorial style suits him perfectly. Here’s an example. I’ll underline the words which stick out like a sore thumb to my professional eye.
“The most famous of all purported photographs of a UFO, the Trinidade Island saucer, also came from Brazil. First published in Brazilian newspapers on February 21, 1958, the pictures showed the dark mountain crags looming against an overcast sky. Above one peak appeared a startling image (much like the O Cruzeiro saucer of l952) resembling the planet Saturn -- a flattened sphere banded round the middle by a dark line that extended like a platform beyond the curved sides. According to the accompanying news stories, the UFO had flown over the island of Trinidade and had been observed by the officers and crew of a ship of the Brazilian Navy. The pictures, taken by a photographer on board, had been examined and supposedly pronounced genuine by Navy experts before being released to the press. Since a responsible military organization and a major world government thus seemed to accept the photographs as proof that flying saucers actually existed, [21] the incident raised a storm of official inquiry both in Brazil and abroad (and made a complete ass out of Menzel and other pontifical pundits who claim that Flying Saucers are hallucinations. Ed.). Then, within a few weeks, the storm abruptly subsided. Although no explanation was given, the object in the pictures was obviously considered no threat to our planet’s security.
“Although saucer enthusiasts regard these pictures as genuine evidence for the reality of UFOs, careful study of the facts strongly suggest that this case, which rocked the Brazilian government and created a short-lived but world-wide saucer scare, was merely an unusually skillful hoax.”
Professor Quack-Quack then takes nine pages to destroy the character of the photographer, Barauna, and to accuse him of perpetrating a fraud on Brazil and the world. This is most unscientific prejudice on the part of the head of Harvard’s astronomical department. It indicates to me that Menzel’s talents as a propagandist are at least equal to if not superior to whatever talent he has as a researcher in astronomy.
In the preceding chapter of the book, Chapter IX, the two propagandists take up the problem of Electro-Magnetic and Gravity effects of Flying Saucers. One phenomenon common to many UFO sightings, especially those close to the earth, electrical apparatus in the area is seriously effected, even stopped dead!
This is one of the facts the professor and his henchmen left out of the Island of Trinidad sighting, deliberately, I suppose. According to the men on the Brazilian ship, all radio and electrical equipment on the vessel went dead while the UFO was in view. This caused almost as much excitement and consternation as the presence of the aerial visitor! Of course, in Chapter IX, Moyd and Benzel do their best to explain this electrical phenomenon away, too.
PETER HURKOS’ VIEW
The Trinidad sighting was revived again as a news item in Los Angeles recently, at least in parapsychological circles. Psychic Peter Hurkos gave an exhibition of psychometry on the stage of the Ebell Theatre on the night of May 22, 1963. The audience was asked to supply him with a tray full of personal objects, billfolds, jewelry, letters, etc. He picked up the objects, one at a time, “tuned in” on them, and described the images or information about the owner which came to him while he held them. He picked up a plain brown envelope, hunched over it, turning it over and over, and finally broke out with, “I see little people!” He was obviously puzzled and greatly disturbed. “They’re traveling at tremendous speed, far, far out in space!” He threw the envelope down and walked off the stage. “You explain it! I can’t!”
This show~stopper had to be explained. The MC held up the brown envelope and a lady came up to claim it. She opened it and held up a newspaper clipping and picture. It was the Los-Angeles published picture of the Isle of Trinidad Flying Saucer! She was just curious to see what the famed psychic would get on the controversial photo.
THE CHESAPEAKE BAY CASE
As we said, “The World of Flying Saucers”, could serve as a good reference work on sightings because Boyd and Menzel take on all the best sightings. They unhesitatingly and apparently give all the salient details, then cleverly destroy them. In this case these mental manipulators dare not indulge in character assassination because UFOlogy offers no more highly qualified observers!
“Two of the most famous UFO cases, the Nash-Fortenberry and the Tombaugh sightings, have never been completely explained away even though the witnesses were unusually competent, the incidents fully described, and the basic facts not in dispute.” (Really, Professor Quack-Quack! Captain Edward J. Ruppelt. head of Project Flying Saucer and author of the book, “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects”, thought so little of the Nash-Fortenberry sighting that he gave it only two or three lines in his book! And you give it 8½ pages and three illustrations?) “Although the probable type of mechanism involved is clear in each case, determining specifically what factors combined in exactly what way to produce the phenomenon has so far proved impossible. Neither case, however, supports the theory that the UFO had an extraterrestrial origin.”
This is a most unscientific opinion from the astronomical dunderhead of a department of Harvard University. The simplest explanation of the Nash-Fortenberry sighting is that the Flying Saucers observed were of “an extraterrestrial origin”. Let us continue with the Professor’s version of the story.
“On the evening of July 14, 1952, a Pan-American DC-4 was flying from New York to Miami, carrying ten passengers and a crew of three, including First Officer William B. Nash and Second Officer William H. Fortenberry. As a pilot spending much of his life in the air, Captain Nash had long been interested in the question of UFOs, and during the long night hours of over-water flights he had often out down the cockpit lights to search the sky. In five years of watching he had observed hundreds of meteors, various types of auroral display, the lights of other aircraft, and the multicolored images of stars and planets distorted by refraction, but he had never seen any unidentifiable aerial phenomenon that appeared to be under intelligent control -- until this particular night, when he was not watching for UFOs.
“Shortly after 8 p.m. E.S.T. the plane was cruising on automatic pilot at about 8000 feet over Chesapeake Bay, and approaching Norfolk, Virginia. The sun had set and the night was almost entirely dark, although the coastline was still visible. Fortenberry, sitting at the right as copilot, was making his first run on this particular course, and Nash, in the pilot’s seat at the left, was pointing out the cities and landmarks of the route. Nash had just called attention to the lights of Newport News and Cumberland, ahead and to the right of the plane, when at 8:12 a brilliant red glow suddenly appeared in the west, apparently between Newport News and the aircraft, and so low that it might almost have been on the ground. One of the men exclaimed, as have so many incredulous witnesses on first seeing a UFO, ‘What the hell is that?’
“Looking through the front windows of the cockpit, they watched the unidentified light traveling northeast at incredible speed on a horizontal course roughly a mile below the plane. Almost immediately they perceived that the unknown was actually a procession of orange-red lights, glowing like hot coals. Shooting forward like a stream of red tracer bullets, the line of lights moved out over Chesapeake Bay until they were only about a half mile away from the plane. They appeared to be sharply defined, large, circular disks, arranged in a narrow, echelon formation -- like a set of stairs tilted slightly to the plane’s right, with the leader at the lowest step, each following disk slightly higher and to the rear, and the last disk at the highest point (see Fig. 18).
(Figure 18. Reported movements of the Chesapeake Bay disks. A, Disks at first Approach; B, they flip over and reverse order; C, they change direction and recede.)
“Realizing that the line was apparently going to pass under the plane at the right on the co-pilot’s side, Nash flipped off his seat belt so that he could move to the window on that side. During this brief interval he was not able to see the objects, but Fortenberry kept them in view. As he later described their amazing behavior, all the disks simultaneously turned up on edge, like coins, so that the glowing surfaces were tilted to the right. Still on edge, they suddenly reversed their relative places so that disk 1 now occupied the last place in line and disk 6 became the leader.
“This shift had taken only a brief second and was completed by the time Nash reached the window. Both he and Fortenberry then observed the disks flip back from the on-edge to the flat position. In the same fraction of a second, the entire line changed direction as abruptly as a ball bouncing off a wall and shot away to the west on a heading of 270 degrees. An instant later two similar disks darted out, apparently from beneath the plane, and joined the line as numbers 7 and 8 (Figure 18). The lights receded to the west, suddenly disappeared, immediately reappeared, abruptly began a steep climb to an altitude above the plane, then vanished not in sequence but in random order. The sighting had lasted for a period of twelve to fifteen seconds.
“After a quick check showed that no one else in the aircraft had [24] observed the lights, the pilots radioed a message to the GAA station at Norfolk for forwarding to the Norfolk Navy Base, reporting eight unidentified objects traveling at speeds in excess of 1000 miles an hour. In Miami, next morning, Air Force officials questioned both witnesses. According to their estimates, the disks had moved horizontally about 2000 feet above the ground until their final climb and disappearance, were about 100 feet in diameter (This was about the size of the Flying Saucers seen by Harold Dahl over Maury Island off Tacoma, Washington in 1947. Ed.), and about 15 feet thick. Since they apparently traveled fifty miles during the twelve to fifteen seconds they were in view, their velocity would have been 6000 to 12,000 miles an hour.”
Then Menzel and Boyd begrudge a reluctant word of approval for the two Pan-American pilots, something they refuse to offer other Saucer sighters in the book.
“Few sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena have been more clearly described. Both witnesses were experienced pilots. Nash had flown more than 10,000 hours at altitudes of 7000 to 8000 feet and had held the rank of captain for eight years. Both men had been trained to observe accurately, to check and double-check every factor that might affect safe flying, and to regard the word ‘assume’ as a potential killer. They shared the attitude of all cautious airmen: ‘In God we trust -- everyone else we check.’ Unlike many UFO descriptions, their report distinguished rigorously between fact and inference, and it included the exact time of the sighting as well as the position, height, speed, and direction of flight of their plane. Using a kind of instinct-judgment gradually developed during their many hours in the air, they had made careful estimates of the position, height, speed, and direction of flight of the unknowns. (Now comes the knife. Ed.) Nevertheless, no reasonable explanation of the disks was found.”
Here again we have a most unscientific opinion by a supposed scientist, the honorable Professor Pretzel. For whom does he speak when he says “no reasonable explanation” was found? Surely he and Boyd don’t speak for the pilots. Nash and Fortenberry actually saw the space ships operating, and the book quotes their reasoned judgment.
“Though we don’t know what they were, what they were doing here or where they came from, we are certain in our own minds that they were intelligently operated craft from somewhere other than this planet.”
To Menzel and to Boyd, and to many another authority-worshipping earthling, it is unreasonable to assume there is anyone else in the universe but ourselves; so they spend the next five and a half pages of their opus explaining away the Nash-Fortenberry sighting. Actually, these government propagandists are accusing the two pilots of incompetence. If this were true, the two should have been grounded immediately on their arrival at Miami. They weren’t grounded and as far as I know are still flying for Pan-American. Here again, as in the Trinidad case, Menzel and Boyd leave out a salient factor; thus the unsuspecting reader is unable to make a true judgment for himself. This is the way of propagandists, to disarmingly admit part of the truth, then take the observer or reader off at a tangent to a false position prepared beforehand [25] by the buyer of the propagandist’s services.
LOUSING UP THE FORMATION
From their own experience in military formation flying, Nash and Fortenberry knew that when the leader of a group decelerates too quickly and without notifying the others, they tend to over-fly him and have to jockey for position again. When the six blazing disks below them displayed these same human failings, the human pilots of the DC-4 knew the “unknowns” were piloted from inside by intelligent beings capable of error!
These are Captain Nash’s own words, from the report he wrote for Max Miller, Saucer researcher and author of the Trend Book, “Flying Saucers, Fact or Fiction?”
“Halfway to us, across the black waters of Chesapeake Bay, the three front objects began to slide back and forth over each other, as though the leader had begun to decelerate and the second two apparently were not alerted, or -- as pilots say -- ‘loused up the formation.’ (This indication of ‘intelligence error’ was one of the things which convinced us that the craft were ‘occupied’). . . Their performance demonstrated too much scientific advancement to have reached such a state without some of the intermediate stages ultimately coming within public knowledge; therefore we feel that they were-not developed upon this planet.”
What a relief to turn from the flumduddery and jiggerypook of Boyd and Menzel to the reasoned, intelligent opinions of a highly qualified observer who is grinding no ax but the Search for truth. We’ve already wasted too much space on Professor Quack-Quack but your editor can’t refrain from touching on one more item, which we reviewed ourselves not long ago in the Sept-Oct 1962 journal, “Strip the Flying Saucers of Their Special Status”. There we were writing about the work of Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner, now head of the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest, at Dallas, Texas. But in the fall of 1952 he, along with four other civilian scientific exports, was called to Washington. The Flying Saucer situation had become so potentially explosive that the Office of Scientific Intelligence, of the Central Intelligence Agency, decided it was time to offer the public some fatherly soothing syrup from the authorities.
With officers of the OSI of the CIA riding herd on them, Berkner, Robertson, Alvarez, Coudsmit and Page began their Top Secret study of the Saucer phenomenon on Jan. 12, 1953. For their consideration “Air Force investigators assembled the complete data on the cases they considered most significant. They also prepared on their own initiative an unofficial report setting forth the evidence which, in the opinion of several investigators, proved conclusively that UFOs were interplanetary objects operating under intelligent control. . . For five long days the panel worked, analyzing every available bit of evidence as it related to four alternative theories: 1) that UFOs were a super-secret device of`some sort being developed by by the United States; 2) that UFOs were a super-secret device being developed by some foreign [26] power; 3) that UFOs were normal phenomena wrongly interpreted; and 4) that UFOs came from other planets.”
The honorable scientists, brainwashed in orthodoxy, rejected all hypotheses but number three “that the reported UFOs were merely natural phenomena, wrongly interpreted”. They really can’t be blamed for this because the Air Force and the CIA didn’t give them all the facts. If Robertson, Alvarez, Berkner, Goudsmit and Page had been on the beach of Maury Island with Dahl when tons of spaceship material came pelting down on the afternoon of June 24, 1947 -- and had to run for their lives -- they wouldn’t have rejected hypotheses number four. If they had been shown the UFO that crashed to earth north of Phoenix, Arizona in December 1949, or the one that crash-landed on the island of Spitzbergen in July 1952, they wouldn’t have made asses of themselves by offering hypothesis number three. As it was, the mountain of scientific authority brought forth a molehill of orthodox opinion.
As the most powerful policy-making government agency in the United States at that time, the Central Intelligence Agency wanted a directed verdict from the panel of scientists. This the CIA got when the panel endorsed hypothesis number three, but the scientists took a logical step beyond that and spoiled the CIA’s show. And here Menzel and Boyd reveal that they are 100% for the government’s silence policy on UFOs.
NOT INTENDED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE
When the handpicked panel delivered its opinion to the Central Intelligence Agency it also revealed its total ignorance of the full implications of the Flying Saucer phenomenon. The scientists recommended that “government agencies should immediately abandon the policy of secrecy regarding the UFO reports and should make public all the facts in every case.” The panel also added some rather “caustic comment” on the “general inadequacy of investigative techniques”. And here it is in this chapter on “Panic” on page 143, the authors reveal the bias of their position: “The panel report with its blunt criticisms was of course not intended for public release and, understandably, was kept classified.”
Little more remains to be said about this nauseating bilge from the astronomical dunderhead from Harvard, except perhaps to heave one final brickbat in his general direction. The only way he and Boyd could whiten the CIA’s “silence policy on Flying Saucers” was to blacken the character of the thousands of sincere and honest people who have reported sightings.
Is Menzel’s character above reproach? Of course not. If his “scientific” opinion has not been bought outright by the government, it is certainly subject to question! I don’t know how much money Menzel makes every year, nor how many millions in research grants Harvard receives from the federal government; these are none of my business. But I do know that leading educators the country over are greatly concerned about the impact of abundant research grants on our universities. A few quotes from a recent article by Dr. Benjamine Fine, education editor of the North American Newspaper Alliance, will make my point. This was in the Los Angeles Times for Sunday, Aug. 4, 1963:
“Many colleges get from 70 to 75% of their operating funds through research grants. This is particularly true in medical and engineering schools, or in institutes of technology. ‘Without the money from government research grants we’d have to close our doors,’ a college president said candidly. ‘Half of our staff would be put on short rations.’
“The overwhelming proportion of grants go to scientists, while the humanities and the social sciences are ignored. But even more serious results, in the opinion of`this writer, are the overemphasis upon research on the campuses, and the subsequent inattention to actual teaching. If a professor of physics, for example, can get a $250,000 three-year grant to make a study in his field, he is not likely to continue his classroom teaching,
“‘Why shouldn’t I get into the research racket?’ a well-known college professor asked me cynically, ‘I now get $12,000 a year. The research grant will add another $6,000 to my salary. That means, for the first time, I can get a good salary, and not worry about daily lesson plans.’”
I don’t know who Lyle G. Boyd is; for all I know he may hold a degree in journalism from the University of Georgetown in Washington, D.C. And there’s no denying that “The World of Flying Saucers” is a well-planned, well-written piece of teaching material -- as professional as it can be! -- but the unanswered questions are: Why did Menzel and Boyd write it for a dead market? And for whom? And for how much?
* * *
THE CHICKENS HAVE COME HOME TO ROOST
Flying Saucer flumduddery of the kind reviewed above has lead millions of Americans to believe that the space above our heads is unoccupied and therefore no menace to our security. The U.S. Air Force has leant itself wholeheartedly to this deliberate falsification of the facts. One of the many Americans so mislead was Robert McNamara. Then he became Secretary of Defense and the Air Force had to come to him for approval and continuance of the Dyna-Soar program, leading toward eventual controlled flight in space. McNamara came within an inch of cancelling the Air Force’s pet project last year because he saw no need for controlled flight, military patrol and control, of the space above our heads! Har-de-har-har-har!
In spite of the CIA the Saucers haven’t gone away! Here’s this Aug. 8, 1963 news item from Darwin, Australia, (AP): “A tremendous atmospheric explosion shook buildings in the Kimberley Mountains area of western Australia Monday night, it was reported today. Observers said they saw a trail of smoke and a ball of brilliant orange flame and heard an explosion. A weather office spokesman said the cause of the explosion was unexplained. Satellites sometimes burn themselves up and explode, that could have happened.” Seems to me we could better explain these UFOs by flying alongside them to find out who put them there, and perhaps even more important, who is blowing them up? BSRA’s answer to all this is in “The Coming of the Guardians”, as far as we know, the only comprehensive explanation in print anywhere.
* * *
"The World of Flying Saucers: A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space Age"
"Through their efforts several of the old cases in our files have been provided logical solutions that have allowed the case to be removed from the 'unknown' category. As is normal in the scientific community, there are areas of minor disagreement. This we consider a healthy situation and hope it serves to spur our good friends on to greater effort and other interesting books." - reverse cover, Maj. Carl R. Hart, Project Blue Book Information Officer, U.S.A.F.
Our editor Riley Crabb certainly has made his disagreement with the authors of this book known, but we, as ever, leave it to you to come to your own judgement as to the content of this now fifty year old text.
References
- Menzel, Donald H, and Lyle G. Boyd. The World of Flying Saucers: A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space Age. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1963. Print. <http://amzn.to/RsGisl> [Digital: <http://scribd.com/doc/86656542>]
- Layne, Meade. The Coming of the Guardians: An Interpretation of the "Flying Saucers" As Given from the Other Side of Life. San Diego, CA: B.S.R.A, 1954. Print. [Expanded re-issue available through BSRF: <#B0016, "Coming of the Guardians">]