The late Wilhelm Reich, M.D., used to say that in any human controversy every participant is right in some way. This is certainly true of the newest contributor to UFO bibliography, electrical engineer and aerospace magazine editor Philip J. Klass. His book, "UFO's Identified" (Random House, $6.95) is the result of his two year investigation of UFO's, from which he emerges convinced that, UFO's are merely freak atmospheric phenomena -- plasmas formed near high voltage transmission lines and by poorly understood functions of atmospheric electricity.
Experienced students of UFOlogy, and BSRAssociates in particular, will find Mr. Klass's cursory two-year investigation a slender thread on which to try and swing the author's assertion that he has broken the mystery. Suspicion of Mr. Klass's motivation is unavoidable for more reasons than his brashness. With commendable frankness he admits he was driven to his investigation as a result of his resistance to a proposed 1966 IEE Symposium on UFO's which was to be open to the public. He reports in his book that he was "disturbed" to find this project afoot, and by the interest shown in UFO's by IEE members. He thus took up the study of UFO's on a less than rational basis. His goal was to refute the "fanatics" that he anticipated would attend the symposium.
Mr. Klass had no prior knowledge of UFOlogy. From a character analytic standpoint, the orientation and attitudes of Mr. Klass are basically established by these events. His book further verifies the presence of an awkward compulsive element that impairs the author's clarity of thought. This is nevertheless not a book for light dismissal.
Mr. Klass's contribution to UFOlogy is far larger than his many antagonists to date are willing to grant. Having found what he terms "the fingerprints of plasma" in a number of authenticated sightings, Mr. Klass concludes that UFO's are plasmas -- bundles of electrified particles showing motility, plasticity, luminosity and pulsation. His failing is that having reached this conclusion early in his investigation -- earlier perhaps than common prudence would allow -- he ever afterwards looks at his subject through a plasmatic prism.
The resultant distortions do not preclude the essential truth of most of his findings, but the impact of this truth is diminished by the author's tendency to invade the sense perceptions of other persons with his prism. His attempts to establish, months after the actual participation of persons in a sighting, that they saw plasmas rather than anything else results in his frequently transcending his competence as an electrical engineer. BSRAssociates [13] are familiar, after two decades or more, with the boring futility of such post mortems on UFO sightings. Mr. Klass also indulges the old scientific conceit of the so-called trained observer who, by inference, would not have made the observational errors freely attributed to plain folks.
EARTH, THE ONLY INHABITED PLANET IN THE UNIVERSE
In his advocacy of the plasma theory Klass strikes some telling blows against the interplanetary hypothesis, and in his investigation excited the hostility not only of high personages in NICAP but also of Dr. James McDonald of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Tucson. Klass asserts, for example, that the U.S. radar network established to monitor the presence of every spacecraft in the vicinity of the earth has never detected a UFO. This devastating but undocumented statement would seem to be a body blow against the mechanistic concept (a la NICAP) that UFO's are vehicles from other planets or outer space. At the same time, the statement helps vindicate Meade Layne's "Etheric Interpretation" of the discs promulgated more than twenty years ago by BSRA.
In plasma theory, Mr. Klass has hit upon a cardinal element in the UFO mystery that has been too long minimized by those who now deprecate his efforts. Unfortunately, he has made his contact with the UFO subject tangentially, and as a prisoner of his mechanistic training and outlook he cannot follow the functional leads that are everywhere evident in his findings. He does not conceive of plasmas as other than freak atmospheric phenomena -- creations of Mother Nature's electrical workshop in possible interactions with the electrical works of man. Mr. Klass vigorously denies ever having attributed intelligence to plasmas when he reports in his book that J. Allen Hynek broached this idea at a Washington meeting of MIT alumni.
BSRAssociates and friends who obtain this book will find many fascinating connections between Mr. Klass' postulates concerning plasma UFO's and the invisible atmospheric life-forms photographed by this reviewer and James O. Woods during the past eleven years. The creatures we photographed in such profusion in both stills and movies. are, of course, plasmatic, and they were recorded exclusively on infrared film. With a new project and improved methods, they are still being recorded today. For over ten years this reviewer has held that the sporadic appearance of these creatures in the visible spectrum makes up a considerable portion of UFOlogy's most puzzling sightings. The inference is inescapable that what Mr. Klass asserts are freak atmospheric phenomena (without specifying satisfactorily how they are produced) are these same plasmatic living forms that will eventually have to be acknowledged as a hitherto unsuspected form of life -- Macro-bacteria, for want of a better term.
This reviewer's personal experience abuts on Mr. Klass' theories in another way. Klass postulates much concerning ball-lightning, [14] coronas and plasmas in the atmosphere -- at second hand. For more than eight years the reviewer has plied the oceans of the world as a ship's Radio Officer, and has seen his share of plasmas, coronas and ball-lightning. On one occasion a globular plasma came whistling down the antenna trunk, shot across the radio room and expended itself with an explosion against a bulkhead. These phenomena are familiar to the reviewer at first hand, and they are most assuredly not what thousands of persons describe as UFO's.
The same methods used by the reviewer to photograph the invisible plasmatic creatures in the atmosphere also yielded photographs of vehicles -- electrically propelled constructs. These two general classes of UFO's, both belonging in essence and in the main to an invisible-physical level of life, have been mutually confused for over twenty years. No amount of evidence can persuade the spaceship bunch that there are also plasmatic living forms involved, and Mr. Klass as an advocate of plasma (lifeless) UFO's doggedly refuses to see the merit in NICAP's case for spaceships. Modern man's split character splits everything he considers.
"UFO's Identified" is a good example of how this splitting-up process takes place, of how a mechanistically-oriented person once settled on a mechanistic idea cannot follow the golden filaments of functionalism to their source. Mr. Klass' book is the first strong orthodox pitch in behalf of plasmas as the solution of the UFO mystery, and Klass doesn't hesitate to boast that he has cracked the enigma. BSRAssociates will disagree with the author's obviously excessive estimate of his contribution to UFOlogy, but the book is nevertheless valuable in drawing official attention to plasma phenomena in UFOlogy. If a physicist can be found with the guts and functional mentality to pursue what Mr. Klass has started, the scientific world is in for one hell of a surprise, even if it will be "old hat" to BSRAssociates.
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THOSE FLYING PLASMAS ARE SURE HUNGRY!
Mr. Klass didn't see this story in the Orlando, Florida "Sentinel" and reproduced in Joan Whritenour's "Saucer Scoop", December 1967. Researcher John Keel pulled the material together:
"A rapidly mounting mass of reports from all over the world indicates that many people are now convinced that those elusive unidentified flying objects (ufos) are busily stealing and dissecting dogs, cows, and horses. Irate farmers and pet owners everywhere are confusing local law enforcement agencies with these far-out claims backed up by the dismembered carcasses of hapless animals. Strangest of all, the blood, bone marrow, and certain vital organs have all been expertly removed from the bodies!
"Last November, William Watson of Gallipolis, Ohio, discovered his missing German shepard dog in the center of an isolated field. The knee-high grass around the dog's body was pressed flat in a . . .
(Concluded in CQC, page 26)
. . . perfect circle, 20 feet in diameter. Although there was no sight that the dog had been attacked by any 'ordinary' animal, every bone in its body was crushed and there was no blood in evidence. Innumerable residents in the area had reported seeing low-flying, saucer-shaped objects shortly before the dog's carcass was found.
"A few months earlier, a registered nurse living alone on a nearby farm had complained to the police and the FBI about mysterious 'cattle rustlers' who were slaughtering her cows late at night. She said that she had seen strange luminous objects hovering at tree-top level above her pastures on a number of occasions. One night she glimpsed a tall male figure dress in white coveralls in her field. She ran out with a shotgun and the figure left hurriedly, leaping over a tall fence with astounding ease. The cow carcasses had been expertly butchered in part and the bodies were bloodless . . .
"Another case was reported on April 1, 1963 at Chileno Valley, California here a farmer told police that a Flying Saucer had stampeded his herd of cattle. Aroused by the rumpus he said he reached the scene just in time to see a group of short men in white coveralls grab a calf and haul it into the object. Early in September 1967 a baffled vegetarian was called upon to examine the bodies of several strangely butchered cows near Allentown, Pa. Parts of their hides had been removed, and all of their blood and bone marrow was inexplicably missing. Ordinary animals of prey were ruled out as the culprits. . . Several pigs also reportedly vanished from their well-protected pens at the Agricultural college in Farmingdale, L.I., this August (1967) at a time when there were repeated power failures in the area and UFOs were allegedly appearing nightly.
"During the massive wave of UFO reports in Nov. 1956 there were several well-documented cases of dognapping. A Dante, Tenn., farm boy, Everett Clark, told reporters that he saw four people get out of an oblong object on Nov. 6th and make an effort to catch his dog, Frisky. Hundreds of miles away on that same night, John Trasco of Everittstown, N.J., complained that a strange little man with frog-like eyes tried to take his dog. Trasco said he angrily ordered the creature off his property and it got into a luminous, egg-shaped craft and flew off . . ."
"RAW MEAT ELECTRONICS"
Go back to your Jan-Feb 1968 Journal, page 15, of the article on the "Gruesome Etheric Border Patrol" by Andy Hardie. There in the brief message from Myron, of the Ashtar Command you'll read how these Elementals use electronic beams to dissect animals and remove the blood and other "raw meat" delicacies they enjoy. In their way these humanoids are just as bloodthirsty and brutal as we are. And now the heart-transplant fad is making big business out of the traffic in human flesh!
"UFOs — Identified"
by Philip J. Klass (Random House, 1968)
"A new scientific explanation of Unidentified Flying Objects and their many puzzling characteristics." (Plasma! Ball Lightning! Swamp Gas?)
CONTENTS include: Quite By Chance • The First Clue • Exeter UFO Profile • Mysterious Kugelblitz • Kugelblitz Profile • Remarkable Report • Initial Reaction • NICAP's Report • Erratic Patterns • UFOs and Radar • Electromagnetic Effects • Color and Silhouettes • Intelligent Control?
It is hardly amazing that long-time BSRAssociate Trevor James should find cause to disagree with CSICOP founding member and arch-UFO skeptic Philip J. Klass's first foray into the field of Flying Saucers, is it? But, for the skeptics among us, we would not begrudge a desire to read from the source himself. Let us know what you find in the cloud haze!