March 24, 1965

Flying Saucers May Be Secret Craft

Flying saucers are back in the news a little more frequently these days, keeping alive the interest of the public in this strange phenomena.

The latest is a rather preposterous tale of a small saucer landing near a country stroller, and then a little green man (honest, this was a straight-faced report) jumping out to take the earthling's photograph with a tiny camera before zipping off into space.

A more serious account is that of Horace Burns, a gunsmith doing business in Harrisonburg, Virginia. While driving near Staunton, Va., on Dec. 21, 1964, he claims to have watched a huge metallic object glide to a field and land lightly "like a bubble." The saucer was silver in color and resembled an "upside-down toy top, but the size of it was astounding."

Burns said the saucer was "about 125 feet in diameter, at least, and 80 to 90 feet high." Besides being generally cone shaped, "its circular, sloping sides rose in about six large, concentric convolutions that decreased in diameter to a dome at the top." He noted that all around the perimeter at the base of the monstrous machine there was a bluish glow in a band about a foot wide. He could see no windows, doors, portholes or seams.

The visitor rested on the meadow for about 90 seconds and then with a "woosh" it suddenly rose straight up for several hundred feet and sped off horizontally.

Burns became aware of the approaching saucer when his car motor stopped. After the unidentified flying object had departed, he started the motor of his auto easily.

The startled gunsmith reported the encounter at first only to his wife, and they debated what further disclosures to make for eight days. Burns was afraid he would be ridiculed, yet he knew such a momentous event should be made known. Finally he contacted a UFO Investigators Club at nearby Eastern Mennonite College. On the following day, Professor Ernest Gehman went to the field to make an investigation. He took along a Geiger counter which revealed radioactivity of 60,000 counts per minute.

While tramping around the field, Prof Gehman was joined by two research engineers, Harry Cook and a Mr. Funk, who worked at a nearby DuPont plant. They corroborated Prof. Gehman's Geiger counter reading.

On Jan. 12 of this year, two Air Force sergeants, David Moody and Harold Jones, of Wright-Patterson Base, Dayton, Ohio, surveyed the area of the saucer landing. They found no trace of radioactivity but acknowledged it would have been washed away by the three rains and six inches of snow that fell since Prof. Gehman's visit.

The Staunton sighting is typical of the reports that can be wholly or partially confirmed by corroborating witnesses and which remain unexplained by Air Force investigators. Last year there were 17 such sightings, although there were hundreds more attributable to weather balloons, mirages, bright stars, conventional aircraft, meteors and hoaxes.

It is the tiny residue of UFOs that keep serious investigators at work.

There are two schools of thought among saucer buffs regarding the origin of the spectacular flying objects.

One group, by far the largest, is convinced the saucers are from another planet. Several persons claim to have met Martians and/or Venusians, talked with them and even ridden in their space cars.

The consensus of those who purport to have made direct contact with "out of this world" creatures is that they look exactly like white Anglo-Saxon earth men. They are wise and kind and are visiting this planet to warn us of the dangers of fooling around with atomic bombs.

A less popular theory, but the one to which I subscribe, is that saucers are a secret manmade craft.

The outer space belief does not hold up, in my opinion, because the furtive actions of saucers are contrary to logic of intelligent beings engaged in scientific exploration. Rather than clandestine and cryptic meetings with eccentric earth men, a wise space traveler would be anxious to leave unmistakable proof of his presence and purpose.

There are two circumstances which must be disposed of before I can accept other world origins of saucers.

Shortly after World War II, while doing some rewrite chores for the "Detroit Free Press", I handled on successive days a series of one-paragraph articles from the Associated Press which reported essentially the following:

"Air line passengers, arriving in Melbourne, Australia, today from Manila, Philippines, reported seeing a mysterious military installation deep in the New Zealand jungles. The plane had been forced to fly over what was believed to be uninhabited territory to avoid a severe tropical storm. The passengers said they saw a swarm of uniformed men around a large hole in a mountain. The Australian Defense Minister admitted that the jungle base concerned 'an Allied secret weapon more startling than the atom bomb but having nothing to do with nuclear fission'."

In the final story, the Australian defense minister denied any knowledge of the jungle installation and that he had ever said it was a secret weapon. However, there has been no independent investigation of this sighting.

The second circumstance that needs clearing up is the status of a top-secret research admitted by Canada several years ago. In an unusual copyrighted story by the former magazine "Colliers," Canadian authorities said they had discovered a way of creating a "hole" in the earth's magnetic field and tapping an endless source of planetary power. Except for this one article, Canada has avoided any other disclosures about the project.

The existence of Unidentified Flying Objects of fantastic abilities has been proven to the satisfaction of Air Force authorities. Two movie films of saucers in flight, though unspectacular to the layman, are sufficiently impressive to keep an official investigation active.

Until the nature and origin of flying saucers are definitely known, the casual reader will do well to keep a tight rein on his imagination,

Author: Lindsey Williams