These Flying Saucers

WITH your permission and indulgence we will address ourselves to the subject of Flying Saucers ; and we will begin with a short lament for the lost days of certainty. By the Beard of the Prophet, isn't there going to be anything in future on which we can take an unequivocal stand, saying either " Yes, I am sure it is so," or ".No, I am sure it is not so " ? Only a little time has passed since the generations of assurance, when nothing had yet occurred to challenge acceptance of the twenty or thirty restful ideas which, whether they are right or wrong, a man needs as an aid to good digestion. And look at us now—uncertain, poised between belief and disbelief, unable to make up our minds on as fundamental a thing as a Flying Saucer.

The White House now says that President Truman has no know- ledge of the existence of any kind of Flying Saucer. The Department of Defence says: " None of the three services or any other agency in the Department of Defence is conducting experiments, classified or otherwise, with disc-shaped flying objects which could be a basis for the reported phenomena. . . . There has been no evidence that the phenomena are attributable to the activity of any foreign nation." An Air Force " Special Project " which for two years investigated 375 reports from people who said they had seen Flying Saucers has affirmed that all these reports Were " the result of (1) Misinterpretation of various conventional objects ; (2) A mild form of mass-hysteria, or (3) Hoaxes." Shouldn't that be enough for anybody ? It might be if it were not that (1) scientific and aeronautical progress in this century has conditioned everybody to accept phenomena far more improbable than Flying Saucers ; (2) the current state of public morality condones official prevarication and/or straightforward lying when it is done in the name of security ; and (3) we are here dealing with a subject—the appearance of strange objects in the sky—which for centuries has filled the human mind with fear and awe.

In brief, all that has been said officially in the United States up td now ,IS not enough to dispel the idea—which can be discerned to vary in different individuals from a vague uneasiness to a half or three-quarters conviction—that something out, of the ordinary, something inadequately explained, has been and probably still is flying about in the air. There is no room here to go into the evidence in any detail. A great deal has now piled up. And, while a lot of it no doubt can be explained in terms of misinterpretation, hallucination and hoax, it remains most difficult to see how the remaining part can thus be dismissed. Numbers of experienced airline and Air Force pilots say they have seen something. One Air Force pilot who saw and gave chase to something that had already been spotted from the ground (in Kentucky, in January, 1948) was killed when, at high altitude, his plane went to pieces. A Navy Commander has described the tracking of something through the telescope of a theodolite—something which was travelling at very great speed in the upper atmosphere. - There are some American towns where dozens or scores of people have given similar descrip- tions of something which all of them claim to have seen. Suppose that this was mass-hysteria ? There are several air-bases and army posts where officers and officials with modern instruments of observation have reported that they saw something. Is all that mass-hysteria too ?

Hundreds of reports have come in. They did not stop coming in when the Air Force announced that there were no Flying Saucers and that its project was being abandoned. They have not stopped coming in during the last week or so since the White House and the Defence Department put out the latest denials. And now we shall have to proceed with great caution ; for the denials have implications which do not yet appear to have been fully examined in this country, and the implications are going to carry us very far, unless we watch out, and possibly whether we watch out or not.

The latest denials were occasioned by the publication of an article in a Washington weekly magazine called United States News, and by a coincidental broadcast by commentator called Henry I. Taylor, a man with a national audience. What the United States News and Mr. Taylor approximately said was that there were

indeed such things as Flying Saucers, and that they were aircraft of extraordinary design now being developed in great secrecy by or for one of the armed services. (" 105 feet in diameter, circular in shape . . each saucer appears to have a series of variable jet nozzles around its rim . . . direction of the aircraft and its velocity in turn evidently are controlled by the angle at which the jet nozzles are tilted, the number operating, the power applied.") Up to the time when this explanation was offered it had seemed to a good number of people that something of the sort was the easiest thing to believe. And the only way to get anywhere at all with the Flying Saucer story was to take it in short, simple stages.

First: either there was something in the story or there was nothing in the story. In view of the very large number of circumstantial accounts from reputable observers, it seemed easier to believe that there was something of unusual pattern in the air than to believe that all these observers had imagined it or made it up. Second: if there was something of unusual pattern in the

air, it must have been designed and manufactured either by people on earth or by people not on earth—that is, by the inhabitants of

some other planet. It seemed easier to believe that the job had been done right here on earth, particularly in view of the known recent progress in the air and the known current preoccupation with scientific research. Third: if this was a new sort of plane produced here on earth, the likeliest makers of it would be either the Americans or the Russians. It seemed easier, for many reasons. to believe that the Americans would be turning it out.

The serious trouble, warning of which was conscientiously given--

several paragraphs ago, is now coming uncomfortably close. When the White House and the Department of Defence say that no Government department is making or Flying Saucers (" We are not denying this because of any development of secret weapons, but purely because we know of nothing to support these rumours,"

said Mr. Charles Ross, the President's Press Secretary), it could amount to a piece of official prevarication—as it would be, for instance, if some private concern or some part of the aircraft industry were doing the work—and it could be a plain lie. But it seems

easier to believe that it is neither. Since the President and the Department of Defence would be in serious difficulties with the electorate in the future if they were ever proved to have deliberately misled the people in this case, it is easier to believe that Flying Saucers are not being produced here and are almost certainly not being produced without American knowledge in Russia—or, for that matter, in Britain either.

The implications of this readjustment of belief are plain ; and we shall have to go plunging on, with scarcely a pause to mop

the beads of perspiration now gathering on the forehead. We shall have to start the easy-stage exercise again ; and now we are down to two simple alternatives. One: there are no Flying Saucers, and all the reports are false. Two: there are Flying Saucers, and they come from another world in the infinite universe. It may be better to stop here. Of course there are no Flying Saucers: they are

tricks of the imagination or leg-pulls. Those who can should accept alternative one and drop into a dreamless and enviable sleep. Those who can't had better consider at least an outline of the argument on alternative two, which has cropped up here in several literate forms during the last few months.

It begins by asking whether anyone can dismiss from his mind altogether the possibility that a race of beings, one or more centuries further advanced along the scientific path than we, have found the answers to questions we are now beginning to ask. We are talking about an earth satellite vehicle, rockets and radar experiments with the moon. Suppose they—the other beings—had got far beyond that. Suppose they had got to the point of sending remotely controlled or manned " observer units " to and from the earth. Well ? For at least two centuries there have been reports of unexplained objects in the skies. If they have lately become more frequent, it may be because the far-away beings have made recent progress, or because our atomic explosions and high-altitude rockets have attracted their attention. You see why it would have been better not to go on. The whole thing gets worse from this point. It is not only that—as anyone who looks back into the files can discover—the first official statements issued on the U.S. Air Force's "Project Saucer," which began in January, 1948, revealed much uncertainty and on one occasion went so far as to say that these phenomena were not a joke. It was much later that, without any adequate explanation of much of the material that had been gathered, the official line was changed to the present brusque " all bunk " policy. The question whether the Air Force has come into possession of information which it isn't prepared to launch upon an over-excited world has not surprisingly occurred to a number of people here.

" Project Saucer " was resoundingly declared to have been closed last December. But it has been reported, apparently reliably, that Air Force intelligence officers have been flown to the site of airfields and airports where pilots have sighted "unidentified flying bodies" within the last few weeks and have submitted the pilots to thorough interrogation. And it is not only that either. I know a man who says he is a friend of such a pilot. He says that when the Air Force men reached the airport they went over the pilot's plane with a Geiger counter, which is an instrument that detects any sign of radio-activity. , The man I know demands to be told why, if they feel as certain about the non-existence of Flying Saucers as they're supposed to feel, they go on fiddling about with Geiger counters. I haven't been able to give him any really convincing answer.