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This is Frank Edwards reporting. How real are the flying saucers, officially called unidentified

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flying objects? On December 24, 1959, the Inspector General of the Air Force notified

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all air-based commanders that flying saucers are a serious problem. The government of the

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United States has issued orders advising the military how to recognize the UFOs, how to

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report them, and how to handle fragments of them. Are the flying saucers really solid objects? The

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Canadian government says it has borrowed pieces of flying saucers from the U.S. Air Force. The

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government of Brazil collected several ounces of tin, which gripped from a UFO onto the city of

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Campinas. The Norwegian government reported in 1952 that it had located and recovered the outer

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shell of a UFO, which, it said, was certainly not made on this earth. Slowly but surely,

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the irrefutable facts about UFOs have filtered through the veil of censorship in this and other

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countries. Slowly but surely, the nature and extent of this remarkable phenomenon has become

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public knowledge by patiently piecing together these bits of evidence as they become available,

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by carefully weighing the guarded statements of scientists and military agencies involved in

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the study of unidentified flying objects. We shall see that they are indeed serious business.

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What should we do about them? What can we do about them? Let us consider the case of the

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Argentine naval transport, the Punta Medanos, which was making its way across the South Atlantic,

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near the Falkland Islands in September of 1963. An enormous craft of unknown type and origin approached

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the naval transport from a stern. The officers of the transport estimated that the object was about

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800 feet in diameter. It was gray in color, like dull aluminum, and in shape it resembled two huge

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soup bowls placed together, rim to rim. As the strange craft approached, slowly and silently,

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and about 100 feet above the sea, the Punta Medanos' compass gyrated wildly, the lights went out,

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the intercommunication system went dead, the radar and radio ceased to function, the ship was virtually

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helpless. For 20 minutes, this state of affairs continued, and then the strange aerial craft

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rose ponderously into the heavens and vanished as mysteriously as it had come. This is not an

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unusual case, let it be noted. The Secretary of the Argentine Navy says this was but one

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of 13 such cases in which giant UFOs had interfered with the operation of Argentine naval craft

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in a three-year period. There was no hostility in their actions, but there was unquestionably

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a powerful electromagnetic field which overwhelmed man-made gear while the UFOs were near.

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The captain of the Punta Medanos found that he could do nothing while his vessel was within the

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field of the giant UFO. It was an experience that has been shared by many persons in the air,

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on the ground, and at sea. The captain of the Punta Medanos was as helpless as, for instance,

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our own astronaut, Major Gordon Cooper. As Major Cooper was making his final orbit of the earth

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in May of 1963, he was approaching Perth, Australia, at night. Suddenly, Major Cooper radioed down to

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the tracking station that he was being approached by a greenish glowing disk with a faint red glow

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on one side. It was traveling east to west, which no man-made satellite does. 200 persons at the

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tracking station watched the object on the gear there. They saw it approach Cooper, then it veered

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away from him and sped on out into space. It was only the first of many such cases. Every American

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astronaut since Gordon Cooper has also been approached by unidentified flying objects,

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and each time the UFOs come closer to the astronauts, and each time they remain a little longer.

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In 1965, Major Edward McDivitt photographed one of these objects near the capsule in which he was

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orbiting the earth over the Pacific Ocean, and the photograph, as released by the National

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Aeronautics and Space Administration, clearly shows a bright egg-shaped thing which leaves a

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visible trail from its propulsion system. The astronauts have all been approached by UFOs.

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One of our surveyor shots to the moon was followed by UFOs, according to NASA. These things have

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caused power blackouts by official admission. Individuals have been burned by radiation when

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they got too close to UFOs, and mid-air collisions with planes full of passengers and near collisions

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as well can also be found in the reports around the world. These incidents are but a small part of

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the worldwide story of what we officially call unidentified flying objects. In their early form,

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they were called flying saucers, which they did resemble in flight. But as the old saucer or

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disk-shaped types were gradually replaced by more sophisticated models, the term unidentified flying

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object was officially adopted. It could and did include all types of craft and objects,

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and the objects themselves did and still do constitute a major problem for the government

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of the United States and of many other nations around the world, including Russia, which was

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first to become aware of their presence. In May of 1946, residents of Northwestern Russia,

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Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark were startled by a rash of unconventional objects,

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which darted about in the skies. At first these things were referred to in the news dispatches

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as ghost rockets, but it soon became evident that they were certainly not rockets. They changed

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direction. They were seen to hover. They were silent, and they left no rocket trail. And when

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the jets were sent up after them, the things simply zipped away at fantastic speed and left the jets

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far behind. That was in May of 1946. It was just one year after man had exploded his first atomic

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device. Was there any relationship between those two historic events, or was it pure coincidence?

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Did the flash and the powerful radiation of those atomic explosions attract the attention of something

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or somebody out there in space? If so, who or what and from where? Scientists and military men were

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still pondering those questions in the late summer of 1946, when the weird objects vanished as suddenly

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as they had appeared. In June of 1947, they were back. This time they were over the Northwestern

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part of the continental United States. First there was only a handful of them, but their numbers

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grew rapidly and their activities expanded. A study of their actions led to the conclusion that

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they were definitely interested in the capabilities of our various vehicles. They paced our planes and

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our trains and our automobiles and our ships and our submarines. One of them appears to have been

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involved in a bizarre incident which is a matter of record with the United States Navy. This occurred

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in the summer of 1947, when the battleship New York was on patrol in the North Pacific. The gear

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picked up an object which seemed to be following the battleship. Presently, as the skies cleared,

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the object could be seen with the naked eye and could be examined through binoculars.

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It was some kind of faintly glowing disc or spherical thing, moving in the same direction

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and at about the same speed as the battleship. The radar had it for several hours, as did the

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rangefinders for the guns. At length, when the thing could still be seen the next morning,

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the battleship opened fire, first with the five-inch guns, later with the big 14-inch rifles.

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When this cannonade was finished, the object was gone. There was no indication that it had been

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hit. When the official report was made by the commander of the battleship New York, the refutation

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was promptly issued that they had only been shooting at the planet Venus. Thus, as far back as 1947,

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the official policy of issuing explanations which ignored the facts was in evidence. For one thing,

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the object which followed the battleship New York was in the wrong direction to have been the

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planet Venus. It did not change position relative to either the ship or the horizon, as a planet

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would have done. And perhaps most important and most devastating to the official explanation,

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neither the radar nor the rangefinders on the battleship could possibly have picked up the

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planet Venus or any other planet. If this was indeed the first case of deriding those who reported

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unconventional objects in the sky, it was but the forerunner of many similar cases. And it was also

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the forerunner of many cases in which human beings have tried to do violence to UFOs,

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perhaps a common human reaction to something they do not understand. Many centuries ago,

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when several great shining silvery discs dived out of the sky toward the troops of Alexander the

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Great as the troops were fording a river, most of the soldiers fled the scene. But some of the

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hardier men stood their ground and tried to hit the discs with their arrows and with stones from

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their slings. In April of 1897, when a glowing red, dirigible-shaped object indicated that it was

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about to touch down in a cattle lot on the farm of Alexander Hamilton, near Leroy, Kansas, Hamilton

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and his teenage son and his hired man armed themselves with axes and rushed toward the craft.

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It quickly rose into the air out of reach, taking with it the hideous creatures which the men

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reportedly saw in the brightly lighted cabin beneath the craft. Peasants who worked in a

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beat field in northern Italy reported to the police that when a disc-shaped UFO hovered over

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them at very low altitude, shortly before dark one evening in 1954, they pelted it with clods and

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stones and one man struck at a ringing blow with his shovel. On the night of April 18, 1962, a glowing

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red object was sighted by a ground observer group at Oneida, New York. They immediately notified

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the military at a nearby airbase and the thing was picked up on radar. It was tracked by radar as it

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moved westward across the country to a point near Gridley, Kansas. Then it changed course and descended

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until it was below the range of the radar. A few minutes later, an unidentified flying object

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landed near an electric power substation at Eureka, Utah. While the object was close to the

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station, the station could not function. The military went into action promptly and scrambled

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two flights of armed jet interceptors, one from Phoenix, Arizona, the other from Reno, Nevada.

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The object remained on the ground near the power substation for 42 minutes, according to military

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spokesman. As the jets approached, the object took flight and the electric power again flowed

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through that substation. Pursued by armed jets, the object streaked across southwestern Nevada

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and it exploded in flight about 70 miles south of Reno over the Mesquite Range. The brilliant

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flash lighted the city of Reno like a giant photographer's flash bulb, according to the

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witnesses. The military sources admitted that the object had exploded, but they refused to say

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whether it was the result of action by the pursuing jets. An interesting case is one which occurred

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one evening in October of 1954 near Milan, Italy, when a crowd gathered to watch a dimly glowing

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UFO which had settled down in an abandoned sports field. The witnesses later told authorities

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that they had stopped a passing garbage truck and had armed themselves with part of its spoiled fruit,

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which they threw at the craft and its occupants, scoring several hits, they said, before it rose

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and fled. If this was indeed an extraterrestrial spacecraft with living occupants, it must have

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been very disconcerting for them to cross millions of miles of space only to be hit on the head with

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rotten oranges. The dramatic advent of such fascinating objects as those which were first

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called flying saucers attracted the inevitable attention of those individuals who let their

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imaginations run away with their veracity. By 1950, some of these characters were beginning to spin

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their stories of fantastic conversations with alleged space people. Some of them expanded the

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stories to include alleged rides in the UFOs. Others published books replete with photographs

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of what they blandly called spacecraft, mother ships, and all. Because they all claimed to have

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made contact with the operators of the UFOs, the promoters of these various stories are known as

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contactees. One of the most famous and the most successful was a fellow who had very limited

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schooling but unlimited imagination. He concocted an engrossing tale of his alleged conversation

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with a gorgeous female space traveler from some distant planet. He also concocted some pictures

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which the Air Force experts promptly identified as what they called simulated, which indicated

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charitable restraint on their part to say the least. This charming fellow voluntarily listed

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his book with the Library of Congress as a piece of fiction, but he sold the book to the general

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public as a factual account. I was fascinated by one of his pictures, which he identified as the

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craft in which he said he had made a trip to another planet. It took me eight years to track

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down the object which he called a spaceship. It was the top of a canister-type vacuum cleaner

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made in 1937. Somehow, I doubt that very much space travel is actually being done in vacuum cleaner

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lids. Another of these self-styled space travelers is a middle-aged, ball-headed fellow who was tired

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of his life as the operator of a small, rocky farm. He attracted attention by telling a story

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of how he had been kidnapped by the occupants of a flying saucer and forced to go with them to a

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planet hidden behind the sun, admittedly a great spot for a hidden planet. He was gone from home

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about two weeks. When he turned up again, he explained to his wife that he had been forced

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into the saucer and wasn't even permitted to leave her a note. The wife not only accepted his

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remarkable story, she decided that it was too good to be withheld from the general public,

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and she began booking her imaginative spouse in schools and clubs and county fairs,

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anywhere that they could get an audience together for a few dollars. The husband would sometimes

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change the story a little bit in the course of regaling his audiences, but when he did that,

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his ever-watchful wife would leap to her feet and remind him how he had told the story in the

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first place. In 20 years of research in the field of unidentified flying objects, I have been exposed

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to scores of these contactee stories. I have never yet interviewed or listened to or read about

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a single case of this kind which was, in my opinion, anything more than good rich bunk.

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It is my personal belief that people who tell such stories would benefit from psychiatric treatment.

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Every student of unidentified flying objects quickly discovers that this present development is

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but the latest phase of a very old phenomenon. The Bible contains numerous references to strange

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objects, variously described in terms of contemporary understanding. Ezekiel's wheels of fire were

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probably his description of what would have been great glowing discs, for wheels in his day were

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solid circles. The account of Lot in the Bible tells how he saw strange beings who came down from

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the heavens and who even ate at his table. The Bible contains many references, but those it

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contains are but a small portion of the reports which scholars have found in various ancient

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chronicles. One of these is very old indeed. It is the books of Desire, which are the written

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version of the legends of the hill people of northern India. For thousands of years these

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accounts were handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth until at last they

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were preserved in writing in the form in which they exist today. The account to which I refer is

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that which purports to describe a singular event in the history of those ancient people. The time

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of the incident was about 6,000 years before the Christian era, yet some of its details have been

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known to modern science for less than 20 years. The legend tells how strange glistening metallic

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vessels were seen in the skies of northern India. After circling the earth, so we are told,

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these craft landed, and the awestruck natives fell down before the men who got out of the vessels.

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In a short time the visitors became the rulers of these people, and they built two cities from

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which they ruled for many years. The people prospered under their rulership and all went well

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until a grievous misunderstanding arose between the two groups of visitors. Then says the chronicle,

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one leader took a group of his companions and they rose into the sky in one of their huge vessels.

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They flew to a point from which they could see the city in which their opponents dwelt. Then they

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released what the chronicle describes as a great shining lance which rode on a beam of light.

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This weapon exploded in or above the doomed city. The flash blinded all who gazed upon it, and burned

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those in and about the city for a great distance. The water of the river was poisoned by the explosion,

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and the dust of the city was also poisoned so that none dared enter. When the visitor who had

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launched this attack realized the enormity of the devastation, he gathered about him the remnants

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of his own people, put them into the remaining vessels, and rose into the sky, never to return.

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The devastated city eventually crumbled and vanished. The other city was finally abandoned

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and fell into ruins. This account sounds very much like an early attempt by space beings

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to establish a base or a foothold on earth. It notes that these creatures circled the earth,

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and that was at a time when humans were of the belief that the earth was flat.

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The description of a great shining lance that rode on a beam of light bears a striking resemblance to

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a modern rocket, with its flaming exhaust, described by those who had never seen such a thing before.

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And the great flash that burned and blinded and poisoned the dust and the water

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bears an ominous similarity to a detailed description of a nuclear blast and its aftermath.

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Yet all this was said to have taken place many thousands of years ago,

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and for men of that time to have imagined such things in such detail would be more

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fantastic than the story itself. The chronicles of ancient India, in this case, merely add mystery

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to an enigma. If it did not occur, as stated, then how did they know about such things in such

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precise and accurate detail? And if it did happen, as described, who were the strange visitors,

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who sailed their metal ships in the skies of earth almost 8,000 years before man learned to fly?

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In or about the year 956 AD, the records of an ancient church in Ireland tell of a weird incident

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which defies explanation other than some early type UFO. It tells how the people attending church

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were alarmed by a loud crashing noise. They rushed out to find a metal anchor hooked in the wood above

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the front door of the church. The anchor was at the end of a cable which ran up to a strange craft,

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hovering in the air a short distance above the church, and a man-like creature, who was apparently

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trying to dislodge the anchor, was seized when he endeavored to climb back up the cable. But the

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bishop, who wrote the report for his superiors, said that he made the parishioners turn the

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creature loose for fear they might harm him, and that upon being freed the creature hastily climbed

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the cable, which was then cut, and the craft sped away in the skies. The anchor, says the old church

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record, was kept in the church for many years as a souvenir of the incident. In January of

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1910, the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, was surprised by the visit of a large,

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dirigible-shaped craft which cruised about over the city in broad daylight for about half an hour,

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in full view of thousands of people, many of whom were admittedly frightened by it. In those days,

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the only similar devices known to man were a few clumsy, underpowered zeppelins in Europe,

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totally incapable of visiting this country. Next day, the object was back over Chattanooga,

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and then it rose into the clouds and moved away toward the south, another well-attested enigma

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in the long, long story of the unidentified flying objects.

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When you hear the statement that no professional astronomer has ever seen a flying saucer,

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you are entitled to reply, malarkey, for that's exactly what it is. The first UFOs ever photographed

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were seen and filmed by Professor Bonilla at the Observatory at Zacatecas, Mexico,

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on August the 12th, 1883. He and his colleagues saw hundreds of spindle-shaped craft in formation,

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passing between their telescope and the sun on that and the succeeding day.

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More recently, let us consider the case of Dr. Clyde Tombow, who is world famous as the discoverer

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of the planet Pluto. In 1949, Dr. Tombow and several other witnesses, including members of his

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family, watched a strange cigar-shaped craft with regularly spaced rectangular apertures along the

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sides, similar in appearance to windows, as the craft moved silently about over the desert near

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Tombow's home in New Mexico. The noted astronomer said in a written statement that he had the

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impression that the object was some form of extraterrestrial device. Dr. Seymour Hess of

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Lowell Observatory also saw a UFO and had the courage to report what he had seen. It was on May

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the 20th, 1950. Dr. Hess described a shiny double convex disc which he had watched maneuvering about

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in the clear sky of the southwest. It was completely unlike any other object he had ever seen,

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with or without the aid of a telescope. One of the most famous astronomers of our time was the

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late Dr. H. Percy Wilkins, famed among other things for his leadership of the British

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Selenological Society as a result of his lifelong study of the moon. On June the 11th, 1954, Dr.

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Wilkins was in this country on a speaking trip and he was flying in a convent from Charleston,

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West Virginia to Atlanta, Georgia. The weather was good with scattered clouds and bright sunshine.

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When Dr. Wilkins arrived at Atlanta, he held a press conference, at which he described an unusual

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experience which he had had during that flight. He said that he had been looking out the window

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where he was seated near the rear of the plane when he noticed two large, coppery-looking discs

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darting in and out of the clouds. They were near enough that he could discern certain details,

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which indicate that he was seeing the double convex type UFO which was just beginning to

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replace the earlier type disc or so-called flying saucer. Dr. Wilkins described what he had seen

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to the reporters in Atlanta and when asked if he had any idea what the objects were, he replied,

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and I quote him, I certainly do. I saw two flying saucers." Frank Halstead, who was for 25 years

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the curator of the University of Minnesota Observatory at Duluth, says that he has seen a

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total of three UFOs, two of them in one day and almost at the same time. No professional astronomer

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ever saw a flying saucer? The record indicates otherwise.