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From: Edoardo Russo <erusso@TORINO.ALPCOM.IT>
Date: Sun, 27 Apr 1997 21:16:37 +0001
Fwd Date: Sun, 27 Apr 1997 22:17:15 -0400
Subject: PROJECT-1947 - Arnold as a 'Boise Boys' Hoax

Hi Jan and all!

A few days ago somebody asked himself whether Arnold's report might
have been a hoax.

This reminded me of an article I read more than 10 years ago, so I
went and found it. Since I never found it mentioned any longer and
i've since remained with the curiosity, I'm submitting you the story,
wondering who else had read it in "UFO Research Australia Newsletter"
(UFORAN, one of the best UFO journals down under) in 1984.

Its author was veteran Australian ufologist Bill
Chalker, whom I understand is or was among this list's members, isn't
he?

Well, UFORAN published a well-done summary of the 1947 UFO Wave in its
vol. 5 no. 3 issue (dated May-June 1984), pages 4-16, by a John Burford,
titled "Western USA - 1947: the Beginnings". Around the end of the
article, Burford noted that some of the main characters in the early
days of the wave were strangely connected with each other, but concluded:
"As for the sightings by  Arnold, Johnson and the United Airlines crew,
their common connnection with Boise, Idaho, is probably circumstantial
an I will not allege conspiracy on such hin evidence. I do find hard
to accept that sich a small group of connected people should share such
spectacularly strange experiences in so short a space of time."

In the following issue (vol. 3 no. 6, July-August, 1984) Bill Chalker
had a short article published in the "Forum" column (pages 6-7), titled
"Flying Saucers - the Boise Boys' Legacy?", telling of his recent reading
of Arthur Koestler's book "Janus - A Summing Up", where he had found
the sentence "the term 'ufology' was coined by Air Marshal sir Victor
Goddard in 1946". The anomaly of that 1946 took Chalker to Goddard's
own book "Flight Towards Reality" (1975), where he told he had been
at a naval hospital near Washington, DC, in 1946 (when Goddard was the
RAF representative at the Pentagon), for a broken leg, when he met
a U.S. Navy Captain from Boise, Idaho. That man told him the favoutite
leisure pastime of the government "upper set" of Boise, Idaho (then a
haven for VIPs): a cult of high elaborate pranking. "The idea was
that locals might start a scare in the headlines of l=ECthe local press
and see to what extent 'ex-Boise Boys', scattered by migration through
all other States, would emulate and make the scare a national one",
thus giving the originators their pay-off via the mass media diffusion
of their story.

So when, no longer after he heard this, Godard saw a news item with a
Boise dateline, referring to "flying saucers" over Boise, etc., he told
his wife: "the Boise Bos have started something now". But when one
of the pilots of fighter planes sent to investigate died in his plane
crash, Goddard felt "A joke's a joke, but this has gone too far",
called his U.S. colleague General Spaatz and told him the "Boise Boys"
anecdote. Spaatz rang the President Truman and the "saucer search" was
called off.

A brief mention of that story was also done by Goddard in his speech
at a meeting of "Contact International" in London, on May 3, 1969,
as reported by Charles Bowen in his article "UFOs and Psychic Pheno-
mena", Flying Saucer Review vol. 15 no. 4, July-August 1969, pp. 22-25,
but I can't remember having ever encountered elsewhere, nor
having ever read of anybody trying to verify it.

As Chalker wrote in 1984: "There surely must be researchers in the U.S.
in a position to determine with certainty whether the initial wave with
Arnold and others was solidly based in real observations of bona fide
UFOs. Is there someone out ther who can answer this?"

13 years have passed since then, but I'm afraid U.S. colleagues
were never even aware of its existence. And I might add that some
UK ufologist might also try and verify the British side of the
story, if yet possible.

Not that I believe it to be the real trigger of the wave, but...
a good investigator should never leave a clue uninvestigated, shouldn't
he?

If nothing else, as us Italians say, "se non e' vero e' ben trovato"
(if that's not true, it's well invented).

I remain waiting for my decade-old curiosity to be satisfied by
somebody out there, beyond the Pond.

Of course, if anybody need a photocopy of the item, just ask me for it.

Best regards

Edoardo Russo
Centro Italiano Studi Ufologici