I published my first article on UFOs when I was 13 years old. I was in eighth grade at Franklin Delano Roosevelt Junior High School in Bristol, Pennsylvania; I’d gotten hooked on flying saucers, as it was then more normal to call them, a few months before. It all came from reading what in my article I naively described as a “fascinating and reliable book,” this being Gray Barker’s They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.
The article appeared in the Roosevelt Press, an eight-page mimeographed school publication, in the issue dated March 20, 1961. It was entitled either “Flying Saucers?” or “Flying Saucers?–Yes,” depending on how you want to read the title. My reprinting it here, nearly 60 years afterward, is not entirely an indulgence in nostalgia.
The book that’s grown out of that article, Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO, is scheduled to be published in two and a half weeks by Stanford University Press. “I know the hold UFOs once had on me,” I write in the book’s introduction. “I know also that they still do. … The years have given me the perspective to ‘feel the emotional tug of such things, and yet see them dispassionately for what they are.’ So in following the trail of what I call the ‘hidden story of the UFO,’ I’ll start with my own story. From there I’ll branch off to the stories of others.”
And so the first chapter of the book: “Confessions of a Teenage UFOlogist.”
And so the article that appears below in its entirety: a glimpse into that UFOlogist’s almost-teenage brain. Captivated, it would seem, not by the outer-space origins of the flying saucers–which he dismisses, for reasons he doesn’t explain, as “unlikely”–but by the very fact of their mystery and suppression.
As if the concealment of the UFO were something more vital, more essential, than the UFO itself. A mystery of the earth and not of the sky.
Which, 60 years later and from a different perspective, I still believe.
Are there such things as flying saucers?
The answer, in all probability, is – YES.
My classmate, C_____ R______ [who appears in Intimate Alien under the name “Bryan”], and I have been doing research on this greatest of all scientific mysteries for about three months, and we would like to give you some of the results of this research. It must be understood that neither of us have had any direct experience with saucers, but we have consulted reliable books on the matter and written a couple of letters to certain authorities on the subject, and I think that I can say that the facts given below are reliable.
For one thing, it is generally acknowledged by most people who have looked into the matter, both civilian and official, that although a large percentage of the sightings can be explained, there are some which must be regarded as authentic, and therefore cannot be overlooked.
Saucer history began on June 24, 1947, when a young pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted nine saucer-shaped objects skipping over Mt. Rainier at at least 1,200 miles an hour.
That started it all. Since then there have been more than 6,000 reported sightings. Among them are such famous ones as the Mantell case in 1948, where a pilot was killed chasing a mysterious object, and the “Washington Attack” in 1952, where a group of saucer-shaped objects were seen over Washington, D.C., while at the same time blips appeared on radar screens.
And, to make the mystery more mystifying, it is known that there are certain agencies out to suppress the truth about flying saucers. One of these is the Air Force. Every six months it issues a “Fact Sheet” debunking saucers. However, the behavior of the Air Force at other times indicates otherwise, and saucer investigators are almost positive that the Air Force is attempting to conceal something.
There is evidence that besides the Air Force, there is a private group that is attempting to hide the truth from the public. However, there appears to be a number of differences between it and the Air Force: it knows the whole truth, it is more efficient and it is a good deal less orthodox.
Where the Air Force stops at putting out “Fact Sheets” to disprove saucers, this shadowy group goes a step further, it silences saucer investigators who have either stumbled on the truth or are coming dangerously close to it. If you want to read more about this group, I recommend Gray Barker’s “They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers,” which reports that one investigator solved the saucer mystery and was subsequently visited by three men in black suits, who demanded that he be silent about the matter.
In this fascinating and reliable book, Barker relates other incidents concerning the activities of this group, including the famous Dahl-Crisman case in 1948 [actually, 1947] where mysterious fragments fell from the skies, the discoverers were visited by a mysterious man in a black suit who took the fragments, and subsequently were spirited away by some group. Two Air Force officers who investigated the incident were killed in a plane crash, and a woman who hinted that she knew the truth about the incident was killed in an automobile accident. And, strangest of all, the fragments later turned out to be phony…
If we could find out what this organization is, we might have the answer to the riddle of the flying saucers.
From where do flying saucers come?
That is a great mystery. They might come from Mars or Venus, although this is unlikely. They might come from some planet circling a faraway star, but this is also unlikely. Some people say they come from another dimension, which is extremely improbable, but must be mentioned. Or they may be secret weapons of the United States or Russia.
I have given you a bit of information concerning saucers, but for every fact there are five questions which neither I nor any other person can answer.
I wasn’t going to give up trying, though.
My classmate and I were going to write the definitive book on flying saucers, to be entitled The Flying Saucer Mystery. I recall we wrote about 15 or 20 pages before he lost interest and I set the project aside, turning my UFOlogy in other directions. In retrospect, that seems to me the central theme of my life as a religion scholar: to write that book.
At last it’s written, and about to be published. Under a different title, and from a perspective I couldn’t have imagined 60 years ago.
“The UFO doesn’t happen only, or even primarily, or even authentically in the sky,” I write in Intimate Alien. The event’s witnesses, its transmitters, and, yes, even its debunkers–“they’re part of the sighting too. The UFO mystery is the mystery of them, or more correctly the mystery of us.”
An aspect, in other words, of “the ancient and insoluble mystery of who we are”–
“We: a two-legged, two-gendered animal evolved from microbial existence through unthinking, unfeeling biological processes, capable nonetheless of thought and feeling. We: rational and sentient yet mortal, living and knowing we must die.”
At age 13, I couldn’t possibly have understood these things. At age 72, my grasp on them is still shaky. But I’m still trying.
by David Halperin
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