Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (14 page)

They began to argue; one thought it was a lighted balloon, another an aeroplane, another a meteor.
They made some telephone calls—and, Ruppelt adds, their rank was such that they got swift results.
Radar said there had been no aeroplane in the past hour, and the weather station said there were no weather balloons in the air.
The station also checked on high-altitude winds, and discovered that none were blowing in the right direction.
The light had been in sight too long to be a meteor—and, in any case, meteors do not climb and dive.

After Ruppelt had checked the story, he agreed that they had seen an ‘unidentified flying object’ and left it at that.

So we have a light that flies until it is almost directly above the garden full of distinguished guests, and then performs some absurd manoeuvres to draw attention to itself, then flies away, having demonstrated to a large number of Pentagon officials that UFOs were more than a hysterical rumour.

Ruppelt tells how they—the air force—decided to subscribe to a press-cutting service, just to see how many UFOs were reported in the newspapers.
For the first month or so the cuttings came in ordinary-size envelopes, then in large manila envelopes, and finally in shoe boxes.
All this was between March and June 1952, and by June they were aware that there was a major ‘flap’ (which Ruppelt defines as ‘a condition .
.
.
characterised by an advanced degree of confusion that has not quite yet reached panic proportions’).
Project Blue Book—the official investigation—had only just got started, and it was immediately overwhelmed by hundreds of sightings.
There was even a wave of sightings over Washington itself.
Many flying-saucer enthusiasts predicted an imminent invasion from space; but nothing happened.
It seemed that the flying saucers were merely occupied in an exercise to get themselves noticed.

Half a century later, this still seems to be the case.
I did not have to look further than my own doorstep to find an example.
My part-time secretary, Pam Smith-Rawnesley, told me that one of the first-year students at the local drama college where she works had seen a UFO a few days before, and I asked her to tape-record him describing what had happened.
This is what Matt Punter said in June 1997:

I was travelling from my friend’s house in Liskeard, at a quarter past eleven at night, to where I live in Pensilver.
After about three miles, I was passing a place called Rosecraddock, and as I drove up the hill, and—basically—four different-coloured bright lights came over the top of my car, so low that I instinctively ducked my head.
My first thought was that it might be an aeroplane about to crash on top of me, or just in front of me.
So I slammed on my brakes.
Then—I had no stereo on, and I realised there was no sound to the thing—that’s when I thought: Mmm, it’s a bit weird.
Then, after stopping, the four lights stopped about ten metres in front of me, and stayed there for a second, and for that second, it really did seem that whatever it was was looking at me, and I was looking at it.
Then they shot off in the air—so quickly that I couldn’t see them once I looked up.
But there were four different-coloured lights, blue, red, yellow, and white—there were possibly two white lights—in a shape of a—er—parallelogram.

Pam asks whether he could see metal above the lights—obviously wondering if they were on the underside of a flying saucer.
He says: ‘No, I could actually see the road through them.
All I saw were the four suspended lights in midair’.

After more questions, Matt goes on: ‘I got home, and I woke my mum up—I wouldn’t usually do that because she works early in the morning—but I woke her up and told her about it, and she calmed me down.
She could see I was telling the truth, because I actually had tears in my eyes, my heart was going like nothing on Earth’.

It seems an oddly pointless event: four lights in the shape of a parallelogram swooping down over the car, and halting for a moment in front of him, so that he can see the road (he was driving uphill) through them.
He feels as if they are watching him.
Then they take off, so fast that when he looks up, they have already gone.

Matt Punter remarks that ‘the weird thing was, there was absolutely no traffic on the road’.
This seems to be a curious recurring feature in UFO cases—empty roads, empty streets, and so on; it has been labelled ‘the Oz Factor’, after Dorothy’s journey down a yellow brick road apparently used by no one else.
In Matt’s case, this meant that there was fairly certainly no other witness, no car going in the opposite direction, who might have seen lights rise into the sky.

But the Oz Factor does not always apply.
On 4 September 1997, while I was writing this book, my wife went out into the garden at about 11:00 at night, to give the dogs a final airing, when she saw an orange globe, about the size of the moon, which moved in the direction of an orange streetlight on the estate below, then turned and went back the way it came.
She had time to go indoors and call my son Rowan to come and see it before it vanished behind trees.
Yet she was so little struck by it that she did not even bother to tell me for several days, when I happened to mention that a large number of UFOs are orange globes, and she realised that she had probably seen a UFO.

One of the first questions raised by sceptics is that of the credibility of witnesses.
As the philosopher David Hume said, is it more likely that a miracle occurred, or that someone is telling lies?
But the UFOs seem to have taken care to neutralise this objection by overwhelming us with sheer quantity.
And, even without David Hume, I find it impossible to believe that Matt Punter and my wife were not telling the truth.
And Ruppelt obviously felt the same about the pilots of the DC-4, and the CIA officials at the garden party—in spite of the fact that every one of them had undoubtedly been drinking.

But it is important to be fair to the sceptics.
Those who accept the reality of UFOs tend to be harsh on them—particularly those with some official position.
At best, they think that sceptics are stupid or intellectually dishonest, at worst that there is a sinister conspiracy.

This, I feel, is missing a vital point: that the sceptic is often a totally honest person who, for perfectly good, sound reasons, simply cannot see a case for belief.
In fact many—like Courty Bryan—admit that they would
like
to be convinced, but find it impossible.

A case in point is an official investigator called Roy Craig, author of
UFOs: An Insider’s View of the Official Quest for Evidence.
Typically, it is published by the University of North Texas Press, for it is the kind of book that would not be taken on by a commercial publisher—they know that the public is not willing to pay money for books written by nonbelievers.

Craig was a member of the Condon Committee, hated and derided by all good ufologists.
This was set up in 1966, after the termination of Project Blue Book, with the aim of studying all the available evidence for UFOs, and deciding whether the United States government ought to take them seriously.
Two years later, their highly sceptical report was denounced as a whitewash, a cover-up, an attempt to let the defence establishment ‘off the hook’.
The UFO Encyclopedia,
edited by John Spencer—one of the most balanced and objective writers on the subject—comments, ‘There is some doubt as to Dr.
Condon’s impartiality in respect of this (sceptical) conclusion, and in any case it appears clear that the conclusions of this report do not necessarily mirror the actual findings of the investigation’.

Craig’s book makes it clear that both these statements are disputable.
It also makes it clear that the truth is far more fascinating, and far more subtle, than most believers in UFOs are willing to concede.

Craig tells how, in October 1966, newspapers announced that Dr.
Franklin Roach would be one of the chief investigators for the Condon Committee, and how, that same day, he happened to meet Roach at a party, and remarked that he envied him.
Roach said that, if he was interested, he ought to speak to Bob Low, the coordinator of the project—another name that makes ufologists wrinkle their noses.
As a result, Craig was appointed an investigator for the committee.

His first ‘case’ was in May 1967.
Many people in Hoquiam, near Seattle, had heard strange beeping noises originating from above the ground, and there was no obvious explanation.
Cattle seemed worried by the noise, dogs cowered, and frogs stopped croaking.
Ornithologists said it was not a bird.
The story reached the newspapers, and Craig went to investigate, together with camera, tape recorder and ultrasonic translator-detector.

He and five fellow investigators spent an uncomfortable night lying in damp vegetation.
They had hoped the beeping would start early and they could go home to bed.
But, although it started briefly, there was not time to turn on the tape recorder.
They left, cold and hungry, at dawn.

The next night it was raining, and they sat in a car with the window open and tape recorder at the ready.
Again, nothing happened.
They were so exhausted that they left at midnight.

The next day they phoned the local sheriff’s office, and were told that a man who lived close to the site of the beeping had shot a tiny owl, the size of a sparrow, called a saw-whet owl.
He had got sick of people trampling over his yard looking for the noise, and killed it with a shotgun.

After that, the unearthly beeping stopped.
The lesson was obvious.
Look around for a local countryman who knows what a saw-whet owl sounds like.
The people who had reported the beeping were not countrymen, neither did they know it was the saw-whet owl’s mating season.

Craig’s next case was more significant, for it involved one of the most famous encounters in ufology.

On Saturday, 20 May 1967, a fifty-one-year-old Polish-Canadian named Stephen Michalak returned to his home in Winnipeg with first-degree burns on his chest, and complaining of nausea.
His story was that he had been out prospecting—looking for quartz—in Manitoba’s Falcon Lake Park, when the local wild geese began to cackle loudly.
When he looked up he saw two cigar-shaped objects descending from the sky, glowing with a scarlet colour.
One of them remained in the sky, while the other landed on a flat-topped rock.
The second UFO began to fly away, its colour changing from red to orange, then grey.

About to disappear behind clouds, it changed to orange again, it was moving very fast, and without sound.

Michalak now saw that the craft on the ground was changing colour, from red to grey-red, then light grey, then to the colour of ‘hot stainless steel, with a golden glow around it’.

There was an opening in the top of the craft, and a brilliant purple light, which hurt his eyes, poured out.
Then he felt wafts of warm air, smelt burning sulphur, and heard a whirring noise like a small electric motor running very fast.
There was also a hissing sound, like air being sucked into the craft.
A door stood open in the side.

By now his fear and astonishment had subsided, and he concluded that it was an American space project, and that someone would appear at the door at any moment.
He went close to it, and heard muffled voices above the rush of air.
He called to ask if they were having trouble but received no reply.
He tried calling out in Russian, German, Italian, French and Ukrainian.
Still receiving no reply, he approached closer, placing green lenses over the goggles he was wearing (to avoid chips of flying quartz), because the light hurt his eyes.

He stuck his head inside the opening, and saw a maze of lights—beams of light like a laser light show (although he did not use this image), flashing randomly.
When he withdrew his head, the door closed, and another ‘door’ dropped down from above.
He touched the craft, and found it was hot enough to burn his glove.

Then, very quickly, the craft tilted, and he felt a scorching pain in his chest.
As it took off, his shirt and undershirt burst into flames.
He tore them off and threw them on the ground.
Meanwhile, the craft changed colour, then disappeared.
Michalak vomited and passed out several times as he struggled back to the main road.

This was Michalak’s story, and Craig went to investigate it two weeks later.
A friendly taxi driver told him that Michalak had been in hospital, although Craig understood he was at home.
Apparently he had been out in a helicopter to try to locate the site of the UFO landing, without success.