Communion: A True Story (28 page)

My historical survey has found that the core experience of seeing flying disks and small figures goes back a long, long time. If we are dealing with extraterrestrials, would they really have been here, say, for a couple of thousand years and remained hidden all that time? Or did they come recently, and find a way to slip themselves into a preexisting human mythology in order to hide there? Or even more extraordinary, it is possible to consider that they might have really, physically arrived sometime in the future, and then spread out across the whole of our history, in effect going back into time to study us. This might mean that they could be here only a short time — say a few weeks or months-but are carrying out a study that would seem to us from our position in sequential time to have extended over our entire recorded history. Of all the theories, this one alone explains why creatures in 1986 would seem so unaware of our languages, nature, and even our clothing, and yet possibly have a history as fairies and gods going back thousands of years. It might also explain why they are so enigmatic and seemingly immaterial. If time travel can exist and is involved, God only knows what the travelers would look like to us as they reached back from the future. From our perception, they might appear in the skies one moment and have full understanding of our entire history, our cultures, and our languages the next. This would be because they would travel back across the whole of our time in the few moments between discovery and understanding, picking up and assimilating all the details at their leisure, while we would be presented with the illusion that they already knew us well even though they had, in effect, just arrived.

All these hypotheses are interesting, but none of them is in the least provable. They' do suggest, though, the rich range of possibilities that are available for further study.

The central question remains, Is there anything real about all this?

I have spent a great deal of time in the past few months searching what could only be described as a morass of literature on the subject of unidentified entities and their craft. I have talked to scientists who think that it's all nonsense and to scientists who are not so sure. I have read dozens of case histories and met many other people who have had visitor experiences.

Something is happening. This is clear. It is not a version of known phenomena.

In my research I found an undertone of claims that the government knew more about this mattes than it was saying I decided to do some investigation into the truth of this possibility.

I found myself in a minefield. Real documents that seemed to be false. False documents that seemed to be real. A plethora of "unnamed sources." And drifting through it all, the thin smoke of an incredible story.

There is some small reason to speculate that the United States government may have had some sort of communication from visitors as early as the late 1940s, as well as obtained pieces of crashed disks and the bodies of the occupants.

I base this notion on the two best pieces of evidence I could find, both of which I have personally investigated and confirmed as genuine.

These two pieces of evidence are certainly real, in the sense that they are not wilting hoaxes. Of course people can make mistakes. The first document is a letter written by Dr.

Robert I. Sarbacher, dated November 29, 1983, addressed to Mr. William Steinman, a UFO

researcher who had inquired about Sarbacher's s government consulting activities during the late forties. The letter has been offered for publication, but to date has not been fully exposed except in the journal of the Mutual UFO Network, a group of people, many of them scientists and academics, interested in serious study of the phenomenon. The letter was also referred to and quoted in
Omni
. As Dr. Sarbacher died on July 26, 1986, a few days before I became aware of his letter, I was unable to interview him, but I discussed his case with Mr. Barry Greenwood. co-author of
Clear Intent
, who had had extensive discussion with him. These discussions revealed that Dr. Sarbacher did not appear to know more than he stated in his letter, but he was quite certain that the facts he did relate were as he remembered them.

Dr. Sarbacher was a Department of Defense Research and Development Board consultant during the Eisenhower administration. Educated at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and Princeton, he is the author of
Hyper and Ultra-High Frequency Engineering, Research Accrediting at
Military Establishments, and the Encyclopedia Dictionary of Electronics and Engineering
.

This last book is considered a fundamental contribution to science.

He has been dean of the Graduate School of the Georgia Institute of Technology and has participated as a consultant for the Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies, in Tennessee, and the navy, as well as the Department of Defense. He has held many corporate directorships, among them as director of the General Sciences Corporation and the Union Life Insurance Company.

Dr. Sarbacher writes, in part:

Relating to my own experiences regarding recovered flying saucers, I had no association with any of the people involved in the recovery and have no knowledge regarding the dates of the recoveries ....

About the only thing I remember at this time is that certain materials reported to have come from flying saucer crashes were extremely light and very tough. I am sure our laboratories analyzed them very carefully.

There were reports that instruments or people operating these machines were also of very light weight, sufficient to withstand the tremendous deceleration and acceleration associated with their machinery. I remember in talking with some of the people at the office that I got the impression these "aliens" were constructed like certain insects we have observed on earth....

I still do not know why the high order of classification has been given and why the denial of the existence of these devices.

All I can say is that I remember very well the eidetic image. I described the joints of the creature I saw as "insectlike." And my hypnotic transcripts continually refer to my impression that I was dealing with creatures that moved like insects. I did not know of Dr. Sarbacher and his letter until August 9, 1986, months after I had my experiences.

The combination of Dr. Sarbacher's recollections and my own memory of how the visitors acted and treated me may provide insight both into why they are so secretive and why they have been so seemingly indifferent to our rights and dignity with their forceful abductions.

If the visitors are indeed insectlike they could be organized as a hive, and not only as small as I saw but also as light as Dr. Sarbacher recalls being told. They may be no physical match for us, not even in fairly large groups. In addition, it could be that there is very little sense of self associated with individual members of their species. Taken together they might be very formidable, but separate individuals may be almost negligible. If their mind is also a hive structure, it could be that their language is more a biological function than something learned. Maybe it is like the language of earth's hive insects: a complex combination of movements, smells, and aural output. There may even be more to it; one of the greatest of biological mysteries is how hives function, and whether or not a hive can have a group mind.

I will briefly illustrate the profundity of this enigma. There has been a study of bees under way at Princeton for some years. A part of this stud was designed to determine how quickly a hive coup find a food source if it was moved. Each day the food source was moved a measured distance. It was soon discovered that the bees would be waiting for the food source
at its anticipated location
before it was moved.

What a truly intelligent hive mind might have achieved, and how it communicates with itself and others, may be very hard to know.

My second piece of evidence that the government may know more about this than it is saying is a small but telling one, a press release that was issued in July 1947. In that month an incident took place on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, that is the granddaddy of all the

"government has a UFO/alien bodies" rumors. Throughout 1947 there were many reports in the New Mexico newspapers of odd lights. But the first modern flying disk sightings, near Mount Rainier, Washington, had been heavily publicized at the time, and some of the New Mexico sightings may have been a result of confused observations of two V-2 launches at White Sands. One took place on June 12 and another on July 3.

However, on the evening of July 2, something was seen by members of the public in the skies over Roswell and reported locally. This object was brightly lit and crossed the skies in a northwesterly direction. On July 8 the Roswell Army Air Base issued a release which was published, among other places, in the
San Francisco Chronicle
. The release was Issued by public relations officer Lieutenant Walter Haut, on order from the base commander.

The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 9th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff's office of Chaves County.

The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff's office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel of the 509th Bomber Group Intelligence Office.

Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher's home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.

Later a report was issued to the effect that this disk was a crashed weather balloon.

Maybe it was although it is odd that a crashed balloon would have retained enough of its tension to appear to anybody, even briefly, to be anything other than a flaccid plastic bag and some tinfoil.

Under the headline DISC: SOLUTION COLLAPSES the
Chronicle
reported that General Roger M. Ramey had stated that the wreckage was "a high-altitude weather observation device" that "consisted of a box kite and a balloon." Later in the same story General Ramey is reported to have said that it was a "starshaped tinfoil target designed to reflect radar." Since General Ramey claimed to have the debris in his office, it is strange that he could not seem to settle on an identification for it. Weather balloons, box kites and radar stars were all familiar to air-base personnel in the late forties, and Air Force officers on active duty would have been unlikely to mistake them. Even less likely to be confused on this matter would have been a working base commander such as Colonel William Blanchard, whose order led to the base press officer issuing the original press release claiming that the debris was a crashed disk. The debris was picked up by air intelligence officers Jesse Marcel and "Cav" Cavett —two more men who would have been unlikely to misidentify items like weather balloons and radar targets.

It seems possible that the debris may have been what the officers who originally saw it thought it was — and what they naturally told the press. They were obviously ignorant of General Ramey's cover-up plans.

Much has been made of the fact that the original discoverer of the device, rancher W. W.

Brazel, was quoted by the Associated Press as being "sorry he told about it" and describing what he found as tinfoil and other debris. There are three enormous problems with the credibility of the rancher's statements. The first is that he was held incommunicado for days before he made them. The second is that members of his family have asserted that he made them under duress, and his being held incommunicado, which is a matter of record, would certainly support that assertion. The third problem is more telling because it does not rely on the rancher's verisimilitude at all. It is that none of the officers originally involved ever thought that they were dealing with the remains of known objects or they never would have allowed their press release to be issued in the first place.

On looking back through old copies of the
Skeptical Inquirer
, I discovered an article in the April 1986 issue entitled "Crash of the Crashed Saucer Claim." As it refers to the same incident I have been discussing, I researched it in some detail. Its primary assertion, I am sorry to say, was not supportable at all. The article claimed that the whole busyness began with a story in a book by Frank Scully entitled
Behind the Flying Saucers
(New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1950). I obtained a copy of this book and discovered that there is no relationship whatsoever between its rather dubious tales and the affair in Roswell in 1947. And I also obtained a photostat of the San Francisco Chronicle article from which I have quoted. The photostat is hated July 9, 1947, a year before the "events" covered in t e book. To connect the book and the earlier incident in any way strikes me as an example of poor scholarship and seems not to be supportable. In addition, the
Skeptical Inquirer
article makes much of rancher Brazel's statements, as quoted by the Associated Press, but does not acknowledge in any way that he made them after a period of being held against his will, and in the presence of the An-Force officers who had been interrogating him. If all he found was a crashed weather balloon, why did they interrogate him? A more logical course would have been to interrogate and severely discipline the officers responsible for the "false" press release. There was no reason to hold an innocent citizen who had made an innocent mistake. Strangely, based on the service information I was able to obtain from the Air Force, I found no evidence of disciplinary action taken against any of the officers involved in the press release.

Was Mr. Brazel interrogated in order to induce him to change his story? There seems to be no other logical conclusion. The inescapable fact of the Roswell affair is that a group of professionally competent Air Force officers caused the publication of a press release claiming that the Air Force had recovered a crashed fling disk, after observing the debris. Only after this' release was published was any ahem pt made to change the story. Even then, neither the release nor the professional competence of its author, his base commander, or the concerned intelligence officers was ever called. into question, publicly or-as far as I was able to discernin internal Air Force procedures. Instead the original witness, who was in no position to know what he had actually seen, was placed under duress and compelled to change his story. Even this process took a substantial period of time, which suggests that the man may have been clinging to the truth despite the frightening situation he was in. The recent attempt to debunk this story in the
Skeptical Inquirer
was not satisfactory. As a matter of fact, its author, it turns out, takes the unusual position that all unidentified-flying-object sightings can be explained. I have not found many scientists willing to make such a strong assertion about these transitory and poorly understood phenomena, and I wonder if the
Inquirer
has not stepped beyond the limits of healthy skepticism in its recent article.