Chapter 2
Descriptions of UFOs by multitudes of witnesses around the world have established a pattern of characteristics which are pertinent to this presentation. Occasionally, a report will describe an object or a characteristic which does not fit the general pattern, but this does not preclude the authenticity of the report. Indeed, it would be surprising if all reports described the same object, for, as will be shown, all UFOs do not have a common origin and hence all should not be alike.
The bulk of UFO sightings at night describe the objects as luminous, glowing lights easily mistaken for a star, except that they sometimes
change colors. When in motion, they often exhibit an erratic flight pattern: swooping, darting and zigzagging. They have been known to hover for days, duplicating exactly the appearance of a star. At least one UFO even maintained its relative position against the background of stars.
When they are close enough for the observer to distinguish their shape, UFOs are most frequently described as disc-like, and they are said to vary in size from a few feet to as much as four hundred feet in diameter. The most common dimensional range however, is between fifteen and forty-five feet in diameter.
In August of 1965, Rex Heflin, a highway-traffic investigator for the Orange County Road Department, in California, took some excellent Polaroid camera shots of a disc-shaped UFO that flew overhead at about 150 feet altitude. As he says, the object was shaped like a straw hat. He estimated its diameter to be about thirty feet and its thickness eight feet. It looked like polished metal, with a narrow beam of light sweeping around its lower surface.
As Heflin snapped the camera, which he carried with him to photograph road conditions, the object drifted lazily over the telephone poles, and across the road and then suddenly squirted out of sight, leaving in its wake a Peculiar puff of smoke. An interesting detail in the film, which Heflin failed to notice at the time, is a ring of turbulence on the ground directly below the craft. Because the area of turbulence is no larger than the UFO overhead, it obviously is not caused by any type of prop blast; besides, rather than pushing down the dust appears to be straining up, toward the UFO. And this is just what we would expect if the disturbance were caused by an electrical charge on board the UFO. Such a charge, however, would have to be tremendous in order to act over a distance of 150 feet. When it is remembered that the force between charges is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, we can appreciate the magnitude of the charge and might even wonder why it didn't dissipate to the ground like a bolt of lightning.
The "straw hat" is but one of a large variety of discoid UFOs. Another type often sighted and occasionally photographed is the so-called Saturn UFO. This object appears as a flattened sphere encircled by a large ring reminiscent of the planet for which it is named. Such a craft was photographed six times from the deck of the Almirante Saldanha, a vessel of the Brazilian navy. At 12:15 P.M. on January 16, 1958, in the harbor of Trinidade Island, Almiro Barauna, a professional photographer on board to do some underwater photography, snapped the six pictures amidst the confusion and excitement on the deck. The crew watched in wild-eyed disbelief as the object streaked behind a mountain peak on the island, made an abrupt turn and then sped away. Its flight was later described as "like a bat," and it emanated a greenish haze.
Discs have been sighted and photographed which have a rounded dome; others have a flattened cupola with a centrally located antenna-like protuberance; still others look like two saucers joined at the rims, with the lower saucer sometimes appearing flatter than the upper. This last type may also account for the brilliantly glowing globes that are frequently sighted. A group of four of these luminous crafts was photographed by a sailor at the Salem, Massachusetts, Coast Guard station on July 16, 1952. Although the light from the objects is obviously intense, obscuring the exact structure, it nevertheless is possible to discern an upper and a lower section of light on each. This fiery globe, as evidence will show, is perhaps the most important foreign object in our heavens today: it may even be the original model - the granddaddy of them all - God's own!
Another type of object regularly reported, though with less frequency than the disc, is the cigar- or cylinder-shaped UFO. As with discs, the size varies considerably: estimates of from eight to well over one mile in length have been recorded. They are usually sighted at very high altitudes and seem to pulsate with a reddish glow. On numerous occasions they have been observed to spew out discoid UFOs and to receive them, giving rise to the theory that they are "mother ships" (carriers for the discs). Here from Jacques Vallee's Anatomy of a Phenomenon is a typical account of a cigar-UFO sighting:
It was about five in the afternoon. Emerging from the thick layer that looked like a storm coming up, we saw a luminous blue-violet mist, of a regular shape something like a cigar or a carrot. Actually, the object came out of the layer of clouds in an almost horizontal position, slightly tilted toward the ground and pointing forward, like a submerging submarine.
This luminous cloud appeared rigid. Whenever it moved, its movements had no connection with the movements of the clouds, and it moved all of a piece, as if it were actually some gigantic machine surrounded by mist. It came down rather fast from the ceiling of clouds to an altitude which we thought was perhaps a half-mile above us. Then it stopped, and the point rose quickly until the object was in a vertical position, where it became motionless.
During this time the dark clouds went scudding across the sky, dimly lighted from underneath by the violet luminosity of the object. It was an extraordinary sight, and we watched it intently. All over the countryside other farmers had also dropped their tools and were staring up at the sky like us.
All at once white smoke exactly like a vapor trail came from the lower end of the cloud. At first it pointed to the ground but finally rose up to describe around the vertical object an ascending spiral. While the rear of the trail was dissolving in the air and being carried off by the wind, the source of the trail went up to the very top of the vertical object and then started to come down again, turning in the other direction. Only then, after the smoke trail had vanished entirely, could we see the object that was sowing it - a little metallic disk, reflecting in its rapid movements flashes of light from the huge vertical object.
The little disk then stopped turning around the luminous cloud and went down toward the ground again, this time moving away. For quite a few minutes we could see it flying low over the valley, darting here and there at great speed, sometimes speeding up, then stopping for a few seconds, then going on again, flying in every direction between villages that were four miles apart. Finally, when it was almost a mile from the vertical object it made a final dash toward it at headlong speed and disappeared like a shooting star into the lower part, where it had first come out. Perhaps a minute later the carrot leaned over as it began to move, accelerated and disappeared into the clouds in the distance. The whole thing lasted about half an hour.
This sighting occurred on September 14, 1954, and it was described in essentially the same way by hundreds of witnesses from four different villages southwest of Paris. Although it didn't happen in this account, cigar UFOs are often reported to disappear almost instantaneously.
Some writers, notably Harold Wilkins in Flying Saucers Uncensored, have tried to explain this appearing-and-disappearing phenomenon by resorting to the science-fiction gimmick of a fourth dimension, claiming that in some manner the UFOs can create a sort of space warp and move instantaneously from their dimension to ours and vice versa. Their dimension, according to this theory, would have to be parallel to ours: they would occupy the same space as we do but because of the extra dimension, would never interact with us.
Such an explanation, though audacious, is needlessly complicated; for although in these times it is not wise to scoff at science-fiction themes (too many of them have a way of proving more science than fiction), yet, where a problem can be solved in a simple and obvious way (as this one can), there is no need to touch on the metaphysical. UFOs appear and disappear by the simple expediency of adjusting their luminosity and color to blend with the luminosity and color of the background. The illusion is similar to the disappearance of stars with the break of day. This explanation would also account for the many reports of UFOs becoming translucent before disappearing. Add to this the fact that UFOs seem capable of vaporizing water and holding it suspended in a mist about them, and we have an excellent explanation of the frequently reported luminous-cloud UFO.
Invisible UFOs have been tracked on radar installations across this country and throughout the world. Experienced operators at the installations are convinced that not all such contacts are air inversions (weather conditions which can cause a radar blip) but that many of them are solid objects, sometimes seen to travel at speeds in excess of three thousand miles an hour. And finally, in support of the adjustable-luminosity theory, there is the case of the United States Air Force jet pilot who chased, at close range, a growing vapor trail with no apparent source. If the object were in a fourth dimension, surely its vapor trail would not be visible in our three-dimensional space.
Besides the discs and cigars, many observers report spherical or egg-shaped UFOs. These also vary greatly in size: tiny craft, as little as two feet in length, have been observed, and at least one report describes an object as nearly half a mile long.
A Mrs. ___ in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, arriving home late one night in the summer of 1966, drove her car through the tree-shrouded driveway leading to the garage. A light in the rear-view mirror caught her eye as she pulled into the garage and turned off the ignition. Upon climbing out of the car, she saw that the light source was slightly above the garage door and shone a strange, luminous blue. When she stepped outside, she was shocked by the eerie character of the tiny egg-shaped object which emitted the light. "It was a little larger than a football and fuzzy around the edges because of the foggy light." It hovered, darted and swooped, all the while giving the distinct impression that it was studying Mrs. __. After a few minutes it shot out the narrow driveway and streaked off into the wooded night.
This object, it appears, is about the size of the foo fighters, mentioned earlier, which were reported by World War II pilots. Some speculators have suggested that such tiny craft must be remote-control devices, but it seems unlikely that beings with such an advanced technology would find it necessary to use "unmanned" probes to investigate life on a strange planet. To investigate the atmosphere, temperature and other vital phenomena with robots would be reasonable, but to use the same probes to study life forms would be unnecessarily clumsy. For this reason I feel that these little craft are manned and that the occupants must be no taller than a human, hand. On earth all creatures of this size, showing no great intelligence, are considered lower animals. The universe, however, is a large place; somewhere in it there may even be ants more intelligent than man.
Triangular or cone-shaped UFOs also show an interest in planet Earth. In the summer of 1958 a series of reports from South America described triangular-shaped objects with rounded corners streaking through the skies. One such object was clocked at 18,000 miles an hour. In October of 1967 a mother and her two small children in Winsted, Connecticut, driving along a country road, rounded a bend, to be confronted by a "huge triangular-shaped object" resting on the pavement two hundred feet away. It was silvery-gray in color, with lights at its vertices. When the car rounded the curve, the object lifted silently from the road and quickly disappeared into the gathering dusk.
UFOs shaped like a top, like a crescent with a tail and like a spindle are also reported with sufficient frequency to establish reliability.
In all, the evidence indicates that our heavens are being invaded by a variety of craft; and it is the contention of this survey that except for the cigar and its accompanying disc, all of them are from different parts of the Milky Way galaxy and some perhaps are even from foreign galaxies. Their purpose is scientific investigation, which they have only recently been given permission to conduct. Who granted permission? The leader of the master technologists - God!