The Ugly Truth About UFO's - Part I
By Carl Austin
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| Image courtesy flickr |
Of all the mysteries I’m likely to cover, the topic of
UFOs is without a doubt one of the most controversial. Just mention the word UFO at a cocktail party
and see how fast the other guests avoid you like the plague. Even worse is for a respected professional
or, heaven forbid, a pilot or scientist to admit that he or she saw one and
their careers are likely to take a sudden tailspin as quick as showing up for
work wearing a tin foil hat. What’s even
worse is that many highly respected people including police officers, military officers,
astronauts and at least two US Presidents have publicly acknowledged that they
have seen something strange in the sky and one wonders why all the fuss?
Why indeed?
While true believers point out the fact that modern
day sightings began shortly after we dropped two atomic bombs, historical
reports of strange sky ships have been documented since antiquity. Therefore, I believe the best way to tackle
this subject is to start by going back in time, not to document a UFO incident,
but to point out other taboo subjects that got some rather well-known
personalities into hot water.
Way back in the 1633, Galileo Galilei was placed under
house arrest by the Inquisition. His
transgression – the heresy of insisting that the Earth was NOT the center of
the universe. In 1616 he’d been
forbidden by the Church to defend his position that the Earth revolved around
the Sun. Church orthodoxy at the time
held that the Earth was the immovable center of the universe around which everything
revolved. This was despite the fact that
other scientists such as Copernicus had known for centuries that this was not
the case. In addition to being
denounced, the book in which his heretical declarations were published was
banned and Galileo spent the rest of his life locked up.
As bad as it was for one of the world’s most gifted
scientists of all time to be treated in so cavalier a manner for espousing a
belief that would ultimately prove to be correct, his tribulations were not an
isolated incident. In the last few years
of the 16th century, another Italian scientist, Giordano Bruno faced
a far worse fate than Galileo. Not only
did he agree with Copernicus, he publicly stated his belief in an infinite
universe interspersed with numerous inhabited worlds. When he refused to recant, the Inquisition
had him burned at the stake on February 17, 1600.
While dying for one’s scientific beliefs does seem a
bit extreme, scientists whose views were ridiculed didn’t end there. Here are a few more recent examples:
1. Alfred
Wegener postulated the theory of plate tectonics and publicly advocated
continental drift in 1912. While he had
a few initial supporters, the vast majority of geologists of his era not only
ridiculed the idea, they promptly organized a symposium specifically designed
to poke holes in the theory. It wasn’t
until the 1950’s that scientific data proved Wegener right. Unfortunately, Alfred had died in 1930 at the
age of 50.
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| Image courtesy flickr |
I could go on and on to point out other great thinkers
who were ridiculed and sometimes run out of the very science they helped
pioneer by espousing beliefs that flew in the face of scientific dogma, only to
later be proven to be right. Some of
these long-held beliefs that were held against them would themselves be
ridiculed today, but at the time they were held as sacrosanct. The reason I point this out is to set the
stage for the next piece in the UFO puzzle.
Are we alone?
Since the mid-1950’s when UFO sightings from both
civilian and military personnel exploded, there have been many highly respected
individuals who realized that there was a high probability that the Earth was
being visited by beings from other worlds. Bear in mind at the time, there was literally
nothing manmade capable of orbiting the Earth, much less traveling to another
planet. Even though a number of
well-documented UFO incidents involving both radar confirmation and fighter
plane chases occurred both in the US and abroad, neither the military nor the political
powers that be were willing to admit that the airspace over all our heads was
routinely being breached.
Here are just a few of the reported cases from the
1950’s:
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| Image courtesy flickr |
September 10, 1951 – The Fort Monmouth Incident where a
military controller spotted several UFOs on his radar, only to vector fighter
planes in that gave chase.
December 16, 1953 – Skunk Works director Kelly Johnson reported a UFO that both he and his chief test pilot saw.
July 17, 1957 – A USAF RB-47 reconnaissance plane was trailed for more than 700 miles by a glowing UFO.
January 1958 – Fairbanks Alaska military air traffic
controller tracks UFO flying at 5,000 MPH.
April 8, 1958 – American Airlines plane follows a UFO
over New York.
Sept 8, 1958 - 20 Strategic Air Command officers see aUFO over Offutt Airbase, Omaha Nebraska.
February 24, 1959 – An airliner was paced by threeglowing UFO’s
Incredible Claims Require
Incredible Proof
Far from a lack of empirical evidence, there was such an
embarrassment of riches in the 40’S & 50’s that the US Air Force was to
come to grips with the phenomena. As
early as 1943, 5-star General Hap Arnold was tasked with investigating pilot
reports of luminous or silvery disks that occasionally shadowed bombers heading
to or from targets over war-torn Germany.
The pilots back then called them foo fighters, which they dutifully
logged in their after-action reports. At
the time, the US military thought foo fighters were a German secret
weapon. It was only after the war that
it came to be discovered that German pilots who had encountered them thought
they belonged to us.
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| Image courtesy flickr |
After the end of WWII, the reports of anomalous aerial
phenomenon didn’t abate. In fact, they
increased dramatically. Initially, the
military didn’t take the sightings all that seriously. But this attitude changed in the summer of
1947 when the onslaught of reports by civilian and military pilots, radar
operators and military personnel reached a fever pitch. This was the same year that the world-famous
Roswell incident occurred. While the
military first admitted and then later recanted the fact that debris had been
recovered from a crashed “flying disk”, the cat was out of the bag if only
briefly. So much so that even the FBI
began to take an active interest in the reported phenomenon. You heard me right, UFOs had caught the
attention of J. Edgar Hoover.
On July 15, 1947, J. Edgar sent a memo to Clyde Tolson,
the number two man in the bureau that read as follows: “I would do it [study UFOs], but before agreeing
to do it, we must insist upon full access to the discs recovered. For instance,
in the L.A. case, the Army grabbed it and would not let us have it for cursory
examination.”
Two and a half years later, the Bureau was still in
the thick of the chase. Here’s the transcript of a memo to Hoover from the
Washington FBI office dated March 22, 1950 that was released in 1976 under the
Freedom of Information Act.
“An
investigator for the Air Force stated that three so-called flying saucers had
been recovered in New Mexico. They were described as being circular in
shape with raised centers and about 50 feet in diameter. Each was occupied by
three bodies of human shape, but only 3 feet tall and dressed in metallic cloth
of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the
blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots.” https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/ufos-and-the-guy-hottel-memo
LA Case? Recovered
flying saucers with Alien bodies
recovered? The plot thickens.
In Part 2, I'll cover Project Sign, Project Grudge & Project Blue Book, plus the Washington Invasions of 1952.
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It would seen that a coverup has been taking place for quite some time!
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