'God damn it!' stuttered Dave, 'I heard you and Toland yelling to each other over the radio. I thought you'd gone crazy. But just look at that!'
Fifty-eight qualified eye-witnesses came forward during the investigation of the mysterious incident that was subsequently carried out. They included meteorologists and members of the Coast Guard, in other words men who as reliable observers were scarcely likely not to be able to tell a weather balloon from a helicopter, or a falling satellite from the navigation lights of an aircraft. The report contained factual statements, but did not give any explanation of the unidentified flying object.
On 5 May, 1967, the Mayor of Marliens in the Cote d'Or, Monsieur Malliotte, discovered a strange hole in a field of clover 680 yards from the road. He found traces of a circle with a diameter of 15 1/2 ft and a depth of 1 ft. Deep furrows 4 inches deep ran out in all directions from this circle. They gave the impression that a heavy metal grating had been pressed into the ground. At the end of the furrows there were holes 1 ft 2 in. deep, which might have been impressed in the soil by 'feet' at the end of the metal grating. An exceptionally curious feature was the violet-white dust which was deposited in the furrows and holes. I have inspected this place near Marliens personally. Ghosts could not have left those traces!
What are we to make of this account? It is depressing what many people—and sometimes whole occult societies— make out of their ostensible observations. They only blur our view of reality and deter serious scholars from dealing with verified phenomena because they are afraid of exposing themselves to ridicule.
On 6 November, 1967, during a transmission by German Television 2 on the subject 'Invasion from the Cosmos?', the captain of a Lufthansa aircraft told of an incident of which he and four members of the crew were eye-witnesses. On 15 February, 1967, about ten to fifteen minutes before landing in San Francisco, they saw close to their own machine a flying object with a diameter of about 33 ft that shone dazzlingly and flew alongside them for some time. They sent their observations to the University of Colorado which for want of a better explanation surmised that the flying object was part of a previously launched rocket falling to the ground. The pilot explained that with over a million miles of flying experience he was as unable as his colleagues to believe that a falling piece of metal could stay in the air for a quarter of an hour, have such dimensions and fly alongside an aircraft; he believed this explanation even less since this unidentified flying object had been observable from the ground for nearly three-quarters of an hour. The German pilot certainly did not give the impression of being a visionary.
Two reports from Die Suddeutsche Zeitung, Munich, for 21 and 23 November, 1967:
'Belgrade (from our own correspondent)
'Unidentified flying objects (UFO's) have been sighted over various districts of south-east Europe during the last few days At the weekend an amateur astronomer photographed three of these gleaming celestial objects at Agram. But while the experts were still giving their opinions of this photograph that was splashed across several columns of the Yugoslavian papers, more UFO's have already been reported from the mountainous region of Montenegro, where they were even supposed to have caused several forest fires. These accounts come mainly from the village of Ivangrad where the inhabitants swear black and blue that they have observed strange brightly illuminated heavenly bodies every evening during the last few days. The authorities confirm that several forest fires have occurred in this district but so far cannot explain what started them.'
'Sofia (UPI)
'A UFO has appeared over the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. According to the report of the Bulgarian News Agency BTA, the UFO could be recognised with the naked eye. BTA says that the flying body was "bigger than the sun's disc and later took the shape of a trapeze". The flying body is supposed to have emitted powerful rays. It was also observed by telescope in Sofia. A scientific collaborator of the Bulgarian Institute for Hydrology and Meteorology said that the flying body apparently moved under its own power. It was flying about 18 miles above the earth.'
People block the road to serious research by boundless stupidity. There are 'contact men' who claim to be in communication with extraterrestrial beings; there are groups who develop fanciful religious ideas from hitherto unexplained phenomena or build cranky philosophies of life from them or even claim to have received orders for the salvation of mankind from UFO crews. Among the religious fanatics, the Egyptian 'UFO angel' naturally comes from Mohammed, the Asiatic one from Buddha and the Christian one directly from Jesus.
At the 7th International World Congress of UFO Investigators, in the autumn of 1967, Professor Hermann Oberth, the man known as 'the father of space travel' and the teacher of Wernher von Braun, said that UFO's were still 'an extra-scientific problem'; but, said Oberth, UFO's were probably 'space-ships from unknown worlds' and to use his own words: 'Obviously the beings who man and fly them are far ahead of us culturally, and if we go about things properly we can learn a lot from them.' Oberth, who accurately predicted rocket development on earth, suspects that the prerequisites for abiogenesis exist on other planets in the solar system. Oberth, a research scientist himself, demands that serious scientists, too, should tackle problems that may seem fantastic at first. 'Scholars behave like stuffed geese who refuse to digest anything else. They simply reject new ideas as nonsense.'
On 17.11.67, under the headline 'Second Thoughts', Die Zeit said: 'For years the Russians have ridiculed western hysteria about flying saucers. Not long ago Pravda contained an official denial that such peculiar celestial vehicles existed. Now the Air Force General Anatolyi Stolyakov has been appointed director of a committee which is to examine all reports of UFO's. In this connexion the London Times writes: "Whether UFO's are the product of collective hallucinations, whether they originate from Venusian visitors or are to be understood as a divine revelation—there must be an explanation for them, otherwise the Russians would never have set up a Committee of Enquiry".'
The most spectacular and puzzling incident connected with the phenomenon of 'matter from the universe' took place at 7.17 on the morning of 30 June, 1908, in the Siberian Taiga. A fire-ball shot across the sky and was lost in the steppe. Travellers on the Trans-Siberian Railway observed a glowing mass which moved from south to north. A thunder-bolt shook the train, explosions followed and most of the seisomographic stations in the world registered an appreciable earth tremor. At Irkutsk, 550 miles from the epicentre, the needle of the seismograph went on quivering for nearly an hour. The noise could be heard over a radius of 621 miles. Whole herds of reindeer were destroyed. Nomads were whirled up into the air with their tents.
Not until 1921 did Professor Kulik begin to collect eyewitness accounts. Finally he also succeeded in collecting the money for a scientific expedition to this sparsely populated region of the Taiga.
When the expedition reached the Stony Tunguska in 1927, they were convinced that they would find the crater made by a gigantic meteorite. Their conviction turned out to be quite wrong. They saw the first trees without tops as much as 37 miles from the centre of the explosion. The nearer they came to the critical point, the more barren the district became. Trees stood there like shaved telegraph poles; in the vicinity of the centre even the strongest trees had been snapped off outwards. Last they found traces of a tremendous conflagration. Pushing on further north, the expedition became convinced that a vast explosion must have taken place. When they came across holes of all sizes in swampy ground they suspected the impact of meteorites; they dug and drilled in the marshy ground without finding a single remnant, a piece of iron, a bit of nickel or a lump of stone. Two years later the search was continued with bigger drills and improved technical resources. They drilled to a depth of 118 ft without finding a single trace of any-kind of meteoric material.