During his two-day visit, Light went on, he saw five different types of aircraft “with the assistance and permission of the Etherians.”
The notion that he would have been included with such well-known figures as the Hearst columnist and the bishop is self-congratulatory, and the tone is a strange combination of sermonly seriousness and offhand weirdness:
President Eisenhower, as you may already know, was spirited over to Muroc one night during his visit to Palm Springs recently.
Mental and emotional pandemonium is now shattering the consciousness of hundreds of our scientific “authorities.”
“Pity” was what he felt watching “the pathetic bewilderment of rather brilliant brains struggling to make some sort of rational explanation.” For himself, he said, he had long ago entered “the metaphysical woods.”
I had forgotten how commonplace such things as the dematerialization of “solid” objects had become to my own mind. The coming and going of an etheric, or spirit, body has been so familiar to me these many years I had just forgotten that such a manifestation could snap the mental balance of a man not so conditioned.
Light’s letter reads like the most clever sort of propagandist document — one whose real message is oblique. While designed to be read by someone outside, it speaks as an insider: Light would not have to define “etheric” for his pal Meade Layne (a name smarmy enough for a character from a Chandler novel). He drops the names of his companions (an unlikely bunch) and describes a thoroughgoing background check that only someone unfamiliar with the military could imagine. Such signs mark his letter as an effort to shift the discussion of flying saucers into the territory of the Borderlands and other spiritualist groups. The flying objects were not from Mars or Zeta Reticuli but from a “higher plane,” “a different dimension.”
The leaps of speculation implicit in references to Eisenhower’s “secret trip” slip in almost unnoticed. Thus uncertainty or secrecy mutates into fantasy: If the president catches cold, the stock market may get pneumonia; if the president has a heart attack, the whole Cold War balance trembles. When the president got a chipped tooth, in this year of maximum danger, consternation ensued. From a tiny chip, a crevasse of speculation could grow.
But it was too late for the conspiracists to be disarmed. The first few months after their advent in 1947 was probably the last time that an air of open-mindedness about flying saucers was sustained. The lines of opposition had not yet hardened between private researchers and government. The Air Force, just established as an independent service, had not grown disgusted with the question. Fear had not yet overwhelmed curiosity. A variety of ideas were in play, and speculation was neither stifled nor rampant. Theories of government cover-up had yet to take root. The question, in short, was still open.
On September 23, Gen. Nathan Twining, commanding general of the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, wrote a secret memo to Brig. Gen. George Schulgen, chief of the Air Intelligence Requirements Division at the Pentagon, about the flying saucer question.
Twining’s memo offered what seems a reasonable and open-minded listing of possible explanations for the UFOs: They are a secret U.S. craft, or a secret Soviet system, perhaps developed with the aid of German scientists (shades of future theories). They are an unexplained meteorological or atmospheric phenomenon, or — and this was not ruled out — craft from another star system. Indeed, he added, “It is the considered opinion of some elements that the object may in fact represent an interplanetary craft of some kind.
“The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious,” Twining concluded, in words that would be cited again and again. There was recommendation for further study and a suggestion, later explicitly rejected for reasons of cost, that interceptor fighters be kept on alert to shoot down UFOs.
In December 1947, the Air Force set up Project Sign to track the saucers and other UFOs and determine their nature. But in 1949 the name was changed to Project Grudge, an unconscious symbol that the attitude of the Air Force had quickly turned to irritation. It hated dealing with the UFO problem, the press, the watchers, the nuts. It was uncomfortable with the notion that objects might be able to fly so easily through its air defenses. It felt disarmed dealing in areas where hard evidence was hard to get. Most of all, it wanted to be rid of the problem. The Air Force, a joke had it, wished the saucers swam instead of flew so that they would become the Navy’s problem.
In 1948, a report of Project Sign, called “Estimate of the Situation,” was completed. Neither chief of staff Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg nor Twining found it acceptable. Deciding that the evidence did not support the conclusions, Vandenberg ordered it destroyed, and the “Estimate” was not made public. Years later, when UFO researchers asked for a copy, neither the military nor the civilian agencies could or were willing to provide one. This lapse would be cited in support of the argument that there was a cover-up. Quotations ostensibly from the never-issued document made reference to descriptions of material that sounded a lot like the Roswell wreckage, which believers saw as proof that the Roswell recovery had been part of a cover-up, that the stuff was indeed pieces of a saucer, and that Air Force units were being asked to be on the alert for similar incidents and objects. The cries of cover-up would soon be a dominant note in the debate over UFOs. In January 1950, True magazine published the famous Donald Keyhoe story that charged the government with a cover-up of the truth about the saucers. “Estimate of the Situation” would become legendary and leave a legacy of suspicion.
Keyhoe published a book-length argument, The Flying Saucers Are Real, in 1950 and soon began to speak of “silencers,” Air Force officers or other government agents intimidating witnesses to keep the truth secret. He followed up with The Flying Saucer Conspiracy in 1955.
The strand of the Lore charging cover-up and conspiracy spun off from that of the happy contactees almost immediately. An early and recurrent part of it were the “Men in Black.” Here one could clearly see folklore crystallizing from real events.
It began with a plane crash, like a science fiction film I remembered from childhood — was it Target Earth? A B-26 crashes, and marks in the dirt indicate the movement of an invisible creature. Suddenly, a dead aviator shudders back to life and begins a zombielike walk — a military man possessed by an alien force.
In July 1947, Fred Lee Crisman and Harold A. Dahl, two men from Tacoma, Washington, who claimed to be harbor patrolmen, reported that they had seen a group of doughnut-shaped UFOs near Maury Island and had gathered scraps of one that had crashed. There were intriguing details: Their radio was jammed and strange spots appeared on photographs they took. And a mysterious man in black drove up in a black Buick and told them to keep quiet.
The Air Force dispatched its top flying saucer investigators, Lt. Frank Brown and Capt. William Davidson from the TID — Technical Intelligence Division. They determined that the whole story was a hoax. But when their B-25 bomber crashed on their return home, suspicions immediately arose that someone was hushing things up. The Tacoma newspaper headlined the story SABOTAGE SUSPECTED.
A book by Gray Barker called They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers was published in 1956 and established the Men in Black legend firmly in the Lore. In 1952, Barker claimed, a man named Albert K. Bender organized a UFO group called the International Flying Saucer Bureau. Within months, Bender was visited by MiBs who told him that the government knew and would soon reveal the truth. They persuaded him to dissolve his organization.