“What makes you think these people have died?”
“Think? I know!” She took a bundle of clippings out of her handbag. “I’m one of those who read every page of the morning paper. Even the obituary page.”
He spread out the clippings on his desk.
Suddenly at her home in East Orange, N. J., on July 13, Sarah Ann (Sally) beloved wife of Samuel Kuzak, and daughter of Prosper and Maria Morelli. Funeral private...
N. Y., July 15
Clarence V. Flaherty, retired police sergeant, formerly attached to the 15th precinct, died suddenly at his home, 93–48 Mimosa Boulevard, Jackson Heights, last night. After dinner Mr. Flaherty, who lived with his widowed mother, went out in his backyard to cool off. When Mrs. Flaherty finished washing the dishes and went out to sit with him, he was dead. Mr. Flaherty will be remembered as the police sergeant who captured two members of the Harsch gang of jewel thieves after a gun battle on Madison Avenue three years ago...
Charleston, S. C., July 20 —
A Columbia Airlines passenger plane burst into flame shortly after it crashed here tonight killing the pilot, co-pilot, and fourteen passengers. The only survivor was Miss Eleanor Godfrey, airline hostess, thrown out of the plane before fire broke out. “/ had just been to the pilots’ compartment to ask for help in quieting one of the passengers, a sailor, who had been drinking before he boarded the plane,” Miss Godfrey told reporters. “The pilot, Captain Sanders, was at the controls. The copilot, Lieutenant Becker, came back with me and talked to the sailor. Then an earthquake seemed to hit the plane and all the lights went out...”
Boston, Mass., July 21 The Reverend Dr. Alexander Amherst, rector of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension, was found dead in his bed by a chambermaid this morning at seven when she knocked on his door to wake him. He is survived by a daughter, Mrs. Lawrence Llewellyn...
Basil laid the clippings aside. “What makes you think these were four of the people who saw and heard the Singing Diamonds?”
“But, Dr. Willing, it is so! Look!” Again Mathilde Verworn laid a bundle of clippings on his desk.
N. Y., July 6 —
Scientists yesterday were unable to explain the alleged Singing Diamonds reported by observers in several states. The A.P. states that Captain F. L. Sanders, ex-Navy pilot now with Columbia Airlines, reports seeing “nine flat, elongated squares, like the pips on a nine of diamonds, flying in V-formation at 1,500 miles an hour, at 10 p.m. last night, six miles north of Chicago. He was alone in a plane flying at 20,000 feet to test a new high octane gas.
The first published account came from Donald MacDonald, rancher of Deep Gulch, Montana. On July 1st at 11:55 p.m. he saw “three objects, bright, flat and diamond-shaped,” flying over his ranchhouse at a speed he claims to have calculated exactly as 621 miles an hour. They flew at a great height with a strange resonance like the humming or singing of a high tension wire in the wind.
Dr. Anders Verworn, Professor of Astrophysics at Manhattan University, suggested crystallized ice, formed far above the earth’s surface, as a possible explanation. “Artificial ice crystals have been made in the laboratory two feet wide,” he said. “Natural crystals are only a few thousandths of an inch wide. They are not diamond shaped. They do not make a humming sound. As I said a month ago in my address to the graduating class at McGill University, people who insist on seeing mysteries in nature should be more careful about spreading stories based on insufficient data, inaccurately observed and uncritically analyzed.”
Basil looked up. “This Dr. Verworn is your husband?”
“Yes. Anders tells reporters there is no such thing. Then suppose I, his wife, should say I had seen them? It would have been bad for his career. He didn’t understand that. He urged me to give my story to the papers. But I knew better. I kept silent. Success means much to my husband. When we married we were fellow students at the University of Vienna and poor, so poor! I gave up my own studies to take care of him. I marketed, cooked, mended, washed — more like a mother than a wife. We saved money to come to America. He worked his way up to a full professorship and got a job as technical adviser to Glueck & Riddle, makers of astronomical instruments. The salary he invested in their stock and became a partner. When another partner sued him once he was so frightened, like a little boy. I told him to put the stock in my name so they couldn’t take it away from him and he did. But it was then I first realized how our long struggle had left its mark on him.”
Basil went on reading.
N. Y., July 7 —
Six P-515 from Mitchell Field with cameras and radar scoured the sky from New York to Poughkeepsie for Singing Diamonds last night without success. A spokesman for Army Air Force Public Relations said: “All these witnesses saw and heard something, but I cannot believe that any foreign power has developed a radio-guided missile that will go 1,500 miles per hour as Singing Diamonds are said to do.”
New York’s first celestial diamonds appeared yesterday evening when a retired police sergeant, Clarence V. Flaherty, formerly of the 15th precinct, Manhattan, described his view of “twelve, brilliant, fiery objects” flying from north to south above his home in Jackson Heights an hour after sunset. “I heard the humming,” he told U.P. “Sweet and shivery like the plucking of harp strings.” Mrs. Sally Kuzak, housewife of East Orange, New Jersey, said she saw and heard two of the strange objects above her home yesterday at 4:00 p.m. — their first appearance by daylight. Mrs. Kuzak, trained as an airplane spotter for Civilian Defense during the war, described them as “streamlined diamonds, bright as spun aluminum, speeding at 1,000 miles per hour at a height of 30,000 feet with an almost supersonic humming, shriller than an airplane engine.” The Reverend Dr. Alexander Amherst of the Church of the Ascension, Boston, Mass., told A.P. he was walking in his garden at Brookline before breakfast this morning when he heard a humming sound “sweet, high, and clear.” He looked up and saw a procession of six diamondshaped objects flash across the sky “bright as silver.” He said they crashed on a hillside and he telephoned the local office of the FBI.
Dr. Tamara Radanine, assistant professor of Social Psychology at Manhattan University, told reporters that the whole affair threw a lurid light on the hysterical imagination of the American people, drugged as they are by comic books, radio, movies, and detective stories. “Motivation is obscure,” added Dr. Radanine. “But everything is interpreted in terms of personalistic dimensions suggesting widespread egoinvolvement and pseudologica phantastica. Like Orson Welles’ Martian broadcast, it illustrates their highly consistent structuration of the external stimulus world.”