The ground shook beneath him, sand swirling, sky tilting, and then he felt the ground under his back and he rolled toward the trees. A fierce light swept across him. He covered his eyes with his hands. The sand was whipped up to rain down upon him as his ears started ringing. Epstein cursed and smacked his own forehead, blinked repeatedly and then looked up; he saw Stanford scrambling back to his feet, bathed in incandescent light. Epstein pushed himself back up, but fell weakly against a tree. The tree shivered and poured rain upon him as he forced himself onward. Stanford’s eyes were too bright, looking stunned and confused. The air around him was red, blue and yellow, the colors flickering and merging.
They both looked out to sea and saw the stately Endeavour, bathed in moonlight and a spectral rainbow haze, the light flickering crazily. The great disk was still above it. The surrounding haze had disappeared. What they now saw was an immense, silvery disk rimmed with windows and flashing lights. The windows were long and narrow, curving strips of bright light, broken up by what seemed like black dots moving to and fro, inside. The colored lights were below the windows, running round the circular base, flashing from left to right, right to left, at incredible speed. The lights formed a kaleidoscope, flickering on and off brilliantly, turning the dark sea into blood and yellow lava and rippling green, changing the ship’s sails into billowing rainbows, obliterating the starry sky.
Stanford gasped and turned away, shook his head and stared at Epstein. His friend looked like a translucent ghost, materializing and vanishing. Then they ran between the palm trees, scrambled over the wall of earth, slithered down to the cove on the other side and saw the flat, empty sand.
‘We’re too late,’ Stanford said.
Epstein sighed and closed his eyes, his head vibrating painfully. The humming sound was all around him and above him and it seemed to dissolve him. He opened his eyes again. The shadows rippled with various colors. He moved forward and saw a large sunken circle, the sand curled at its edge. Looking up at the sky, he saw a globe of hazy light. It was flying obliquely toward the great disk, moving slowly and gracefully.
‘Oh, God!’ Epstein whispered. ‘They’ve got him.’
Then the great disk disappeared. The night was plunged into starlight. The billowing sails of the Endeavour were gleaming white in the moonlight. Epstein didn’t remove his gaze. His tight head was still vibrating. He kept looking and he saw an enormous black patch where the stars should have been. Then he saw two squares of light, about three hundred feet apart. They were windows floating there in the sky, illuminated brightly from within. Then one of them blinked out and the glowing orb flew toward its partner. The glowing orb became a stark black silhouette in that square frame of brilliant light. Then the light blinked out, became a black hole in the sky, and the great disk reappeared, filled up the black hole, and the colored lights flickered on and off and then turned into a white haze.
The bass humming grew louder. The beach vibrated with some violence. The great disk became a dark mass within a pulsating glow, rising vertically toward the drifting clouds with serene, stately grace. The ship below it was untouched. Its sails billowed in the breeze. The white glow illuminated the blue sea and erased the stars nearest to it. The great disk continued ascending. The humming sound became fainter. The ground vibrated and then settled down and the silence was total. The great disk continued rising and shrinking until it was no more than a glowing ball. This ball reached the clouds and abruptly blinked out and the stars reappeared.
Stanford and Epstein were speechless. They stayed close to the lapping water. They stood there a long time, looking up, breathing deeply, bathed in the warm, silky moonlight, the stars glittering over them. The sea washed upon the sand, splashing lazily around their feet. They lowered their eyes and looked across at the
Endeavour . There was no one on the boat. Its rigging shivered in the breeze. Its wooden hull was rolling from side to side, the boards creaking in protest. Stanford and Epstein stared at it. The white sails were bathed in moonlight. They looked up to see the stars in the sky, and then they both walked away.
Chapter Fifteen
‘Okay, Stanford, I want you to understand one thing: I’m going to give you the information, I won’t ever do it again, and if you even breathe my name in your sleep, I’ll have your name in a doggie bag. It’s a very dangerous subject. I like to think it’s all behind me. So when we’re finished, when you walk out that door, make sure it’s the last time.’
O’Hara looked like a prosperous man, his tie straight, his cuff links gleaming, his face lined to match the graying of his hair, his blue eyes clear and hard. He was framed by a plate-glass window, his backdrop Manhattan, and his broad frame seemed oddly out of place in the neat, paneled office.
‘Okay,’ Stanford said, ‘that’s fine with me. First the Robertson Panel.’
‘According to my notes, the panel met from 14 January, 1953, to
17 January, in Washington, DC, and the meeting at the time was top
secret. The seriousness with which the subject was to be treated may be
best illustrated not only by the credentials of the men involved – all
specialists in the physical sciences, with particularly emphasis on
atomic research and advanced weaponry – but also by the fact that the
group’s written verdict was to be given to the National Security Council
and then – if the decision was that the UFOs were of extraterrestrial
origin – to the President himself.’
‘That sounds like a heavy number,’ Stanford said.
‘It was,’ O’Hara said. ‘And what later intrigued me about the
panel was that – at least according to the concrete evidence that I was
seeing and hearing – the extraterrestrial was in fact a grim reality and
that the existence of the UFOs had been proven. Nevertheless, and
pretty much to my amazement, the panel rejected the findings.’ ‘What findings?’
‘I’ll just give you a few. They’ll be enough to convince you.’ Like
so many of the people that Stanford had been interviewing in the past
few years, O’Hara, while puffing on a fat cigar, read from the file he
had in front of him. ‘For the first two days Ruppelt reviewed the Blue
Book findings for the scientists, and what he said was pretty damned
impressive. First, he pointed out that Project Blue Book received reports
of only ten percent of the UFO sightings made in the United States,
which meant that in five and a half years about forty-thousand sightings
had been made. He then broke the sightings down into the percentage
that was composed of balloons, aircraft, astronomical bodies, and other
misinterpretations, such as birds, blowing paper, noctilucent clouds,
temperature inversions, reflections, and so forth, pointing out that this
still left four hundred and twenty-nine as definite unknowns. Of those
unknowns, it was clear that the most often reported shape was elliptical,
that the most often reported color was white or metallic, that the same
number of UFOs was reported as being seen in daylight as at night, and
that the direction of travel equally covered the sixteen cardinal points of
the compass. Seventy percent of those unknowns had been seen visually
from the air – in other words, by experienced pilots and navigators;
twelve percent had been seen visually from the ground; ten percent had
been picked up by airborne and ground radar, and eight percent were
combination visual-radar sightings. Ruppelt then greatly disturbed us all
by confirming that the UFOs were frequently reported from around
places like our atomic energy installations, harbours and manufacturing
areas. Finally, he asked us to take note of the fa
ct that according to radar
readings there were recorded flight speeds of up to fifty thousand miles
an hour.’
‘You were right,’ Stanford said. ‘It sounds impressive.’ ‘Indeed,’ O’Hara said, puffing smoke. ‘And even more impressive
was the fact that Ruppelt and Major Dewey Fournet had completed an
analysis of the motions of the reported unknowns as a means of
determining if they were intelligently controlled. Regarding this, Major
Fournet, who had an exemplary reputation, told us of how – by
eliminating every possibility of balloons, airplanes, astronomical bodies
and so forth from the hundreds of reports studied, and by then analyzing
the motions of the UFOs in the remaining unknown category – his study
group had been forced to conclude that the UFOs were, in the words of the group report: “intelligently controlled by persons with brains equal to or far surpassing ours.” The next step in the study, the major explained, had been to find out where those beings came from; and since it seemed unlikely that their machines could have been built in secret, the answer was that the beings were from outer space. Surprised, Dr Stanford? Well, so were we… And we were even more surprised when, the following morning, we were shown four strips of movie film
that had been assessed as falling into the definite unknown category.’ ‘You mean the cinetheodolite movies taken by scientists at the
White Sands Proving Ground in 1950.’
‘Bright boy. Those plus the Montana Movie taken on 15 August,
1950, by the manager of the Great Falls baseball team, and the
Tremonton Movie, taken on 2 July, 1952, by Navy Chief Photographer,
Warrant Officer Delbert C. Newhouse.’
‘And?’
‘The Montana Movie showed two large, bright flights flying
across the blue sky in an echelon formation. The lights didn’t show any
details, but they certainly appeared to be large, circular objects. The
Tremonton Movie showed about a dozen shiny, disklike objects fading
in and out repeatedly, performing some pretty extraordinary aerial
maneuvers, and darting in and out and circling one another in a
cloudless blue sky. Any possibility that the objects might have been
astronomical phenomena was dispelled when the film clearly showed
them heading in the same tight cluster toward the western horizon, and,
more specifically, when one of them left the main group and shot off to
the east.’
‘Anything more positive than that?’
‘Yep. The Montana Movie had been subjected to thousands of
hours of analysis in the Air Force lab at Wright Field, and their analysis
proved conclusively that the objects weren’t birds, balloons, airplanes,
meteors or reflections – in short, they were genuine unknowns. As for
the Tremonton Movie, it was studied for two solid months by the Navy
lab in Anacostia, Maryland, and their conclusion was that the
unidentifieds were not birds or airplanes, were probably traveling at
several thousands of miles an hour, and were, judging by their
extraordinary maneuvers, intelligently controlled vehicles.’
Stanford gave a low whistle and sat forward in his seat, thinking
back on what had happened in St Thomas and of how it had affected
him. It had left him in a state of wonder, overawed and disbelieving, but
now, as he listened to O’Hara talking, he began to accept it. ‘That was the evidence,’ O’Hara said, ‘and it seemed pretty
damned conclusive, but the Robertson Panel still managed to reject it.
The panel members duly spent two days going over the evidence, but
the results of their ponderings were preordained. Guided by myself and
my fellow CIA members, the panel simply concluded in their report that
the evidence was not substantial, that the continued emphasis on the
reporting of the phenomenon was resulting in, quote, “a threat to the
orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic,” and
that the reports clogged military channels, could possibly precipitate
mass hysteria, and might encourage defense personnel to misidentify or
ignore actual enemy aircraft. In short: the real problem wasn’t the UFOs
– it was the UFO reports.’
Staring past O’Hara, Stanford saw the skyscrapers of Manhattan.
Raising his eyes, he surveyed the blue sky with its drifting white clouds.
The sky revealed nothing. Sighing, Stanford lowered his gaze. His
friend O’Hara, a private detective, once a CIA officer, was leaning
forward with his elbows on his desk, exhaling smoke from his nostrils. ‘So,’ he said, ‘we made some recommendations. First, we
recommended that the two major private UFO organizations – the
Aerial Phenomena Research Organization and the Civilian Saucer
Intelligence – be watched because of what we described as their
“potentially great influence on mass thinking” in the event of
widespread sightings. Regarding this, we also inserted the sentence:
“The apparent irresponsibility and the possible use of such groups for
subversive purposes should be kept in mind.” Next, we recommended
that national security agencies take immediate steps to strip the UFO
phenomenon of its importance and eliminate the aura of mystery it had
acquired, the means being a public education program. Finally, we
outlined a program of public education with two purposes: training and
debunking. The former would help people identify known objects and
thus reduce the mass of reports caused by misidentification; the latter
would reduce public interest in UFOs and thereby decrease or eliminate
UFO reports.’
‘The liberal conscience,’ Stanford said, ‘would call that
brainwashing.’
grinned coolly at Stanford, leaned back in his chair, gazed momentarily
at the ceiling, then, still puffing on his cigar, leaned over his open file
once more. ‘As a means of pursuing this educational – or, in the
vernacular, brainwashing – program, the panel suggested that the
government hire psychologists familiar with mass psychology, military
training film companies, Walt Disney Productions, and TV personalities
such as Arthur Godfrey to subtly convey this new thinking to the
masses. They also – contrary to what we were later to tell Ruppelt –
decided not to declassify the sighting reports, and implied – again,
contrary to what we were to tell poor Ruppelt – that the Air Force
should further tighten security and continue to deny nonmilitary
personnel access to UFO files. In other words: kill it.’
Thinking back on Gardner in Albuquerque, Stanford realized that
Gardner, though a drunkard, had been telling the truth.
‘Despite my own involvement in the Robertson Panel
recommendations,’ O’Hara continued, again studying the notes in his
file, ‘it was shortly after their release that I began wondering what the
hell was going on. As you can see for yourself, the whole point of the
Robertson Panel was to enable the Air Force to state for the next decade
or so that an impartial scientific body had examined the UFO data and
found no evidence of anything unusual in the skies. While this was an
obvious di
stortion of the facts, it did mean that the Air Force could now
avoid discussing the nature of the objects and instead concentrate on the
public relations campaign to eliminate the UFO reports entirely. And
given the nature of the panel’s recommendations, there’s little doubt
that they were directly responsible for the policy of ridicule and denial
that has inhibited an effective study of the phenomenon ever since; and
that has, to put it mildly, some unfortunate effects on the lives of a lot
of perfectly responsible civilians and Armed Forces personnel.’ ‘You mean, humiliation of UFO witnesses was fairly standard.’ ‘More or less,’ O’Hara said. ‘Anyway, given our brief about
national security – we were still fighting the war in Korea, the Soviets
had exploded their first hydrogen bomb, and the Cold War was still at
its chilliest phase – I could understand the need for such a charade. However, what I couldn’t figure out was why our superiors wanted us to lie to Ruppelt – wanted us to tell him that Project Blue Book was being expanded instead of run down, that UFO info was going to be freed of restrictions instead of being further restricted – and why they wanted him to believe that he could carry on with his plans when in fact
we intended stopping him in his tracks.’
‘Did you ever find out?’
‘I’m not sure, but let me tell you what happened… As you’ve
already indicated, you know what happened to Project Blue Book: it
was practically wiped out. Also, by that time, the recommendations of
the Robertson Panel were in full swing – and the most credible UFO
witnesses, namely aircrews and radar operatives, had been successfully
frightened out of submitting their UFO reports. But worse was to
come… In August 1953 – the same month Ruppelt left the Air Force –