UFOs and the Media

I Know The Secret Of The Flying Saucers
From the TRUE Report On Flying Saucers, 1967
By Major Donald E. Keyhoe

Editor’s Note: Major Keyhoe has been writing about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO’s) in this magazine and elsewhere for over 15 years. From the outset he has insisted that flying saucers are real and interplanetary, and many authorities have come to agree with him. Now he claims that control over gravity itself is the only explanation for the astounding maneuvers which saucers are said to make. Some physicists dismiss this theory as fundamentally erroneous. But, as you will read, there are others who find Major Keyhoe’s latest chapter in "The Great Flying Saucer Story" important and plausible.

         One night last February, over the North Pacific, a Flying Tiger Airlines crew had a startling aerial encounter. What they saw is a clue to a fantastic technical mystery. In its solution lies a prize so great that six government agencies are searching for it right now. The answer may not be far off. What they are searching for is the secret of gravity control. About midnight on February 15, the Flying Tiger plane, carrying a military group from the U.S. to Japan, was four hours out of Anchorage. Suddenly the cockpit radar picked up three fast-moving objects. The plane captain and his crew looked out at the side and saw three huge oval-shaped ships, glowing red in the night. An Air Force captain who was a passenger on the plane was called forward to confirm the sighting. His signed report is in the files of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena.
         According to the captain’s report, the unknown machines slowed down to the airliner’s speed and flew in close formation. Five miles away, by radar range, they leveled off to pace the plane. The Air Force captain computed their length as much more than 700 feet. It was plain that the giant Unidentified Flying Objects had an unknown type of propulsion. No jets, no exhausts were visible. For 30 minutes, still in formation, they continued to pace the plane. Then, swiftly accelerating to 1,200 knots, they climbed out of sight in seconds. This startlingly swift acceleration is a maneuver that could not be duplicated by any ship now made on Earth. What makes it possible for UFO’s? According to many scientists and engineers, there is only one possible answer. The answer is antigravity: artificial gravity fields and control of gravity power.
         Control of gravity is something that men have been dreaming about for centuries. Now it appears that we are on the threshhold of achieving it. Its value, to the country that first attains it, is incalculable. Our government, hoping for a technical breakthrough, has set up 46 different research projects on various aspects of gravity control. The Air Force is running 33 of these projects and the others are divided among five other agencies. Included in the 46 government projects are experiments and research at two Air Force Laboratories (Flight Dynamics and General Physics Research), Radio Corporation of America, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa; Stevens Institute of Technology; the universities of California, Denver, Harvard, Indiana, Manchester (England), Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Purdue, Stockholm (Sweden), Syracuse, Texas, and two New York schools – Queens College and Yeshiva Graduate School of Science. And, of course, some government agencies have projects so secret that they are not publicly registered and cannot be revealed without permission.
         Private industry is also looking at the question of gravity control with new seriousness. A large number of giant corporations, including Bell Aerospace, General Electric, Hughes Aircraft, Boeing, Douglas and many others, have set up gravity projects. If you add up all the known gravity programs being run by the government and private industry, you get somewhere between 65 and 70 projects. This means there is a heavy concentration of scientific and engineering brains working on the problem.
         One leading scientist who is convinced that UFO’s are spaceships using gravity control is Dr. Hermann Oberth. Doctor Oberth, a recognized authority, was co-designer of the V-2 rocket and later a U.S. special consultant at Huntsville, Alabama, one of the installations where important antigravity research is now under way. "With ordinary propulsion," Doctor Oberth told me in 1961, "such violent accelerations and maneuvers would endanger the ship. Also, the force would crush any creatures aboard against the rear or sides of the machine. But with an artificial gravity field the force applies simultaneously to the passengers and the spaceship. Even in swift changes of speed and direction, the ship is not strained and the passengers feel nothing." Today, doctor Oberth is willing to go further. He is now of the opinion "that energy, inertia and gravitational fields are only aspects of one and the same thing" and that it will prove impossible to separate them from each other. What he has in mind, he says, is "not yet known fields of force" which can be used to accelerate material objects in a way similar to the force of gravity.
         Another noted authority who agrees that UFO’s are using artificial G fields is William P. Lear, Sr., [see "Hard-nosed Gambler in the Plane Game" in this issue] multimillionaire inventor, pilot, designer of air and space equipment and builder of jet aircraft. Lear, who once sighted a UFO from his executive plane, predicts that future U.S. vehicles will also use artificial gravity. "The people on board would probably not feel any more effect," Lear says, "than they do from the tremendous speed of the Earth as it rotates and orbits and orbits the sun."
         Several years ago, Glenn Martin’s vice-president for advanced design, G. S. Trimble, predicted that by 1985 practically all airliners would be using artificial gravity, flying at almost unbelievable speeds. At about the same time, future airliner speeds of 10,000 mph. or more were pictured by Dr. Walter Dornberger, then Bell Aircraft’s chief guided-missile scientist and now president of Bell Aerospace.
         Grover Loening, pioneer aircraft builder and consultant to the Air Force, said it even more strongly, "I firmly believe that before long man will acquire the ability to build an electromagnetic contragravity mechanism that works," he stated. A top official of Bethlehem Steel, Jesse V. Honeycutt, has indicated some of the results we can expect if Loening is right. ""serious research is being concentrated in an attempt to solve the mystery of gravity and bring about a control of its power. It would bring about a greater revolution in power, transportation and many other fields than the discovery of atomic power,""he stated.
         Antigravity? It seems inconceivable. Yet, the search goes on and many responsible men believe the answer will be found. And, to my mind, it is the only possible explanation for the performance of the UFO’s. The stakes are so high that no clue can be overlooked. The Air Force Technical Intelligence, hunting for overlooked leads, is carefully checking hundreds of verified UFO reports. Hopefully, some of them will help us find out how these strange vehicles operate.
         Four days before Christmas, 1964, a round, metallic craft about 125 feet in diameter was observed to make a brief landing in a field near Staunton, Virginia. Two Du Pont scientists later took Geiger counters to the site. "It was ‘hot’-highly radioactive," Du Pont engineer Lawrence Cook reported. "We checked for 45 minutes – it was definitely ‘hot’."
         In Puerto Rico, near dusk on December 26, 1964, Ramey Air Force Base radar spotted two large discs. As A4D jets streaked up to pursue them, the discs accelerated to terrific speed. Making instant right-angle turns-impossible for any known aircraft-they vanished over the Atlantic.
         On March 21, 1965, Capt. Yoshiaki Inada, piloting a Toa Airlines Convair on a domestic Japanese flight, was chased by a "mysterious, elliptical luminous object." Flying close to the plane, the UFO blanked out his radio and "violently interfered" with his automatic direction finding equipment.
         Puzzling earlier cases also are being rechecked. On July 1, 1954, an AF F-94 – a two-man jet – was scrambled to chase a UFO near Walesville, New York. When the pilot tried to close in, a sudden, unbearable heat filled the cockpit. Half-dazed, the pilot and radar officer bailed out. The jet crashed in the street, killing two children and their parents.
         These odd phenomena, high radiation, mysterious heat and electrical interference may be side effects of gravity control devices. Like most people, you probably took gravity for granted before space flights began. Now you know, for example, that one "G" is the Earth’s normal gravitational pull. This is what holds you to the seat of your chair – and more important, keeps you from being tossed into the air by the Earth'’ rotation. You feel two or three G'’ in a roller coaster or a stunting plane -–a mere hint of what our astronauts have to endure during blast-off and acceleration. But gravity causes a lot of trouble and expense we seldom think about. Aircraft and rocket builders have to provide heavy engines, huge weight of fuel, just to offset gravity. In construction of buildings, bridges, and in a hundred other ways, G affects our lives and adds billions to the cost of work. Gravity control could reduce or end many of these problems.
         How soon can we expect antigravity? Some researchers say it may take a long time. Others believe there may be a sudden breakthrough. If that happens, there will be some fantastic results. First, obviously, our space program would take a big leap forward. Instead of our present wasteful rockets, we could build spaceships matching the UFO’s high speeds and maneuvers. With such advanced ships, we could make swift flights to the moon and the planets.
         Recently, Alexander de Seversky stated that "with abundant energy available, we will move in space with constant acceleration or deceleration. Accelerating half-way to our goal and decelerating the rest of the way at one G or 32.2 feet per second, the moon will be reached in three and a half hours, Venus in 36 hours, Mars in two days, Jupiter in six."
         According to Oberth, German physicist Burkhard Heim and other scientists, gravity control will enable spaceships to reach even greater speeds than these. With such advanced machines, we could explore the nearest star systems a century or more ahead of our present timetable. Using carrier or "parent" ships with short-range probes, we could fully explore a planet – either by remote control or direct observation – before attempting to land. Many cases are on record in which large UFO’s have launched small units, apparently for close observation of the Earth, then retrieved them in swift, precise operations.