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UFOs and the Media
Follow the Bouncing Ball
Part 2
From
the TRUE Report On Flying Saucers, 1967
By Major Donald E. Keyhoe
The description given by
Clifford H. Jenkins, an engineering supervisor at the Seattle plant of the
Boeing Airplane Company, varied considerably from the others. Mr. Jenkins saw
the object just over the leading edge of the right wing. "I've never seen
anything like it before," he told me with emphasis. "It was like a row of
windows glowing deep red. It had no blinker or clearance lights like a
conventional plane." "Could you distinguish separate windows?" I asked him. "No,
it looked like windows blended by distance into a solid red band. The thing was
perfectly steady, with no oscillation that I could see." Just before Captain
Adickes came back, Mr. Jenkins said, the plane veered rather sharply to the
right, but the angle of the Saucer in relation to the DC-3 did not appear to
change. (In effect, this substantiates the pilots' statements that the object
moved simultaneously with the air liner.) "I had the thing in view three to four
minutes," said Jenkins. "Its top speed was obviously much higher than ours, for
it left us behind in a hurry." According to Jenkins, the Saucer disappeared on a
parallel course. "The aspect never changed-neither did the angle. The thing just
faded in size until it was out of sight in the darkness. (Captain Adickes later
pointed out that Manning and he had the Saucer in view from the nose of the
plane, where it would be visible longer. This might explain Jenkins' failure to
see the object's change in altitude.)
Since most of the
witnesses agreed that the Saucer was round, I asked Jenkins again about its
shape. "It was like a red-hot bar, moving horizontally," he answered. "If it was
a row of windows, then the thing must have been at some distance to blend them
together like that." (Captain Adickes has suggested that the air liner's lighted
cabin made it difficult to get a clear view, unless the passenger was close to a
starboard window. Jenkins and his seatmate, Bourland, were in the aisle, two
feet or more from the window. It is possible that this could account for the
difference in descriptions; Jenkins might have attempted subconsciously to fit a
blurred reddish mass into the conventional pattern of airplane windows.
Otherwise, it seems to be one of those puzzling discrepancies often found in
group reports of accidents and other exciting incidents. Miller, for instance,
was no closer than Jenkins, yet he saw the object clearly as a disk.)
"It definitely wasn't a
hallucination," Jenkins summed up his opinion, "for at least a dozen people saw
it. It wasn't any known type of aircraft. It couldn't have been a meteor-it was
too slow; besides, it was flying along horizontally. "It may have been something
the United States has developed which it doesn't choose to announce. Or it may
be, as some people believe, that such things come from another planet." Jenkins
told me that Dean C. Bourland, from Boeing's Wichita plant. also had seen the
mysterious object, but he was not sure whether Bourland's description agreed
with his. I tried to reach Bourland at Wichita, but he was on vacation.
After a little
difficulty, I located the passenger who had been asleep in the right front seat.
He proved to be Edward J. Fitzgerald, vice-president and sales manager of Metal
Parts & Equipment Company, Chicago. "I missed part of the excitement," said Mr.
Fitzgerald. I was sound asleep until the pilot woke me up. He was leaning over
me, and two men were kneeling in the aisle, staring out the window. The pilot
asked me to look out at the Saucer - he said he wanted plenty of witnesses so
people wouldn't think he was crazy. "When I turned around, I saw this strange
red glow on a level with the wing. tip. The effect, after being waked up so
suddenly, was naturally startling. The thing looked round, though perhaps not a
perfect circle. I estimated it to be about two hundred yards away, but that's
only a guess.
"The pilot started to
explain how they'd sighted the thing, then he saw it was pulling ahead. He went
back to the cockpit and a second later the plane banked to the right. The
'saucer,' or whatever it was, speeded up and then dipped a little. Altogether, I
saw it about thirty seconds before it disappeared." "Did you see any windows, or
any resemblance to a plane?" I asked him. "No, it wasn't anything like a plane,"
Fitzgerald said positively. "It was a very strange object-almost weird."
Five officials of the
International Harvester Company who were passengers or Flight 117 refused to be
interviewed; whether this was to uphold company dignity or through personal
preference was not stated. Two of these officials were in the Chicago office-a
Mr. Gelzer and a Mr. Irwin. The others were located at the Springfield, Ohio,
plant-Mr. Drum, the works manager, Mr. Anderson, the superintendent, and a Mr.
Smith, initials unknown. In spite of their collective refusal. I learned that
two or more of this group did see the Flying Saucer. Other witnesses told me of
the Harvester men's comments. One man thought it was round, another oval. Both
agreed on its mysterious appearance, its bright-red glow, and its speed.
Another Chicago
passenger, Harold C. Weimer, of 5028 Windsor Avenue, reported he did not see the
Saucer. He was sitting on the left side, in the rear; by the time he looked out.
the object had disappeared. (It was Weimer who suggested the blast-furnace
explanation.)
The Saucer was also seen
by Martin Nerat, an employee of the Schwernan Trucking Company of Milwaukee.
When the hostess made her announcement, Nerat stepped across the aisle and gazed
out a starboard window. Like the other witnesses, he was startled by the
mysterious object. When I talked with him, Nerat said the bright-red glow had
prevented him from seeing any distinct shape. He agreed with the pilots on the
Saucer's maneuvers. "Every time the plane turned toward it, the thing pulled
away. At the last, it was going a lot faster than we were. I don't know what it
was, but it wasn't an airplane." There were five more passengers aboard Flight
117, but their addresses are unknown. The names are: Berder, Guttfred, Kehma,
Moran, and Moseley.
The Flight 117 incident
has had an important effect. This carefully noted sighting by TWA pilots and
passengers impressed many Americans. Among those who made public statements
after the incident was Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, then president of Eastern Air
Lines. In a United Press story from Savannah, Georgia, Captain Rickenbacker
said, commenting on the Saucers: "There must be something to them, for too many
reliable persons have made reports on them." However, Captain Rickenbacker
apparently suspected that the Saucers might be American guided missiles. When I
interviewed Captain Adickes, I mentioned Rickenbacker's comment, and I found
that he had the same theory. "I think that the thing was equipped with some sort
of repulse radar," said Adickes, "so it would keep at a certain distance from
air liners and other planes."
The guided-missile
explanation is not new, of course. The armed services and the White House have
emphatically denied that the Saucers are an American development, but some
Americans discount this as a smoke screen to hide a secret weapon. To recheck, I
went to the foremost guided-missile authority in the United States, Captain
Delmer S. Fahrney, U.S.N. Captain Fahrney began guided-missile experiments for
the Navy in 1936. The television-eye missile was designed and perfected by
Fabmey and his engineers. All of the later Army and Air Force developments stem
from Captain Fabmey's early work. As commanding officer of the Naval Air Guided
Missile Test Station at Point Mugu, California, Captain Fahrney exchanges
top-secret information with both the other services. "I can tell you flatly that
the Flying Saucers are not guided missiles of the Navy, Army or Air Force," he
said when I interviewed him in Washington. 'No guided-missile officer would be
stupid enough to test any such device along airways or over cities. It would be
criminal negligence-a mechanical failure could endanger lives. Even when
launching a missile over the ocean, we clear the test range and keep it
patrolled during operations."
Admiral Calvin Bolster,
of the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, gave me the same personal assurance in regard
to U.S. piloted aircraft of advanced design. "If the Flying Saucers exist," he
said, "they're not anything we're producing." Other high defense officials have
pointed out that such top-secret devices, even if piloted, would hardly he
tested at random all over the United States, Canada, Mexico and other countries
where Saucers frequently have been seen.
The case of Flight 117
is, in chronological order, the ninth air-line Saucer sighting of which TRUE has
specific record; a tenth occurred one month later; there have also been, at
various times, a number of other cases incompletely documented. Sightings by
experienced transport airmen are impressive testimony to the reality of Flying
Saucers. The Air Force, which undertook the investigation of Saucers, has
nevertheless professed to deny their existence from the first reported incident.
On July 4,1947, shortly
after the start of the "Saucer scare," Captain Emil J. Smith of United Air Lines
was still one of the skeptics. But that evening, over Emmett, Idaho, Captain
Smith and his copilot, Ralph Stevens, saw nine fast-flying disks above their
DC-3. The Air Force's Project Saucer brushed off the sighting as an illusion.
Some time after this, the crew of a Pan American Airways plane sighted a strange
aerial object between Everett and Bedford, Massachusetts. The pilot and
navigator described it as cylindrical in shape, about the length of a P-40
fuselage, and blunt at both ends. "Weather balloons," said the Air Force.
Near the end of 1949, a
Golden North air freighter was paced between Seattle and Anchorage, Alaska, by a
night-flying Saucer. When the pilots tried to close in, the strange craft zoomed
at terrific speed. Later, the air-line head reported that Intelligence officers
had quizzed the pilots for hours. "From their questions," he said, "I could tell
they had a good idea of what the Saucers are. One officer admitted they did, but
he wouldn't say any more."
On April 18, Captain Carl
Gray was piloting a Braniff air liner when a C.A.A. tower operator at Childress,
Texas, radioed an urgent message. A mysterious, silvery-white object had been
sighted from the tower; the operator asked Gray to be on the lookout for it.
Captain Gray and his crew spotted the thing a few minutes later-a large, round,
shining object oscillating at a high altitude. His first thought, that it might
be a balloon, quickly gave way to puzzled astonishment. "I've never seen
anything like it," he radioed the tower. Later, two Air National Guard fighter
pilots were guided up toward the Saucer by the C.A.A. tower man, who was
watching it through binoculars. But the planes failed to reach the object. Its
height was later estimated at fifteen miles above the earth. My request for the
final C.A.A. report on this sighting was refused, as in the case of the Vandalia
affair and, later, Flight 117.
On the night of May 29,
1950, the pilot, first officer, and flight engineer of an American Air Lines
DC-6 that had left Washington watched an intensely glowing something approach
their plane head on while they climbed southwest-ward a few miles beyond Mount
Vernon. Captain Willis Sperry edged right to avoid it, whereupon it swerved left
and stopped. When they swung back toward it, the thing resumed motion. As it
swiftly circled behind the plane, it passed before the rising full moon in
silhouette, and Captain Sperry observed that it was much
elongated-"torpedo-shaped," he called it-and wingless. The lighted portion was
at its forward end, and the slim body suggested dark metal. Then it darted out
of sight to the east with great speed.
Besides the air-line
sightings described above, there are incomplete reports of others-a sighting by
a Capital Air Lines pilot near Buffalo, New York; a strange encounter on the
airway between Alaska and Japan; Flying Saucers reported by air-line pilots
flying from Hawaii to the mainland, and other sightings on American domestic
lines. The Air Force either denies knowledge of C.A.A. reports or refuses
permission to see them. Concerning its own data, it announces: "There is no
investigation going on. Flying Saucers simply don't exist."
Any thinking person who
examines the mass of evidence can reach but one conclusion: the Saucers are
real.
 
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