by Colin Wilson
Two cases helped convince Hynek that UFOs had to be genuine. One was the extraordinary ‘Socorro incident’. On 24 April 1964, Patrolman Lonnie Zamora, of Socorro, New Mexico, saw a flame in the sky, then saw that it was coming down in the desert. Alarmed in case it landed on a hut containing dynamite, he drove to a hilltop in time to see a silvery object settle in the gully. It was shaped like an egg balancing on one end, and was standing on four legs. Two small figures—about the size of children, and wearing white overalls—were standing near it. Zamora radioed back to his sergeant at Socorro, and drove round the hill to get a closer view; when he looked again, the craft was taking off with a thunderous noise, and vanished at a great speed. The brush near it burnt for an hour. Two colleagues arrived, and found four V-shaped depressions in the ground where the module had stood.
There is a kind of sequel to this story. A year later, on 1 July 1965, a French farmer named Maurice Masse, who lived in the provincial village of Valensole, heard a whistling noise in the sky, and saw an egg-shaped craft standing on six legs, with two beings he mistook for boys standing near it. Since vandals had recently been pulling up his lavender, he sneaked up on them—then became aware that they were not boys, whereupon he walked openly towards them. One of them pointed a pencil-shaped object at him, and Masse found that he was paralysed. The machine then took off.
Masse described his visitors as being less than four feet tall, with pumpkin-like heads, high fleshy cheeks, large eyes that slanted round the side of their heads, slitty mouths without lips, and pointed chins. They were wearing close-fitting grey-green clothes.
A French investigator, Aimé Michel, went to interview Masse, and took with him a photograph of a model spacecraft that had been based on Zamora’s description. When Masse was shown this he was thunderstruck, and went pale. At first he thought this was his machine. Told that this one had been seen in America, he said, ‘You see, I was not dreaming’.
As investigator for the air force, Hynek went to see Zamora, and set out to undermine his testimony by trying to get him to contradict himself. He did not succeed, and ended totally convinced of Zamora’s honesty. He then went to look at the site, and saw the charred plants and the marks left by the craft. He also learnt of another witness, who had seen a ‘strange flying craft’ looking as if it was about to land, and then saw Zamora’s squad car on its way across the sandy terrain towards it.
But the case that most impressed Hynek was that of the Rev. William Booth Gill, an Anglican priest who headed a mission in Boainai, Papua New Guinea. At 6:45 p.m. on 26 June 1959, he was leaving his house when he saw a huge light in the sky. He sent a servant to fetch other people, then found a pencil and paper, and recorded his observations. The light was close enough to see something—or someone—moving on top of it, then he thought he could see three men, ‘doing something on deck’. A ‘thin electric blue spotlight’ was switched on. At 7:20 the UFO vanished through the cloud cover, but an hour later, when the cloud thinned, Gill saw it again. Then a second UFO appeared. Finally, a third was seen over a nearby village. Gill and numerous witnesses saw what they took to be a mother ship hovering, ‘large and stationary’. Gill watched, on and off, until after 10:00.
The next evening the UFOs were back again. Gill was walking with a nurse and a schoolteacher near the hospital, and the UFO came so close that the teacher was able to wave at a figure on its deck; the figure waved back. Gill and several other people waved, and received waves in return.
Hynek learnt of the case from the British Air Ministry, who handed Hynek the report (apparently glad to get rid of it), and Gill’s notes, as well as some lengthy tapes he made. Hynek remarks, ‘As a few excerpts from his tape show, Reverend Gill is utterly sincere. He talks in a leisurely, scholarly way, delineating details slowly and carefully. The manner and contents of the tapes are conducive to conviction’.
Typically, the Australian Department of Air decided to classify the UFOs as an ‘aerial phenomenon . . . most probably . . . reflections on a cloud’.
Hynek had earlier dismissed hundreds of sightings of UFOs as misinterpretations of astronomical objects; these sightings led him to begin stating publicly that he now saw the UFO phenomenon as ‘the greatest mystery of our age, perhaps the greatest mystery of all time’. The air force was understandably upset by this unexpected turnabout of one of its most reliable debunkers; but Hynek was by now too well known to be silenced by threats.
For the rest of his life—Hynek died in 1986—he attempted to persuade governments and scientific bodies to take the study of UFOs seriously; to this end, he founded the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), whose purpose was to study the evidence scientifically. But it was uphill work. Most official bodies felt then—as they do now—that UFOs should be classified with ghosts and sea serpents, as something that could safely be ignored because it made no real difference whether they existed or not.
Yet Hynek failed to come to any ultimate conclusion about UFOs—apart from a conviction that a percentage of them are real. He compared his task to that of Marie Curie, trying to refine tons of pitchblende to obtain a fraction of a gram of radium.
His caution exasperated his friend Jacques Vallee, another astronomer who had been preoccupied with UFOs since 1954, when he was fifteen.
In that year there had been a deluge of sightings in Europe, and Vallee had heard a railway worker describe on the radio how he had been relieving his bladder in the night air when he saw a UFO and two small robots near the railway. Police found signs that a large machine had landed at the spot. In the following year, Vallee saw one for himself. His mother screamed from the garden, and Jacques rushed down three flights of stairs in time to see a grey metallic disc with a bubble on top, hovering above the church of Saint-Maclou, in Pontoise.
In 1958, Vallee came upon a book called Mysterious Things in the Sky (Mysterieux Objets Celestes) by an acoustical engineer named Aimé Michel. That same day, Vallee recorded in his diary the wish that he could one day become a UFO researcher, and wrote a letter to Aimé Michel. Two weeks later, Michel replied; but he also made the baffling comment that many UFOs simply vanished, as if they had dematerialised. In other cases, they had changed shape instantaneously; ‘can you imagine a pyramid turning into a cube?’ It was obviously not a simple matter of visitants from another planet.
By August 1961, when he was twenty-two, Vallee had found himself a job at the artificial-satellite station of the Paris Observatory, at Meudon. Yet he and his colleagues sometimes observed satellites that had no official existence. One night, they tracked an exceptionally bright satellite of which there was simply no record. Moreover, it was travelling the wrong way—in retrograde motion. It took a far more powerful rocket launcher to boost a satellite into retrograde orbit, and no nation possessed one at the time. Yet when he drew this to the attention of Paul Muller, head of the artificial-satellite service, Muller confiscated the tape and destroyed it. When Vallee asked why they didn’t send the information to the Americans (meaning the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, under the Geophysical Year agreement), Muller replied, ‘The Americans would laugh at us’.
In spite of which, the satellite was tracked by a number of observatories all over the world. Then it vanished.
A week later, Vallee went to call on Aimé Michel, ‘an amazing gnome of a man, short and deformed, who barely reaches to my stomach. Yet he radiates a kind of beauty that is unforgettable, a beauty that comes from the mind, and the nobility of his piercing eyes’. Michel had suggested a notion that he called orthoteny—that UFOs tended to appear on straight lines. But Michel had collected so many observations—hundreds of reported sightings—that he was unable to handle them all. Vallee offered what help he could, extending a line that went through Bayonne and Vichy right around the world, so Michel could find out whether other sightings appeared on it. The result was an excited letter from Michel. The line went through three major concentrations of UFO sightings, in Brazil, New Guineau and New Zealand. (A New Zealand
er named Bruce Cathie, an airline pilot who had experienced four UFO sightings between 1952 and 1965, arrived at a similar theory independently.) Vallee now began using the IBM computer at weekends (it occupied a whole room) to perform more calculations. He was aided by his wife, Janine.
Vallee found that this interest in UFOs was attracting unfavourable comment, and became afraid that he would lose his job. An astrophysicist called Pierre Guerin had joined the group, and scientists next door were wondering why an expert on planets was talking to satellite-trackers. ‘It seems amazing to me’, Vallee commented in his journal, ‘that people should find it suspicious and undesirable for scientists of adjacent disciplines to talk to one another. Isn’t that what science is all about?’
He and Janine made the interesting discovery that there was an apparent relationship between the frequency of sightings and the distance of the planet Mars, which comes closest to Earth every twenty-six months. This might have led him to wonder whether flying saucers are from Mars; instead, he reflected that it is odd that, if the visitors are from space, they are not seen long before they reach Earth—after all, fairly small objects can be seen in space, even with the naked eye, when they are hundreds of miles away. Vallee was already beginning to suspect that the flying saucers were not necessarily from other planets, or anywhere else ‘out there’.
On a bookstall by the Seine, Vallee discovered a book by Major Donald Keyhoe, one of the pioneers in the field of ufology, and noted that the attitude of American scientists and military men towards UFOs was disturbing: ‘They behave like a well-organised insect colony whose life is suddenly impacted by an unforeseen event’. He observed that their idea of researching UFOs was to chase one and shoot it down. Keyhoe’s book led Vallee to formulate the notion that UFOs are ‘the first great collective intelligence test to which mankind has been subjected’.
Early in 1962, Vallee resigned from the Meudon observatory, sick of the small-minded attitude of French astronomers. His boss Muller actually reproached him with the words, ‘You think too much’. He took a job with an electronics firm, which gave him more time and freedom.
Janine asked a friend to look at the computations, and he asked her if they had anything to do with Mars. It turned out that he had a friend named Michel Gauquelin, a statistician who had decided to discredit astrology by using the statistical method. In the 1930s, a Swiss mathematician named Krafft had studied the birth data of 2,800 musicians, and concluded that the result proved a relation between a person’s sun sign (the sign of the zodiac he is born under) and temperament. Gauquelin had fed this data into a computer, and discovered that Krafft was deceiving himself. Carried away by his success, Gauquelin decided to explode another superstition: that a person’s choice of profession is governed by his rising sign—the planet that is just rising at the moment of his birth. (Doctors are supposed to be born under Mars, actors under Jupiter, scientists under Saturn, etc.) To Gauquelin’s embarrassment, his first sample—people born under Mars—showed that the Mars effect was real. The tests were repeated in four different countries, and showed the same result. Without intending to, Gauquelin had made it fairly certain that astrology is not pure superstition.
Jacques and Janine met the Gauquelins, and were amused to realise that they had both been working on a kind of ‘Mars effect’, and that both couples had been obliged to keep their work secret for fear of the scientific establishment. Vallee began thinking about moving to America, and, when Aimé Michel told him about Hynek, wrote him a letter, and sent him his Mars correlations.
A few days before leaving for America, in September 1962, Vallee paid a visit to a musician named Paul Misraki, who had just published a book called The Extraterrestrials, in which he suggested that some religious miracles, like that at Fátima, might have the same cause as modern saucer sightings. The Fátima sighting had occurred on 13 May 1917, when three Portuguese children saw a white-robed woman who asked them to return every month for six months. On the second occasion, fifty people were there, and heard an explosion, followed by the sight of a cloud rising from a tree; the third time, there were 4,500 people, who heard a buzzing noise, saw a cloud ascending from the same tree, and again heard an explosion. The children were shown a vision of hell, and told that a second world war would occur if people did not mend their ways. (It would begin, said the vision, during the reign of Pope Pius XI, who died in 1939.)
By September, there were thirty thousand people, and they saw a globe of light moving down the valley towards the children, and the air seemed to be full of glistening bubbles as the globe rose and disappeared into the sun. On the last occasion, in October, there were seventy thousand people. The pouring rain suddenly stopped, and the clouds parted to reveal a revolving disc of a silvery colour, which radiated, in succession, all the colours of the spectrum. Then it plunged towards the Earth. Most of the crowd thought it was the end of the world and fell on their knees; but the disc suddenly reversed, and flew upward into the sun. When it had gone, the crowd discovered that their clothes and the ground were miraculously dry.
This suggestion of a connection between Fátima and UFOs was to be extraordinarily fruitful for Vallee.
A year after arriving in America, Vallee finally met Hynek in a Chicago hotel, and they talked continuously for twenty-four hours. Hynek mentioned a vacancy in the computer programming department at Northwestern University, where he worked, and Vallee applied and was accepted. Soon he was working as one of Hynek’s research assistants on Project Blue Book. Hynek’s wife, Mimi, thought the whole UFO business was
nonsense, and that it would never be taken seriously. But Vallee, having read and disliked a number of books on UFOs—for their popular tone—decided to write one of his own. By this time, his computer calculations had convinced him that Michel’s orthoteny was almost certainly a matter of chance.
By December 1963, Vallee was suggesting to Hynek that ‘an extraterrestrial intervention might have been a factor in man’s early history, specifically in the early development of civilisation and of biblical events . . . The return of such phenomena today could be explained by the need to boost our religious vacillations’. He thought that some benign group of cosmic beings, trying to guide us towards galactic status, would behave exactly as the saucer operators do.
We should pause here to glance briefly at this notion of UFOs and man’s early history. It seems, at first sight, absurd, an arbitrary linking of two completely different phenomena—biblical miracles, which most of us take with a pinch of salt anyway, and flying saucers.
What is difficult to grasp is that, for more than five years, Vallee had been studying hundreds—in fact thousands—of UFO sightings, and hearing them described in the witnesses’ own words. It was totally impossible for him to doubt that flying saucers were real, even though many of them sounded absurd (like the two little robots seen by the Frenchman).
But when did they begin?
Certainly not with Kenneth Arnold; there had been hundreds, even thousands, of sightings long before that day in 1947.
In his dictated book The Song of the Stars (1996), the South African shaman Credo Mutwa writes:
There are things that fly through the night, that you call UFOs, which we in Africa call Abahambi Abavutayo, ‘the fiery visitors’ . . . Long before they were heard of in other parts of the world, we, the people of Africa, had contact with these things and the creatures inside them. I can only speak within certain constraints because we are not allowed to talk in any detail about these sacred things. Our people fear that should we do that, then the star ships would stop visiting us.
He goes on to speak about the Mutende-ya-ngenge, ‘the grey or white . . . creature with a largish head whose face is chalk-white, with large green eyes that go around the creature’s head so that it can look at you over its shoulder . . .’. He adds that the Mutende sometimes captures human beings, cuts them open, then closes them up again, and makes them forget what has happened. ‘It is only when a witch doctor puts this p
erson into what we call the godsleep . . . that this fact comes out’.
Mutwa goes on to describe his own abduction encounter with ‘fellows like little dolls’ in the bush, who were able to paralyse him, then examined him painfully, sticking instruments up his nostrils. He then describes how a female creature made love to him: ‘but there was nothing human or warm about it . . . only a feeling of coldness and violation’, Afterwards, he was shown a creature like a baby frog, suspended in a purplish liquid—a humanoid foetus?
He found himself back in the bush, and, when he approached a village, all the dogs tried to attack him, and he had to be rescued. He then learnt he had been missing for three days.
Mutwa adds, ‘There are creatures who are watching over us curiously, and who, I think, are regulating human progress for some reason’.
In 1925, the Russian mystical artist Nicholas Roerich, who designed the set for Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, set out across the Himalayas, and described in his journal how his party had been staring up at an eagle when ‘we all saw, in a direction from north to south, something big and shiny reflecting the sun, like a huge oval moving at great speed. Crossing our camp this thing changed in its direction from south to southwest. And we saw how it disappeared in the intense blue sky. We even had time to take our field glasses and saw quite distinctly an oval form with shiny surface, one side of which was brilliant from the sun’.
