by Timothy Good
Many of Stefano’s experiences and projects were shared with his friend Giancarlo, the accountant mentioned earlier. But the lengthy contacts took their toll. Eventually Stefano terminated his participation with the W56s, as it began to impact on his professional career. “You cannot live a quiet life when you are regularly meeting aliens!” he explained to me. “And after forty years I decided to quit.”62
In edition to the material cited in this summary, Mass Contacts features an interesting foreword by Roberto Pinotti, one of Europe’s leading investigators. Though not directly involved with the W56s, he became aware that something exotic was going on in 1969, while studying political science at the University of Florence. At the time he was also general secretary of Centro Ufologico Nazionale, a leading Italian group. He learned from his professor that an underground alien base existed near Pescara, information acquired from important and well-connected sources.63
In Mass Contacts, Stefano Breccia also includes a very interesting background history relating to various extraordinary individuals, including George Washington, who over the centuries seem to have been inspired by advanced beings from elsewhere. He also writes about some of the post-World War II contactees, such as George Adamski, Truman Bethurum, Dan Fry, and George Hunt Williamson, and devotes about ninety pages to the so-called “Ummo” affair. The latter is a complex and sometimes seemingly ridiculous saga beginning in 1965, when hundreds of physicists, engineers, biologists, astronomers, and selected people all over the world interested in the subject (including Stefano) began receiving strange letters from these people, individually typed, in many different languages, though primarily in Spanish. The information and diagrams covered mostly scientific and technical aspects of their craft, plus aspects of their culture and language—and much else besides.
Like a number of other researchers, I remain skeptical about the “Ummites,” though I retain an open mind. Stefano shares my skepticism about many aspects. However, he describes personal experiences in Mass Contacts that tend to suggest that—like the W56s—something quite extraordinary was going on, which simply can’t be a hoax (by Earth humans, at least).
With regard to the Amicizia saga, Stefano wisely cautions us not to take everything at face value. He was concerned, for example, when the W56s requested some of their contacts (including himself) to bring them certain potentially harmful substances related to their technology. As Hans explains:
“They use a lot of mercury in most of their applications, so that Earthlings trying to [duplicate] their technology had to cope with this metal: horresco referens, a device based on a nitrogen plasma generator, with mercury pipes, that became solid thanks to a liquid air envelope … mercury is an expensive substance, not readily found in great quantities, moreover a toxic substance. We have also been working with asbestos and radioactive compounds such as radium, barium-strontium niobate and with hyper-voltage generators (beyond one mega-volt), so we were used to being careful.”64
“Who knows if there is anyone who actually [understands] the knowledge of what Amicizia has meant, in toto?” asks Stefano. “Who knows how many persons, all over Central Europe, are acquainted with it? … Too many have died during this period, even those foreign to it; too many people went mad, and too many have ruined their lives.”65
Recently, in delving through one of my files containing correspondence between George Adamski and his Swiss representative Louise “Lou” Zinsstag, by happenstance I chanced on an Amicizia connection. “I want you to know what a singular experience I had during a short visit to Italy,” Lou wrote to Adamski in July 1962. “A very good journalist named Bruno Ghibaudi wrote a whole series of articles in one paper, publishing all kinds of intriguing contact stories and also photos from other people. Among them were those of a young artist, Gaspare De Lama, from Milano, which were so interesting that I wrote to him. My Italian being rather poor, I asked a friend of mine, Curt Zäch, to accompany me to De Lama. We met him, his wife, and his mother. They are very sincere and trustworthy people; poor but of good breeding, well educated and hospitable…. De Lama tells an amazing story. He forbade me to write to anybody about it except you.
“His first question was regarding your pamphlet on the spaceships being useful in case of cosmic wars. He had heard this from Alberto Perego through a friend, but was not sure. When I confirmed it and said that [Adamski] took this seriously, he murmured: ‘I knew that Adamski is no fool….’
“He then proceeded to show us his photos. This man has been able to photograph saucers since February 1962, in seven series, one of them in color: ‘A friend of mine pilots them and sometimes lets me know when they’re coming and where I can take pictures. He is an Italian like me, called Franco. He works with people from another galaxy. These people have subterranean bases here on Earth….’
“I asked him why his space friends were here and why they hid under the Earth. ‘In the first place, they explained that they are kind of like military people and would have to hide everywhere. They are not here to make war on us, they came to fight—not with weapons—a bad race who came to this planet some time ago in order to force us to make war with each other….’
“He himself has not yet had any contact. But Franco gave him some letters written by space people. They look most intriguing [though] did not much resemble the ‘letter’ from Venus which you showed me here in Basle [see p. 113]. I was all the more astonished when De Lama added (almost with your own words): ‘You see, those signs are whole sentences. Such a letter may contain the contents of a whole book….’”
In Alien Base, I alluded to the testimony of Ghibaudi, citing a series of photographs he had taken of alien craft on the shores of the Adriatic coast in Pescara in April 1961, one of which shows a bizarre-looking craft with what appear to be “wings” and “fins” set at a non-aerodynamically high dihedral angle (see photo section). A respected science journalist, Ghibaudi was a familiar figure on Italian television and radio at the time, specializing mostly in aerospace matters. Later that year, he was introduced to several of the W56 aliens, with witnesses present. They explained that although nuclear weapons remained one of the principal reasons for their increased presence, there were other reasons he was forbidden from disclosing (the alleged conflict with the CTRs undoubtedly being one, I would assume).
Ghibaudi learned that the aliens’ reluctance to reveal themselves more openly was based not only on the danger that would ensue from public panic, but that their open appearance among Earth people would inevitably lead to negative comparisons.
“Do not let us forget,” he pointed out, “that between their science and ours there is a gap of thousands of years, and for this reason an ‘official’ mass descent of space beings from other planets would inevitably bring about comparisons between their worlds and ours [and] there are cosmic laws which prevent the more evolved races from interfering, beyond certain limits, in the evolution and development of the more backward races….”66
Chapter Fourteen
Alternative Spacecraft
Early one evening in November 1950, eighteen-year-old William “Blackie” Raulerson and his schoolmate Tommy Brown were hunting on north Merritt Island, west of Cape Canaveral, Florida. Suddenly, they heard a “noise winding up like a turbine” emanating from the southeast. Raulerson told Florida Today reporter Billy Cox that a “radial wing” aircraft approached slowly from about two miles away until it was directly overhead, some sixty feet off the ground. He estimated that it was about ninety to a hundred feet in diameter.
Behind the aircraft’s twelve- to fourteen-foot-high windows of blueish tinted glass could be seen “about a twenty-eight-foot-long console cabinet with instrumentation,” Raulerson recalled, as well as six human-appearing crew members, wearing “light blue-looking flight suits with square, black collars, about six inches [high].” The crewman he saw most clearly had “reddish blond hair—it looked like a crew-cut,” he told Cox. The vehicle “gl
owed” from the inside, but had no running lights: the only exterior light was “a fourteen-inch diameter hole on the bottom that was this solid, flaming red. But there was no exhaust coming from it.”
The encounter lasted about four minutes. “Then it took off real fast, to the northeast,” said Raulerson. “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about what I saw.” Sixty-five years old when he gave this interview in 1997, he was then the owner of two light aircraft and had been a pilot for forty years.
“What makes Raulerson’s tale a bit different from the rest,” Billy Cox points out, “is its location—north Merritt Island, just west of modern-day Kennedy Space Center, roughly four months after the United States entered the rocket era with ignition of the Bumper sequence from the Cape.”1 That was in July 1950. Although Launch Pads 1 to 4 were then barely under construction at Cape Canaveral, the Army scheduled launches of two modified German V-2 Bumper rockets as first stage and a “Without Any Control” (WAC)-Corporal rocket as second stage.2 The space program was under way. And it was constantly monitored by beings from elsewhere.
Raulerson’s early description of a red-haired alien is supported by the testimony of others, such as the Native American friend of Carl Anderson (Chapter 7) and by Apolinar (Paul) Villa (also Chapter 7), who had encounters with aliens in the 1950s and 1960s. In June 1963, for example, he witnessed the landing of a large disc in New Mexico from which emerged four men and five women, ranging in height from seven to nine feet. Some had red hair.3
In December 1959, Omar Bowley, of Cocoa, worked as a blockhouse and pad inspector for Northrop, mainly during the Snark rocket tests. “Off duty, having pulled over in his car to watch a late-night launch not far from pads 3 and 4,” reports Billy Cox, “Bowley watched as three glowing objects—‘with edges slanted like pie plates and if you turned one upside down on top of the other’—descended upon the launch area from the north.” As Bowley reports:
“They were in a triangle formation, one in the lead, two in back. They were off-white in color, I guess, and absolutely noiseless. It was astounding. When the rocket launched, the first one turned over on its side in a vertical position and followed it, then the second vehicle followed, then the third, in single file. One was near the front, another was near the middle, and the other was near the back end. They all went out of sight together.
“There was one other fella pulled over at the time. He was in a Jeep, sort of a mustard color. I remember he looked at me and said, ‘You didn’t see anything at all, nothing occurred here. If you say anything, you’ll be in deep trouble.’ So I didn’t say anything. But I never forgot it….”4
Clandestine Rendezvous?
In June 1967, NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center issued an ambiguously worded management instruction from Director Kurt H. Debus—applicable to all organizational elements—to “establish procedures for handling reports of sightings of objects such as fragments or component parts of space vehicles known or alleged by an observer to have impacted the earth’s surface…. Included are reports of sightings of objects not related to space vehicles.” Under Definitions (a) and (b), the latter specifies “Unidentified Flying Objects.” Procedures for handling reports included the instruction: “Under no circumstances will the origin of the object be discussed with the observer….” UFO reports per se were to be reported to Patrick Air Force Base (Florida) Command Post.5
In late December 1967, Jim Oglesby lived in Orlando, Florida, working as a clerk in the machine shop at the Bendix Corporation Launch Support and Logistics Office Modules at the Kennedy Space Center. His brother-in-law, Jon Baker, had invited him to join his family for New Year’s Eve weekend celebrations at their mobile home in Bithlo, eighteen miles east of Orlando. On the early evening of December 30, Jon and Jim were chatting in the kitchen while the family watched a classic Christmas movie in the living room. “Suddenly, a flash of amber light reflected through the kitchen window that faced east,” Jim reports in his book. “I reached around and flung wide the front door, my heart pounding, as I expected to see a meteor hit the ground.
“Instead, my attention was drawn to an amber basketball-sized swirling mass, suspended in midair less than a hundred feet above and east of the mobile home. At first glance, I thought [it] might have been the phenomenon [known] as ball-lightning…. The mysterious anomaly maintained the estimated hundred-feet distance; however, just before it vanished, its amber color illuminated the upper round structure, the underside, and the lower outer rim of a pewter metallic craft that measured perhaps forty-five to fifty feet in diameter. The unknown craft glided soundlessly as it banked and headed due east, and vanished.” Both Jon and Jim’s sister also witnessed this event.
At one point, a beam of deep-red cone-shaped light emanated from beneath the craft, tracing the ground as it continued eastward. “The red beam winked out, then on, then off again,” Jim continues. “I concluded that whether remote-controlled or piloted by an occupant, the craft was under intelligent control and beyond our technology. Then a pattern of flashing red lights appeared where the red beam had just winked out, just above the shadowy tree line that lined up within the two poles that flanked the driveway.
“I stood in amazement as I watched the configuration of flashing red lights rotate in a 6-5-4-3-2-1, 1-2-3-4-5-6 pattern around the outer perimeter of a solid structure. Moments later, a second craft with an identical band of flashing red lights that flashed to and fro around the craft’s middle, floated in from the left and glided alongside its companion. Now, the flashing red lights that rotated back and forth around the middle of each unidentified craft did not conform to any terrestrial navigational protocol that I had ever observed on aircraft before.
“Both craft hung there in the air just above the tree line; then the craft on the left rose and, on cue, the second one descended. Then the twosome reversed the process and, in one harmonious rhythmic motion, both craft floated and swayed back and forth (like leaves caught on the wind), as they dropped below the dark topography.
“As both ships descended, the frequency of the red lights increased back and forth in a horizontal pattern around the middle of each, and as the twosome dropped out of sight there was a moment of awe as I stared out there where something most extraordinary had just happened.
“I was not close enough to see the saucers touch the ground, but I watched the flashing red lights through the open space between the stand of trees in the distance, until the flashing red lights dropped out of sight. At that point, it was speculation if the two unknowns had touched down….”
A short while after, six helicopters (believed to have been AH-1G Huey Cobra’s) “fanned out in an ever-widening circle, their bright beams [directed] on the dark terrain below as they moved back and forth above the general area for three or four minutes, while two F-106A Delta Dart jets [also] flew low over the UFO targets’ area…. After a brief scan of the area, the choppers resumed single-file formation and headed back in the east-south-east direction of their original approach. The jets banked, came back for another pass before heading back in the same direction as the choppers….
“Two ships from parts unknown had apparently landed on the ground and possibly were still there! Why call off jets and choppers right in the middle of their special task-force operation? The answer would become clearer, but for the time being common-sense stated that either they found nothing upon arriving at the ‘hotspot’ and called back to base, or the pilots were ordered back to base whether they located and/or identified the craft(s) or not…. At my urgent request, Jon and I hopped into his pickup and took to the back roads and the general area where the incredible incident had just happened. Although this was Jon’s neighborhood, driving blindly through unfamiliar territories turned out to be a futile effort.” The two were forced to give up the search and head back for home.6
Back at the mobile home, Jim remained on the porch from where the observations had been made, anxiously aw
aiting any further developments. “From 7:10 to 7:20 p.m., Saturday evening December 30 until 1:50 a.m., New Year’s Eve,” he reports, “I stood in one spot, my attention riveted out there, waiting.
“At 1:50 a.m. one of the craft began rising from the area that had harbored it for the best part of six hours [sic] … the flashing red lights that circled the lone ship’s outer perimeter moved faster and faster in the 6-5-4-3-2-1, 1-2-3-4-5-6 sequence as it climbed steadily above the dark terrain below. Then the ship shot straight up, paused, accelerated to a greater height until [its] outer structure transformed into a glowing white magnificent craft [which] shot straight up again, paused, then accelerated in one final ascending burst of speed, covering a vast distance….”
At this moment, a fiery object could be seen rising from the ground above the Atlantic Ocean: coincidentally, a Minuteman II missile had just been launched from its underground silo at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. As if in response, the strange craft “zipped to the right, [then] to the left, performed a vertical Z-pattern all in one continuous flowing streak of light, [then] drew near the cone section of the fast-rising missile, [then] streaked off to the south and vanished.”7
During Easter 1968, Jim read an article in a special edition section of the Orlando Sentinel entitled “UFO tracks Minuteman Missile over Cape Canaveral,” written by Dick Young. Unfortunately he lost track of the newspaper. Several years later he researched microfilm at both the Sentinel and Orlando Public Libraries’ system main branch. The newspaper was intact, with the exception of the special edition—of course.8
In 1968, further sightings occurred in the same general vicinity. On February 17, Jim approached an intense flashing blue light which appeared to be reflecting off the metallic surface of a disc, as well as “patches of a deep glowing red.” He then perceived “an aerodynamic structured craft perhaps fifty to sixty feet end to end, with each end tapered down and expanded to fifteen to twenty feet in height at its center.
