GENESIS (Projekt Saucer)

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GENESIS (Projekt Saucer) Page 26

by W. A. Harbinson


  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.’

  ‘The liberal conscience,’ O’Hara said, ‘would be right.’ He

  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 –

 

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