by Phil Patton
Survivors reported that from the ground the bombers silhouetted against the sky sometimes looked like the black blades of knives and sometimes, when the flames lit them from below, like silver moths trapped in the amber reflections. The bombs themselves seemed to fall like a liquid silver rain rather than a series of solid, deadly objects.
Women fleeing, carrying babies on their backs, continued walking, seemingly unconscious that the bundles had burst into flame. Bodies twisted and turned into the pumice of Pompeiian victims. Those who dropped into canals or pools seeking refuge boiled to death.
The fires died down fairly quickly, and processions of silent refugees moved under moonlight amid the burning ruins. One man paused to light a cigar at a still burning telephone pole.
Time magazine called the raid “a dream come true.” It showed that “properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves.”
Approximately as many people died in this, the first great triumph of airpower, as did in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings combined. The step to the atomic bomb was now only a technical one.
The dominance of airpower was ratified in 1947 by the establishment of the Air Force as a separate branch of the military, equivalent to the Army and Navy. The same year brought the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, the declaration of the Truman Doctrine, and the Marshall Plan. It saw the invention of the transistor and Chuck Yeager’s breaking of the sound barrier over the dry lake at Muroc.
One of the first tasks of the new Air Force was to explain reports of mysterious craft—possibly craft from distant stars.
They were as shiny as mirrors, pilot Kenneth Arnold reported. He saw nine objects near Mount Rainier, Washington, on the afternoon of June 24, 1947, in loose formation, shaped like boomerangs or flying wedges, moving at tremendous speed.
After landing in Pendleton, Oregon, Arnold described his sighting to Nolan Skiff, a columnist for the East Oregonian, and told him how the objects “flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” The Associated Press picked up Skiff’s story, and in its version the objects changed from flying like a saucer into “saucer-like” objects, then into “flying saucers.”
The flying saucer would come to inhabit many of the the dreams of the postwar era, focusing fears and hopes like the lens whose shape it shares, reflecting the wider culture like its mirrored surface. Nothing says more about its origins than the birth of its name in the press. For the image of the saucer was about to become a new kind of mythological figure, a Hermes or Puck, a unicorn or leprechaun, that flourished not in oral tradition but in the mass media. The first folk emblem to emerge from the realm of technology, it turned into the most flexible sort of cultural icon, with overtones ranging from the cosmic—dark visions of potential invasions—to the comic—a thousand magazine cartoons with stubby saucers piloted by little green men.
In the days after Arnold’s sighting, dozens of additional reports flowed in from around the world. In July, the Air Force boldly issued a press release claiming the “capture” of a flying disc, at Roswell, New Mexico, then decided that the object had in fact been a weather balloon. The Roswell story quickly dropped from the headlines—to be reexamined only decades later—but within two months, polls showed that 90 percent of Americans had heard of flying saucers.
Arnold at first thought he had seen advanced military aircraft. The flying saucer was “discovered” amid almost daily announcements of wildly new technologies and rising tensions, which in the new atomic age threatened the end of the planet. The saucer became a fact of life, like the nuclear threat, and soon it was common enough to be treated lightly. Billy Ray Riley and his Little Green Men had a hit record with the rockabilly number “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll,” and by 1957 there was a new toy in American backyards: the saucer-shaped Frisbee, product of the Wham-O company.
The embodiment of airpower in its new guise as the atomic deterrent force would be the Strategic Air Command, and its leader Curtis LeMay.
LeMay took charge in October 1948 and declared the SAC a shambles, with untrained crews who couldn’t hit their targets. He staged a mock bombing attack on Dayton, Ohio. It was a dismal failure—most crews missed. LeMay called it the darkest day in the history of airpower. He proceeded to get the SAC into shape.
He gave SAC its motto: “Peace is our profession.” It said so on its seal, a shield bearing an armored hand glinting like an airplane against a blue sky—an image like a knight painted by Piero della Francesca. But the SAC seal had three lightning bolts and only one olive branch. LeMay’s premise was: We are at war already. Since the next war would be one of deterrence, won or lost before it started, we were in effect already fighting World War III. So LeMay kept some of his planes in the air at all times. All were designed to scramble quickly, with a red button for one-touch start-up inside the nose wheel wells where you boarded the plane, for a kind of Le Mans start.
He had no hesitancy about striking first if attack seemed imminent. With every passing year, the margin of advantage for the United States grew smaller. SAC’s advantage, LeMay said, was a “wasting asset.” It seemed crazy to him to let the other guys strike first. “Hit ’em with their pants down,” as George C. Scott urges, portraying the general in Dr. Strangelove modeled after LeMay.
In June 1950, SAC staged an exercise involving dozens of bombers that targeted Eglin Air Force Base. In Mission with LeMay, the autobiography LeMay wrote with MacKinlay Kantor,3 he described his methods of constant practice: “We attacked every good-sized city in the United States. People were down there in their beds, and they didn’t know what was going on upstairs. By the time I left SAC, … every city in the United States of twenty-five thousand population or more had been bombed on innumerable occasions. San Francisco had been bombed over six hundred times in a month.”
LeMay had an obsession with security and a fear of sabotage. He gained national publicity when he staged a surprise visit to a SAC hangar and found the security guy eating lunch. “I saw a man guarding our planes with a ham sandwich,” he said. He had crack Air Police patrolling SAC bases, like the commando units depicted in Dr. Strangelove. He dispatched trained “penetrators” to plant notes that said, “This is a bomb.” This obsession shows up in the film Strategic Air Command, in which mild-mannered Jimmy Stewart goes back to the Air Force and is baffled by the rough security checks at the base gate. It’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Omaha,” and it may be one of the least convincing military movies ever made.
Sometimes they would paste a baby picture or animal picture on the ID badges just to test security guards. Once a SAC general found soldiers entering his office to repair phone lines. It took the officer several minutes to remember that the Air Force used outside repair people. He drew his automatic before the intruders had time to deposit the slip of paper that read, “This is a bomb.”
The Office of Special Investigations penetrators became a regular nuisance to SAC crews. LeMay even had his wife tested by a bogus repairman who tried to penetrate the general’s residence.
SAC’s headquarters was at Offut Air Base in Omaha, Nebraska, formerly a dreary Army post. The location had been chosen carefully: By the Great Circle route, it was as far from the bases of Soviet bombers as possible. Like railroad towns, Offut and the other distant SAC bases at Rapid City or Minot quickly turned into American dream towns. LeMay made SAC a housing developer, creating whole new communities around the bases, green-grass Levittowns under blue skies. He set up hot-rod shops on SAC bases to improve morale. The cars raced on the runways. It was Pax Atomica, as LeMay liked to call it.
“Do you realize how many babies are born in SAC each month?” said Jimmy Stewart, as a B-36 pilot in Strategic Air Command. I had been one of those babies. I grew up on a SAC base.
I grew up with the religion of airpower. I must have been but three or four when my mother brought home a model of the B-29 on which my father had flown, all silver, with burgundy prop and tail tips, and I learned that the airpower t
hat had won the last war was there to prevent the next. Like many of the Interceptors, I had “imprinted” on these aircraft as a child, the way Konrad Lorenz described the imprinting nature of goslings. The B-36s overhead were just a larger, clunkier version of the B-29; the B-52s and B-47s and B-58s would continue the evolution.
My father figured as a heroic warrior of airpower. Family myth segued neatly into the national myth that arrived on our primitive black-and-white TV set via Walter Cronkite and the program The Twentieth Century: how eager American youths from small towns across the country were sent for training to the new bases set up far from the vulnerable coasts.
Then Air Power had shuffled the trainees into ethnically mixed all-American crews—the kid from Brooklyn, the guy from Texas, the farm boy and the city boy—that would fly from Wichita to Khartoum and Bombay, to China and Guam, and eventually over the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. My father had bombed Tokyo in LeMay’s great firestorm, then been shot up over Osaka, left blind, with his right arm crooked and bent. His left compensated; from my earliest days I thought it looked like the arm on the baking soda box. Decades later, bits of shrapnel were still working their way out of his skin.
The B-36, the flagship of SAC during the 1950s, was something of a turkey, slower and with less range than promised. Originally designed in 1941 to reach Germany from the United States in case England fell, it first flew in 1946. It was jokingly called “aluminum overcast” for its huge size. A mechanically ragged airplane, it was saved by its abundance of engines. There was another joke about it: “Pilot: Feather four. Engineer: Which four?” The bomber’s big, slow propellers emitted a distinctive whump-whump sound. One pilot recalls that it sounded like a streetcar rumbling toward takeoff.
It was huge, with six pusher-prop turbojets set along its wings so thick crewmen could scramble out to work on the power plants in flight. But the dome and the bulbous nose gave the plane a stupid, brontosaurian look. In flight, the great glass-domed turtleback canopy atop the bomber was often filled with blue smoke from the cigars the pilots felt free to smoke on long flights because LeMay was rarely without his own stogie. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but in SAC it was a symbol of jaunty esprit, an accent of élan on the way to the end of the world.
Trophies given to the winning crew in a SAC competition one year were ashtrays with a B-36 mounted on their rim, circling the smoking ashes beneath.
SAC was staffed by callow youth and bomber vets, “the Blue Sky Boys,” who had pounded Germany and Japan with Flying Fortresses and Superfortresses and who got the nod in 1948 to deliver the big ones. SAC’s job was to routinize Doomsday, to bureaucratize Armageddon. They stayed airborne twenty-four hours a day.
SAC’s Cold War was a new kind of war, but LeMay still needed targets. He needed them to etch into three-dimensional Lucite templates for the radar bombsights of his bombers. He needed them to flesh out his Strategic Library Bombing Index. He needed them to shape the SIOP, the sinister acronym for single-integrated operating plan—the blueprint for nuclear war.
LeMay needed targets because he alone controlled them. Neither the joint chiefs nor the president knew the targets in case of nuclear war. LeMay kept the information to himself until the early sixties. And since there were no locks, no presidential codes for the weapons, his bombers could have launched a nuclear war on his authority alone.
LeMay feared dilly-dallying politicians: He wanted to “hit ’em with everything we’ve got” at the first signs of any massing of the bombers he was sure the Soviets were rapidly building. But he had very little information. The Soviet Union was a great black empty space. SAC was still using German maps of the country from World War II. Human agents had little success. They might manage to pass for ordinary Soviet citizens, but ordinary Soviet citizens had virtually no access to the areas and targets desired. Reconnaissance versions of the B-29 had skirted the perimeter of the Soviet Union since the end of World War II. A variety of electronic listening and air-sample programs had been in continuous operation.
Other ideas floated around. In the early fifties a forward-looking officer at Wright-Pat had taken a look at new engines and wings and realized it might be possible to fly above radar. Maj. John Seaberg began Project Bald Eagle, developed to create a high-flying spy plane. Specs were issued, proposals advanced, but nothing came of it.
Several balloon programs had been used to spy; one was Mogul, the secret program later officially asserted to have been the source of the Roswell “saucer” wreckage, aimed at sampling potential fallout from Soviet atomic weapons.
The most ambitious balloon program carried cameras: Project Genetrix, aka Weapons System 119L, launched polyethylene balloons high into the jet streams. It operated under the cover story of weather research and the code name Moby Dick. It involved five launch sites and ten locations for tracking, and the Soviets protested as soon as the first flight was made, in January 1956. Almost five hundred balloons were launched; some were shot down, many were lost, and only forty produced any useful photos. The program ended with the humiliating spectacle of captured balloons displayed in Moscow’s Gorky Park as evidence of imperialist treachery.
LeMay also enlisted the help of the British for a less confrontational approach and supplied them with planes, Canberra bombers adapted for reconnaissance. They fared poorly. The historian Richard Rhodes records that one pilot from those missions, looking out of his cockpit, realized what a difficult task it would be to find anything in the vast landmass. It looked, he said, like “one large black hole.” Some of the Canberras returned full of bullet holes.
When President Eisenhower, in his Open Skies proposal, suggested that the United States and the Soviet Union should allow each other free reconnaissance overflights, the Soviets were suspicious. They rejected the proposal immediately.
At the height of Cold War tensions, in 1956, LeMay sent a fleet of RB-47s over Vladivostok at noon without approval from his commanders. They took pictures boldly, brushing off the few MiGs that rose to intercept them. He could easily have started a war with such a flight. In fact, there is much evidence he regretted not doing so.
In the spring of 1953, a top-secret RAND corporation study pointed out the vulnerability of SAC bases to a surprise attack by Soviet long-range bombers. That August, just nine months after the first American blast, the Soviets tested their first hydrogen bomb. LeMay thought they would be ready to attack by 1954—the year of “maximum danger.” Others, however, believed that salvation from impending nuclear holocaust could come only from the intervention of agencies from beyond the threatened planet itself.
8. “Something Is Seen”
Driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas one day, I took the southeastern route and made a diversion to catch a glimpse of the shrine of the saucers. Near Twenty-nine Palms, where the Marine Corps had its vast desert training ground, stands a white, domed building called the Integratron. It reminded me of the dome the Air Force had built atop Bald Mountain to provide a commanding view of Dreamland.
Here, in April 1954, five thousand people attended “The World’s First Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention,” and all the important figures from the flying saucer world were there, including contactees George Adamski, Daniel Fry, Truman Bethurum, and Orfeo Angelucci.
The event’s organizer was George Van Tassel, a former aircraft mechanic at Lockheed. In 1947, Van Tassel had leased the airstrip at Giant Rock, named for a huge boulder in the desert east of Los Angeles. A German spy was rumored to have hidden beneath the boulder during World War II, and Van Tassel dug rooms there and established a café restaurant for fliers and the less frequent auto tourists. He furnished one chamber with sofas and couches and even a piano. He found it just the place to make contact via telepathy of the “omnibeam” with the space people and “etherians,” and he established a Council of Twelve that provided “the first mental contact” from Ashtar, commandant of a space station. Under direction from his voices, Van Tassel began building the Integratron, a dome-shaped
structure that would focus spiritual forces with which to prolong life and make possible both antigravity transportation and time travel. Left unfinished at Van Tassel’s death, the building is now derelict, its paint peeling. After 1955, attendance at the annual “Saucerian conventions” would slowly decline.
One of the most charismatic figures at the first Saucerian convention was another Lockheed alumnus, Orfeo Angelucci. One attendee noted that he was the only one of the contactees she could really imagine on a spaceship, describing him as “a small, slender, almost fragile man” with “dark, wavy hair, trusting eyes, and a delicate, semi-ascetic face … frequently reminiscent of a saint’s head by da Vinci … The softness of his voice reflects the quality of quiet perseverance.”
In 1952 Angelucci was hired at the Lockheed factory in Burbank as a mechanic. He was a nervous man, often in ill health, who suffered from what he believed was “constitutional inadequacy.” He felt small. He had been born in Italy, was not very well educated, and was not at all sure he was going to make it in the bustling get-ahead southern California culture of the early fifties.
He had pretensions: He believed his wife was a distant relation of the storied Medici family. He fancied himself something of a thinker. He had seen a UFO in 1946, and pondered its meaning, and for several years had been working on an ambitious philosophical treatise he called “The Nature of Infinite Entities.” Its subject matter was “Atomic Evolution, Suspension, and Involution, Origin of the Cosmic Rays.”
Coming off the late shift at Lockheed on the night of May 23, 1952, Angelucci felt unwell; his skin prickled. Driving home, he saw a strange red light hovering above the highway and “pulsating.” It then shot off to the west at about a 30- or 40-degree angle into the sky and vanished. In its place, two smaller green orbs like green fire hung in front of him.
