How about ascertaining UFO facts rather than attempting to prove or disprove the fantasies generated in 23 years of controversy? YING SAUCER news and information has been heavily censored for the past 20 years —not by the government but by the two dozen or so re- searcher-writers who have been most vocal on the subject. Of these only a small handful have FABLES of the eeu tiny fragments of information, many of which are irrelevant to the overall picture, And to make matters worse, investigative methods of the UFO buffs have been designed to cope with the criticisms of the skeptics rather than with the problems inherent fo AGE By John A. Keel made any sincere attempt to set the complex and contradictory UFO data before the public. The rest more often than not have seized upon the extraterrestrial conclusion and then carefully se- lected those reports which ap- pear to fit this conclusion. They have “brainwashed” you by busily discarding everything that fails to conform to their speculations and by carefully tailoring their “evidence” to fit their conclusions. Astounding fantasies have been founded on 90 in attempting a real study of the phenomena. There surely is no question that some sort of unknown phe- nomenon does exist. All kinds of UFOs were seen, reported and documented by the military ser- vices during World War Il. The Air Force always has admitted that a certain number of cases could not be explained; the Air Force never has denied the exis- tence of the phenomenon but has claimed that a certain percen- tage of all sightings could beexplained as natural phen- omena, misinterpretation, etc., and that no scientific evidence has been uncovered to support the claims of the UFO buffs. Now let’s stop the fun and games and examine some of the neglected facts and facets of the UFO situation and compare these facts with the speculations of the buffs. For our purpose a “fact” is based upon identical observations in several different parts of the world. Thus if six teen-agers report a bizarre inci- dent in Nebraska and an iden- tical incident is reported from South America and/or Australia and is repeated in Canada and/or Norway we can assume that this phenomenon has basis in fact. The reliability of the wit- nesses becomes less important than the incident correlations! And it is time to compare some correlated facts with the popular speculations of the UFO buffs. For instance: It is a Fact that throughout his- tory strange, unnatural sub- stances have fallen from the skies. Slag (industrial refuse) fell on Darmstadt, Germany, in 1846; slag reportedly fell from a UFO over Puget Sound in 1947. Many other substances reported- ly have fallen from UFOs over the years and in nearly every case these substances have proven to be ordinary earthly 91 ABOUT THE AUTHOR, JOHN A. KEEL is well-known for his mag- azine and newspaper articles as well as many radio, TV and motion picture scripts. The North American Newspaper Alliance syndicates his features to more than 150 major news outlets in the United States and abroad. For | several years he has spe veled wide- eres translated and reprinted in foreign coun- tries, The book Space” (Fawcett Publications, New York, N.Y.) presents a gamut ranging from UFO occupants fo ghosties and ghoulies and ially notable for its extensive doc- leased by G. P. ration Trojan Horse," definitive study of the UFO Phenomenon. materials such as aluminum, magnesium, silicon, etc. There are hundreds of these cases from every country on earth. But because BUFF FABLE insists the UFOs are of extraterrestrial origin any physical substance falling from them must consist of alloys unknown to earth. There- fore, all of these cases are hoaxes! But if the organized buffs had systematically collected all of these fragments instead of dis- carding them and made the92 necessary correlations they now would have an impressive body of evidence proving that UFOs do exist and are manufactured from or utilize common earthly materials. It is a racr that it has been frequently and reliably re- ported that the unidentified ob- jects have executed sharp right- angle turns while traveling at high speed, thereby defying the known laws of inertia, (Any oc- cupants caught in such a maneu- ver should be crushed by “G” — gravity — forces.) But Burr Fase insists that such maneuvers prove the objects are the product of an “advanced technology” and as such must come from another planet. Nevertheless, such maneuvers indicate only that the objects operate outside the known phys- ical laws. They prove nothing of the object’s origin or technology. It is a Facr that the objects frequently have been reported to travel at incredibly high speeds within our atmosphere (they have exceeded 25,000 mph on radar). Yet they produce no sonic boom. Any physical object traveling at such speeds would have to displace air and produce booms. Burr Fase has it that the ab- sence of sonic booms indicates, again, that an advanced techno- logy is involved. FATE Actually the absence of sonic booms indicates that the objects are cither nonphysical (mirages, projections, etc.) or are com- posed of substances of less den- sity than the air around them. In other words, these objects may pass between the molecules of air rather than force these mole- cules aside. Again, this points to something outside our known physical laws but not necessarily outside our planet. It is a Fact that in many docu- mented cases the unidentified objects have landed in snow or mud without leaving any marks and UFO occupants have been observed under similar condi- tions and they too have left no footprints behind. (There are now hundreds of such cases.) The UFO buffs automatically reject these cases as “hoaxes” because of the absence of phy- sical “proof.” It is probable that both the craft and occupants in these cases are nonphysical in our sense of the term. They could be of a different density. They re- portedly have been seen to leap or “fly” long distances and jump easily over high obstructions. Because of a density difference they may, therefore, be unaf- fected by gravity in the same way we are. (‘The irony here is that the buffery accepts the ab- sence of sonic booms as proofFABLES OF THE UFO AGE that the objects are extrater- restrial but the absence of ground markings or footprints is regarded as proof that the sight- ing report is erroneous or a hoax.) It is a vacr that numerous wit- nesses have reported UFO oc- cupants walking through the seemingly solid walls of ground- ed saucers. There is also a grow- ing list of cases in which witness- es have claimed that occupants walked through the walls of homes, into the faces of solid hills and cliffs, etc. The buffs generally reject these reports outright and they rarely are published in the buffery journals. Nevertheless these incidents lend additional support to the thesis that some of the objects and their occupants are non- physical and of a different den- sity, enabling them to pass through solid matter in the same way that smoke passes through a window screen. It is a racr that in the early 1950’s one Colonel Maitland, USAF, inadvertently flew his jet fighter straight into and through a large UFO he was pursuing. The buffery shelved this report and it hasn’t been mentioned since. But obviously Colonel Maitland’s UFO was of a differ- ent density than his airplane be- cause the two were able to oc- 93 cupy the same space at the same time. It also is a Fact that over 50 percent of reported sightings in- volve objects described as being transparent or translucent. The buffery tends to shelve such reports and concentrate only on sightings of apparently solid objects. But while the bufs have tried to convince everyone the objects are solid machines, over 50 per- cent of the sightings suggest that they are not solid. And perhaps they are not machines! Another Fact: in a large per- centage of cases objects viewed at low level visibly change their size and/or shape while in full view. BUFF FABLE ignores these cases. Nevertheless this surprising non- physical characteristic further suggests that many of the ob- jects are not machines. It is a racr that in hundreds of landing reports the objects are said to have appeared or disap- peared instantly. In such cases the objects often appear sudden- ly on the ground. Then instead of taking off they vanish . . . often in a bright explosive flash. The few UFO buffs who have studied these cases have as- sumed that the objects simply took off so fast they couldn’t be seen. There are two other “impos.94 sible” answers: the objects can become invisible either by be- coming totally transparent or by bending light rays around them- selves; or such objects are three- dimensional projections (like a laser beam hologram) and do not physically exist. Ivan San- derson and others suggest still a third possibility —that the ob- jects move from place to place by teleportation or instant trans- ference (ITF). It is a Fact that thousands of reports from the 19th and 20th Centuries describe unidentified objects which suddenly exploded in midair and disappeared. Some of the Scandinavian re- ports in 1946 also mentioned this peculiar characteristic. Burr FABLE insists the objects explode when caught in a radar beam. But this hardly explains the cases from the 1800's or the innumerable radar sightings in which the objects did not ex- plode. In actuality no one has bother- ed to collect and study these in- triguing and possibly significant cases. Since those exploding UFOs usually are audible, the noises may be caused by air rushing in to occupy the space where a material object had been. In some cases the explod- ing object apparently sprayed fragments over the area but no fragments could be found. In the FATE few cases where such fragments have been located they proved to be aluminum or magnesium. This kind of data deserves ex- tensive study. It is racr that in a majority of all UFO reports, both historical and contemporary, only flying lights were observed; no solid object was visible. Burr FABLE says a solid object is hidden within these lights and the illumination is caused by the ionization of the air produced by the theoretical electrical field surrounding the craft. ‘As a matter of Fact many of these lights are only a few inches in diameter; yet they behave in a controlled, intelligent manner. While some of these lights may be part of a larger, unseen craft, many of them probably are non- physical and might be similar to what we call “focused radar.” Another Facr in evidence: the solid, definitely configurated dise or cigar-shaped objects with windows, fins, antennae and ap- parently metallic construction are quite rare in comparison to the type of reports outlined above. They constitute a minor- ity of the total sightings. But BUFF FABLE has concen- trated on these sightings, thus basing its speculations on only a small fragment of the data available. Actually, since the solid,96 machinelike objects are the rarest of all, they may represent the least important of the overall phenomenon. A really significant study of the UFO mystery must include a study of all the report- ed phenomena —not a superfi- cial choosing of those cases that seem to support a single theory. What with overlooking or ig- noring a large proportion of the FATE available data it is little wonder we are failing to comprehend or explain UFOs. Clearly, a large part of the phenomena suggests nonphysical characteristics be- yond the grasp of our present- day science. But we’ve had our eyes shut for a long time and the UFOs haven’t gone away! It's time to find and try a new approach,