| library of light | download |
FLYING SAUCERS HAVE LANDED
DESMOND LESLIE
and
GEORGE ADAMSKI
1957
2006
PRINTING HISTORY
First Published T. Werner Laurie in 1953
Second Impression September 1953
Third Impression October 1953
Fourth Impression October 1953
Fifth Impression November 1953
Sixth Impression December 1953
Seventh Impression March 1954
Eighth Impression November 1954
This Panther edition was just published in 1957.
(+)
"If Adamski and the six companions who swore an affidavit to his Space Man encounter are not trying to pull off a gigantic hoax, then this is quite possibly the greatest story ever."
That was what the Daily Sketch wrote about" Flying Saucers Have Landed." For, in the second part of this book, Adamski swears that he saw a space ship land in the desert in California and that he made contact with one of its occupants. More, he provides considerable testimony to support his claims.
Desmond Leslie, who contributes the first part of the book, goes even further, asserting that flying saucers have been landing on earth for thousands of years, and gives records of their arrivals
(++)
I would like to dedicate Book One to Shaun and to Christopher-Mark who will know much more about these things than their father by the time they are grown up,
DESMOND LESLIE.
Book Two of this work is dedicated to People, everywhere and in every world.
GEORGE ADAMSKI.
July, 1953.
I wish to thank Michael Juste, Robert Roberts, b.sc., Harold Chibbett, Oswald Frewen and Herbert Jones, who in various ways have provided me with invaluable assistance in the preparation of Book One.
I also wish to thank the Editors of Time and Life for their kind permission to reprint the seven incidents from Life mentioned in Chapter 2; Elliott Rockmore for kindly supplying the Flying Saucer Review, referred to in Chapter 4; Theosophical Publishing House for allowing liberal quotations from the works of Besant, Leadbeater and Sinnett; Lucis Press for the quotations from The Tibetan; Andrew Dakers Ltd for the extract from More Things In Heaven, and the various Saucer Research Groups throughout the world who have furnished material. Also to Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd, for permission to quote from The Flying Saucers Are Real, by Donald Keyhoe. No acknowledgment would be complete without a most grateful thought cast in the direction of the shade of the late Charles Fort, whose researches have literally saved me years of labour.
DESMOND LESLIE
With grateful thanks I acknowledge the sincere co-operation and untiring efforts of those who have helped me make this book possible. And without the editing and helpful encouragement of C.L.J. this book in its present form and at this time would have been impossible.
GEORGE ADAMSKI
(**)
About eighteen million years ago, say the strange and ancient legends of our little planet, at a time when Mars, Venus and Earth were in close conjunction, along a magnetic path so formed came a huge, shining, radiant vessel of dazzling power and beauty, bringing to earth ‘thrice thirty-five’ human beings, of perfection beyond our highest ideals; gods rather than men; divine kings of archaic memory, under whose benign world-government a shambling, hermaphrodite monster was evolved into thinking, sexual man. 1
1/ See: The Tibetan and A. Bailey, A Treatise on Cosmic Fire; Annie Besant, The Pedigree of Man; H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Vols. I and III; A. E. Powell, The Solar System; C. W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant, Man, Where, Whence and Whither.
The arts by which these elder members of the Solar Family propelled their vessels, raised great weights, and ordered their dominion over natural elements (say the legends) were imparted to our early forefathers who, later, built shining vessels of their own, and with colossal intuition explored the upper spaces, and sought out the secrets of the inner depths. They understood and wielded states of matter whose existence modern science barely suspects, and constructed forms outside the crippling limitations of tangible matter.
From then until the present day, earthly constructions, and constructions from a myriad of other worlds, have been seen and recorded in our sky.
When press and radio came, enabling man to fill the whole world with his chatter, hitherto restricted by the effective range of his lungs, a luminous body seen over London or an aerial phenomenon seen in Western America would cause speculation in Australia and wonder in India all on the same day—thanks to the modern improvements.
That is why, on 24 June 1947, when Kenneth Arnold saw a fleet of ten shining circular disks whizzing along at a thousand miles per hour, darting in and out of the peaks around Mount Rainier, State of Washington, the news flashed round the world with the speed of light waves, and started the commotion we call flying saucers.
Arnold certainly started something (revived would be more accurate), and from then on a steady stream of reports came in, mainly from trustworthy, observant citizens who had noticed that an early form of locomotion was once more active in the air. In spite of constant denials and quite unbelievable explanations, the governments of the world have gradually been forced to give their attention to the matter and to create secret departments for investigation. Today, the American Government has dropped its original attitude of disbelief and admitted that it has over eighteen hundred authentic cases on its files. The British Air Ministry is more cautious, but grudgingly admits that it also has a secret department to deal with or to discourage questions.
The American Government, however, on 25 September 1952 dropped the alarming hint that it accepts these phenomena but hints that it is not in the public interest for it to publish all it knows.
Now such a remark is disquieting, not only to those old ladies who nightly peer beneath their beds for burglars, but also to the general public, down whose communal spine a slightly chilling sensation is apt to pass. Thus it is the purpose of this book to find out just what that something could be the authorities do not wish us to know. And the result of this Pandora-like curiosity is to land ourselves with a splash in Stygian waters, well out of our depth, and out of the depth, too, we think, of the authorities, governmental and scientific, who would be loath to consider such possibilities. Nor is it really their business to do so, for when governments start plumbing the river Styx, the results are not always beneficial to the governed.
However, having wet ourselves in its alluring waters we have, undaunted, dropped our little plumbline, and in the course of our survey made some quite unexpected soundings, usually in places where the few existing charts say: ‘No bottom’; and at others, where the depth is confidently given, the line has practically run out of our hands into some unfathomable abyss. The following chapters will present the findings as they came.
A word in passing, and a warning. This book is neither intended for, nor humbly dedicated to, the statistician, nor anyone else who mistakes figures for facts, nor does it aim to please the followers of what is called Popular Science. A proponent of the latter once took considerable pains explaining to G. K. Chesterton that the diamond was exactly the same as a lump of coal. At the end of it all Chesterton replied: ‘Any fool can see it isn’t !’
It is to this sort of fool; to the lonely heretic who likes to walk alone down strange untrodden paths; to him who believes that all things are possible, particularly those things held by other men to be impossible; to him who leaves no stone unturned, and to him who gives a second chance to ‘the stone rejected by the builders’, that this book is dedicated.
To these I offer some very curious stones for the turning; taking no responsibility whatsoever for anything they may find beneath.
BOOK ONE
(1)
What Saucers Are Not
Ever since the cliché ‘Flying Saucer’ was coined, the greatest and most exciting mystery of our age has been automatically reduced to the level of a music hall joke. The comics of Vaudeville and the comedians of State and Science banded together, most successfully, to encourage humanity in its oldest and easiest method of escape—to laugh at what it does not understand.
From then on, anyone who said ‘I have seen a flying saucer’ or, worse, ‘I believe in flying saucers’ was considered a bit of a leg-puller, or some kind of a crank. Despite evidence to the contrary (and there is enough of it to fill many volumes), there is still a widespread notion, hazy and ill-defined as are all popular notions, that flying saucers are some kind of American joke, a newspaper stunt, or the result of something not quite nice. On top of this comes an even hazier reassurance that the mystery has already been cleared up; that the skies have been purged of these ungodly objects and that there is nothing more to worry about.
For this latter notion we can thank those semi-scientists and self-appointed ‘experts’ who have simply failed to study the facts. Too many glib pontifications have been issued to the Faithful by those who should know better. Scores of neatly parcelled explanations have been doled out which barely cover a few of the facts. But to say, as their perpetrators say, that they cover all the cases on record is a flagrant untruth for which a Higher Justice may, or may not forgive them.
Let me say at the outset that I have devoted the last two and a half years solely to the investigation of this phenomenon: that I have studied thousands of cases and read reports both ancient and modern; that I have studied with an unbiased mind things which seemed possible, and things that seemed impossible, and that I feel as qualified to speak as any ‘expert’ who after a few weeks, or even days, of research calmly announces the once-and-for-all solution, and returns thence to his normal activities. www.universe-people.com www.cosmic-people.com
Let me say also that if I write of the flying saucer mystery in a light or easy style it is not because I do not seriously mean what I say. On the contrary, I take flying saucers extremely seriously; but I deplore pedantry and, like the ancient Toltecs, I find the serious things of life a cause for joy and pleasure rather than for pompous gloom.
And lastly, though I would prefer to use the ancient names for the sky disks such as ‘cars celestial’, ‘vimanas’, and ‘fiery chariots’, I shall use the modern abomination ‘flying saucers’ throughout this volume, merely to. avoid confusion.
I would like to devote little time to proving or disproving the reality of these wonderful flying objects. In fact, I would like to get right down to essentials without further ado, but for those who have heard of saucers only by hearsay or read of them in the popular Sunday papers that would prove a little unsatisfactory, so I shall dedicate the first part of this book to an account of what has happened up to the time of writing.
Let me say once again, that although I quote less than two hundred incidents, these have been selected from nearly two thousand cuttings, reports, articles, manuscripts and ancient documents supplied to me by kind helpers from many countries this side of the Iron Curtain. To quote them all would require a volume the size of a city telephone directory. For the past eighteen months barely a single day has gone by without flying saucers being reported somewhere in the world. But I am being modest. On some days there have been as many as ten different sightings in different places. And if a thing is seen daily, week after week, month after month, by ordinary people in free countries, then it follows that the thing in question must surely exist.
* * *
Do you remember the first amazing story ?
It came on 21 June 1947, three days before Arnold’s experience over Mount Rainier. A man named Dahl was out in the Tacoma Harbour Patrol boat near Maury Island. He looked up and saw six large disks about 2,000 feet above him. Five of them were slowly circling one that seemed to be in difficulties. Slowly they sank to within 500 feet of the sea, without a sound or whisper. Then suddenly there was a loud boom from the central disk and out fell a light, and a dark, metal object. Fragments landed in the water near the island, causing a loud hissing noise, whereupon the whole flight rose and shot off to sea.
Three days later Maury Island was visited and layers of slaglike substance were found there. Reports circulated that dark and light coloured metal disks were among the droppings. Air Intelligence was brought in and pronounced ex cathedra, through the vocal organs of a Major Sanders, that the metal was just slag. Neither the Major, nor Dahl, seemed to have noticed that slag, cinders, blue ice, jelly-like stuff and clinker have been recorded as arriving in large quantities on this planet, in utterly unexplained circumstances, for the last three hundred years.
Then came a variation. Experienced airmen began to see them. Two airline pilots, Adams and Anderson, were flying their D.C.3 the 130 miles from Memphis to Little Rock on the night of 31 March 1950 when a huge glowing flying saucer zoomed down at terrific speed to investigate them. On the central cupola there was a bright blue-white flashing light—either a signal or part of the propelling mechanism. And on the lower side, the airline pilots observed a row of eight or ten brilliantly lighted portholes. They thought they were portholes, but admitted that they could have been vents through which some kind of powerful energy was flowing.
‘I’ve been a sceptic all my life’, said Adams in his report,’ but what can you do when you see something like that ? We were both flabbergasted.’
Both pilots were slightly blinded by the glare. ‘It was the strongest blue-white light I’ve ever seen,’ said Adams.
Something just as bright, but quite different in construction, was seen by Eastern Airline pilots, Chiles and Whitted, early in July 1948 on a flight near Montgomery, Alabama. A large ‘aerial submarine’ three times the size of a B.29 came alongside and circled their aircraft. It was torpedo-shaped and glowed all over with a weird dark-blue light. There was a double row of ports or vents along the side from which came an unearthly white light. After inspecting them for some moments, the thing suddenly let out a sheet of flame, fifty feet long, turned up its nose at an abrupt angle, and shot off at about 700-1,000 m.p.h., rocking the sedate D.C.3 with its mighty blast.
Earlier still, nine flying saucers, in loose formation, were seen by Captain E. Smith, of United Airlines, eight minutes flying time away from Boise, Idaho, on 4 July 1947. Smith and his copilot, Ralph Stevens, saw the disks silhouetted against the late-evening sky, and at first thought they were aircraft. Notice, please, that they were ‘silhouetted’. Fireballs, illusions, and refractions of light do not produce dark silhouettes against the evening, or any other, sky. Four more saucers joined the group, giving the two pilots and their stewardess time to observe them thoroughly. ‘They were flat and roundish,’ they said afterwards, ‘and larger than ordinary aircraft.’
A huge round disk flying on its edge came alongside a Chicago-bound plane on the night of 27 April 1950. Captain Adickes, the airline pilot, said it looked like a giant wheel. ‘It was very smooth and streamlined and glowed evenly with a bright red colour as if it were heated stainless Steel. It appeared to fly on edge like a wheel going down a highway.’
It was intelligently controlled—either by repulse mechanism or by thinking beings, for each time Adickes tried to bring his plane nearer, the object turned away from him, keeping perfect distance until it decided it had seen enough of the comic terrestrial contraption lumbering along at a mere 200 m.p.h., and shot off in a sudden burst of speed, zooming down to 1,500 feet, where it passed over a place called South Bend, and disappeared in the distance.
Then came the tragedy.
A red glow in the clouds over Godman Field, Kentucky—a disk the size of the Pentagon, lurking, silently, above a fighter base—a construction dwarfing the Queen Mary supported by dull orange flames that lit up the cloud base and caused Captain Mantell, of the U.S.A.A.F., to be dispatched in his tiny pursuit plane to investigate. When Mantell found it, his voice came over the radio, full of excitement. It was immense, he said, a colossal metallic thing, 500-1,000 feet in diameter, and cruising at 250 m.p.h. He was going to try to overtake it. As soon as it sighted (or sensed) him, the giant began climbing at 400 m.p.h. It accelerated faster than any jet, and Mantell went streaking up in pursuit. The next news of Mantell was that the wreckage of his plane had been found in tiny pieces, scored by peculiar deep lines as if he had got into a shower of some terribly powerful unexplainable something; as though he had flown into the tremendous exhaust stream—or worse—against which no terrestrial metal could survive.
Ex Cathedra spoke Authority. First, Mantell had been ‘chasing the planet Venus’. Will some kind illusionist kindly explain how the planet Venus could appear as a disk 500 feet across, going at 200 m.p.h.; afterwards climbing rapidly and emitting orange flames ? Later, we read of a new official explanation, that Mantell had hit a ‘Skyhook’ meteorological balloon and crashed.
Well, say he had ? Would it tear his plane to pieces ? I am quite willing, for anyone who will pay my expenses, to pilot a fighter plane through a Skyhook balloon any time of the day or night and observe the results, without very much fear of hurting myself. But when has a Skyhook ever cruised along at 250 m.p.h., or risen sharply at 400 m.p.h., with orange flames, etc., etc., into the bargain ?
But officially Mantell had chased the planet Venus, metamorphosed later into a Skyhook balloon, and thus, alas, met his death.
Another theory followed about a mirage or magnification caused by layers of hot air or cold air, or something no one knows anything at all about, but in that case why doesn’t this sometimes magnify the sun, distort the moon, stretch out the stars ? Why always pick on poor old Venus ? This Venus idea makes it very hard to understand a sighting at White Sands Rocket Testing Ground, New Mexico, where a flying saucer was tracked by radar, and found to be cantering along at a mere 18,000 m.p.h. We’ve had radar echoes from the moon, but not yet from Venus, so far as I am aware.
Far from solving the mystery, radar has only added to it. Sometimes, ‘invisible’ flying saucers have produced the type of radar echo that indicates a solid body moving at high speed. At other times, when the flying object itself was visible to the eye, it has produced the kind of indefinite image on the radar screen associated with ionised air or radioactive clouds. And other times, solid-looking saucers have given clear ‘solid body’ echoes and have been tracked at speeds up to 20,000 m.p.h. The American papers have contained many such reports over the last few years, and the U.S.A.A.F. has issued special equipment to various units in an attempt to solve the mystery.
In England the R.A.F. has had incidents, most of which occurred during large-scale official exercises. The two I shall now quote as examples come from officers personally known to me. Reasons oblige me to withhold their names; one is a scientist, the other the son of a famous London editor and theatre critic.
One (the editor’s son) told me that while on duty in November 1952 he tracked a vast object, flying in cloud, from the river Humber in Yorkshire to the Thames Estuary; it covered the 200 miles in a matter of two and a quarter minutes !
The other (the scientist) was in comand of an East Coast radar post during ‘Exercise Ardent’. At 3.20 a.m. his attention was drawn to a ‘blip’ on the radar screen which suggested a flight of ten closely-packed aircraft leaving the English coast and heading towards Holland. The incredible speed of these objects—or object—made direct measurement of their speed impossible, but calculations, twice checked, showed them to be shifting along at 21,000 m.p.h. !
Worse was in store. When they—or it—reached the Dutch Coast, the screen went blank. The thing had physically disappeared, which even a schoolboy knows to he impossible.
The scientist’s explanation (which is the only explanation to our limited knowledge) is that the thing ‘dematerialised’ or rather translated itself into a higher octave of matter, quite beyond our present comprehension.
Unfortunately, most scientists and other ‘experts’ are not willing to be so broadminded. Saucers offend them because they cannot be conveniently pigeon-holed into What-Is-Known-and-Accepted. From the time of Captain Mantell’s tragic death to the present-day, the ‘experts’ have told us glibly one thing after another—contradiction following contradiction until our heads, like the saucers, are spinning in the air.
They say that flying disks are:
‘Small specks of dust before the eyes which look like large objects far away,’ vouchsafes a Group Captain.
‘Mass Hysteria,’ says an American psychiatrist.
‘Not so much mass hysteria as collective illusion,’ says the Australian Institute of Applied Psychology, in a kindly attempt to soften the blow. Apparently it is less ignoble to be suffering from collective illusion than from mass hysteria.
‘Spots in front of the eyes.’
‘Red blood corpuscles inside the eyes.’
‘Cobwebs flying high.’
‘Meteors.’
‘Distant headlights.’
‘Venus.’
‘The Perseids.’
‘Balloons.’
‘Ionised air.’
‘Un-ionised air.’
‘Cold air and hot air causing refraction at certain levels.’
‘Just hot air.’
‘Nuts !’ says Dr. Menzel of Harvard University, in an exclusive interview for an American magazine; (‘nuts’ ejaculatory rather than vegetable).
‘Sex’ say some progressive psychiatrists, well up in their desire-trauma.
We thought sex would creep into it sooner or later.
And lastly from Russia where, because Stalin failed to invent them,’ they are a case of pure war-mongering psychosis,’ according to Professor Kukarkin, of Moscow.
In fact, flying saucers are everything except flying saucers.
Bewildered, befuddled, and unimpressed, we turn to Washington, D.C. There, surely, in the City of Experts, we shall find an expert who really knows what it is all about ?
Tons of paper meet our eye; a vast and costly monument known as ‘Project Saucer’ which, a few years ago, was launched to find the complete and final answer. ‘Project Saucer’ fizzled out, or was shelved, or sent in disgrace to the dungeons of the Pentagon for not giving the correct answers. ‘Project Twinkle’ followed (was some humorist responsible for this choice name ?) and vast quantities of paper were consumed; many men did many things, so that from time to time the Pentagon could issue a new Dogma to the Faithful.
Some of the Dogmas thus issued were:
30 July 1952: General Samford of the U.S.A.A.F. speaking: ‘Eighty per cent, of all objects sighted could be explained by natural causes, but twenty per cent. remain inexplicable.’
Exactly a month earlier, a Mr. Sid Eubanks had arrived in Enid, Oklahoma, white and shaking; he tells the police how an enormous flying saucer, ‘four hundred feet wide at least’, swept down and almost blew his car off the road with its colossal exhaust, blast, or back-wash.
General Samford adds comfort, for there is nothing to fear. ‘Flying saucers are definitely not a menace to America.’
Mr Eubanks is comforted.
A day before the General’s announcement, the Faithful are told that saucers are definitely not American secret weapons, but more likely ‘spots before the eyes’.
Possibly a spot 400 feet long before Mr. Eubank’s eyes caused him to drive his car into a ditch.
25 September: the Pentagon announces a ‘breath-taking report’, expressing the belief that some flying saucers are interplanetary and may originate in outer space; this report they decided not to publish, lest it cause too much public alarm.
The announcement adds that over 1,800 sightings have been examined.
Eighteen hundred sightings ! 2
2/ At the time of first publication of the cloth-bound edition this figure had risen to ‘over 3,000’.
That’s practically one for every day since Arnold first saw them.
Eighteen hundred or not, the panic and possible alarm was swiftly allayed. On 12 November came the ‘final, complete and official answer’, exquisitely phrased by an official spokesman called Colonel Watson:
‘Bunk !’
‘It’s a lot of damn nonsense... they just don’t exist,’ said the Colonel to the Faithful. He may, in keeping with the general mood of erudition and enlightenment, have added an anathema to heretics: ‘Let all who believe to the contrary be damned for un-American activities’, but I can find no trace of it. Or maybe it was forgotten when, at Christmas six weeks later, the Pentagonists found a heretic in their ranks, as General Samford hinted that landings by flying saucers ‘were possible’.
At this stage, we would like to leave the Pentagonists alone and be troubled by them no more, for it seems we shall obtain little truth, coherence or guidance from that modern Tower of Babel. But the question is ‘Will they leave us alone ?’
It is doubtful.
For a long time various world powers have, despite their contradictions and denials, been doing their utmost to build a flying saucer of their own. If my information is correct they have nearly succeeded in constructing a moderate imitation—that is to say—a near-circular aeroform such as the ‘Avro Saucer’ that will far exceed the performance of most existing aircraft.
Very well ! What of it ? Let them get on with it. Why confuse the issue ?
Only that we may be sure that if, and when, the existence of such an aircraft is announced, it will also be declared as the cause of the mystery all along. We shall be told that all the flying saucers seen to date (with the exception of illusions, balloons, etc., etc.) were experimental prototypes and nothing more.
The pity is that many people will believe it. It will sound so convincing. ‘You, the public, have been seeing flying saucers. We, the Powers, have been making flying saucers !’
What could be simpler ? The two pieces fit together with all the moronic neatness of a form and its carbon duplicate. Unfortunately, neither I nor many saucer researchers will believe it.
So to safeguard the Faithful from all duplicity we shall now, with their indulgence, start going backwards through time... back to when there was no Soviet Russia, no United States of America; back to an age when there actually was no Great Britain; then back farther to when there was no Rome, no Greece, no Ancient Egypt, back and back until we are lost in the earliest mists of time.
And what do we find there ? The hazy outline of a prehistoric flying saucer ? Alas no ! We find, instead, the solid outline of wonderful vehicles, beautifully built, packed with power sources still unknown to us. We find in fact that space vehicles are not a product of the twentieth century imagination, but have existed in human memory and records since our particular human family first began to think and to remember.
So if the flying saucers are the experimental craft of modern governments, then we can only say that they have been experimenting a very long time.
(2)
The Flying Saucer Museum
We shall not go back too far at first. A.D. 1290 is as good a place to begin as any. We have on our right, Ladies and Gentlemen, an old manuscript discovered at Ampleforth Abbey in January 1953, which gives a very clear account of a flying saucer passing over the startled community of Byland Abbey in Yorkshire.
‘oves a Wilfredo susceptos die festo sanctissimorum Simonis atque Judae assaverunt. Cum autem Henricus abbas gratias redditurus erat, frater quidam Joannes introivit, magnam portentem foris esse referebat. Turn vero omnes ecuccurrerunt, et ecce res grandis, circumcircularis argentea, disco quodam hand dissimilis, lente e super eos volans atque maximam terrorem exitans. Quo tempore Henricus abbas exclamavit Wilfredum adulteravisse (qua) de causa impius esse de .. .’
A. X. Chumley, who supplied this information, gives the following translation:
‘Took the sheep from Wilfred and roasted them on the feast of S.S. Simon and Jude. But when Henry the Abbott was about to say grace, John, one of the brethren, came in and said there was a great portent outside. Then they all ran out, and Lo ! a large round silver thing like a disk flew slowly over them and excited the greatest terror. Whereat Henry the Abbot immediately cried that Wilfred was an adulterer, wherefore it was impious to...’ 3
3/ These seven incidents are reprinted with the kind permission of the Editors of Time and Life International, published 5 May 1952, copyright Time Inc., with acknowledgments to H. B. Darrack, jnr., and Robert Ginna.
There is a remarkable similarity in this report to that sent to the Editor of the London Observer on 23 March 1953 by Bruce Angrave, m.s.i.a., who also saw a large round silver thing like a disk pass slowly over Milan Cathedral on 2 November 1952. And there are several hundred other modern reports that use exactly the same phrase for describing the appearance of a flying saucer—’ a large silver round thing.’ And in December of 1952 a photograph of one was taken in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, that certainly fills the description given by the terrified and sex-scandalised monks of Byland in 1290. It is a pity the rest of the manuscript is missing. I long to hear what Brother Wilfred had been up to, and what the Abbot thought would be impious.
What probably happened is that a flying saucer did, in fact, pass over Byland Abbey at the close of the thirteenth century and that the astute Abbot Henry seized the opportunity to admonish Wilfred for his carryings-on, and the community for their lack of piety. Whenever something inexplicable happens, the zealots of each age take it as a sign of celestial umbrage and hasten to warn their erring brethren; just as the Dutch Pastors were swift to declare the recent catastrophe a direct retribution for the sins of their sheep. Whereas, had they suggested it could have been the inevitable result of nuclear necromancy in another part of the Globe they might have come nearer to the truth.
Our next exhibit is an old print showing the startled inhabitants of Devon gazing skywards at a neat V-shaped formation of dark elliptical objects (rather like tadpoles) with fins or streaming exhausts, that passed over Devon in 1704. These things are not meteors, ‘Northern Lights’, nor comets. They are shown as dark solid objects, flying in formation, in broad daylight.
And now, please, step into the seventeenth and eighteenth century galleries of the Flying Saucer Museum where we have an assembly of space-craft of all different shapes, hues and sizes, few of which can be glibly dismissed as meteors, aurora or other natural phenomena.
SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY GALLERY
1619 Flüelen, Switzerland. Enormous long fiery object seen flying along a lake by Prefect Christopher Schere.
1661 Huge flaming things seen over Worcester, England.
1704 January 8th. Strange lights over England.
November 4th. Switzerland. Luminous cloud, moving at high velocity, disappearing behind the horizon.
1731 December 9th. Florence, Italy. Strange globes of light in the sky.
1750 June. Edinburgh, Scotland. Vast ball of fire, moving slowly.
1752 April 15th. Stavanger, Norway. Strange, bright, octagonal object.
1752 Augermannland. Spheres of fire emanating from a long, bright tubular object.
1755 October 15th. Lisbon, Portugal. Immense bright flying globes seen many times.
1761 November 2nd. Procession of ‘immense globes’ cross Switzerland.
1762 August 9th. Basle, Switzerland. An enormous dark spindle-shaped object, surrounded by a glowing outer ring, seen slowly crossing the sun’s disk, by astronomers, de Rostan at Basle, and Croste at Sole.
1777 June 17th. The French astronomer Charles Messier observes large number of dark round disks in sky.
1779 June 7th. Boulogne, France. Flight of numerous glowing disks pass over the city.
NINETEENTH CENTURY GALLERY
This vast hall, Ladies and Gentlemen, which you now see stretching away as far as the eye can see, is the Nineteenth Century Gallery. Enter, if you will, and see saucers that came in such numbers to observe the Victorian Age and Industrial Revolution. Exhibit One is dated:
1802 February 7th. A dark disk crossing the sun, seen by the Astronomer Fritsch at Magdeburg in central Germany.
October 10th. Another dark disk seen by Herr Fritsch.
1808 October 12th. Pinerolo, Piedmont. Luminous disks pass over the town.
1813 July 31st. Tottenham, Middlesex. Flashing lights in the sky.
1816 Lisbon, Portugal. Strange objects seen in sky after an earthquake.
Autumn. Edinburgh, Scotland. Large luminous crescent-or heel-shaped aircraft crossing the horizon.
1817 Palermo, Italy. Dark flying object that howled.
1818 January 16th. Astronomer Loft of Ipswich, England, observed strange object near the sun, visible for three hours and a half.
1819 Spring. Two dark bodies cross the sun together, observes Astronomer Gruithuisen.
1820 February 12th and April 27th. Unknown bodies in the sky.
September 7th. Embrun, S.E. France. Wonderfully even formations of flying objects cross the town in straight lines, turn ninety degrees, then fly away again, keeping perfect formation.
1821 November 22nd. Luminous disk crosses the Channel.
1822 October 23rd. Astronomer Pastorff observes, two unknown objects pass across the sun’s disk.
1823 May 22nd. Astronomer Webb sees bright shining thing near Venus.
1826 April 1st. Saarbrücken, France. A grey torpedo-shaped object seen rapidly approaching the earth.
July 31st. Unknown object seen by astronomers.
1828 May 26th. Disk crossing the sun, seen through telescope.
1831 September 6th to November 1st. Geneva, Switzerland. Dr. Wartmann and his observatory staff see strange luminous body, night after night. Not seen anywhere else on Earth.
November 29th. Thuringia, Germany. Fiery disk seen ‘the apparent size of the moon’..
1833 Toland, Ohio. Very brilliant object shaped like a hook.
November’ 13th. Niagara Falls, U.S.A. A large square luminous aircraft was seen for over an hour.
November 5th. Chile. Bright disk passes near the sun.
1834 Astronomer Pastorff reports two round objects of different size. He sees them again in 1836 and 1837.
1835 May 11th. Luminous disk seen by Cociatore, a Sicilian astronomer.
1836 January 12th. Cherbourg, France. A large luminous vessel hangs over the city. It rotates on its own axis and seems to have a hole in the centre like a doughnut.
May 15th. Professor Auber sees a number of luminous objects move away from the sun in different directions.
1837 February 16th. Pastorff sees more strange things flying around.
1838 India. A flying disk with a long glowing orange appendage.
1844 October 4th. Astronomer Glaisher reports luminous disk ‘sending out quick flickering waves of light’.
1845 March 29th. London, England. Stationary orange object like a luminous mist, supported by four bright lights, like stars.
May 11th. Signor Capocci, of Capodimonte Observatory, Naples, sees number of shining disks flying west to east, some are star-shaped, others have luminous tails.
June 18th. Three luminous disks rise from the sea and remain visible ten minutes, half a mile from the ship Victoria (36° 40’ N. Latitude, 13° 44’ E. Longitude). They are described as being five times as big as the moon and appear to be connected by some kind of glowing streamers. They are seen simultaneously by many different observers as far apart as nine hundred miles.
July 25th. Florence, Italy. An enormous fiery disk riding overhead, ‘many times larger than the moon’.
December 2nd. Flaming lights seen far out to sea off Ryook Phyoo, China.
1846 October 26th. Lowell, Mass., U.S.A. A luminous flying disk from which fell a lump of most fetid-smelling jelly which was found to weigh four hundred and forty-two pounds, and was four feet in diameter.
1847 March 19th. Holloway, London, England. Blazing spherical craft rises vertically into clouds.
1848 September 19th. Inverness, Scotland. Two large objects, ‘as bright as stars’, sometimes stationary, sometimes moving at high speed.
1849 Gais, Switzerland. Thousand upon thousand of luminous objects seen by Astronomer Inglis crossing a clear sky. Some had what appeared to be wings, or a coronal glow. Autumn. Deal, England. ‘Dark bodies in the sky.’
1850 February 5th. Sandwich, Kent, England. A ‘speck of light slowly approaches on a straight course until it has become one-third the size of the moon; it then remains stationary for three minutes’.
June 6th. Côte d’Azur, France. A red globe crosses the sky, leaving a hail of sparks; it drops a dark object.
1851 September 4th. England. As if interested by the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, a vast host of luminous disks stream from the East and from the North. The procession lasts from 9.30 a.m. till 3.30 p.m., and are observed through the telescope of the Rev. W. Read.
1852 September 11th. Fair Oak, Staffs, England. Between 4.15 a.m. and 4.45 a.m. several early-morning risers see a strange luminous disk, surrounded by a haze of corona, near the planet Venus. Venus is at the point of closest approach to Earth at the time.
1853 May 22nd. Three luminous objects near Mercury. One large and round, one cigar-shaped, and one small disk; reported by a Mr. R. P. Gregg.
June 15th. A Lieutenant Gazette reports seeing a ‘flying machine’ fifty years before the Wright Brothers’ first successful flight.
July 9th. Société Météorlogique de France report ‘a great number of red points in the sky—like small suns’.
October 26th. Ragusa, Sicily. A large luminous disk seen moving from East to West at 2 a.m.; visible two minutes.
1855 June 11th. Large dark aerial body seen without telescope by Astronomers Ritter and Schmidt.
August 11th. Petworth, Sussex. A glowing red disk ‘like a red moon’ rises slowly, crosses the sky, and disappears in the distance. It has spokes like a wheel; ‘stationary rays’ projecting from it. Visible for ninety minutes. Venus again near to Earth.
1856 April 6th. Colmar, France. Dr. Dussort saw a black flying ‘torpedo’. Round one end and pointed at the other. As it passed overhead it gave off a low melodious whistling sound.
1857 October 8th. Illinois, U.S.A. Just before an earthquake a brilliant flashing light passes slowly across the sky to be followed by a loud explosion.
1859 September 1st. Astronomer Richard Carrington sees two moving luminous bodies— ’not meteors’ , he says. His observatory was at Redhill, Surrey.
1860 Spring. Large flights of small black disks seen by astronomers Herrick, Buys-Barllot and de Cuppis.
July 20th. Lights in the sky that’ appeared, then went out’, following the fall of the Dhurmsalla meteors.
1863 April 27th. Zurich Observatory. Dr. Wolf sees large number of shining disks coming from the East. Some have tails, others are star-shaped.
1864 March 20th. S. England. ‘Unknown object of vast size.’
October 10th. M. Leverrier reports witnessed flight of a long luminous cigar-shaped body, tapered at both ends.
1866 November 6th. A red glowing disk seen for three minutes before it disappeared below the skyline; seen by the British Consul at Cartagena, Colombia.
1868 A shaft of light seen to leave Venus on 15 March. Something similar seen by Webb on 6 April.
June 8th. Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford. Observers see a luminous object that moves in the sky, halts, changes course to westwards, then to south, then makes off to the north after four minutes’ observation. Venus near to Earth. Blazing red spot seen on Venus.
1870 March 22nd. Captain Banner and the crew of the Lady of the Lake at Latitude 50° 47’ N., Longitude 27° 52’ W., see an amazing object flying along under the clouds. It is circular. The rear hemisphere or trailing edge is surrounded by a fuzz or luminous band, divided into four equal sectors. From the centre extends a long curved tail. The object appeared flying against the wind, and was visible until the dusk or clouds obscured it. Captain Banner made a drawing.
1871 August 1st. A tremendous red disk hovers over Marseilles, France, at 10.43 p.m., stationary until 10.52 p.m. Then it moves North for seven minutes, halts again, then moves East, disappearing at 11.3 p.m. Venus again near inferior conjunction.
August 29th. France. Astronomer Trouvelet reports formations of highly complex objects; some triangular, some round, others many-sided. Some of them hover, then move off One appears to go wrong, to fall, to crash. As it falls it oscillates from side to side like a disk falling through water, or like a flying disc that has suddenly lost its motive power.
1873 June 17th. Fantastic glowing projectile shoots out from the planet Mars and explodes on reaching Earth. Seen in Austria, Hungary and Silesia simultaneously. Astronomer Galle, who observed it by telescope, said it was seen ‘to emerge and separate itself from the disk of the planet Mars’. Dr. Sage at Rybnik, Poland, said that an object of some kind did in fact issue from Mars and explode in our upper atmosphere. He was observing the planet ‘attentively at the time’.
August 30th. Bright, star-like vessel rises