By John Keel

An Air Force plane spiraled clumsily out of the sullen Argentine sky and crashed near Quilino in August 1957, setting the stage for one of the hundreds of strange UFO “contact” stories that have been going almost unnoticed in newspapers throughout the world for the past 20 years. The Argentine Air Force dispatched three men to the site to guard the wreck until proper equipment could be
mustered to haul it back to the base. On the evening of August 20, 1957, two of the men went into town for supplies while the third man lounged in their tent.

Suddenly, according to his story, he heard an eerie high-pitched hum. He stepped outside of the tent and was astonished to see a huge, luminous metal disc hovering directly overhead. In horror, he reached for his pistol but could not draw it from the holster for some unknown reason, he claimed later.

Standing transfixed, tugging helplessly at his gun, the young man heard a soft voice coming from the humming object. It ad­ dressed him gently in his own language and told him not to be afraid. Then it went on to tell him that it was an interplanetary spacecraft and that a base for such craft had been installed in the nearby province of Salta (an area where UFO sightings have been re­ ported constantly for the past 15 years).

“We intend to help you,” the voice is supposed to have declared, “for the misuse of atomic energy threatens •to destroy you.” The voice went on to say that very soon the rest of the world would know about flying saucers. Then the bushes and trees began to rustle and the craft shot straight up and disappeared.

The young Argentinian was so upset by this experience that he reported, it in full to his commanding officer. The latter took him seriously and passed the story on to one of Argentina’s largest and most respected newspapers, Diario de Cordoba, which carried the full account two days later. Linguist Gordon Creighton later translated it and published it in England’s scholarly, “Flying Saucer Review.”

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Is this story, and the many others like it, pure hogwash? Or is it possible that the unidentified flying objects are making contact with bewildered Earthlings? In spite of the noisy opposition of several “serious-minded, scientific” amateur UFO investigating groups, the contact stories continue to appear. Like most flying saucer stories, they are rarely noticed by the press, and many of them contain such ludicrous details that they are easy to dismiss-until you realize that the same ludicrous details are popping up in Italy, Brazil, Sweden, Africa, the Soviet Un­ ion, the United States, and nearly every other country on Earth.

Consider the tale told by movie actor Stuart Whitman, star of many films. According to Mr. Whitman, he was trapped in his 12th floor suite in a fashionable New York hotel during the big blackout of November 1965, when he heard “a sound like a whippoorwill” whistling outside his window. He looked out and saw two luminous disc-shaped objects, one blue, and the other orange. At least that’s what he later told Hollywood columnist Vernon Scott. Then he heard a voice which sounded as if it were coming from a loudspeaker.

“They said they were fearful of Earth,” Whitman explained, “because Earthlings were messing around with unknown quantities and might disrupt the balance of the universe or their planet…the blackout was just a little demonstration of their power and they could do a lot more with almost no effort. They said they could stop our whole planet from func­tioning.”

No one else in the crowded streets of darkened New York re­ ported seeing those objects and no one else apparently heard that loudspeaker. But Whitman sticks to his story. Why is anybody’s guess? He certainly doesn’t need publicity. At least not that kind of publicity.

Senhor Helio Aguiar didn’t seem to be looking for publicity, either, when he spun his strange tale to Brazilian journalist Joao Martins in 1959. A 32-year-old statistician employed by a bank in Bahia, Brazil, Aguiar not only claimed to have received a message from a UFO, but he took a series of startling pictures to back up his story.

While riding a motorcycle near a place called Piata on April 24, 1959, Senhor Aguiar says he observed a silvery disc with a number of windows visible on the dome on top. The underside of this object bore three markings or symbols which were faintly visible in the originals of his pictures but, unfortunately, do not reproduce well. Aguiar stopped his motorcycle, unlimbered his camera and took three quick shots as the object performed leisurely movements overhead. Then, according to Gordon Creighton’s translation of the photographer’s original testimony, “he began to feel a strange pressure in his brain, and a state of progressive confusion overtook him. He felt vaguely as though he were being ordered by somebody to write something down. It was as though he was being ‘ hypnotized. As he was winding the film on before proceeding to take a fourth picture, he lost all sense of what was happening.”

The next thing Aguiar knew, he was slumped over his motorcycle and the UFO was gone. But clutched in his hand was a piece of pa­ per bearing a message in his own handwriting.

“Put an absolute stop to all atomic tests for warlike purposes,” the message warned. “The balance of the Universe is threatened. We shall remain vigilant and ready to intervene.”

These are only three of the many stories in which alleged “contactees” have claimed that they received messages explicitly stating that we should discontinue our atomic tests. Each of these re­ ports sounds like sheer fantasy by itself, but when you compare all those collected by patient ufologists the world over, many remark­ able consistencies come into view. Even more remarkable are the patterned inconsistencies. The un­ sung heroes in this narrative are the dedicated researchers who have faced ridicule for years while they soberly investigated and re­ corded each of these stories and searched for the underlying pat­ terns. The Aerial Phenomena Re­ search Organization (APRO ) in Tucson, Ariz., for example, has doggedly kept track of each obscure tale of UFO contact, as has Britain’s ”Flying Saucer Review” mentioned earlier. And now, at long last, many of the pieces of this fascinating jigsaw puzzle are be­ ginning to dovetail.

For one thing, it is now becoming clear that maybe these contacts did occur; that maybe the witnesses were not lying or hallucinating after all. Instead, it looks • as ii they might have been lied to by the UFOnauts.

After all, if a flying saucer landed in your back yard and a man in a space suit. Got out and told you he was from Venus you would hardly argue the point with him. You would probably tell your friends and the press that “a flying saucer from Venus landed in my backyard.” They might not believe you-they would probably avoid you from that day on but you would have no reason to disbelieve your visitor. Or would you?

The UFO messengers have been feeding us information – and misinformation – for years. They have spread many a bold and barefaced lie, all of which were dutifully recorded by the “contactees.” Per­ haps these lies were deliberately passed on to witnesses who stumbled across the strange craft because the UFOnauts knew that when the lies were exposed the witnesses’ whole story would be discredited.
Since 1897 more than 2,500 con­ tact stories have been published and in recent years a handful of researchers have returned to old newspaper files to painstakingly survey and study this mass of data. Some of their findings are as incredible as the stories them­ selves.

During 1896-97 there were sightings all over the world of giant dirigible-like aircraft (this was be­ fore we had managed to get our own dirigibles aloft), and men like Dr. Jacques Vallee, Jerome Clark, and Lucius Farish have spent many a weary hour in musty libraries piecing together the hundreds of reports published in the newspapers of that period. Most astonishing of all, there were many “contacts” during that historic UFO “flap” and many of the de­ tails gibe uneasily with the modern contactee tales.
Some of those pioneer “contactees” were pretty impressive characters.

Judge Lawrence A. Byrne of Texarkana, Ark., for example, was described as a man “who is known here for his truthfulness” by the Daily Texarkanian reporter who recounted his weird story in the April 25, 1897 edition of that journal.

“I was down on McKinney bayou Friday afternoon looking after the surveying of a tract of land,” the Judge is quoted as saying, “and in passing through a thicket to an open space, saw a strange-looking object anchored to the ground. On approaching I found it to be the ‘airship’ I have read so much about of late. It was manned by three men who spoke a foreign language, but judging from their looks, I would take them to be Japs. They saw my astonishment and beckoned me to follow them, and on complying, I was shown through the ship.”

The Judge went on to a “studied” description of the interior of the craft and attempted to explain machinery which he saw but could not quite understand: The interesting thing about his story is his description of the “Jap” pi­ lots-men of slight stature, dark skin, and Oriental features. Identical descriptions have cropped up again and again in the stories of other contactees throughout the world. Even the famous story of the “abduction” of Betty and Barney Hill includes similar descriptions.

Perhaps some of the flying saucers actually are operated by such beings.

In March and April of 1897 there were hundreds of other “air­ ship” stories from all parts of the country. But in December, 1896, one J. A Heron, an electrician in San Jose, Calif., told reporters that he was also taken aboard one of the craft and that “it rose very high in the air, and then went westward until it reached Honolulu. Here it turned and sailed back to the starting point, the trip having been made during one night.” Mr. Heron’s story parallels the numerous modern contactee tales of brief trips aboard flying saucers which covered hundreds, or even thousands, of miles in a short span of time.

Large crowds in Chicago and Omaha viewed overflights of these craft in April 1897, and on April 15th one of the objects reportedly landed outside of Springfield, Ill. Two farmhands, Adolph Winkle and John Hulle, signed affidavits swearing that they had chatted with the occupants – two men and one woman. They were told that a full report would be given to the government “when Cuba is declared free.” (The Spanish­ American war over Cuba was then in the making.)

On April 22nd, a “well-known Iron Mountain railroad conductor” named Captain James Hooton told of encountering a grounded UFO near Homan, Ark. “There was a medium-sized man aboard,” Hooton told a scribe from the Arkansas Gazette, “and I noticed he was wearing smoked glasses. He was tinkering around what seemed to be the back end of the ship, and as I approached I was too dumbfounded to speak. He looked at me in surprise, and said : ‘Good day, sir, good day.’ I asked : ‘Is this the airship” and he replied : ‘Yes, sir,’ whereupon three or four other men came out of what was apparently the keel of the ship.”

Captain Hooton gave a detailed description of the craft and made a sketch of it for the Gazette. It was a cylindrical object with a windowed cabin below and a strange complex of movable vanes on top.
Two law officers, Deputy Sheriff John Mclemore and Constable John J. Sump­ter of Hot Springs, Ark., suffered a considerable amount of ridicule after they solemnly filed the following affidavit:

“While riding northwest from this city on the night of May 6, 1897, we noticed a brilliant light high in the heavens. Suddenly it disappeared and we said nothing about it, as we were looking for parties and did not want to make any •noise. After riding four or five miles through the hills we again saw the light, which now appeared much nearer the earth. We stopped our horses and watched it coming down, until all at once it disappeared behind another hill. We rode on about half a mile further, when our horses refused to go further. “About 100 yards distant we saw two persons moving around with lights. Drawing our Winchester for we were now thoroughly aroused by the importance of the situation we demanded: ‘Who is that, and what are you doing?’ A man with a long dark beard came forth with a lantern in his hand, and on being informed who we were proceeded to tell us that he and the others- a young man and a woman-were traveling throughout the country in an airship. We could plainly distinguish the outlines of the vessel, which was cigar shaped and about 60 feet long, and looking just like the cuts that have appeared in the papers recently. It was dark and raining and the young man was filling a big sack with water about 30 yards away, and the woman was particular to keep back in the dark. She was holding an umbrella over her head. The man with the whiskers invited us to take a ride, saying that he could take us where it was not raining. We told him we believed we preferred to get wet.

“Asking the man why the brilliant light was turned on and off so much, he replied that the light was so powerful that it consumed a great deal of his motive power. He said he would like to stop off in Hot Springs for a few days and take the hot baths, but his time was limited and he could not. He said they were going to wind up at Nashville, Tenn., after thoroughly seeing the country. Being in a hurry, we left and upon our return, about 40 minutes later, nothing was to be seen. We did not hear or see the airship when it departed.
(Signed) John J. Sumpter, Jr.

John Mclemore “Subscribed and sworn to before me this 8th day of May 1897.

“C. G. Bush, J.P.”

Were the two lawmen hallucinating? If so, then an Arkansas Senator named Harris was suffering from the same kind of pipe dreams. At l a.m. on the morning of April 21, 1897, Senator Harris claimed that the airship landed on his property near Harrisburg, Ark., and that he had caught the occupants drawing water from his well. He said that there were four people on board. Two young men, a woman, an elderly man with “a. heavy set of dark, silken whiskers, which hung down near his waist. . . . He had jet black eyes and a deep, firm expression.” Researcher Lucius Farish uncovered the complete ac­ count in the April 2 3, 1897, edition of the Harrisburg Modern News.

Another airship is supposed to have landed outside of Waterloo, Iowa, at 3: 50 a.m. on April 17th with a single man on board and, according to the Drew County Advocate of April 20th, “thousands of people are congregated about the strange visitor, and questioning the navigator .” There are no further details on that one, but the Nashville News of April 28th told of another landing which was “seen by one of our prominent citizens. . . . There was said to be a most beautiful lady aboard the ship and the gentleman referred to is said to have conversed with her for a few moments.”

Several other contactees throughout the country contradicted each other by claiming that the UFO occupants had told them that the airship was the product of inventors based in several different sections of the nation. Either they were all lying or they had all been lied to. The fact remains: thousands of people did see something in the skies during those months and many photo­ graphs were taken. Scores of honest citizens carefully filled out and signed sworn affidavits about their sightings. One of the most celebrated of these was a farmer named Alexander Hamilton of Vernon, Kans, who not only signed a statement testifying that he and his fam­ily had seen the airship at 10:30 p.m. on the night of April 19, 1897, but that it has stolen one of his cows in front of their eyes. Then Mr. Hamilton got 11 of his town’s most prominent citizens to sign an affidavit swearing to his fine reputation and truthfulness. Hamilton declared that the airship had a glass undercarriage “occupied by six of the strangest beings I ever saw. There were two men, a woman and three children. They were jabbering together but we could not understand a syllable they said.”

It is apparent that at least three different types of beings were operating these airships: normal people who looked like ourselves; the Oriental-looking characters allegedly seen by the Arkansas Judge and the strange indescribable entities seen by Alexander Hamilton and his family. Modern contactees continue to report these same contradictions. Some describe tiny men in space-suits, others give elaborate details of tall bug-eyed giants, and still others tell of Oriental­ types and of tall, beautiful blondes. Many have described seeing women in the crews. Some have even claimed to have relations with these women (see SAGA, February 1967).

Dr. Carl Sagan, the Harvard astronomer who takes a skeptical position regarding the UFO phenomenon. recently wrote: “UFOs have been described variously as rapidly moving or hovering; disk-shaped, cigar-shaped, or ball-shaped ; moving silently or noisily; with fiery exhaust, with no exhaust whatever;_ accompanied by flashing lights, or uniformly glowing with a silvery cast. It is immediately clear that all UFOs do not share a common origin” [author’s italics}.

We can ask, did UFOs from several different sources visit the Earth in 1897? When all of the hundreds of clippings of that period are reviewed it is obvious that more than a single “airship” was involved. They appeared over many areas all at approximately the same time, and if we can accept the descriptions of the many witnesses these “airships” were widely varied in size and construction, just as the modern “flying saucers” seem to be. And some of those “airships” appeared to linger for days or even weeks in the same vicinity, just as modern UFOs reportedly re­ turn night after night to the same spot for several days running.

Apparently the 1897 operation was carefully planned and skillfully executed. Some deliberate contacts were made and the contactees were given contradictory information to lend confusion and ridicule to the reports. If we are to believe these stories,’ then we must believe that the UFO pilots al­ ready knew a great deal about us, our languages, and our geography. They were also keenly aware of the world situation at the moment and they never once led anyone to believe that they might be extraterrestrial. In fact, those newspapers which did not scoff at the flood of “airship” stories _were con­vinced that some unknown “inventor” was behind the whole thing. Several large dailies actually spent a lot of time and money trying to find out who that “inventor” was and how he had managed to build such a fantastic machine in secrecy. One group of contactees were told that the parts for the “airship” had been manufactured • in different sections of the country and then assembled secretly in Boston or Iowa or California. You can take your pick.
Clearly, the UFOs of 1897 went through elaborate lengths to conceal the truth about their origin. They told many people many different things so, in the end, they really told us nothing.

Communications were still rather slow in those days and there was no organized attempt to keep tabs on the appearances of the “airship.” It was relatively easy to make everyone believe that only one craft was being used and that it was making a leisurely jaunt across the United States. And, most important, it was simple to convince all the “airship” witnesses that they were seeing nothing more than a remarkable new and secret invention.

The majority of amateur UFO buffs enthusiastically collect clippings about housewives seeing funny lights in the sky but sneer at all the contact stories chat come along. This author was vehemently anti-contactee when he first plunged into the UFO mystery. Then a series of astounding discoveries were made which forced him to reconsider the whole contactee issue. First of all, there is an impressive number of relatively unknown and unpublicized Contactee stories; secondly, many of these contactees have revealed identical details over the years. If we are ever going to get to the bottom• of this mystery, we must carefully consider all of these stones.

A common complaint among skeptics and self -styled “scientific ufologists” is: Why don’t they contact us? The startling truth is chat “they” have been contacting us frequently and over many centuries. It’s true, of course that they have never landed on the White House lawn or hovered over the Empire State Building. But they have done many things that were almost as dramatic and have gone almost unnoticed. If we can believe anything in this wealth of contactee material, they have also told us a great deal about ourselves-and about themselves. The only reason there is a mystery to this UFO business at all is because the press has a negative atti¬tude toward contactee stories and some of the amateur UFO organizations have battled long and hard to keep these stories from gaining public or official recognition.

UFO occupants often pass along in­ formation about wars and crises crucial to the period. In 1897, the war in Cuba was mentioned. During the 1950’s, when everyone was digging bomb shelters in their backyards, contactees were warned about the danger of atomic war. In more recent years the UFO messages have taken an awesome new turn: Today they are warning us of an impending global disaster the end of the world!

Can we take this new wave of messages• seriously? Or are we simply dealing with some kind of undefined global hysteria, a psychological phenomenon of some kind?

In his book, Flying Saucers-Serious Business , the late Frank Edwards dis­ cussed the huge flying saucer “flap” that overtook the Kazakhstan region in the Soviet Union in 1962: “Recently the Soviet government sent a veritable army into the villages and settlements in that area to try to ‘explain,’ ” Edwards quoted Soviet expert Paul Voronaeff as saying. “These flying saucers had resulted in a widespread religious revival and a return to God…the last thing the Communists wanted. The flying saucer phenomenon was being interpreted by the natives of that region as some sort of warnings by supernatural beings of an impending catastrophe the end of the world.”

New contactees from one end of this planet to the other are beginning to mutter unhappily about the, forth­ coming end. Last spring the same kind of hysteria was beginning to build up• in sections of West Virginia where UFO sightings were becoming fairly common­ place. The problem of unidentified flying objects is so complex and confusing that many people cannot begin to cope with it. Those with a scientific turn of mind look for a simple answer in the widely-held view that these things are nothing more than vehicles piloted by intelligences from another planet. The devout turn to the Bible for explanations of what they have seen-or thought they saw.

Another thing that has puzzled ufologists is the dearth of UFO reports during rainy weather and heavy overcasts. A contactee in England may have in­ advertently learned the reason for this in 1957 if we are willing to believe his wild story of a ride in a flying saucer. His name” is James Cook of Runcorn, Cheshire and he insists that he saw a strange luminous object in the sky at 2: 15 a.m. on the morning of September 7, 1957. While he watched in fascination the object changed colors from blue to white, then blue again, and finally to a dark red. It settled to the ground only a few feet from him and, he claims, a voice addressed him, inviting him aboard. A ladder descended from the object and the voice instructed him: “]ump onto the ladder. Do not step onto it. The ground is damp.”

He obeyed and jumped onto the ladder and entered an empty chamber illuminated by a dazzling light from some unseen source. The voice then told him to take off his clothes and put on the plastic-like coveralls which were in the chamber. Again, he did as he was told. After he had changed his clothes he was asked to leave the craft and enter another one that had landed nearby. There he found 20 people, all of them much taller than he was, and they took him for a ride into outer space. Their craft could not operate in damp weather, they allegedly explained to him, apparently because they were surrounded by some kind of electrified field. They also told him that the saucers were used only in the vicinity of the Earth and could not operate in outer space.

“The inhabitants of your planet will upset the balance if they persist in using force instead of harmony,” Cook claims he was told. “Warn them of the danger.”

“Nobody will listen to me,” he says he protested.

“Or anyone else either,” one of the “spacemen” snapped.

Cook was deposited several hours later in the very spot where he had been first picked up. He related his story to the authorities and then quietly returned to his garden in the English country­ side. Like the majority of all known contactees, he did not write any books or go on any lecture tours.

Miss Thelma Roberts of the “Flying Saucer Review” interviewed Mr. Cook and he showed her a burn on the back of his left hand and told her he had received it when he had left the saucer and had failed to remove his hand from the ladder’s railing before his feet touch­ ed the ground.

A lot of people have been believing such stories since the lace George Adam­ski came up with his tale of meeting a tall, blond Venusian on the desert near Mount Palomar in 1952. A lot more have, of course, laughed uproariously over such yarns.

Are these contactee stories the product of neurotics and psychopaths? The author has interviewed over a score of little-known contaccees in the last year and has discovered some bewildering patterns. Most of those people interviewed were men and women with very low IQs and very little education. Their imaginations were very limited and they had read no science-fiction. (Until recently UFO books and flying saucer literature was quite scarce and not generally available to such people anyway.)
Usually people in this group have an identity problem. They are nobody and they have absolutely no chance of ever becoming somebody•. Often they lean toward belief in the occult and the pseudo-sciences in their search for self. They are, in short, highly gullible and a perfect set-up for any plan which promises to make them somebody. They are also ready to accept anything •they might be told. They are not liars or fabricators but they are natural victims for those who are liars and fabricators.
If a flying saucer were to step one of these people, they would be apt to believe anything they were told. And because the “contact” would suddenly make them somebody in a world that hardly knew they existed, they would be eager to please and would willingly carry out any mission asked of them.

Furthermore, not many people would believe them when they told their incredible stories.

The patterns revealed in centuries of sightings and contacts certainly indicates that the UFOs do not want their presence known. So •maybe when they required information about us, or had specific chores which necessarily had to be performed by terrestrials, they some­ how deliberately selected individuals in this unfortunate group. Later, when such contactees went running to the press or appeared on radio and television, they merely made fools of themselves. No­ body believed them. Nobody would ever believe them. The UFOs and their secrets were safe.

Suppose some of these contactees were telling the truth and were not just fakes, phonies and publicity seekers? What kind of “truth” have they told us? In recent years we have been told that the saucers •come from unknown planets named Clarion, Maser, Schare, Blaau, Tvthan, Korendor, Orion, Fowser, Masar, Zomdic, and a dozen other absurd places. There are also contactees .who talk freely about the people of Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Saturn and the Moon.

Chances are excellent that the flying saucers do not come from any of these places, any more than the great “airships” of 1897 came from secret “inventors” in Nebraska. These names are plants, not planets. Whatever the UFOs are up co, they are doing it on a very large scale all over the Earth and it is inevitable that they should accidentally come into contact with some of us from time to time. When such contacts occur, they deliberately hand out ridiculous false information. It is time that we got wise to this simple psychological stunt.

They’ve been pulling it on us for centuries.

“They” have been buying time with our stupidity. To allay the possible suspicions of the believers, the UFO occupants have also been spreading messages of peace and many of the cultists refer to them happily as the “Brothers from Outer Space.” Let us remember that a Japanese Peace Mission was sitting in the waiting rooms in Washington while Japanese bombers were on their way to Pearl Harbor.

There is, however, another side to this coin. It could be possible that some of the groups involved in the UFO phenomenon are not allied. They might even be competing in some way. There might be “good guys” and ‘bad guys.” The “good guys” might be trying to warn us while the “bad guys” try to deceive us and set us up as the “patsies” in some cosmic chess game.

While wandering around the country­ side investigating UFO reports, the author has encountered still another type of contactee. These are truly “silent contactees”- ordinary people who have undergone such incredible experiences that they do not even tell their neighbors about them. They are hard to find•, but once you have met one you can learn to spot the others. They all tell the same story, for they have all under­ gone basically the same kind of adventure and none of their stories have ever been published. None of the important details are known, not even to the hard­ core UFO buffs who busily circulate mimeographed newsletters filled with rumor. These “silent contactees” are a separate phenomenon. There is no one they can turn to, for even when they do dare to approach the authorities they are laughed at.

For example, in a little Ohio town the author uncovered a strange case involving a professional woman who lived alone in a house on the outskirts. One night last fall she was walking home from work when a luminous object appeared above the trees and landed near her. Two medium-sized men got out and approached her. They wore luminous coverall garments but their faces were clearly visible and were dark and Oriental-like. She fainted and when she came to they were gone.

A few weeks later she was walking down a street in the town when she suddenly saw the same two men! She was sure of it-their faces were etched in her mind. They were wearing black caps and black jackets over their coveralls. For some reason, she had the feeling that they were evil and they terrified her. She ran into the local police station babbling that, “Two men from a flying saucer are walking down Main Street!” Naturally, the police laughed at her. Since then she has had a series of other frightening experiences but has prudently kept her mouth shut about them.

Like so many others, she is living in a state of constant fear and there is no one she can turn to.
There may be thousands of “silent contactees” all over the world today. Thanks to the unending ridicule and disbelief that has been applied to such stories during the past 70 years, we may never hear of most of them. Others, a mere handful, make a frantic effort to tell somebody through anonymous letters to newspapers and anonymous phone calls to ufologists.

Here is such a letter. It may be pure crackpotism, then again it may be a sincere cry in the wilderness. It was published in New York’s East Village Other in May 1967.

“Dear EVO,

Please read this whole letter, without stopping, no matter now unusual or un­ believable it may seem to you. Every word written here is absolutely •true, and• our futures will depend on how you react to it. . . . Today I have learned ( sic ) that there really are flying saucers, for I spent six hours circling the Earth at fantastic speed. I have seen and been in contact with actual living beings, somewhat similar to our own race, incidentally, who come from a solar system whose sun we have not yet seen, and who have been exploring the universe for over 300 years!

“They tell me that this is the forty-ninth planet on which they have found beings advanced enough to overcome the law of gravity, and therefore be on the threshold of space travel. But the most • important thing they tell me, the thing that is driving me out of my mind and forces me to write this letter, is that they are now trying to decide whether or not to destroy us!
“They say that every other race as technologically advanced as we are has long ago learned to live at peace with itself. They fear that we are going to carry our war-like ways into space with us and eventually embroil other parts of the galaxy in death and destruction! “Therefore, they say that we must achieve peace!”

It is an old message, one that was first heard in the days of the biblical prophets and perhaps it is the only true message the UFOs have to offer us. Desist or die. •1t has been said many times in many places to many people. A “silent contactee” in New Jersey recently told the author that a Bible-quoting UFOnaut had informed him that many attempts had been made to reach our heads of government, beginning back in 1939.

“We just cannot understand your leaders,” the UFO pilot is supposed to have said.

The problems are obvious: we now know that some of the UFO groups have been deliberately setting up a smoke­ screen of lies and deception. Who can we trust? How many of these stories are products of unbridled imagination? Where does the truth end and psychopathic fantasy begin? Perhaps we have performed a grave error in ridiculing and ignoring all contactees. Perhaps there is one man or woman, or one thousand out there who knows the truth – the whole truth about the UFO mystery-but is afraid to tell us.

Maybe we should start searching for that person or persons before it is too late. We will never learn any answers from newspaper clippings describing colored lights in the sky.

* THE END