THE AYVING SAUCER ENIDENCE ENERYONE IGNORESBRTHE AIVING SAUCER ENIDENCE ENERYONE IGNORES By John A. Keel Somewhere in California the U.S. Air Force maintains a warehouse full of care- fully cataloged scraps of metal and at least one completely intact flying saucer. In that same warehouse there are several glass tanks of formaldehyde containing the bodies of a group of tiny humanoids retrieved from a UFO that crashed in the Southwest in the late 1940s. At least, that’s the story that's been handed down by some American ufolo- gists for the past 25 years. And, like a great many popular flying saucer beliefs, it's all fiction. It was originated partly in a newspaper hoax first published in Mexico and was given immortality by humorist Frank Scully in his 1950 best-seller Be- hind the Flying Saucers. Scully first heard the rumor from an oil man who said he had gotten it straight from a flying saucer pilot. Later, after Scully's sources had been tracked down and exposed by other reporters, he publicly repudiated the whole thing. But the rumor goes marching on; the Air Force still receives letters from newcomers to the UFO scene demanding the truth about those pickled spacemen. When Air Force public relations officers reply that there is no substance to the ru- mor, the UFO enthusiasts how! “Cov- erup!” and accuse the government of keeping evidence of the existence of fly- ing saucers from the public. ‘A far more bitter truth is the sobering fact that the UFO enthusiasts and their or- ganizations have overlooked a moantain of evidence themselves, often suppress- ing such evidence because it doesn't con- form with their dogged belief in extra. terrestrial visitations. If they had system atically collected all the physical materials dropped from flying saucers in the past 25 years they would now have their own warehouse full of proof. The problem is most of the debris UFO enthusiasts and their organizations have overlooked a mountain of evidence often because the material contradicts their belief that unidentified flying objects come from other galaxies. found in the wake of UFO sightings and landings turns out to be rather ordi- nary . . . largely aluminum, magnesium, and silicon. Common earthly materials The UFO enthusiasts have been looking for, and expecting, something far more exotic Unfortunately, after all these years of research, study, and investigation by thousands of people and scores of scien- tists operating outside the Air Force and government, there is still no evidence to back up the notion that flying saucers come from outer space. There is, on the other hand, considerable evidence that real UFOs are of earthly manufacture and are piloted by normal human beings (ex- cluding those landings and contacts which seem more in the nature of psychic phenomena). What's more, there is evi- dence that persons who dress and look like us (and probably are earthlings) are often engaged in collecting UFO artifacts, arriving on the scene before the original witnesses have had a chance to tell any- one about what they have just seen. Today it's popular for ufologists to speculate that the CIA is responsible for some of these mysterious events, But the GIA didn't come into being until 1947, and these strange Men in Black (MIB) were busy 50 years ago, during the UFO waves of 1896-97 and 1909! Shortly after a UFO landing in Wales, Great Britain, May 1909, a clerk reported that he had seen five “foreigners” at the site, taking measurements and snapping pictures (Daily Mail, May 20, 1909). There have been thousands of similar stories since then. They have produced an elabo- rate lore and inspired acute paranoia among many ufologists. No one has yet managed to resolve the simple basic Question: who are these “foreigners” and what is their purpose and interest? ‘These mystery men show a peculiar penchant for visiting isolated areas in northern Canada, Alaska, South America, and other out of the way places. Usually Investigators stumble across their trail rather accidentally and then labor to find SAGA [) 25