The Flying Saucers are Real, Donald Keyhoe [new ebook reader txt] 📗
- Author: Donald Keyhoe
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I listened to Steele’s account with mixed astonishment and suspicion. It sounded like a pipe dream; but if it was, it had been carefully thought out, especially the details that followed.
At first, Steele said, American defense officials had been completely baffled by the disk reports. Then the British, learning about the sightings, had hastily explained to top-level American officials. An agreement had been
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worked out. We were to have the benefit of their research and testing and working models, in return for helping to conceal the secret. We were also to aid in tracking and controlling the missiles when they passed over this country.
“And I gather we paid in other ways,” Steele said. “My source says this played a big part in increasing our aid to Britain, including certain atomic secrets.”
That could make sense. Sharing such a secret would be worth all the money and supplies we had poured into England. If America and Great Britain both had a superior long-range missile, it would be the biggest factor I knew for holding off war. But the long ranges involved in Steele’s explanation made the thing incredible.
“How are they powered? What fuel do they use?” I asked him.
“That’s the one thing I couldn’t get,” said Steele. “This man told me it was the most carefully guarded secret of all. They’ve tapped a new source of power.”
“If he means atomic engines,” I said, “I don’t believe it. I don’t think anyone is that far along.”
“No, no,” Steele said earnestly, “he said it wasn’t that. And the rest of the story hangs together.”
Privately, I thought of two or three holes, but I let that go.
“If it’s British,” I said, “do you think we should even hint at it?”
“I don’t see any harm,” Steele answered. “The Russians undoubtedly know the truth. They have agents everywhere. It might do a lot of good for American-British relations. Anyway, it would offset any fear that the saucers are Soviet weapons.”
“Then you’re not worried about that angle any more?”
Steele laughed. “No, but it had me going for a while. It was a big relief to find out the disks are British.”
“What’s the disks’ ceiling?” I asked, abruptly.
“Oh—sixty thousand feet, at least,” said Steele. After a moment he added quickly, “That’s just a guess—they probably operate much higher. I didn’t think to ask.”
Before I hung up, he asked me what I thought, of the British explanation.
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“It’s certainly more plausible than the Soviet idea,” I said. I thanked him for calling me, and put down the phone. I was tempted to point out the flaws in his story. But I didn’t.
If he was sincere, it would be poor thanks for what he had told me. If he was trying to plant a fake explanation, it wouldn’t hurt to let him think I’d swallowed it. When I saw Redell, I told him about Steele.
“It does look like an attempt to steer you away from the interplanetary answer,” Redell agreed, “though he may be passing on a tip he believes.”
“You think there could be any truth in the British story?”
“Would the British risk a hundred-foot disk crashing in some American city?” said Redell. “No remote control is perfect, and neither is a detonator system. By some freak accident, a disk might come down in a place like Chicago, and then blow up. I just can’t see the British—any more than ourselves—letting huge unpiloted missiles go barging around the world, flying along airways and over cities. Certainly, they could have automatic devices to make them veer away from airliners—but what if a circuit failed?”
“I go along with that,” I said.
“I don’t say the British don’t have some long-range missiles,” Redell broke in. “Every big nation has a guided-missile project. But no guided missile on earth can explain the Mantell case and the others we’ve discussed.”
I showed him the material I had on the Nazi disk experiments. Redell skimmed through it and nodded.
“I can tell you a little more,” he said. “Some top Nazi scientists were convinced we were being observed by space visitors. They’d searched all the old reports. Some sighting over Germany set them off about 1940. That’s what I was told. I think that’s where they first got the idea of trying out oval and circular airfoils.
“Up to then, nobody was interested. The rotation idea uses the same principle as the helicopter, but nobody had even followed that through. The Nazis went to work on the disks. They also began to rush space-exploration plans—the orbiting satellite idea. I think they realized these
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space ships were using some great source of power we hadn’t discovered on earth. I believe that’s what they were after—that power secret. If they’d succeeded, they’d have owned the world. As it was, that space project caused them to leap ahead of everybody with rockets.”
When I asked Redell how he thought the space ships were powered, he shrugged.
“Probably cosmic rays hold the answer. Their power would be even greater than atomic power. There’s another source I’ve heard mentioned, but most people scoff at it. That’s the use of electromagnetic fields in space. The earth has its magnetic field, of course, and so does the sun. Probably all planets do.
“There’s a man named Fernand Roussel who wrote a book called The Unifying Principle of Physical Phenomena, about 1943. He goes into the electromagnetic-field theory. If he’s right, then there must be some way to tap this force and go from one planet to another without using any fuel. You’d use your first planet’s magnetic field to start you off and then coast through space until you got into the field of the next planet. At least, that’s how I understand it. But you’d be safer sticking to atomic power. That’s been proved.”
Most of our conversations had been keyed to the technical side of the flying-saucer problem. But before I left this time, I asked Redell how the thought of space visitors affected him.
“Oh, at first I had a queer feeling about it,” he answered. “But once you accept it, it’s like anything else. You get used to the idea.”
“One thing bothers me,” I said. “When I try to picture them, I keep remembering the crazy-looking things in some of the comics. What do you suppose they’re really like?”
“I’ve thought about it for months.” Redell slowly shook his head. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”
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THAT EVENING, after my talk with Redell, the question kept coming back in my mind.
What were they like? And what were they doing here?
From the long record of sightings, it was possible to get an answer to the second question. Observation of the earth followed a general pattern. According to the reports, Europe, the most populated area, had been more closely observed than the rest of the globe until about 1870. By this time, the United States, beginning to rival Europe in industrial progress, had evidently become of interest to the space-ship crews.
From then on, Europe and the Western Hemisphere, chiefly North America, shared the observers’ attention. The few sightings reported at other points around the world indicate an occasional check-up on the earth in general. Apparently World War I had not greatly concerned the space observers. One reason might be that our aerial operations were still at a relatively low altitude.
But World War II had drawn more attention, and this had obviously increased from 1947 up to the present time. Our atomic-bomb explosions and the V-2 high-altitude experiments might be only coincidence, but I could think of no other development that might seriously concern dwellers on other planets.
It was a strange thing to think of some far-off race keeping track of the earth’s progress. If Redell was right, it might even have started in prehistoric time; a brief survey, perhaps once a century or even further spaced, then gradually more frequent observation as cities appeared on the earth.
Somewhere on a distant planet there would be records of that long survey. I wondered how our development would appear to that far-advanced race. They would have seen the slow sailing ships, the first steamships, the lines of steel tracks that carried our first trains.
Watching for our first aircraft, they would see the drifting balloons that seemed an aerial miracle when the
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Montgolfiers first succeeded. More than a century later, they would have noted the slow, clumsy airplanes of the early 1900’s. From our gradual progress to the big planes and bombers of today, they could probably chart our next steps toward the stratosphere—and then space.
During the last two centuries, they would have watched a dozen wars, each one fiercer than the last, spreading over the globe. Adding up all the things they had seen, they could draw an accurate picture of man, the earth creature, and the increasingly fierce struggle between the earth races.
The long survey held no sign of menace. If there had been a guiding purpose of attack and destruction, it could have been carried out years ago. It was almost certain that any planet race able to traverse space would have the means for attack.
More than once, during this investigation, I had been asked: “If the saucers are interplanetary, why haven’t they landed here? Why haven’t their crews tried to make contact with us?”
There was always the possibility that the planet race or races could not survive on earth, or that their communications did not include the methods that we used. But I found that hard to believe. Such a superior race would certainly be able to master our radio operations, or anything else that we had developed, in a fairly short time. And it should be equally simple to devise some means of survival on earth, just as we were already planning special suits and helmets for existence on the moon. During a talk with a former Intelligence officer, I got a key to the probable explanation.
“Why don’t you just reverse it—list what we intend to do when we start exploring space? That’ll give you the approximate picture of what visitors to the earth would be doing.”
Naturally, all the details of space plans have not been worked out, but the general plan is clear. After the first successful earth satellites, we will either attempt a space base farther out or else launch a moon rocket. Probably many round trips to the moon will be made before going farther in space.
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Which planet will be explored first, after the moon?
According to Air Force reports, it is almost a certainty that planets outside the solar system are inhabited. But because of the vast distances involved, expeditions to our neighboring planets may be tried before the more formidable journeys. More than one prominent astronomer believes that life, entirely different from our own, may exist on some solar planets. Besides Mars, Jupiter, and Venus, there are five more that, like the earth, revolve around the sun.
One of the prominent authorities is Dr. H. Spencer Jones, Astronomer Royal. In his book Life on Other Worlds, Dr. Jones points out that everything about us is the result of changing processes, begun millenniums ago and still going on. We cannot define life solely in our own terms; it can exist in unfamiliar forms.
“It is conceivable,” Dr. Jones states in his book, “that we could have beings, the cells of whose bodies contained silicon instead of the carbon which is an essential constituent of our cells and of all other living cells on the earth. And that because of this essential difference between the constitution of those cells and the cells of which animal and plant life on the earth are built up, they might be able to
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