No Such Thing as Flying Saucers
I was four years old, still living in the Georgia house where I was born because my mother didn’t trust hospitals, the summer that Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot flying near Mt. Rainier in Washington State, saw something weird in the skies with him, moving at outlandish speeds, and coined the term “flying saucers.” That’s just historical fact.
My grandfather’s favorite loafing spot was lying crosswise on his bed to catch whatever breezes came in the window from the back yard. Only when he was at work could I sneak out there and bang a tennis ball off the clapboard wall between his bedroom and the kitchen window.
Me and Jackie Hill.
I would be in grade school and Jackie long gone away before the grownups told me that Jackie Hill was my imaginary playmate. He seemed perfectly real to me that summer. You might say I was an imaginative child.
In memory, those Georgia summers were stifling, humid, hot as the hinges of hell. When I was four, the heat was just the environment in which I lived. I would play outside right in the heat of the day and then take refuge in the dark quiet space behind the brick pilings upon which our house sat.
It was one of those glaring bright hot days that the miniature Japanese pilots strafed Jackie and me while we played in the back yard.
Scared me to damned near to death.
I already was in the habit of keeping an eye on the sky. My teenage uncle had amused himself with a deck of wartime flash cards, showing me the silhouettes of enemy airplanes until I could instantly differentiate between a Stuka and a Betty, or between an Me-109 and a Zero. I couldn’t pronounce most of the words and I didn’t understand that the war was over. So I kept an eye peeled.
I spotted a small dark silhouette coming out of the sun from over the Bazemores’ house. Too small to be an enemy airplane. My first thought was that it was one of those model planes my uncle took me to watch the big kids fly on guide-wires on the Richmond Academy drill fields. The school was a couple of blocks away. Every weekend you could hear the high-pitched droning of the little motors that propelled them round and round.
Then this thing swooped silently right through the yard above my grandmother’s clothes lines, and out over the top of our house.
I was startled out of my mind to see big goggled eyes in the rounded head of the pilot. He was staring out of the cockpit right at me.
The proportions were all wrong: those eyes and that head were far too large for the tiny dark fuselage.
I had never been so scared. I couldn’t move.
And here it came again — or another one — zooming in silently over the Bazemore’s, aiming right for me before it pulled up at the last minute. Same goggled eyes, narrow shoulders, same rounded head — it had to be the Japs! The goggled head looked like the caricatures of helmeted Japanese aviators in the war comics my uncle read.
For some reason I couldn’t make out the shape of the fuselage. It was just a dark smudge against the blazing sun. I kept trying to make it fit one of those flash-card silhouettes. I couldn’t do it.
The third pass broke my paralysis.
I yelled “Run, Jackie!” and broke for the steps to the screen porch. I banged the screen door hard and didn’t stop till I got into the kitchen, so I could see out to the back yard.
My grandmother heard the commotion and came into the kitchen. I tried desperately to explain to her what had scared me. I couldn’t have had a very large vocabulary. I remember most the fear and the frustration of trying to make myself understood.
“Big eyes!” I kept saying. “Big eyes!” Over and over.
But they had stopped strafing by then. Jackie must have run under the house. He wasn’t there to back me up. I vaguely remember my grandmother calming me down. She told me I was safe, nothing could get me with her there. I was young enough to believe her. She didn’t question my seeing something strange. Raised in the superstition-ridden South — it was years before I learned that the colored folks viewed her as a witch — she believed in all kinds of unseen and unexplainable things.
The vision of those disproportionate, goggle-eyed pilots over my backyard was burned into my memory beyond extrication. But they didn’t come back again, and life moved on. My brother got old enough to be my playmate and closest buddy. One day Jackie Hill just stopped coming around. It took a while for me to even notice.
I didn’t have exactly the easiest childhood: whooping cough, chicken pox, two kinds of measles, scarlet fever. On a Cub Scout outing I ripped my pants open going over a barbed wire fence one jump ahead of an angry bull, and celebrated my survival by eating tomato-and mayonnaise sandwiches left under the sun in the back window of a car. Food poisoning damned near killed me. It was either the food poisoning or the scarlet fever when I entered that dark tunnel they talk about and saw the bright lights ahead, benevolent strangers beckoning me to safety.
But old Doctor Mathis, who delivered me at home at my mother’s insistence, brought me back, even when I wasn’t sure that I wanted to come back.
I fell off a running horse at the riding academy, and rolled beneath the hooves of the rest of the group that had been trying to catch me — nothing injured but my pride. I had a teacher in fourth grade try to break a steel-edged ruler over my drawing hand because she didn’t like what I drew. When we moved to Florida, I almost drowned in an ocean riptide. I was stung by jelly fish and then really badly by Portuguese men-of-war. I got so sun-burned more than once that they almost hospitalized me. I broke some bones.
All before I was ten years old.
As my grandmother put it, I had “more realer” worries than little bug-eyed men in their flying machines.
Somewhere between the time we moved to Florida and the time I graduated from high school, a nerdy classmate introduced me to science-fiction despite my reluctance. I was strictly a Western fan. Science-fiction, to me, meant the horror-movie “coming attractions” that the old Modjeska invariably ran before every Gene Autry movie. I hated and feared those snippets of film. They kept me awake all night, night after night, waiting for “The Thing from Outer Space” or other monsters to come and get me while the family slept.
It would be another decade or so before an odd little man with a horribly mottled face connected the little men who strafed me to my fear of monsters.
The first science-fiction book my high-school friend virtually forced on me was by Robert Heinlein. Well hell, it was just recognizable humans facing a crisis on the Martian moons: space ships for stage coaches, blasters for six-guns, a pretty clever plot involving secret aliens who weren’t all that terrifying. I decided to try another one and picked up a paperback by A. E van Vogt called The World of Null-A.
Whoa! A virtually immortal hero who could be shot and burned to pieces and be right back after the bad guys the very next chapter, courtesy of endless identical bodies hidden here and there. I’m not sure the word ‘clone’ had entered the language yet.
Not only was he virtually immortal, he could out-talk and out-think the sinister aliens from another star, and was utterly unmoved by the gorgeous female for whom Gene Autry would have been strumming his guitar by the second chapter.
I liked this much better than horror movies, full of victims who ran screaming and helpless. I became a solid science-fiction fan who detested people who abbreviated the genre to “sci-fi.”
True science-fiction fans stayed as far away from True Believers in UFOs as they could get. It was hard enough to gain respect for science fiction back then, without being associated with the loony tunes who burned bonfires in the desert to attract passing Galacticans, or whatever the hell the saucerians were calling them that week. I started trying to write science-fiction myself — after all, I had been a very imaginative boy.
I wanted to create heroes who could out-think and out-talk sinister aliens from another star. And shoot them dead if they became too threatening. I saw absolutely no connection between my writing and my childhood terrors.
I must have done something right, because I published my first science-fiction novel when I was twenty years old. A few years later I was an Army veteran, working as a feature writer for a Sunday Magazine in Florida, when I got drawn into the UFO nonsense. My Sunday editor thought it would be clever to have a published science-fiction writer do a feature on flying saucers over Florida. I so did not want to do it. But I thought that if I wrote the story firmly tongue-in-cheek, I could avoid lunacy by association.
So I went all the way back to Ezekiel for my lead, an Old Testament prophet who reported an aerial whirlwind, and four-faced visitors who rode it down to earth to talk to him near Babylon in the fifth year of some tyrant or other’s reign. Ezekiel took them seriously all right, calling them messengers of God, and supposedly built his entire ministry on what they told him.
“And sightings and interpretations have been getting wilder ever since,” I told my readers, setting the tone of the piece.
The thing is…four-faced? What the heck did that mean? Was it a poor translation of old Zeke’s observation? Whole religious wars have been fought over such mistranslations. And if you are of a certain age you will remember how we nicknamed our classmates before the era of political correctness. Someone with a thick waist was “Blimp.” Some Polio survivor, hobbling with one leg in a metal brace, was “Gimp.”
Anyone who had to wear glasses was “Four-eyes.”
Four faces, or four eyes? Maybe Ezekiel was trying to report goggles, not extra visages.
But I really didn’t want to carry that thought any further. It would have ruined the ironical tone and diverted the story toward those crackpots who imagined the tube of an oxygen mask, where early Hindus reported an elephant-trunked god. I wasn’t about to explain where I got the idea for the four-eyed interpretation. I would have to reveal my childish terror. So I skipped it.
Instead I did what you might call due diligence. I pulled clips from the newspaper morgue about earlier Florida sightings than the one that inspired my editor to want a story. One was a three-year-old account of a small-town man named Howard H., who let his kids stay up late to watch the flying saucers he and his wife had spotted the night before above the St. Johns River. The saucers obligingly reappeared. According to the story, the family treated the UFOs as an unexpected but appreciated early Fourth of July. I thought it might be interesting to see what Mr. H. and his family remembered three years later.
But there were no families by that name in the small town phone book, or the crisscross directory. There was one Howard H. listed in Jacksonville. Nine phone calls over a two-week period, at different times of the day, and no one ever answered.
The same three years before, a classified advertisement had appeared in the Jacksonville Journal : “UFO — Anyone having information regarding the sighting of unidentified flying objects, please contact — “ and there was a mailing address. I wrote to the address as soon as I found the ad. My response was a mysterious phone call during the time I tried to reach the H. family. I’m sure that was a coincidence; pretty sure.
“I will be in Jacksonville Sunday,” the caller, who was responding to my letter, said. He implied things of great import in every syllable. He wouldn’t give a name.
I arranged a meeting with the anonymous caller at the then-home of the Journal, on 400 West Adams. The city was gray and rain-wet and Sunday-still beyond the windows of the deserted newsroom when my caller pulled a frosty Coke from the battered soft-drink machine near the city desk, dropped into a chair and started to talk.
Right up front I should state that my Sunday visitor was not wearing a dark suit. He was a soft-voiced young man in Ivy-League casual clothing, who looked like what he purported to be: a college student from Gainesville, whose class was studying human behavior in relation to alleged UFO sightings.
I bring up dark suits because my research into that initial Kenneth Arnold saucer sighting, and the nation-wide rash of sightings that followed, had turned up a Tacoma man named Dahl who told reporters in 1947 that a man in a dark suit visited him, took him to lunch at a nearby diner, and warned him to stop talking about what he had seen above Puget Sound. It was the earliest reference I found to what later became a staple of saucer lore, the mysterious “men in black” who seemed to haunt people with an interest in UFOs.
My Ivy League-looking visitor sipped his Coke and said the class had interviewed witnesses around the state, “interested in why people insist they see things that authorities say just aren’t there.”
“We decided to call in a sighting.” He smiled innocently, having received my assurance beforehand that I would keep the name of his school and teacher confidential if he would talk about why they placed that advertisement.
“A phony sighting.”
“Goes without saying, doesn’t it?”
He smirked around his Coke. “We contacted newspapers and radio stations. We described an object vaguely fitting the bulk of the supposed sightings. It was carried in the local newspaper and mentioned over the air. We sat back to wait, to let the suggestion seep in.”
He said they were quite pleased with their experiment, because sure enough, several more sightings were reported around North Florida in quick succession.
“We feel sure those reports were brought about by our breaking the ice.” He smiled. “What we want to determine now is whether they deliberately jumped on the bandwagon or really think they saw something…”
The classified ad, he explained, was to try to draw out the people who said they saw something after the class launched their hoax. They hadn’t had much luck with their newspaper ad. Maybe some of those people had talked to me instead?
“Not a single one,” I said.
I was irritated. It was a wasted trip to the city on Sunday; he could have clarified his interest in five minutes on the phone. Being me, I came right out and said so.
He gave me another of those boyish smiles. He was quite the smiler, this guy.
“But now we know what each other looks like,” he said. “It’s easier to cooperate long-distance with somebody you’ve met in person.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that. I was keeping my temper leashed. He didn’t seem to notice. He stood up, polished off his Coke, and promised to keep in touch. He declined to leave a phone number, saying he was between locations right now, whatever that meant. But I never heard from him again. The next time I sent a letter to the mail drop, it had been closed with no forwarding address. My letter came back as undeliverable.
I had failed to ask him an obvious question: as a student, why was he still following a class project three years later, still answering the mail? Didn’t college students take a grade and move on, and eventually graduate?
Perhaps he was the class teacher and didn’t want to admit responsibility for the hoax. Or, the UFO nuts would say, perhaps he was a sinister something else, and wanted to size me up. Maybe his dark suit was in the cleaners that weekend.
So what my story turned out to be was a fairly lengthy feature without much substance. A vanished family of saucer-spotters, an equally gone researcher into human herd instinct. I put all that in the published story, hoping to draw a reaction for somewhere — anywhere. Nothing; no phone calls, no letters to the editor from anybody saying they’d been there all along and I just missed them.
My story included the obligatory checks with the U.S. Air Force. A colonel in the office of the Secretary of the Air Force paused in delivering cups of coffee to the generals to assure me that “all sightings in this specific area (Jacksonville and environs) have been of a routine nature.”
Huh?
But that was his story and he was sticking to it. What about the Navy, since it had three separate naval air stations around Jacksonville?
“The Air Force is the only government agency concerned with UFOs,” he said firmly.
The local Navy bases agreed — the public affairs people said they had no recent reports of sightings, and that as far as the record showed, no Navy jets had ever been scrambled to chase an unknown bogie. This was in the middle of the Cold War, when not challenging an unknown aircraft would have constituted dereliction of duty.
The local FBI conceded that some citizens must figure aliens from outer space should be their bailiwick and called them.
“We refer them to the Navy,” an agent told me.
Wait. The Navy? When I called them back, the Navy said, “Try the Florida Air National Guard.” They were getting tired of me calling them about this. But the Florida Air National Guard’s phone number had been changed and nobody answered the new one.
This was all good news for me personally, because the story developed into just the tongue-in-cheek piece I hoped for, without a lot of help from me. I shoveled in a few mind-numbing statistics to round things out: Kenneth Arnold made his famous sighting June 25, 1947 — by July 1, no fewer than 43 states and Washington, D.C. had sightings on record, including a pretty dramatic show of force above the nation’s capital. By the first of the next year, at least one P-51 Mustang had gone in pursuit and gone down, with the loss of its pilot.
By 1967, when I was writing the story, the famous Gallup Poll reported that an estimated five million Americans claimed they had seen a UFO. Whether Gallup interviewed 500, and extrapolated using statistical models, was not explained; statistics were king in those days, despite Disraeli’s dictum that there are lies, damn lies and statistics.
The Air Force Project Blue Book was quoting the Swiss psychiatrist C. J. Jung about humanity’s need to replace old mythological frameworks — “the gods that science, for good or otherwise, has deposed,” to explain the explosion of the saucer tales, calling them evidence of “one of the few viable contemporary cult movements….”
But the Air Force spokesman told me that in the twenty years since Kenneth Arnold coined the term “flying saucer,” there had been 11,108 sightings actually investigated, with “only” 676 of them remaining unexplained.
My private thought, predicated on science-fiction reading, was that if you discounted ninety percent of the 676 unexplained sightings, that could leave three extraterrestrial vehicles per year calling on Earth — damn close to regular passenger service for a planet as isolated as ours. But no way was I going to taint my science-fiction theorizing by associating it with this story. So I kept my own statistics to myself.
John I. Keel, later famous as the author of the creepy Mothman Prophesies, was syndicated by the North American Newspaper Alliance the year I wrote my story, calling UFO watching “the eerie new American sport.” I made sure to get that quote in, because it fit the mood I was trying to strike. Maybe I should have let him have the last word, but I reserved that for the writings of Charles Fort, an unusual character who collected news accounts of weird things from around the globe long before Kenneth Arnold took that fateful flight.
Charles Fort was the very definition of an “out of the box” thinker. He likened humanity to fish living in the deep ocean beneath shipping lanes, where discarded junk drifted to the bottom: “Sometimes I think we get our noses bumped.”
Then I filed my story and gratefully forgot about the whole thing.
For six months.
Not long after I killed off the saucer story, I took a new job with a small daily newspaper in Georgia, working the night-side. It happened to be located in my hometown, where as a little boy I was strafed in the back-yard by goggled midgets. Not something to tell the cynical newsmen with whom I consorted, not the story to tell a girl on a first date — just a little organic chip of images hidden back there in the closet of almost-forgotten memories.
This particular night in December, cold and crisp, the police reporter was out chasing a story. I was helping out on the city desk, doing rewrite. Earlier that week, a surge of UFO sightings had been reported across the river in South Carolina near the Savannah River Plant, known to locals as the “bum plant” because it had to do with nuclear weaponry. The Aiken County Sheriff’s Office had been besieged with excited calls.
The city editor asked me to do a wrap-up — call back the places the reporter had talked to earlier. I called the Air Force radar installation in Aiken. An airman — an enlisted man — answered the phone.
“Yeah,” he said matter-of-factly. “We got bogies again tonight. Same as the other night.”
“You do? Where?”
“Same as before — Wait one.” I waited. “Gotta go,” he said, and hung up.
Same as before meant Aiken County. I got the sheriff on the line. Not only were they getting the same calls, he had seen the thing himself. He put one of his deputies, named Eubanks, on the line. Eubanks, in the company of a Military Police patrol, observed the UFO hovering over the Savannah River plant and then drifting away above the piedmont. He and the military cops all saw it. He took out after it, following it twenty miles west of Aiken before he lost it.
A round, glowing, pulsing ball of energy, he described it. Weird-looking as hell. “But the dispatcher can give you more of a story,” Eubanks said. “He received all the calls.”
The midnight deadline was inching closer. I called the dispatcher.
“Well, it’s back,” he said. “They’re seeing it again tonight. A girl from Bath just called.”
I called her number: busy signal. The police reporter came huffing into the newsroom, having taken the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. The police scanner in his VW was going crazy with reports.
“Let’s go up on the roof!” he said. “We should be able to see it from there.”
The door to the roof in the little rooftop shed was locked, so we pried open an unused window and peered out over city roofs across the river toward the dark bulk of South Carolina.
“What’s that?” the police reporter said.
I looked. A glowing, pulsing ball that phased from white to yellow and faded away beneath the dimly seen horizon line.
“Headlights,” I said. “It could have been headlights.”
“Then what is that?”
This time the thing was dim red, rising and then dropping behind the horizon.
“Taillights,” I said. “Going over the same hill.”
Then the glowing thing rose up, well above the horizon. We looked at the North Augusta TV towers — it was about twenty degrees off the towers. It rose about a quarter their height, jinked sideways at least that far, disappeared again.
I had about five minutes until deadline. I hurried down the stairs, passing another curious reporter on his way up. I was finishing the story, leading with the personal sighting, when he came back down and said that there now were two of the things promenading along the skyline. The non-believers — among whom I had pretty much listed myself until twenty-five minutes ago — gave us the horse laugh. Nobody else would go up and look.
As soon as the edition was down, the police reporter and I jumped in his VW and took off for South Carolina. Scanner traffic had died off almost to nothing, and what few transmissions there were concerned mundane things — the police moving on with their nightly rounds. We drove around for almost two hours through sleeping rural neighborhoods, nobody up and around, nobody staring at the sky — no gigantic sphere lighting up the piedmont.
It was like the two of us had been hallucinating — but for the Air Force guy’s remark about bogies, and the deputy’s account of his twenty-mile pursuit. When I called the radar station back after deadline, a sergeant answered the phone. He told me the Air Force did not comment on UFO sightings and airmen were not authorized to take calls at work.
We gave up, hit one of the South Carolina after-hours bottle clubs for a late meal and some beers, and got back to town before the sun came up. I didn’t sleep all that well and was up before noon, driving back to South Carolina on my own. I thought in daytime I would find somebody to talk to.
But the children were in school, farmers were far out in their fields doing farmer stuff, and bedroom commuters had commuted long since. It was as if the neighborhoods were abandoned. Except for the dogs: they paced my car along their property lines, they ran barking furiously off their porches, they stood in their driveways with hackles up if I so much as slowed down to see if anybody was home. I decided against doorbelling.
Then I spotted a fire watch tower, unoccupied this time of the year, standing up out of a wide acreage of replanted pine trees. I found the dirt access road, no gate, and drove to the tower. I calculated that from the top I could see a lot of the real estate over which that thing had paraded the night before.
But I never did.
I got halfway up — and just froze there. I could not go higher. I had never thought of myself as afraid of heights before. But I could not move.
I cussed myself out loud. I essentially ordered my leg to take one more step up.
Nothing doing. I was locked in place. This wasn’t prudent caution in avoiding protective dogs, this was akin to terror. I looked down at my car. It looked awfully small down there. Of course it did — I was halfway up a damn fire tower! I didn’t have any of those weird sensations that I was about to fall or anything like that — I was just stuck.
There were no witnesses to my cowardice. But I was ashamed anyway. And I was furious with myself. I mulishly hung there on that middle platform, unable to go higher, unwilling to admit defeat and go down. The tension was incredible. When I broke, I broke all at once. I ran down those steps — a stupid thing to do if my fear was of falling.
I didn’t fall. When I got to my car, I left twin rooster tails of dirt as I spun the tires getting out of there. I didn’t calm down until I was back in town, still angry at myself — but unwilling to go back for another try…
The sightings stopped. Days went by without any further excitement on the extraterrestrial front, and then weeks.
It was March of the New Year when a local night-side disk jockey, who was a True Believer in flying saucers, called me. I had been a guest on his show and debated their existence with him, trying to distance myself, as a serious science-fiction writer, from the crazies. After I wrote that story about seeing the thing in South Carolina, he’d had a lot of fun at my expense — both off and on the air.
Now he told me that I should call a guy who ran a Stuckey’s, one of those roadside pecans-and-pralines tourist traps that predated fast food joints on every highway exchange. The Stuckey’s guy had called his talk show with an interesting UFO story to tell.
This Stuckey’s was located in the small town of Wrens, Georgia, maybe thirty miles out from the city. About the only claim to fame for Wrens, so far as I knew, was a stone marker that said Sherman almost marched through there on his way to the sea. I didn’t mention that to the excitable guy who answered the phone at Stuckey’s.
He told me that he had photographs of a definite flying saucer, portholes and all, taken in broad daylight behind his place of business with a Polaroid Swinger Camera. I was welcome to take a look at them. His story was that he had been out back, taking photographs of his cats when the cats suddenly went crazy, arching their backs and hissing and running for cover. When he looked up, the saucer was coming toward him on a high arc as if to land in the fields across the road from the front of Stuckey’s. He started taking pictures as fast as the Polaroid would feed them. The cats hadn’t come out for several days except to drink water and scuttle back into hiding.
At least go look, the city editor said. It will be a nice day trip. So I went and met this guy — I’ll call him Mr. J — and we looked at his series of Polaroid snapshots. They appeared to show this thing moving across the farm fields. Sure enough, the closest one showed the distinct portholes he had mentioned, in a rounded fuselage that appeared mounted on the wider disk below.
Mr. J was at least six feet tall, with a heavy red face and thick silver hair, and a deep well-trained baritone voice. He was excited about the fame sure to come his way. He told me his life story as we looked over the pictures: that he had been in the radio-broadcast business in its infancy, had worked microphones all over the country — explaining his trained voice — and ultimately retired. He had purchased the Stuckey’s franchise to live the quiet life in rural Georgia. But fame had come calling, and he was ready.
He let me take three of his Polaroids back to the newspaper with me. But not the ones with portholes, which he thought was his money shot. I dropped the snapshots at our photo studio to get negatives made, so I could return his originals. The city editor mulled it over and decided not to publish any of them. It was too soon after the December stories and we might look too gullible — there had been too many UFO hoaxes across the country that had made fools of too many people.
Before I could mail J’s photos back to him, he called me in what seemed like a genuine panic.
He had shown his treasures to anyone who expressed an interest, he said, and someone had broken into his private quarters behind Stuckey’s last night and stolen all his Polaroid snaps of the UFO — including the porthole shot.
He wanted to come straight to town to retrieve the snaps I still had. When I went to the studio get them, the best of the three was missing. They just couldn’t find it. I really didn’t want to tell Mr. J that. I feared an eruption; he was in quite a volatile state. But he took my news with a surprising fatalism. It’s a cover-up, he said. The man in the dark suit, everything. The same old cover-up over and over again. Do you think your editor is in on the conspiracy, that’s why he wouldn’t run the pictures?
I told him I thought it was just sloppy handling in the photography studio. What man in a dark suit?
I showed them to him just before I was burglarized, he said, and went away with his shoulders drooping. I sincerely hoped I had seen the last of J; he was beginning to sound like a bona fide nut.
No such luck. He called me in a couple of days, all upbeat again. True Magazine, he said, had sent a staff writer to interview him about the goings-on in Wrens. The magazine writer would consider me a credible witness that J. actually had had a photo of a UFO with portholes showing. Would I be willing to tell this writer that? And about the lost photo at the newspaper office?
Maybe I owed him that much, so I reluctantly said okay.
Mr. J showed up at my apartment with a slender, neatly dressed middle-aged man festooned with professional 35 mm cameras and notebooks. His most noticeable feature was a heavily mottled face, as if he were no stranger to liquor. But he trailed no fumes. His clothing was dark, but casual — a golf jacket and slacks. No dark suit.
As he interviewed me, he shot about two rolls of candid shots of my wife and me, though she had absolutely nothing to do with the story. I confirmed that I had seen Mr. J.’s porthole photograph, and that one Polaroid shot had gone missing from the newspaper offices. That took ten minutes.
Then he wanted every single detail that I could remember about my earlier South Carolina sighting — weather, wind direction, temperature, proximity to the nuclear facility, duration of the sighting, on and on. Had anything unusual accompanied those sightings? I wasn’t accustomed to being on that side of an interview. I didn’t like it all that much. I wasn’t about to tell somebody who might publish it about my cowardice on the fire tower. And that December spate of sightings was old news.
He conceded the point about them being old news, but said UFO trackers had to take a longer view, develop context as to the pattern of sightings and events around sightings.
For instance, he said, had I experienced any “lost time” episode around my sighting? I had no idea what he was talking about. He told me that persons reporting close encounters with UFOs often reported time missing from their lives they couldn’t account for. And not necessarily near the time of the encounter.
I looked at Mr. J. He wouldn’t meet my gaze. He seemed embarrassed, and well he should. Who was this clown? First of all, I hadn’t had any close encounter. No real reporter would ask a damn fool question like that. I told him he was barking up the wrong tree. I saw what I saw — a weird UFO over South Carolina, and the Polaroid snap of a saucer with portholes that Mr. J no longer had — period, end of discussion.
He apologized gently, saying he hadn’t meant to offend me. He supposed, then, that I was not subject to frightening memories of little men with large flat expressionless eyes staring at me?
Bang: just like that, I could see those damned goggled midgets strafing me and Jackie Hill. His question tripped me up and he saw it, and leaned forward. Did I recall being paralyzed by terror? Did I recall repeated unexplainable episodes of fear that made it difficult to sleep?
His bloodshot eyes glittered with what I recognized as the thrill of the chase. I’d been on the other side of interviews too many times not to know it when I saw it. He was poised to bore right in.
But he could go to hell and stay there before I would accommodate him.
“Only the first time I tried to have sex, and afterwards,” I said.
My wife snorted, and Mr. J chortled. The man with the mottled face recoiled as if I’d slapped him. Then he gave a brief I-don’t-believe-you smile. But he knew I had closed down. I would have known the same in his place. He wrapped up his interview quickly then — leaving those questions hanging in the air, not something I would have done in his place — and they went away. Mr. J, oblivious to the byplay, was happily sure he was going to enjoy his moment of fame when the story came out, with old radio colleagues calling him from all over to razz him about what he’d gotten himself into now.
I was as unsettled as I had been in a long time. Why would that guy ask questions like that? He couldn’t possibly know they would trigger such a strong reaction. And why would he leave them hanging in the air? Did he expect me to spill my guts? He had knocked me back on my heels, but not that far. My mind went round and round for the next couple days until I worked myself up into one of the worst migraines of my life. Talk about lost time! I think migraines qualify.
When my head finally stopped pounding, all that flying saucer nonsense had receded into proper perspective, not worth worrying about. My daily life was busy taking its usual twists and turns that had nothing to do with flying saucers. By the summer of ’68, we were back in Florida, living at my grandparents’ house on the beach while I tried to sell a novel, look for another job and reconcile myself to the fact that I had to bring my wife home so we could eat, like a deadbeat.
Then like a bad penny Mr. J surfaced, in the form of a letter to my grandparents’ house. I didn’t recall giving him the address, but he could have gotten it from the Georgia newspaper or my disk jockey friend, the UFO true believer. Mr. J was depressed again. His True contact had dropped the ball. There would be no story. Since I was a professional writer, would I consider taking it on? Against my better judgment I agreed to consider it — maybe make a quick couple hundred bucks to help with the grocery bill. Bad idea.
Out of professional courtesy, I wrote a short letter to the Cape Canaveral P.O. Box that the man with the mottled face had given me, to ask if he was truly dropping the story. The letter bounced back in two days marked “return to sender — addressee unknown. No such address.”
So I wrote to True Magazine asking about their ostensible staff writer, and also to verify that they had lost interest in the story. “I am not acquainted with any writer of that name,” the managing editor wrote back. “So it’s not a question of our losing interest. We never had any interest because we knew nothing about it. If there actually are ‘un(re) touched Polaroid shots of aerial visitors,’ we’d be very interested…if you want to enlighten us, we’d like to hear from you.”
That was enough for Mr. J.
Before I could turn around, he was forted up in a Jacksonville Beach motel ready to be re-interviewed, this time by me, and turn over some photos to send to the magazine. It was like the damn Wrens story had taken on a life of its own. For the first time in my career, I decided I needed a tape recording of an interview, and borrowed my brother’s massive Japanese reel-to-reel, a state-of-the-art gadget in 1968, purchased when he was in the Navy and on shore leave in Japan.
Mr. J went on point like a good bird dog with a nose full of quail when he saw the recording gear. This was his milieu! He started talking, tuning and tweaking his radio voice as he went, as if he were going live to the nation. It was hard to get a question in edgewise.
Two hours’ worth of tape; suffice it to say that the simple story of a cat fancier’s accidental photographs had grown — and grown.
I was led backward through time to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, where he had witnessed (and photographed) an earlier UFO appearance, accompanied by another couple as witnesses. Where were those pictures? Gone, just like the stolen Wrens ones. Not stolen though, scissored to shreds out of fear. Fear of what? The men in dark suits looking for him, that’s what. Negatives too? (He was using a 35 mm that time.) Yes, negatives too. (His wife was nodding and agreeing to all this as he went along.)
Oh and by the way, when he was driving back to Wrens the day he picked up his snapshots from the newspaper, he saw the Wrens saucer again. This time it was hovering above Brier Creek Swamp. He turned into the swamp and chased it until his Cadillac bogged in the mud, then continued on foot, trying to get another good picture of the portholes.
With a flourish like a magician, he spread three new prints across the motel-room table.
Esthetically, these were better than the first ones, although there were no portholes or other features visible. All they showed was the dark bottom of a mysterious elongated disk, nicely framed by the bare branches of swamp trees. There was the barest hint of superstructure in one of the shots. This thing looked alien and other-worldly. There was nothing of the coffee can on a hubcap, suspended by fishing line, which a cynic might have imagined from J’s first pictures.
There was something about the slant of the dark disk, like a smudge against the cloudy sky, that made me uneasy: those childish memories of the dark shape slanting in over the Bazemores’ house kept slinking around in the back of my mind.
I suppressed those memories hard, to focus on what was obviously in front of me now: if it walks like a hoax and talks like a hoax, it’s probably a hoax.
I believed that J had seen something that first day. But the loss of his best photos, including his porthole money shot, had robbed him of his fifteen minutes of fame. Now he was fighting back, trying to reclaim the limelight that had just missed him. If it wasn’t a deliberate hoax he was trying to perpetrate now, I thought that men in white coats, not dark ones, should be after him. He was beginning to exhibit the loony-tune behavior that I always associated with saucerians.
I packed up my gear and said that yes, I’d send his new photos to True, and I would be governed by their decision. If they didn’t want a story, I was out of it. Oh they’ll want it, he assured me, they’ll want it — the other guy just dropped the ball.
But they didn’t want the new photos, or the story.
Mr. J was beside himself the next time he called. He blamed John Keel, the syndicated writer I had quoted in Florida. Keel was a “sensationalist” who wanted UFOs as his private preserve and had poisoned J’s water with all the New York editors. Please keep trying to sell the story — he just knew it was important new evidence in the UFO story. Meanwhile he would be out of touch for a while — he was on the road stumping for Ronald Reagan ahead of the 1968 Presidential primaries, hoping to knock Richard Nixon out of the race. Busy man, Mr. J.
When I had been working the Florida UFO story, Roger Zelazny, another science-fiction writer, had suggested I talk to Keel, and said to use his name since they knew each other. I hadn’t needed that introduction then, but now I wrote to Keel to ask him about J’s allegations. He responded promptly and courteously.
“Here is the J story as I know lt. A few weeks ago Mr. J visited NYC and ran around to all the magazines trying to peddle his pictures. He was politely turned down by all except SAGA. I am SAGA’s resident UF0-nut so they asked me to call J.’s hotel and talk with him and give the pictures the once-over… I never did reach him.
“J turned copies of the pictures over to SAGA. They gave me the pics and I wrote J a letter asking for details on the Wrens sightings…and gently told him that UFO pictures are a dime a dozen (they really are) and suggested that he might want to try to peddle them to the wire services, which will pay about ten bucks for all rights…He then called SAGA ranting, and calling me a ‘sensationalist.’ The editor asked me to please get this ‘nut’ off his back. So I sent his pictures back and told him politely that there was no interest here…”
J was definitely beginning to sound like a crackpot saucerian.
Keel sent me carbons of all his correspondence to review, as well as some of his newsletters about UFO phenomena. The newsletters outlined questions an interviewer should ask of UFO witnesses. Right on the list were the ones the mottle-faced man asked me, in almost the same order. Keel was more interested in the mottle-faced man than the Wrens UFO:
“Could you describe him? We are being plagued by ‘mystery men’ who pop up in the damnedest places. I now have a couple hundred stories in my file from everywhere. Are they beginning to use our own interview tools against us?”
Huh?
Keel was so focused on the unknown mottle-faced man’s use of his own list of questions to ask UFO spotters that he forgot entirely to ask what my replies to those questions had been. I didn’t remind him. So the mottle-faced man entered Keel’s archives as an anecdote.
I still was getting replies to letters I sent out when I agreed to consider doing the story. One woman in Wrens sent a hand-written affidavit that she had seen the UFO that J photographed, and gave its description, altitude and direction of travel. A black school teacher J had listed as a witness wrote to demand a percentage of any proceeds from a sale to say he saw it. The Polaroid Corporation wrote to say that their cameras, like any cameras, only captured what was in front of them — as to how one might hoax a Polaroid, I’d have to consult somebody else on that. Had I considered the Air Force?
Then a Jacksonville Beach police cruiser pulled into the lane. The cop was hand-delivering a request for me to call a Georgia Bureau of Investigation detective who had once worked on Jacksonville Beach and remembered my name from the Jacksonville papers. He wanted to talk about J, because the state GBI commander wanted to know why there wasn’t a file on the incident. The agent had been to see J twice in March and talked to him once in April, and again in May. Now he was finishing up a formal incident report, and I needed to request a copy from his boss.
By August, J still among the missing, I had the report.
The agent had first gone to Stuckey’s with a state trooper out of simple curiosity to see the photos. Mrs. J said she was in the kitchen when the pictures were taken and had seen nothing. J wasn’t there.
He went back to Stuckey’s three days later. J showed him eight photos, including the one with the visible portholes. J also showed him photos he said he’d taken in Brier Creek Swamp on his way back from Augusta the day the agent missed him. “I thought it was coincidental, him seeing the same object two separate days…” the agent said.
Something else didn’t compute, but it was only a long time later that I noticed it: J told me that he took those Brier Creek shots on his way home after picking up the photos he loaned me — after his others were stolen, including the porthole shot. But he still had the porthole picture when he showed the Brier Creek shots to the agent.
I missed that detail then.
Because of the other stuff that shouted fraud.
For instance at their first meeting the agent told J that several people had called his detachment office asking if it was true a UFO had been seen in Wrens. A month later J wanted him to confirm to the alleged True writer that the GBI heard from a number of people who saw his UFO. “I told him that I had not told him any such thing.”
Until then the GBI guy had been carrying the contacts on his daily work sheet. He decided it was time to formalize a report. A month after J irritated him with the false statement, he went back to Wrens accompanied by another GBI agent who was a professional photographer. J had told him that both the chief of police and a local weekly newsman had seen the thing. The GBI now took statements from both.
The police chief had been home sick in bed the day J took the photos. But J had showed up with the mottle-faced man in tow for the chief to tell him about the UFO he saw. The chief was pissed off.
“No! I didn’t see it and I never told you I did, J!” the GBI quoted him in the report. “J went on to say well you could say you saw it, the publicity would be good for the city of Wrens. It will put it on the map.”
The chief basically kicked both of them out of his office.
The weekly newspaperman said that yes, he got a glimpse of something that didn’t look like a conventional aircraft the day before the photos were taken, just as it went behind some trees. Less than a second, he figured. When J called him and said he had photos, he took his children to look at them and mentioned the strange glimpse. J had turned it into a full-blown sighting. Just not true, the newsman said. He had checked with city hall to see if anybody else had called in a sighting. No one had.
The GBI checked with the city hall employee who answered the phone and she confirmed what the newsman said. Three curious city employees had trooped out to Stuckey’s to see the pictures. Again, Mrs. J told them she had not seen it either. The GBI emphasized this latter point.
From there the GBI went to a hilltop package store in front of Brier Creek Swamp. The owner said J was a regular customer, often buying as many as three bottles of wine every other day or so, and had asked him to say he’d seen the UFO.
“I told him I didn’t see nothing,” the GBI quoted him. “He said well you could say you were out back feeding your dogs and looked up and seen this thing flying around. The publicity would triple my business. I told him I didn’t have no dogs, and the people of Wrens would run me out of town for saying something like that. I asked him not to come back anymore.”
Finally the agents went back to Stuckey’s.
J brought out some more Polaroids, saying someone had broken into his living quarters and stolen most of his originals. This time around he had eighteen snapshots, ten more than he’d had the first time.
And now Mrs. J said she’d seen the thing, described its changing colors, how it changed shape, the whole thing. The GBI agent who had seen the original photos asked where the porthole picture was. J said it was one of the ones stolen.
First it was stolen, then it wasn’t, then it was. Depending on whom he talked to, and which day.
J now had five tape-recordings of interviews he and the mottle-faced man had taken, to go with his eighteen photos. The GBI received permission to take the whole lot to the detachment office and copy them. They noticed that each Polaroid print was numbered, and that the sequence of the numbers did not match the order in which J said they’d been taken. Numbers in the same sequence had different backdrops and two different looking objects in the sky.
“There are more photographs in May than there were in March,” the GBI report noted. He then summarized the inconsistencies: the wife changing her story, the “witnesses” who had seen nothing, J’s attempt to get at least two of them to say they had.
“As to the truth of flying saucers over Wrens, I cannot say they were not there,” he concluded.
There was a postscript: the Js had moved away from Wrens a week after the final GBI interview, and new people had taken over Stuckey’s.
And that, I figured, was that. By August I had found a job as a weekly newspaper editor. My wife and I were able to move to our own place again. I put away my Wrens file with the GBI report on top. It looked like Mr. and Mrs. J had vanished from the stage like the university hoaxer I had interviewed and that North Florida family I tried to find.
But in early September, a handwritten letter on pink stationery from a Vero Beach motel arrived. It was from J, cheerfully optimistic that I had “something submitted or near ready…on our UFO story.” He assured me that he had written a letter to Fawcett Publications informing them that any proceeds from the “book” were to be split fifty-fifty between us — he knew I had ethically informed them of this, but it was always good to provide written confirmation from both parties in business arrangements like this…
Fawcett Publications? Book? What the hell was he talking about now? I had not been in contact with any Fawcett Publications. When did a possible magazine article turn into a book?
“I also told him,” J reported breezily, “that I have sufficient ‘never before published photos’ — 22 in all — to really make this the first completely new and original publication in a long long time….”
So, since the GBI counted and copied his 18 different Polaroid snaps in May, he had acquired four more. Not a word about where he got all these new photos — the 18 and the extra 4 — or how, or the circumstances.
I really wondered if he needed to be medicated.
He closed with a parting shot at his NYC nemesis: “I see where John Keel, the sensationalist and reprint expert, is still selling his hash to any cheap rag that will buy it. His latest crap is in SAGA — huge fiery-eyed winged bat-like beings flying in West Virginia…” apparently referring to what became famous later as Keel’s Mothman Prophesies.
I didn’t bother to reply. Before too long my wife told me that he called me once when I was at work — on our unlisted home number — just as full of himself as always. She hadn’t thought to ask him how he got our number. She wearily predicted more contact.
Sure enough, he followed up with an undated letter on stationery from an Augusta motel this time, the address scratched out and a scrawl indicating he had taken a P.O. Box in Metter, Georgia. By now I had over a half-dozen addresses for him, motels and retirement villages and residential hotels. He did not seem to be hurting for money.
“I called from over on I-75,” he wrote. He was always on the move, it seemed, and always eager to let me know that. “I didn’t know you were working…I assume from what your wife said that you got no reassurances from Fawcett Publications…they’re hard to deal with since their big internal shakeup…anyway, please put my tapes and photos in a brown mailer and send them to me right away. I have an agent with European connections who is opening up new channels and must submit the material…he’s opening up Eurasian markets in about 14 languages…there could be a good little wad for us — plus reprint rights that would run into four figures for each of us….”
The man was definitely off his meds. I didn’t have the tapes the mottle-faced man had recorded. I didn’t have his 22 new photos. And I damn sure wasn’t going to send him my own recorded interview with him — I was keeping that against the day he turned on me, as he had on Keel.
That was my last contact from J.
A seemingly intelligent, rational man to start with, successfully retired in Wrens, until the day he pointed his Polaroid Swinger at — something. I had watched his personality disintegrate around the aftermath, increasingly as desperate for fame as a hophead for his next fix.
The years marched on, and the Wrens notes gravitated to the bottom of my stacks of stories that never got written. We wandered from Nassau to Pennsylvania back to Florida, I worked in California for a year, and we finally moved to the Pacific Northwest to have children instead of my taking a transfer to Washington, D.C. I left the newspaper business for civil service and stability when the kids were very young and settled in for the long haul. Ironically, my home office looked off across the Cascade foothills to Rainier, where Kenneth Arnold coined the term flying saucers the year I was four years old.
I accumulated enough annual leave as a civil servant to divide my vacations between summer at the beach with the family and winter duck hunts with my Labrador retrievers. Life settled into a comfortable rut.
On one of those winter vacations, a bleak cold day with dusk coming on, I had just driven my duck boat in from the flooded sand dunes of a large Eastern Washington reservoir. My hands were numb and my feet felt like blocks of ice in my hip boots. I backed my boat trailer down the hard sand beach at the resort I stayed at to load my boat to keep wind waves from filling it if I left it on the sand.
Summer, my Labrador retriever with better blood lines than me, alerted, and woofed toward the dark beach. Then she relaxed and wagged as a guy who walked like he was old and tired came close enough for me to see. She permitted him to rub her ears, before she hopped into the truck seat and curled up.
He asked how the duck hunting was, and said he was mostly a fisherman, and wasn’t it damned cold out there today? It wasn’t the first time one of the retirees who maintained a travel trailer at the resort year-round had wandered down to chat. The resort was largely deserted in winter, it was twenty miles to town, and I suppose they were lonesome.
He had a pleasant voice. I couldn’t make out his features in the dusk.
We talked about this and that, the price of gas, Christmas coming, when did we think the reservoir would freeze over this year. I was snugging down my boat on the trailer, moving gear to the back of the truck, checking the lights, all the little chores. He mentioned that he was retired from the Air Force, living in one of the travel trailers at the resort. Just as I had figured; why else would he be out here on the beach in the cold? Said he was tired of traveling, he’d been all over the world in the Air Force.
Lots of yarns to spin I bet, I said, stomping my feet to try to restore feeling.
Best duty I ever had was when I was a special aide to Condon.
Condon?
Yeah. You know, that Colorado professor we hired to investigate UFOs back in the sixties?
I vaguely remember the name.
Thought you might, he said. Nobody else wanted to touch our money. Afraid they’d be a laughingstock. But Lowe — that was the assistant dean — got Condon to take it on. It was big bucks back then. Fuckin’ Lowe!
I was still back on his comment that he thought I might remember Condon’s name. Why had he thought that? I peered at him in the deepening darkness.
You didn’t like the dean I said, to be saying something.
He put it out to the world before we even got started that Condon would prove there was no such thing as UFOs.
And then Condon went ahead and did pretty much that, I said. Your classic applied research as opposed to basic. After the Condon report, anyone seeing UFOs really was a laughingstock.
The other man snorted softly. Professor didn’t have a choice.
There was not another soul around. It was cold and dark and I realized that I didn’t really want to have this conversation. But he kept on talking, saying some pretty radical things.
We flew all over checking out sightings and reported crash landings, he said. There were a lot more of those reports than the public ever knew. We had a specially equipped aircraft of our own.
The Air Force? Or Condon?
We rigged it up for Condon and his staff. Including me.
Okay, I said.
You never saw anything in that report about our secret talks with the Chinese Communists or the Soviets that got us into some of their most-interesting sites, he said.
I never read the report. But I would think that would have made news.
We never had a leak. But we went. Way behind the Iron Curtain, the damn Bamboo Curtain. I wasn’t cleared to the top level, so the Commies wouldn’t take me with them when they took Condon to those specific sites. But when he came back aboard, he’d be both excited and upset all the way home. He saw things he wouldn’t ever talk about. And of course the Reds never did.
The report was whitewash?
Complete whitewash. We needed to calm the public down. He seemed quite matter-of-fact about it.
The man was like a walking time-bomb if he ever said this stuff to some UFO conspiracy nut. I wondered why the hell this guy had homed in on me in the middle of nowhere and started talking about this stuff. Did I have some kind of beacon built into my skull to draw crazies?
Now what about you, he said.
What about me? I said.
You’ve had one or two strange experiences. Haven’t you.
I was suddenly glad that my state job of the moment made it prudent to have my S&W Model 59 tucked warm and snug under my armpit, thirteen hot 9mm rounds to call on if needed.
I wrote a couple UFO stories back when I was a reporter, I said.
His head moved in the dark, a nod of affirmation. Just like Condon.
What, I said.
You didn’t write everything that happened to you either.
Just like that, with ice freezing on the outsides of my wool coat and hip boots and a gun under my arm, I was back on that fire tower, frozen in terror.
Who was this son-of-a-bitch?
That’s a very odd thing to say, I said.
It’s best, he said. Best to leave some things out.
Nice talking to you, I said. I need to get rolling. I stepped up into my truck. He didn’t move. When I put on the headlights, he was just a dim figure off to the side.
Best to leave some things out, he repeated. He didn’t speak loudly but I could hear him clearly above the heater fan in the cab. Especially when you don’t remember everything that happened. I paused in rolling up the window.
I remember, I said.
I doubt it, he said. All you remember is little men with goggle eyes strafing you in your back yard. None of the rest of it.
I popped the clutch and rolled out of there, and didn’t look back. Probably sprayed him with icy water, as the boat splashed ashore; didn’t care. I snatched that rig out of there as hard as I had my car those years ago at the fire tower. I kept driving until I was in Moses Lake, amid the bright lights of a freeway interchange, before I pulled over and just sat, shivering. Not from the cold.
I didn’t go back to the reservoir the next day. I drove straight home that night, to the surprise of my family. I just said I was coming down with something and went to bed. The next day I called the resort owner, a friend of twenty years, to find out about this retired Air Force guy who lived on the resort.
And of course he had never heard of any such person.
That was twenty-five years ago. I’m old now, crippled up, and my sleep patterns are just as poor as they ever were, when fear of monsters kept me awake. Lack of regular restful sleep will probably overtax my heart one of these days and kill me.
My new dog, a Griffon that can see and smell and hear things that nobody else can, awakens me from time to time, snarling in barely suppressed rage. But she’s the happiest puppy on earth, loves everybody. Every time I get up and check, there’s nothing there. But she wags happily, as if she’s done her job and chased away the bad things. She turns around the obligatory three times and goes right back to sleep.
Sometimes I wake up on my own, all at once, before she does.
It’s that old, old feeling that something is watching me right through the ceiling that I’ve had all my life; ridiculous. But in each case I drag myself up, make sure the dog is all right, and check the premises with a Glock .45 loaded with those safety rounds that won’t penetrate apartment walls.
I have really, really had it with UFOs.
