• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Phil Klass and Robert Sheaffer, who troubled to write a few letters and make a couple of phone calls, came up with some telling facts about this event. First, the date was not July 1, as Keyhoe stated, but July 2. The "unknown" was identified as a friendly aircraft—a C-47 cargo plane en route to Griffiss, not a UFO. There were two F-94C "Starfire" jets in the air on an operational training mission, a routine activity at Griffiss. The F-94 pilot reported that as he began his descent a fire-warning light came on and he discovered that the engine had caught fire. The heat was intense, and pilot and radar observer ejected because of the emergency and the critical low altitude. The plane crashed four miles away.

How do we know these facts? The U.S. Air Force issued a perfectly straightforward memorandum following the event. It is not marked secret, is not at all classified, and anyone may have a copy of this report simply by asking for it. A covering letter states, "There is no mention of UFO in the accident report." The reason is obvious: The Air Force treated this accident like any other. There was no mysterious alien, no unexplainable force—nothing except an aircraft that malfunctioned and crashed. And contrary to Vallee's exaggerated claim that the New York Times ran "a photo of the town in flames," we find instead a photo that shows a house afire and a caption explaining that two houses and a car were destroyed.

Those who espouse the UFO cause, finding nothing extraordinary about the crash, were hard-pressed to turn it into a UFO incident but perfectly able to perform under pressure. All it needed was the invention of a few details, the exaggeration of a few more, and a dedicated disregard of the pertinent facts. That's the stuff that creates UFO "incidents" and brings forth UFO "experts." It sells books, too.

Dr. J. Allen Hynek asks plaintively, "I wonder what our chances are of following up on a case like that?" They're pretty good, doctor, pretty good. Just as good as the chances of your having done any checking up on a contact-with-a-UFO case that your own UFO Center reported from Holland apparently based entirely on a one-page transcript of unsupported statements made by a single witness—none of which was followed up for verification! Were there any questions asked or attempts made to validate the data, or were the usual standards of UFO investigation applied?

In the book he wrote with Vallee, The Edge of Reality, Hynek proudly admitted the astronauts to the ranks of UFO-sighters. A total of sixteen remarkable observations were cataloged in the book, but when Hynek visited the Space Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in July 1976 he was informed of the facts behind these "sightings." Perhaps the atmosphere on the premises of a real scientific organization got through to him, for he privately (though never publicly) disavowed the reports, declaring that coauthor Vallee had insisted upon their inclusion, not he, and that the list was put in the book merely to generate interest and discussion. Readers, he told colleagues, had no right to assume that the sightings had been verified just because they were in the book! If that is so, perhaps we had better insist that all accounts be labeled "true" and "false" from now on.

Robert Sheaffer, a very active and valuable critic of these spurious claims, is rightly indignant about this matter, among many others. "The man responsible for the 'Astronaut UFO List,' George Fawcett, admitted in debate with me in 1978 that the list is '99% wrong,' " said Sheaffer. "Hynek never bothered to check it. He told a colleague or two what he'd learned at NASA, but has yet to publicly state a correction. He still is claiming that astronauts have seen UFOs! This kind of misrepresentation occurs again and again in UFOlogy." Any report, it seems, is enlarged, "cleaned up," published, and accepted by even the leading authorities in the field, without any serious attempt to verify the facts. Is it any wonder that