An Introduction to Earth MysteriesPART TWO
The New MythologyIn Part I we saw how interest in the ancient landscape was pushed onto the back-burner with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, but there was a new mystery in the skies which would ultimately lead to its resurrection.War of the Worlds
On 30th October 1938, millions of Americans tuned in to a popular radio program
The Mercury Theatre that featured plays directed by, and often starring,
Orson Welles. The performance that evening was an adaptation of the science fiction novel
The War of the Worlds, about a Martian invasion of the earth.
H. G. Wells had written his novel in 1898 in which he tells the story of an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians equipped with advanced weaponry using tripod fighting machines. It is a seminal depiction of an alien invasion of Earth. Welles had decided that to heighten the dramatic effect of the play, it should be performed so it would sound like a news broadcast. The technique clearly worked and reportedly millions of Americans went into mass panic believing it was an actual account of current events. It has been suggested that
War of the Worlds was a psychological warfare experiment by the US government. The public mindset seemed to have been conditioned for the rapidly approaching future.
Astronauts & PilotsEyes were focused on the skies with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, as aerial technology became a dominant feature of warfare. Aircraft pilots started to report sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFO’s) in the 1940's. The term “
foo fighters” or “
kraut fireballs” was used to describe these UFO’s and
other mysterious aerial phenomena seen in the skies over operational theatres; pilots reporting that these things flew in formation with their airplanes, playing
“tag" with them in dives, and behaving as if they were under some sort of intelligent control. The term initially described a type of UFO first reported and named by the U.S. 415th Night Fighter Squadron, in 1944, the term was then commonly used to describe any UFO sighting. Germans and Japanese pilots are also believed to have seen these mysterious flying objects, pilots assuming that the
foo fighters were secret weapons employed by the enemy; however, they have remained unidentified to this day and the UFO age was upon us.
Post War, UFO activity continued when on 24th June 1947
Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine bright, saucer-like objects flying at
‘incredible' speed at an altitude of 10,000 feet as they
moved between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams, along the Cascade mountains in Washington state, and estimated their speed at 1,200 mph. He described the objects as each as big as a DC-4 passenger plane, and ‘
flat like a pie pan,’ and so shiny that they reflected the sun like a mirror, hence the term ‘
flying saucer’. Less than two weeks later on 3rd July an event occurred which has become known as the biggest UFO conspiracy theory of all time, when an odd aerial craft crashed in the desert near a military base at Roswell, New Mexico; later claims of bodies of extraterrestrials being recovered from the crash site fuelled the conspiracy claims of an ‘
alien autopsy’ video. Roswell Army officials issued a press release announcing it had recovered a "
flying disk”- in other words a UFO. Just 24 hours later, this statement was retracted and a restriction placed on further press coverage. Later, at a press conference in Fort Worth, the Army claimed that the intelligence officer and others at Roswell had misidentified the debris, which was not a UFO but the remains of a weather balloon complete with a metallic radar reflector.
The First Ufologist Donald E. Keyhoe, a respected test pilot during the late 1940s, early 1950s, flew a wide range of aircraft and evaluated their performance and features for
True magazine. When these first
"flying saucer" sightings were reported in June of 1947, Keyhoe, an experienced aviator, was sceptical. When
True magazine asked him to investigate the phenomena in 1949, he interviewed many pilots and military officials in the Pentagon, and found that many credible observers claimed to have seen the unexplained flying objects. In 1950, Major Keyhoe published his article,
Flying Saucers are Real, in the January issue of
True magazine. This article brought the
subject of flying saucers into the main stream of American life and caused a sensation. Keyhoe later expanded this article into a paperback book
The Flying Saucers Are Real (1950) which reached an even wider audience. This was followed by the major books
Flying Saucers From Outer Space (1953), and
Flying Saucer Conspiracy (1955). In January 1957, Keyhoe was appointed Director of the newly formed
National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) in Washington, D.C., which under his direction gave serious publicity to the UFO phenomena. At the time his last book was published,
Aliens From Space (1973), Keyhoe had become convinced that the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was the principal source behind a major UFO cover-up campaign. Conversely some conspiracy theorists claim that the post war UFO flaps were fuelled by the American government in a bid to detract attention away from top secret experiments and no doubt many claimed sightings of UFO’s were in fact post war experimental US craft. Keyhoe may have unwittingly been part of that cover up operation. In a further twist, others claim that leaps in US aircraft technology had come about by back-engineering from captured flying saucers (including material supposedly recovered at Roswell), and kept in the now legendary Area 51 secret military base in Nevada.
Many of these US pilots went on to become astronauts of the 1960’s USA-CCCP space-race. One of these pilots,
Major Gordon Cooper, a US astronauts having flown on Mercury 9 and Gemini 5, was a firm believer in UFOs. In 1951 he had sighted a UFO while piloting an F-86 Sabre-jet over Western Germany. He described them as metallic, saucer-shaped discs at considerable altitude that could out-manoeuvre US fighter planes. It was later claimed that he saw a greenish object with a red tail move past his Mercury 9 spacecraft in 1963 but Cooper denied this was ever a true story. Cooper later testified before the United Nations: "
I believe 
that these extra-terrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets... Most astronauts were reluctant to discuss UFOs." Photo taken by Gemini 12, November 1966.Transcripts from the Gemini and Apollo space missions during the 1960’s - early 1970’s, allegedly claim sightings of UFOs by the astronauts. During the flight of
Apollo 8 in December 1968 as the command module emerged from behind the moon
James Lovell transmitted "
We have been informed that Santa Claus does exist!". As this occurred on Christmas day 1968 it is deemed to have been Lovell's sense of humour, however, it is claimed that “
Santa Claus” was the code word for UFO/Aliens originally employed on the Mercury 8 flight. Allegedly both
Neil Armstrong and
Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, Apollo 11, saw UFOs shortly after the historic moon landing on the Moon on 21 July 1969. It is claimed that all Apollo and Gemini flights were followed and sightings have continued into the modern day Space Shuttle program.
UFO-mania became the new fascination of post war enthusiasts of alternative hypotheses and the following decade saw the emergence of such works as
George Adamski’s Flying Saucers Have Landed in 1953,
followed by
Inside the Flying Saucer in 1955, in which he had claimed to have made contact with these visitors from outer space and even travelled in their spacecraft. Other books followed, like
Morris Jessup’s ‘
The Case For The UFO’ in 1955. Whereas Adamski’s claims were not taken seriously by many, Jessup’s did seem to carry an air of authenticity about them; indeed an '
annotated' copy of the paperback edition of Jessup’s "
Case for the UFO" had been mysteriously delivered to Admiral N. Furth, at the Office of Naval Research. The notations, implying intimate knowledge of UFOs, their means of motion and origin, were written by three persons, in three different handwriting styles, in three distinct ink colours;
blue, blue-violet, and
blue-green, and referred to as
Mr. A, Mr. B, and
Jemi. Jessup went onto to write further works such as ‘
UFO and the Bible’ (1956) and ‘
The Expanding Case for UFO's’ (1957).
In 1959, Jessup committed suicide in Dade County Park, Florida by inhaling exhaust fumes from his own car. Some believed that "
The circumstances of Jessup's apparent suicide remain mysterious” and conspiracy theorists contended that it was connected to his knowledge of UFO’s and the
Philadelphia Experiment, an alleged naval military experiment at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, Pennsylvania, in 1943, in which the
USS Eldridge was said to have been rendered invisible to human observers for a short period of time.
A new age of mysterious events was upon a suspicious public.
Part III - Was God an Astronaut?* * *
At 04.58 BST this morning, a record crowd of around 36,000 people gathered on Salisbury Plain to witness the Solstice sunrise at Stonehenge, however overcast skies obscured the sun.
English Heritage announced that it would be providing Managed Open Access to the event and closed its normal visitor operation at 15.00 hrs on Saturday, 20th June 2009 not re-opening again until 09.00 hrs on Monday, 22nd June 2009.
Although thousands flock to the mid-summer sunrise it is the mid-winter sunrise that was the most significant in ancient solar worship as the death and rebirth of the new sun.
