UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

On February 25, 2009, a legendary figure within the Contactee field – Howard Menger – passed away at his Vero Beach, Florida home, at the ripe old age of eighty-seven. As Contactee authority Greg Bishop notes, Menger was quite a character, and someone who had a particular thing for women of the allegedly E.T. kind: “At the age of 19, Menger enlisted in the Army and saw service in the Pacific during WWII in a flamethrower unit flushing the Japanese out of caves and other hideouts,” says Greg. “He was wounded and received the Purple Heart. Returning to his native New Jersey in 1946, Menger started a sign painting business and a family.” Greg adds:

“This changed in 1956, when he appeared on the Long John Nebel radio show, along with Contactee George Van Tassel. He talked about contacts with space brothers – and, more specifically, sisters – who appeared to him, beginning when he was ten years old. Some of his later published descriptions sounded distinctly sexual in nature, although he carefully couched them in language that could be construed as platonic. He also started taking pictures of the space people and their ships; although most who saw the photos say that they are quite indistinct. On August 4th of 1956, Menger said he was invited on board one of the flying saucers. The next month he said that the space people took him for a joyride where he saw alien civilizations on other planets and structures on the Moon.”

It was not long before there was a major development in Menger’s life, says Greg. In 1956, Menger met Connie Weber, a woman who turned up at one of Menger’s events. According to Menger, he suspected – and finally came to believe – that Connie was nothing less than a reincarnated alien; an alien that Menger had met in another life, no less. It wasn’t long at all before Menger and his then-wife went their different ways and Connie became his new love. They were together for more than fifty years. Things changed radically for the pair as their lives in Ufology progressed: in 1959, Menger’s Contactee-driven book, From Outer Space to You, was published. It cemented his place in the domains of the Space Brothers and Menger’s fellow contactees. He was soon lecturing up and down the west coast. Connie was very much a part of all this too: she wrote her own book, My Saturnian Lover. It was focused on Howard’s and Connie’s fun-filled escapades in their previous lives.

At the dawning of a new decade, something else happened; something unforeseen and weird. It was in 1960, while on a prime-time television program, that Menger came out with an amazing confession. He said that much of his story was not what it seemed to be. Menger elaborated and claimed that a clandestine branch of the U.S. Army had secretly approached him some years earlier. That same branch could not have cared less if Menger’s tales were true, partially true, or complete garbage. All they wanted from Menger was his help in determining how the public might react to the presence of extraterrestrials in their midst. So, they wanted him to keep on doing what he was doing: spreading the words of the aliens among us. It must be said that very few of the many contactees of the 1950s-1970s ever backed off from their original claims. In fact, quite the opposite: they made sure that their stories remained fully intact. Not so Menger. Interestingly, as Greg also notes: “Fortean writer Ivan Sanderson arrived at the Menger residence in the late 1950s and claimed that Menger got very angry with him when Sanderson discovered some equipment and crates in a storage area with ‘U. S. Army’ stenciled on them.”

There can be no doubt at all that the stories (or, rather, the yarns) of Howard and Connie stretch credibility to the absolute limit. They still stretch matters to that very same limit! The tales of new lives in new bodies, and of a home on a new world (ours), are highly entertaining. But, in terms of being the literal truth? Well, I just don’t buy it. What I do buy, however (well, sometimes I buy it…) are Howard’s claims that he was approached by the military, who wanted him to play psychological games with the American public – and to do so by using the UFO phenomenon as a means to an end. Such a thing may not be so far-fetched as it might initially seem to be. Read on…

Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, we know that the CIA’s Robertson Panel of 1953 was deeply concerned about the UFO phenomenon. Not because it believed that real aliens were visiting us, but because they – the panel members – were worried that the Russians might use the lore of the UFO to create fear, hysteria and paranoia in the minds of Americans. We’re talking about psychological warfare. Perhaps, there were still similar concerns a few years later; something which promoted someone on the inside to enlist Menger into the program. There is an earlier case that reinforces this theory: Silas Newton, a millionaire business man and a conman too, was significantly responsible for creating the infamous “UFO crash” story of Aztec, New Mexico in March 1948. There’s very little doubt that the tale was bogus. What we know now, however, is that while the Aztec story was still riding high, representatives of a secret group within the U.S. Government clandestinely approached Newton and asked him to keep spreading his UFO tale – even though they knew there was no truth to the story. This all sounds very much like Menger’s claims.

When it came to Menger’s stories of alien contact, some might say that he was telling the literal truth. Others, like me, conclude that his overall tale was simply that: a tale. But, just maybe, Menger was being absolutely truthful when he said that he was pressed by some arm of the U.S. Army to assist them in a program designed to see how the population was reacting to the UFO phenomenon – and how it could be manipulated, too. If you want to find more about the complex lives and claims of Howard and Connie, you can do so in Greg Bishop’s book, It Defies Language!

Up until 1952, much of the coverage of “flying saucers” in the American media remained unsympathetic to the idea that some unusual new phenomenon was appearing in our skies. That was the case, at least, until Saturday Night Fever erupted over our nation’s capital, marking one of the most well known, and often written about UFO flaps in American history.

It was almost midnight on the evening of Saturday, July 19, 1952. Air-traffic controller Ed Nugent (not to be confused with a particular raucous guitarist with a similar name) was working the tower at Washington National Airport, when he observed something odd on the radar screen in front of him: it appeared to be a group of six or seven slow-moving objects moving together over the region, well outside the flight paths of any known aircraft, military or civilian, in the area at that time.

At that time, it had been treated as something of a joke (Nugent reportedly told his supervisor, tongue planted firmly in cheek, that he had just spotted an entire “fleet of flying saucers”). However, shortly thereafter another of the ATC operators noticed something odd and out of place: a strange light in the distance, which appeared to accelerate and disappear “at incredible speed.”

Thereafter, the incident received notable coverage in the press, with many articles emphasizing the USAF’s apparent interest in the matter. This was particularly the case following a statement given to the press by Major General John A. Samford, who appeared on camera on July 31, 1952, addressing the “flying saucers” seen over Washington, DC:

“The Air Force today investigated reports that several ‘flying saucers’ had been spotted by radar virtually in its own backyard on the outskirts of the nation’s capital,” journalist Jack Rutledge later wrote of the incident for Louisiana’s Monroe News-Star. “Not only were unidentified objects seen on radar–indicating actual substance instead of merely light–but two airline pilots and a newsman saw lights fitting the general description of flying saucers the same night.”

Indeed, a number of pilots claimed to have seen lights similar to those observed from Washington National Airport. However, among the most notable accounts had been that given by Captain S. Casey Pierman of Detroit, who was flying Capital Airlines Flight 807 on the night in question, headed southbound from National Airport, who observed seven objects while en route from Washington to Martinsburg, West Virginia. Pierman described the objects as at times “hanging motionless” like stars, while at other times “moving at tremendous speed” and resembling “falling stars without tails.”

In a statement Pierman gave to the press, he noted that “In my years of flying I’ve seen a lot of falling or shooting stars… but these were much faster… They couldn’t have been aircraft. They were moving too fast for that. They were about the same size and as the brighter stars, and were much higher than our 6000-foot altitude.”

Many years have passed since this now famous incident, allowing plenty of time for questions to be raised as far as what, precisely, might have been observed on the night in question (which, in truth, had been one of several similar incidents occurring near Washington at that time). However, even in the years shortly after the series of sightings over Washington took place, there were those who were of the mind that the phenomenon had stemmed from secret U.S. military activities, rather than extraterrestrial “saucers” from another world.

Leon Davidson, Ph.D, an early proponent of the idea that UFOs were largely a result of technologies and misdirection from our own government, noted that radar technology had existed by 1950 that would have allowed the creation of “false positives” that could easily have explained the radar traces observed by ATC controllers at Washington National. The question, rather than being one of what the “objects” were, was one of who might be behind such activities, which were apparently intentionally aimed at confusing the public, the media, and even members of the military?

Davidson wrote an interesting article on this, which appeared in the Saucer News in 1959, titled “ECM + CIA = UFO, or How to Cause a Radar Sighting.” In it, Davidson wrote:

By about 1950, ECM (electronic countermeasures) was standard equipment on our advanced bombers and was being developed for missiles. Advertisements started to appear about 1956 showing that this equipment could be used for creating simulated targets for training radar operators. I quote from an article in Aviation Research and Development, March 1957, pg. 22:

“A new radar moving target simulator system — which generates a display of up to 6 individual targets on any standard radar indicator — has been developed … to train radar operators … and for in-flight testing of airborne early-warning personnel… Target positions, paths, and velocities can … simulate … realistic flight paths… Speeds up to 10,000 knots (about 11,500 mph) are easily generated… The target can be made to turn left or right… For each target there is … adjustment to provide a realistic scope presentation.”

The reader should keep this quotation in mind when reading about radar sightings of high speed UFOs.

Davidson raises a number of good points, and the description he provides does resemble the circumstances presented in a number of the better known UFO radar reports from over the years. However, if the objects in question had indeed merely been the result of such experimental “war games” being carried out covertly, as Leon Davidson suggested (the CIA was a favorite culprit for this in Davidson’s narratives), can the idea of physical lights observed by pilots be similarly explained in some way?

We may never know the full story behind the objects seen and tracked on radar over Washington in 1952. However, when it comes to military technologies used for misdirection of the public, nothing can be ruled out, as Davidson was already suggesting within years of when the initial sightings took place. In the ever complex annals of Ufology, one thing that should always be kept in mind is that if there’s a will, there’s a way… or as cases like this may indicate, if there’s a way, then someone can find an excuse for a will.