Source: True Magazine 1966 Issue

I know the Secret of the Flying Saucers

by Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe, USMC (Ret.)

Editor's Note: Major Keyhoe has been writing about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO's) in this magazine and elsewhere for over 15 years. From the outset he has insisted that flying saucers are real and interplanetary, and many authorities have come to agree with him. Now he claims that control over gravity itself is the only explanation for the astounding maneuvers which saucers are said to make. Some physicists dismiss this theory as fundamentally erroneous. But, as you will read, there are others who find Major Keyhoe's latest chapter in "The Great Flying Saucer Story" important and plausible.

One night last February, over the North Pacific, a Flying Tiger Airlines crew had a startling aerial encounter. What they saw is a clue to a fantastic technical mystery. In its solution lies a prize so great that six government agencies are searching for it right now. The answer may not be far off. What they are searching for is the secret of gravity control.

About midnight on February 15, the Flying Tiger plane, carrying a military group from the U.S. to Japan, was four hours out of Anchorage. Suddenly the cockpit radar picked up three fast-moving objects. The plane captain and his crew looked out at the side and saw three huge oval-shaped ships, glowing red in the night.

An Air Force captain who was a passenger on the plane was called forward to confirm the sighting. His signed report is in the files of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena.

According to the captain's report, the unknown machines slowed down to the airliner's speed and flew in close formation. Five miles away, by radar range, they leveled off to pace the plane. The Air Force captain computed their length as much more than 700 feet. It was plain that the giant Unidentified Flying Objects had an unknown type of propulsion. No jets, no exhausts were visible. For 30 minutes, still in formation, they continued to pace the plane. Then, swiftly accelerating to 1,200 knots, they climbed out of sight in seconds.

This startlingly swift acceleration is a maneuver that could not be duplicated by any ship now made on Earth. What makes it possible for UFO's? According to many scientists and engineers, there is only one possible answer. The answer is antigravity: artificial gravity fields and control of gravity power.

Control of gravity is something that men have been dreaming about for centuries. Now it appears that we are on the threshhold of achieving it. Its value, to the country that first attains it, is incalculable. Our government, hoping for a technical breakthrough, has set up 46 different research projects on various aspects of gravity control. The Air Force is running 33 of these projects and the others are divided among five other agencies.

Included in the 46 government projects are experiments and research at two Air Force Laboratories (Flight Dynamics and General Physics Research), Radio Corporation of America, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa; Stevens Institute of Technology; the universities of California, Denver, Harvard, Indiana, Manchester (England), Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Purdue, Stockholm (Sweden), Syracuse, Texas, and two New York schools - Queens College and Yeshiva Graduate School of Science.

And, of course, some government agencies have projects so secret that they are not publicly registered and cannot be revealed without permission.

Private industry is also looking at the question of gravity control with new seriousness. A large number of giant corporations, including Bell Aerospace, General Electric, Hughes Aircraft, Boeing, Douglas and many others, have set up gravity projects.

If you add up all the known gravity programs being run by the government and private industry, you get somewhere between 65 and 70 projects. This means there is a heavy concentration of scientific and engineering brains working on the problem.

One leading scientist who is convinced that UFO's are spaceships using gravity control is Dr. Hermann Oberth. Doctor Oberth, a recognized authority, was co-designer of the V-2 rocket and later a U.S. special consultant at Huntsville, Alabama, one of the installations where important antigravity research is now under way.

"With ordinary propulsion," Doctor Oberth told me in 1961, "such violent accelerations and maneuvers would endanger the ship. Also, the force would crush any creatures aboard against the rear or sides of the machine. But with an artificial gravity field the force applies simultaneously to the passengers and the spaceship. Even in swift changes of speed and direction, the ship is not strained and the passengers feel nothing."

Today, doctor Oberth is willing to go further. He is now of the opinion "that energy, inertia and gravitational fields are only aspects of one and the same thing" and that it will prove impossible to separate them from each other. What he has in mind, he says, is "not yet known fields of force" which can be used to accelerate material objects in a way similar to the force of gravity.

Another noted authority who agrees that UFO's are using artificial G fields is William P. Lear, Sr., [see "Hard-nosed Gambler in the Plane Game" in this issue] multimillionaire inventor, pilot, designer of air and space equipment and builder of jet aircraft. Lear, who once sighted a UFO from his executive plane, predicts that future U.S. vehicles will also use artificial gravity. "The people on board would probably not feel any more effect," Lear says, "than they do from the tremendous speed of the Earth as it rotates and orbits and orbits the sun."

Several years ago, Glenn Martin's vice-president for advanced design, G. S. Trimble, predicted that by 1985 practically all airliners would be using artificial gravity, flying at almost unbelievable speeds. At about the same time, future airliner speeds of 10,000 mph. or more were pictured by Dr. Walter Dornberger, then Bell Aircraft's chief guided-missile scientist and now president of Bell Aerospace.

Grover Loening, pioneer aircraft builder and consultant to the Air Force, said it even more strongly, "I firmly believe that before long man will acquire the ability to build an electromagnetic contragravity mechanism that works," he stated.

A top official of Bethlehem Steel, Jesse V. Honeycutt, has indicated some of the results we can expect if Loening is right. ""serious research is being concentrated in an attempt to solve the mystery of gravity and bring about a control of its power.

It would bring about a greater revolution in power, transportation and many other fields than the discovery of atomic power,""he stated.

Antigravity? It seems inconceivable. Yet, the search goes on and many responsible men believe the answer will be found. And, to my mind, it is the only possible explanation for the performance of the UFO's.

The stakes are so high that no clue can be overlooked. The Air Force Technical Intelligence, hunting for overlooked leads, is carefully checking hundreds of verified UFO reports. Hopefully, some of them will help us find out how these strange vehicles operate.

Four days before Christmas, 1964, a round, metallic craft about 125 feet in diameter was observed to make a brief landing in a field near Staunton, Virginia. Two Du Pont scientists later took Geiger counters to the site.

"It was 'hot'-highly radioactive," Du Pont engineer Lawrence Cook reported. "We checked for 45 minutes - it was definitely 'hot'."

In Puerto Rico, near dusk on December 26, 1964, Ramey Air Force Base radar spotted two large discs. As A4D jets streaked up to pursue them, the discs accelerated to terrific speed. Making instant right-angle turns-impossible for any known aircraft-they vanished over the Atlantic.

On March 21, 1965, Capt. Yoshiaki Inada, piloting a Toa Airlines Convair on a domestic Japanese flight, was chased by a "mysterious, elliptical luminous object." Flying close to the plane, the UFO blanked out his radio and "violently interfered" with his automatic direction finding equipment.

Puzzling earlier cases also are being rechecked. On July 1, 1954, an AF F-94 - a two-man jet - was scrambled to chase a UFO near Walesville, New York. When the pilot tried to close in, a sudden, unbearable heat filled the cockpit. Half-dazed, the pilot and radar officer bailed out. The jet crashed in the street, killing two children and their parents.

These odd phenomena, high radiation, mysterious heat and electrical interference may be side effects of gravity control devices.

Like most people, you probably took gravity for granted before space flights began. Now you know, for example, that one "G" is the Earth's normal gravitational pull. This is what holds you to the seat of your chair - and more important, keeps you from being tossed into the air by the Earth'' rotation. You feel two or three G'' in a roller coaster or a stunting plane --a mere hint of what our astronauts have to endure during blast-off and acceleration. But gravity causes a lot of trouble and expense we seldom think about. Aircraft and rocket builders have to provide heavy engines, huge weight of fuel, just to offset gravity. In construction of buildings, bridges, and in a hundred other ways, G affects our lives and adds billions to the cost of work.

Gravity control could reduce or end many of these problems.

How soon can we expect antigravity?

Some researchers say it may take a long time. Others believe there may be a sudden breakthrough. If that happens, there will be some fantastic results.

First, obviously, our space program would take a big leap forward. Instead of our present wasteful rockets, we could build spaceships matching the UFO's high speeds and maneuvers. With such advanced ships, we could make swift flights to the moon and the planets.

Recently, Alexander de Seversky stated that "with abundant energy available, we will move in space with constant acceleration or deceleration. Accelerating half-way to our goal and decelerating the rest of the way at one G or 32.2 feet per second, the moon will be reached in three and a half hours, Venus in 36 hours, Mars in two days, Jupiter in six."

According to Oberth, German physicist Burkhard Heim and other scientists, gravity control will enable spaceships to reach even greater speeds than these. With such advanced machines, we could explore the nearest star systems a century or more ahead of our present timetable.

Using carrier or "parent" ships with short-range probes, we could fully explore a planet - either by remote control or direct observation - before attempting to land. Many cases are on record in which large UFO's have launched small units, apparently for close observation of the Earth, then retrieved them in swift, precise operations.

In one such case (an official AF Intelligence report), groups of small UFO's flying at 5240 mph. were seen and tracked by the crew of an AF B-29. One group, after abruptly slowing to pace the bomber, resumed its speed within seconds. The small UFO's were then seen to merge with or go aboard a huge carrier which accelerated to more than 9,000 mph. before it disappeared.

Because of G-crafts' tremendous speeds, the picture of possible military operations becomes hair-raising. Let's take as a basis the figure in a documented case at White Sands Proving Ground, where Navy scientists saw and tracked a UFO flying at 18,000 mph.

Such terrific speed could put bombers back into the picture in place of missiles. Attacks by G-bombers from bases near major targets would take less than five minutes. If a "rush-fire" war broke out halfway around the world, a huge G-transport carrying a fully armed division - or even an army - could be on the scene in 40 minutes, or less.

Another effect of gravity control will be a big change in air travel. Here's what a G-liner trip would be like, according to several researchers. Let's say you are making a flight from New York to London. You go aboard a large ship - probably disc-shaped, from present indications. Your seat has no safety belts - none are needed. The ship takes off vertically, accelerating at incredible speed. You feel weightless but you feel no motion.

The airliner arcs up into a great circle course, silently, with no "bumps" - no rough air. In 10 to 15 minutes, London suddenly takes shape below. There is no long approach, skimming over rooftops. You descend vertically and land. If traffic is heavy, your pilot would stop the ship in midair and hover until cleared.

In spite of the speed, you'd be safer - especially in regard to many of the strange eddies which have thrown jet airliners into uncontrollable dives.

In probing the riddle of gravity, project scientists try widely different approaches - some even contrary to accepted natural laws.

Under an Army contract, a University of Detroit team has built a 4,000-pound, specially wired rotor which spins at 100,000 rpm. With this unique device, scientists are testing gravitational radiation theories searching for a possible key to G control.

Using gravity meters based on new principles of physics, Air Force teams make frequent flights around the equator and over the poles, to speed up worldwide measurement of the Earth's gravitational pull. Tied in with this is a network of gravity stations and special projects all over the world.

Though no breakthrough has occurred (unless in highly secret projects) two significant facts have been established.

The Earth's G field is relatively weak, compared with the pull of gravity between planets and the sun. There is a connection between gravity and electromagnetic fields. Igo Sikorsky, discussing the colossal force of spatial G, says a steel cable about 8,000 miles thick would be needed to hold the Earth in its orbit --if it were not for gravity.

But, fortunately for our anti-G search, the Earth's gravity pull, for objects on the ground or at average flight altitudes, is fairly small. Likewise, the force required to cancel its pull would be relatively small - if a method can be found.

Using various barriers we can shield ourselves from the heat, light and sound waves. But, so far, no way has been found to create a gravity shield. Some scientists still call the gravity shield idea a "lunatic fringe" notion. But many now refuse to say that such a thing is completely impossible.

Are UFO's using a gravity shield? In an effort to find out, the Air Force is renewing its attempts to capture a UFO. If we could get one on the ground, undamaged, it might make possible a big shortcut in our gravity research and save us years of slow, tedious scientific work.

In the past, many Air Force pilots have tried to down UFO's, without success. But the Air Force has new reason for hope now, based on the recent increase in low-altitude UFO approaches and "touch landings."

On the night of January 12, 1965, an officer of a federal law enforcement agency had a close encounter. As he was driving his official car toward Blaine Air Force Station, in Washington, a flying disc 30 feet in diameter hurtled down at his automobile. At the last moment the disc arced up steeply, avoiding collision. When the officer jumped out, he saw the UFO hovering overhead. After a minute, it shot up into clouds at high speed. A short time afterward, the UFO - or a similar one - was seen landing in a field near Blaine, melting the snow and scorching the ground before it took off. When the AF questioned the federal officer, they said they had tracked the UFO by radar as it raced down toward his car. This officer, like many other UFO witnesses, was warned by his superiors not to let his name be used in connection with the sighting.

On January 25, 1965, two NASA engineers sighted a UFO which touch landed near Hampton, Virginia. One witness was Maj. John Nayadley, a retired AF jet pilot. The other was A. G. Crimmins, who saw the strange machine maneuvering toward the ground.

"It was zigzagging as if searching for a landing spot," said Crimmins. "I watched it through 20 x 50 binoculars and I could see flashing lights. They appeared to be on the rim of a rapidly rotating disc."

Before anyone could reach the spot, the flying disc took off and rapidly climbed out of sight.

The step-up in UFO chases was demonstrated at Washington, D.C., on January 11, 1965, when AF jets pursued several flying objects over the city. The chase was confirmed by an Army lieutenant-colonel and a group of Army communications specialists.

If jets had been near any of the "touch" sites, they might have swarmed down and kept the UFO from getting away. But records of previous attempts to capture UFOs indicate it will be a tough job.

Whether we capture a UFO or not, the search for the elusive secret will go on. The connection between gravity and electromagnetic fields may provide the key to the mystery.

For several years, Burkhard Heim, director of the German Research Institute of Field Physics at Goettingen, Germany, has been searching for the answer to the gravity riddle. Finally, Heim revealed that by direct experimentation he had discovered a positive lead to antigravity. The discovery involved an intermediate field, neither electromagnetic nor gravitational.

The results, Heim stated, if applied to space flight, would be direct levitation, conversion of electricity into kinetic energy without any waste, and "immunizing the occupants and the structures of such vehicles against any effects from acceleration of the vehicle, however great and violent."

After the first shock, several scientists examined Heim's claims.

"His approach is not in conflict with known laws of nature, and it agrees with the quantum theory," A.R. Weyl said in an analysis for the British magazine, Aeronautics. "If Heim were right, the amazing properties commonly ascribed to the mysterious flying saucers' would be, in fact, sound physics and proper engineering."

Heim's work toward the goal of an actual antigravity device using "field inducers" has evidently been put under official German security. He has refused to divulge the key to his formula.

Heim's findings would indicate that antigravity researchers may discover new scientific laws and that their work may invalidate old theories. Some scientists are already saying privately that Einstein's famous "general theory of relativity" may turn out to be totally fallacious. Newton's law has also come in for attacks. However, Robert Forward, G expert of Hughes Aircraft Company, uses the Einstein theory to show that it is possible to partially nullify the Earth's gravitational field. The amount of nullification obtainable with present-day technology is extremely small, however. Forward predicts that some day, when our technology is greatly advanced, we will be able to "create artificial gravity fields at will."

With a real all-out effort this could happen a lot sooner than the 10 or 20 years many scientists have in mind.

But getting enough top men to work in the field is a problem. One scientist says, "Scientists are sensitive about their reputations and many of them still think antigravity is a joke. If they knew the facts, they'd be eager to get into it."

Fear among scientists is partially due to the Air force censorship of UFO reports. Air force censors not only hide the facts but also belittle those who publicly report UFO sightings.

One recent victim was Dempsey Bruton, chief of satellite tracking at NASA's Wallops Island station in Virginia. On January 5, 1965, Bruton saw a strange round object flying at terrific speed toward the station. After it passed overhead, the UFO shot straight up out of sight. Using the elapsed time - six to nine seconds - and angles and times reported by other witnesses, Bruton said the speed was definitely "several thousand miles per hour, possibly 8,000 mph. or even higher." The AF, implying he was incompetent, rejected the report and said it was not evidence of any technically superior machine.

But AF policy notwithstanding, the drive to get the secret of antigravity is well underway. It can't be stopped now. But it can be speeded up. We are already spending billions on the space program - on the race to the moon, to Mars. Harnessing gravity could put us years ahead and save us enormous sums of money.

With control of the universe at stake, a crash program is imperative. We produced the A-bomb, under the huge Manhattan Project, in an amazingly short time. The needs, the urgency today are even greater. The Air Force should end UFO secrecy, give the facts to scientists, the public, to Congress. Once the people realize the truth, they would back - even demand - a crash G program.

For this is one race we dare not lose. - Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe