UFO, page 34
As the details became more public, many wrote off Carter’s sighting as confusion over the appearance of the particularly bright Venus in the night sky—but to more trained observers, it seemed unlikely that the Naval Academy–trained Carter, who would have known celestial navigation through and through, would be confused by a planet. The mystery persisted: What had he seen?VI
As Carter campaigned, he promised he would open up the proverbial vault of the nation’s UFO secrets. “One thing’s for sure, I’ll never make fun of people who say they’ve seen unidentified objects in the sky,” he pledged. “If I become President, I’ll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists.”
Surely, ufologists believed, he would tell the nation what was really happening. In April 1977, U.S. News & World Report wrote that indeed the truth was coming: “Before the year is out, the Government—perhaps the President—is expected to make what are described as ‘unsettling disclosures’ about UFOs.” Once in the Oval Office, though, Carter never followed up on his pledge—and as a result, it was up to the world of popular culture to imagine the worlds beyond.
* * *
That same year, Hynek’s own life of work crossed into pop culture for the first time. Although aliens had been a staple of entertainment for decades, the late 1970s media machine was almost single-handedly driven by stories from space, most notably through the immense popularity of the TV show Star Trek, George Lucas’s groundbreaking Star Wars, and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Hynek had written the young director in January 1976 after realizing that the title of his upcoming film had the same title as one of the tiers of his classification system in The UFO Experience. Spielberg apologized, and eventually his production company, Amblin, optioned Hynek’s book and the right to use the term for $2,000; he also hired Hynek as a technical consultant for three days at $500 each.
The movie, only Spielberg’s fourth ever as director and the follow-up to his massive 1975 summer hit, Jaws, reunited him with Richard Dreyfuss, who played a blue-collar Indiana man whose life was changed by a series of UFO encounters.VII It was a huge sensation, grossing nearly $300 million at the box office, and winning two Oscars. It also further popularized Hynek’s UFO classification system, as well as the work of Project Blue Book; some of the movie’s most famous scenes were inspired by real sightings, including the 1957 encounter in Levelland, Texas, and 1966 sightings in Ohio. A French character in the movie, Claude Lacombe, was modeled on Jacques Vallée, and Hynek was given a six-second cameo, during which he could be seen stroking his ever-present goatee. Contact information for the Center for UFO Studies appeared on the movie posters, and resulted in hundreds of new members, sightings, and inquiries. For the first time, Hynek’s grandly named center moved out of his house and into its own office space, with enough new reports to keep its corps of two part-time and 150 volunteer investigators busy.
The movie’s most profound legacy, however, would be the way it changed Americans’ idea of what an alien was, or could be. Gone were the little green men and the tentacled body snatcher. The extraterrestrials in Spielberg’s world were gray, child-sized humanoids with small noses, hairless smooth bodies, black eyes, and thin arms (setting a new visual for years to come), who offered a benevolent, consciousness-raising contact experience—not a threatening, existential encounter with nuclear-age overtones—and the citizens of Earth were maturing into their roles with a larger galaxy, a concept that, intentional or not on Spielberg’s part, served as a moving tribute to the work that Sagan, Drake, Hynek, and others had been doing for decades. The movie, film critic Charlene Engel wrote, “suggests that humankind has reached the point where it is ready to enter the community of the cosmos.”
When Spielberg was asked a few years later to select his favorite image from his career, he chose the moment when the young wonder-filled boy of Close Encounters opened his living room door to the blazing orange light from the UFO, inadvertently creating the perfect metaphor for our thoughts about what lay beyond our universe—certain and uncertain, but more convinced than ever that something was out there: “That beautiful but awful light, just like fire coming through the doorway. He’s very small, and it’s a very large door, and there’s a lot of promise or danger outside that door.”
That question of “promise or danger” was what had consumed Hynek’s intellectual energies for decades—and it was one he never fully resolved for himself. He retired from teaching at the end of the 1970s, moving west to Arizona, but remained active in the international UFO community. The boy whose parents took him out to see Halley’s Comet pass overhead when he was just five days old in 1910 died just as the comet passed through Earth’s skies once again, never knowing the truth about the quest that had animated so much of his life—but with ever more passing time, he’d come to doubt the idea of any grand conspiracy. “There are two kinds of cover-ups,” Hynek explained late in life. “You can cover up knowledge and you can cover up ignorance. I think there was much more of the latter than of the former.”
I. In 1973, since the facility lacked a television set, Cornell’s James Cordes rigged up an antenna to the observatory’s video screen in order to watch the evening reruns of that summer’s Watergate hearings.
II. The signal was slightly higher than the hydrogen line itself, perhaps reflecting the Doppler effect—the so-called blue shift that would indicate it came from something actually moving toward Earth in the vastness of space.
III. The engaged Druyan and married Sagan, longtime friends, fell in love during the Voyager project and, despite never even having kissed, decided in the course of a telephone call to get married; they broke the news to their respective significant others at 1 p.m. two days after the Voyager launch.
IV. Carter’s opponent in 1976, the incumbent Gerald Ford had, of course, encouraged the congressional investigation after the strange Hillsdale College sightings in his home state of Michigan in the 1960s, but as president had engaged minimally with the UFO issue. His primary contribution to the world of ufology was overruling NASA to rename America’s first reusable space shuttle, set to be named the Constitution—in honor of the national bicentennial in 1976—instead to Enterprise, after the popular television show Star Trek.
V. The Lions Club was one of the most important networks of Carter’s life—he’d followed his father into the service group and risen in its ranks by 1969 to be a district governor, in charge of about fifty-six clubs in southwestern Georgia, a network that provided him important visibility as a rising politician and one that he’d credit later for stoking his ambition to run for governor in the first place.
VI. It wasn’t until 2016 that Jere Justus, a researcher and former air force scientist, finally solved the puzzle: Carter had seen a high-altitude rocket-released barium cloud. Justus knew this because, in the 1960s, he had worked on air force and NASA atmospheric studies on winds in the upper atmosphere—and at twilight and just after dark, particle clouds could give off a green or blue glow as the barium became electrically charged in the atmosphere. As Justus dug into the records, he found that on the night of Carter’s sighting, a similar experiment had been launched from Eglin Air Force Base in western Florida at 6:41 p.m.; a rocket had risen into the sky and released three different clouds of barium at various heights, through about 7:09 p.m. The clouds—rising and growing rapidly in brightness—would have been visible from Leary, which was about 150 miles away. “The rapid growth in apparent cloud size and brightness, followed by the subsequent diminishment in both size and brightness, could easily be interpreted by an observer as an ‘object’ first approaching and then receding,” Justus explained in a subsequent report. It could also appear to be in close proximity, despite being a hundred kilometers up in the sky. This wasn’t entirely rare—in fact, Justus had experience with this kind of observer confusion. During an experiment in the early 1960s, he later recalled, “An Atlanta woman saw a sodium vapor trail, launched one evening from Eglin AFB, about 600 km distant. She viewed the cloud through the bare branches of a deciduous tree, then called a local Atlanta TV station to report that a ‘UFO had landed in a tree at the end of her street’!”
VII. It was hard not to see the entire movie as an allegory of Hynek’s own personal evolution on the question of extraterrestrials, “reinforc[ing] a narrative that had been taking shape for decades,” historian Kate Dorsch pointed out, that “Witnesses were rational, the government couldn’t be trusted, scientific interest was legitimate, and UFOs were real.”
33 Situation Red
One of the puzzles that had long dogged the tales of UFO crash retrievals was why, if the US government had indeed secretly captured astounding, galaxy-traveling equipment, the military was still flying around in gas-fueled jet planes. Thus far, attempts to transform flying craft—like Avro’s Project 1794—had delivered little more than a battlefield hovercraft, failing so significantly that they’d never even been deployed in combat. If the government had succeeded in locating crashed alien ships, it certainly hadn’t figured out how to use them.
Then, in the final months of Carter’s presidency, the Pentagon announced a stunning new innovation. As it turned out, the government had been at work for years on some of the most secret and futuristic planes ever developed—developed not with the help of captured alien technology as it turned out, but computers and modeling clay. The process had begun with a competition by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s own big-thinking skunk works, known as Project Harvey (after the 1950 Jimmy Stewart film featuring an invisible bunny), which had the goal of radically reducing the ability of air defense radar to identify attack planes. Two defense contractors, Northrop and Lockheed, had squared off over competing designs. Lockheed, which had built the original record-breaking U-2 spy plane in the 1950s, submitted the plans for an even more advanced, high-flying, record-setting plane that it was already developing—the A-12 Oxcart designed for the CIA, and its more public but nearly identical cousin known as the SR-71, designed for the air force, had capabilities that were so secret, DARPA had originally excluded Lockheed from the stealth competition, not realizing how much work it had already done in the field. (The A-12 had a radar cross-section just one-twentieth that of the similarly sized B-47 bomber.)
Northrop, meanwhile, had seized upon an observation featured in an underacknowledged 1960s technical paper from the Soviet Union, “Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction,” by Russian physicist Pyotr Ufimtsev: the size of a radar return, Ufimtsev had noted, was determined not by the size of the overall object but by how the radar waves reflected off of it—meaning that, if you could design a plane to break up the radar return, you could design a plane that was effectively invisible. The realization had gone completely ignored by the Soviet military, seen as so obscure and unuseful that it hadn’t even been classified, but at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where the Foreign Technology Division translated Soviet science publications wholesale, it attracted a good deal of attention. Once it passed into Northrop’s hands, “The whole world changed,” an engineer recalled. “My eyes opened, ‘Oh, this is what we need.’ ”
In the years ahead, Lockheed and Northrop continued to face off in secret competitions, driven by computer models and engineer intuition, until the first mounted prototype radar tests at White Sands Missile Range in 1976. Flight tests, code-named Have Blue, followed at Area 51, with planes that looked like nothing aviation had ever seen before—angular, black, and futuristic.
Even following the Pentagon announcement of their creation in 1980, the first two stealth planes would remain secret for years—the B-2 bomber was unveiled to the public in 1988 and the F-117 Nighthawk only in 1990—but their presence at the remote Area 51 site in the Nevada desert, a test range that the government still refused to even publicly confirm the existence of, would add to the range’s mystique, inspiring rumors that even more exotic technologies were hidden away inside the closed facility. In 1978, as the first stealth tests began, the government began actively discouraging—and sometimes even preventing—public access to the Groom mountain range near Area 51, and in the years ahead, it would swallow up more of the adjacent land, throwing a larger cloak around whatever was happening at what insiders called “the Ranch.” If the government was hiding stealth planes inside Area 51, many wondered, what else might it be hiding there?
* * *
These fears of strange technologies, secretive government tests, and extraterrestrials gave rise to one of the more bizarre categories of paranormal phenomena: the “mutes.” Starting in the late 1970s, varying degrees of belief in conspiracies and secrets had begun to divide the ufology world, and one of the defining fracture points was the question of cattle mutilations.
Though decidedly less mysterious and exciting than abductions, encounters, and strange signals, mutilations had always played a role in UFO lore—isolated reports of them in areas where UFOs had been spotted had circulated for more than a decade, and generally involved ranchers and farmers discovering dead cattle or horses with odd seemingly surgical injuries, or bloodless wounds that suggested something more than normal predation—and no one, not even the ufologists, had ever really known what to make of them. In 1967, after investigating an incident in southern Colorado, the Condon Committee and NICAP had emerged more baffled than they had ever been. The victim was Lady, a three-year-old Appaloosa saddle horse from the King family ranch that had been found skinned and butchered around the neck, but with no traces of spilled blood (other odd details included a green substance that burned the hands of the ranch owner’s sister, and ranchers reporting “exhaust marks” in the surrounding desert). Ongoing local fascination had eventually led to a Denver Post article, which in turn had caught the attention of official investigators, including the Colorado State University chief of veterinary surgery and a Blue Book investigator. While they found little interesting about the case—the horse, they determined, died of natural causes and the wounds all appeared to be resulting from normal predation—APRO’s local leader declared that “the whole episode smacks of the strange, the bizarre, the unknown.” (Its subsequent report on the matter, however, undermined the strength of the argument with numerous errors, including both the horse’s name and gender.)
Over the next decade, the odd stories continued, many of them helped along by John Keel—the Mothman Prophecies writer saw them as more indications of the occult-like nature of UFOs and extraterrestrials, and called for more intense examination. In Kansas, a 1973 wave of suspicious cattle deaths, mostly Black Angus cows within a few miles of US 81, prompted a conference of a dozen local sheriffs and state investigators; the veterinarian lab at Kansas State University again concluded that the deaths looked natural, but Ottawa County Deputy Sheriff Gary Dir rejected the idea, saying, “I’ve spent 25 years of my life on a farm around cattle. These cases don’t match up with what coyotes do.” The following year, Newsweek took the story national, explaining that “more than 100 cattle have been dead and gruesomely mutilated in Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa,” with the note that the animals often seemed like their eyes and genitals had been uniquely targeted and carefully excised—although for what purpose no one could ever determine.
As reports piled up, conspiracies deepened. Frustrated and fearful, ranchers began to notice unmarked black helicopters circling at night, which led to speculation that the mutilations were stemming from some mysterious, military-approved training program. (“Mutilated Livestock, Helicopters, and UFOs Source of Wonder, Worry,” read a headline in the Hastings, Nebraska, Daily Tribune.) Armed vigilante ranchers began to stop out-of-state vehicles passing through nearby roads to check for traces of cattle blood; some began to shoot at passing helicopters. “The problem became so widespread that the Nebraska National Guard ordered all helicopters to fly at two thousand feet rather than the standard one thousand when they performed routine exercises,” one historian of the phenomenon noted. Cattleman associations offered reward money for answers.
On some level, ranchers and cattlemen had the right to be suspicious: in 1968, some six thousand sheep had died in a place called Skull Valley, Utah, near a secret military facility known as the Dugway Proving Ground, and for years the army had tried to deny culpability, until the investigative efforts of a Utah senator revealed that a plane had accidentally sprayed VX nerve gas at high altitude as part of an army test, which had then drifted into the valley and destroyed the sheep flock. Perhaps the targeted cattle deaths were due to another case of the government’s reckless disregard for the freedoms of the wide-open range.
As the post–Watergate Church and Pike Committees turned over the dirtiest rocks of the intelligence community’s decades of abuses and scandals, it seemed easier to believe that something was amiss. After all, the cattle industry was facing one of its worst years in recent memory, with little to no support. “The federal government betrayed, targeted, and abandoned small-scale ranchers, leaving them to deal with economic uncertainty,” historian Michael J. Goleman explained. “When the cattle mutilations did occur, small-scale ranchers fought back, blaming the federal government and secret agencies, while also projecting their fear, insecurities, and distrust of the government into the bizarre phenomenon.” Before long, concerned state legislators and members of Congress were pestering the FBI to get involved, but despite the number of reported nationwide incidents climbing into the thousands, the bureau demurred. It was unclear if a crime had been committed, and you couldn’t exactly cross-examine a cow for information.
In 1975, after much lobbying and agitating, official federal and state investigations finally began, including one conducted by ATF agents in Minnesota and another by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. In 1979, a retired FBI agent named Kenneth Rommel received a grant from the Santa Fe district attorney and other entities to continue hunting for answers, and in Arkansas, the Washington County Sheriff’s Office conducted a controlled experiment in which a dying cow was administered a lethal dose of tranquilizers and then placed in a rural ravine under constant human and camera surveillance; after twenty-four hours, the corpse had been subjected to many of the same wounds seen in “typical” mutilation incidents, and now the deputies had photographic evidence that determined normal scavenger predators had been responsible. “It is a rule rather than the exception for these animals to do a neat job and not leave either blood or mess at the site of a carcass,” a Missouri University vet explained. A South Dakota social behavior professor concluded the whole phenomenon was “a classic case of mild mass hysteria,” stemming from the era’s “partial breakdown of normal social-control forces.” Ultimately, the investigations found nothing particularly sinister—no UFOs, no government plot, no mass devil-worshipping cult,I just what folklorists called “foaftales,” according to UFO historian Jerome Clark, stories that were passed along from a “friend of a friend” in a game of telephone that ultimately unraveled when actually investigated—but resistance to that conclusion persisted.
