The Sonny Desvergers UFO Encounter (per Edward Ruppelt)

Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.

While going through my UFO clutter I found an article clipped from the April 1956 issue of Pageant magazine (pictured). Pageant was a Readers’ Digest-like magazine.

The article was by Blue Book’s Captain Ruppelt and dealt with the Sonny Desvergers 1952 incident that this blog provided some material on in 2014:

http://ufocon.blogspot.com/2014/04/some-interesting-asides-from-1952-sonny.html

Ruppelt, in the Pageant piece, expressed his ambivalence about Desvergers’ account:

“While he [Desvergers] was giving me a brief personal history, I had the immediate impression that he was telling the truth.” [Pageant, Page 61]

Eventually, ufologists seem to have dismissed Desvergers story as a concoction (created for notoriety or some kind of fame).

But as Ruppelt presents the blue Book findings, one can’t toss the tale into the hoax bin; there are too many odd and interesting aspects that ring true and conform to other UFO sightings and encounters in later UFO reports, one being the “sharp” and “pungent” odor Desvergers described:

“Ozone gas is ‘sharp’ or ‘pungent.’ To quote from a chemistry book, ‘Ozone is prepared by passing air between two plates which are charged at a high electrical potential.’

“Breathing a high concentration of ozone gas will also cause you to lose consciousness.” [ibid, Ruppelt Page 65]

Both the smell and loss of consciousness were intrinsic to Desvergers experience.

This early flying saucer [UFO] tale fascinates, whether real or a contrivance.

RR

The Condon Brouhaha

This article (from 1966) by super columnist Drew Pearson -- he had a cameo in The Day The Earth Stood Still -- outlines the imbroglio between good guy, James McDonald and bad guy Edward U. Condon:

(I've left the article at full scan so you can mouse over it and click to read it.)

James McDonald was an exemplary UFO researcher, ostensibly for the U.S. Navy (which is the real fount for UFO information, not the U.S. Air Force).

Edward U. Condon was denied security access in his career because of some iffy Soviet associations.

(I've provided, online, our documentation and howling about him getting the UFO contract because of his security lapse. Condon told me he'd quit the Air Force sponsored study if the security issue were raised again, but no one, in national media, took him on and he proceeded to besmirch UFOs by design or ineptness. I think it was the former.)

You can see, in the Pearson article, that McDonald was vilified, unjustly, ending in his alleged suicide eventually.

RR

The good ol' days of flying saucer [UFO] reporting

This huge headlined article, on Page One of the Detroit TIMES for February 25^th, 1959 was how UFOs (or flying saucers) were once covered by news media; not so much nowadays, at least in real news journals.

The pilot of an American  Airline DC-6, Captain Peter Killian, and his crew plus thirty-five passengers on the plane, saw three illuminated “flying saucers” that escorted the airplane for 45 minutes.

John Dee [sic], pilot with his co-pilot, of another American Airline landing at Metropolitan Airport, also saw the “objects.”

This happened in the late evening around 8:45 p.m., February 24th, over Lake Erie as the DC-6 was heading for Detroit from Newark, New Jersey and was over Pennsylvania at 8,500 feet.

Two Michigan astronomers attributed the sighting to a meteor that allegedly was seen at 6:30 a.m. (that’s a.m.) over northern lower Michigan February 24th.

[The newspaper reporter was Al Leaderman.]

Even foolish “explanations” were offered in the early days of flying saucer [UFO] sightings.

Credible, normal people and professionals (airline pilots) have seen and reported strange things in the sky.

They may have misperceived something ordinary or prosaic, but they did see something and to say that strange “things.” that couldn’t be identified then or now, do not exist is madness of an egregious kind.

N.B. John Dee (13 July 1527 – 1608 or 1609) was an English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, occult philosopher, and advisor to Queen Elizabeth I. He devoted much of his life to the study of alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dee

RR

An Extraterrestrial Artificial Intelligent Surveillance?

On October 2^nd, 1978, four boys (pictured above), of Despatch, South Africa, claimed they saw a "gleaming, metallic dome” from which three silver clad entities suddenly appeared, one of them carrying a grayish box despite not appearing to have arms:

The beings didn’t express leg movement but glided, and swiftly moved away from the metallic dome, moving over a fence and then disappearing near the top of a hill.

Police officers, checking the spot where the boys allege they saw the beings, found eight “puzzling imprints in the ground.”

A geologist from the University of Port Elizabeth took measurements of the imprints and found them to be symmetrical and oval, 43 feet by 21 feet in size, each imprint made up of three impressions, “in the shape of a triangle.”

This story, if true, by David Barritt and Malcolm Balfour in the Enquirer adds one more anecdotal footnote to the idea that UFOs may be dispatched AI machines manned by robots.

RR