Books: Heavenly Bogeys

FLYING SAUCERS-SERIOUS BUSINESS by Frank Edwards. 319 pages. Lyle Stuart. $5.95.

INCIDENT AT EXETER-UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS OVER AMERICA NOW by John G. Fuller. 251 pages. Putnam. $5.95.

Unlikely as it seems, Unidentified Flying Objects (unlikely as they are) may well have resolved the conflict between religion and science.

Religion, by one Webster definition, is the object of a pursuit arousing “religious convictions and feelings such as great faith, devotion, or fervor,” and science, by another Webster definition, is “accumulated and accepted knowledge which has been systematized.” The two come together in the field of the UFO, where writers on the subject certainly show great faith, devotion and fervor in their efforts to have the objects regarded as part of accepted and accumulated knowledge.

Frank Edwards, a sometime radio commentator, is perhaps the most fervently devout believer in UFOs, not as mere meteoric oddities or psychic phenomena but as the creations of technically superior beings from parts unknown. His evangelistic style is homiletic, catechetical and religious in tone (the promise of an unprecedented revelation to the merely human race has the strangest effect on the nonbeliever). At any rate, the mixture of science and religion is curious, as if Billy Sunday had undertaken a sermon on the subject of the binomial theorem.

“The day of the denouement cannot be far away,” Edwards warns. But before the reader is quite prepared to meet this day, he must accept a weird record of incidents in which hundreds of people at different times and in different parts of the world have seen something buzzing about in the sky, silently or with a low humming, shining by day or glowing by night, scorching the earth or disturbing the water under its burnished bottom, sometimes plunging into the sea or a river, but mostly zooming off, presumably back to where it came from.

Sleight of Hand. Only the most bigoted proponents of the doctrine of common sense will dismiss these “sightings” as illusory. On the other hand, only those unusually gifted with credulity will accept the Edwards account of them, which offers an explanation more unlikely than the phenomena. For example: “Why were there virtually no UFO sightings from 1926 to 1946?” Obviously “they” (the occupants of the UFOs) were improving the design, which seems to beg the question of whether the UFOs had occupants and were designed at all.

Edwards not only undertakes to explain UFOs as the work of extraterrestrial beings but, by a singular logical sleight of hand, uses UFOs to explain extraterrestrial beings. Thus UFOs can explain parts of the Book of Genesis, which admittedly takes some explaining. Those “angels” in Genesis 19 were “not necessarily of celestial origin” but were some kind of space men, and the “giants in the earth in those days” who mated with women (Genesis 6:4) clearly refer to beings from out yonder.

With its wild notions of what constitutes evidence, Edwards’ book compounds one mystery by creating others. Nor does it help his case for an imminent apocalypse to explain flaws in the brief by making the U.S. Air Force the villain of a conspiracy to suppress the truth; he believes that the Pentagon’s reassuring statements about UFOs are designed to hoodwink the public into supposing that they are psychological, meteoric, or astral in origin. Nor is sinister Air Force activity confined to the U.S. “What,” he asks, “was the mysterious substance that dribbled from a crippled disk over Brazil in 1954?” The Brazilian air force gathered it up and hid it away. (It may have been tin.) The Australian, French, and Indian air forces are also in cahoots with the U.S. Even the Kremlin is involved in a secret pact with the infidel against the UFOs.

Little Men. Incident at Exeter, by John G. Fuller, a columnist for the Saturday Review, is another saucer of flying fish. It simply records his interviews with witnesses at Exeter, N.H., after a glowing red object appeared over Route 150 at 2:24 a.m. on Sept. 3, 1965. Subsequently, Fuller himself saw such a UFO outside the town, and his report is that of a believer, or rather a convert. He writes in documentary style, following the grammar and non sequiturs of his tape recorder, and his work has the police-blotter awkwardness of one who wishes to convince by sincerity rather than to persuade by fine writing.

The ontological status of UFOs is not much furthered by either Edwards or Fuller. The ghostly visitations over that swamp near Ann Arbor, Mich., last March happened too recently to have been included in either book, but sincere testimony to the miracles of the space age abound like grace. Samples: Intrepid small boys with .22 rifles near Rio Vista, Calif., last December got in some shots at a UFO hanging about the town water tower and extorted a satisfactory twang and an angry red glow from the visitor. Some Italian farmers pelted a UFO near Milan in October 1954 with rotten oranges, scoring, they claimed, some hits. They did not hit any of the little men, who were about 4 ft. high, wore light-colored pants, helmets and other equipment, and were “scurrying” about. UFOs were bigger and “hideous” in the sighting that was vouchsafed to Farmer Alexander Hamilton, of LeRoy, Kans., in April 1897. The hideous humanoids stole his heifer, hauled it aboard their “airship,” and, “jabbering together,” sailed away. “I don’t want anything more to do with them,” concluded Hamilton’s affidavit. Most people would echo Hamilton’s heartfelt prayer in the spirit of those who do not believe in ghosts and hope never to see one.

As it happens, the Air Force, which feels pretty much the same way, is playing it safe and plans to award a $300,000 grant to a university for further UFO studies. But until UFOs decide to show up, stay, and give some account of themselves, the majority of mankind, who, like Hamlet, think that they can tell a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is right, can be pardoned for withholding judgment.