Ancillary Mercy полностью

Another Iranian sighting occurred on the fourteenth, in Shamsabad. A man leaving his house in the early morning saw a bright object almost twenty feet long. A “short young man” was standing nearby on a circular piece of metal, laughing at the man’s frightened expression. Evidently the craft departed at incredible speed. A UFO was seen in Kenya on October 14, by a lieutenant colonel of the British army and his wife. The two saw a light green object moving at tremendous speed. A humanoid sighting took place in Tripoli, Libya, on October 23. At around 3 A.M., a farmer saw a flying object descend to ground level about 150 feet away, making a sound like that of a compressor. It appeared to be an oval machine with six wheels and complex machinery. The top half was transparent and filled with bright white light. Six human-looking men were aboard wearing protective masks and yellowish coveralls. The witness touched part of the craft and felt a strong electric shock. One of the occupants motioned for him to stay away. For the next twenty minutes, the witness was able to watch the six men, apparently busy with instruments. According to Vallee,¹⁰⁷ reliable investigations were made of this encounter. The following day, another humanoid sighting occurred in Algeria, in the town of Ain-el-Turck.¹⁰⁸

In Europe, some high-quality UFO sightings occurred not only in France, but Britain, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. Several governments took action on the UFO problem. On October 1, the Swedish Defense Ministry ordered a new secret inquiry into UFOs. The next day, the French Air Ministry ordered an official investigation. On the seventh, the Italian Air Ministry ordered day and night vigilance at detection posts by “saucer spotters.” On October 10, the Royal Belgian observatory at Liege opened a file on UFOs and asked for public reports of sightings.¹⁰⁹

The concern was for good reason. It seemed like the United States from the summer of 1952, with a twist. The traditional sightings by military pilots continued, such as an October 4 incident in which a “saturn-shaped” UFO buzzed an RAF Meteor jet. But increasingly, people with no apparent reason to lie were claiming to have seen, for lack of a better word, aliens. A man named Willi Hoge, from Munster, Germany, had one such experience on the evening of October 9. Returning from work, he saw a blue light and thought an airplane had made an emergency landing. As he approached, he saw four small beings with short legs, very large chests, and oversized heads. They wore some sort of coveralls and were working on a cigar-shaped craft about 250 feet off the road. Another landing and humanoid report came from Castelibranco, Portugal, on October 13. In this case, the beings were seen picking flowers, twigs, and shrubs, “as if gathering data.”¹¹⁰

Another startling encounter with a UFO by an RAF pilot came on October 14, 1954. A pilot flying a Meteor jet over Southend at sixteen thousand feet saw two circular objects streak between two other Meteor planes high above him. Turning to look through his windscreen, he saw a similar object coming towards him. In his words, “it was silvery in color, had a bun-shaped top, a flange like two saucers in the middle and a bun underneath, and could not have been far off because it overlapped my windscreen!” The object passed around him at “tremendous speed.”¹¹¹

The next day, an English woman in Southend named Pat Hennessey claimed to see a UFO landing. With much common sense, she ran away. When she turned around to look again, it had vanished without a sound. On October 21, a woman from Ranton, Great Britain, and her two children saw a disc-shaped metallic object hovering above their house. Like the case from Teheran, they also claimed to see occupants through “transparent” panels—in this case, two men with white skin, hair to their shoulders, very high foreheads, transparent helmets, and turquoise-blue clothing that resembled ski suits. The craft hovered at a tilted angle while the two beings looked at the scene “sternly, not in an unkind fashion, but almost sadly, compassionately.”¹¹²

NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER 1954: WORLD SIGHTINGS CONTINUE

By mid-October, the main area of humanoid sightings shifted from France to Italy; by November it was in South America. Many of the Italian cases involved the theft of plants or small farm animals, reports of witness paralysis, and alleged guttural or unintelligible sounds coming from the short aliens. Several of them also received investigations by law enforcement officials.