Ancillary Mercy полностью

America rounded out the early spring with a few odd and ominous sightings of its own. On February 28, Army Private Gerry Irwin stopped his car in Cedar City, Iowa, to investigate what he thought was a crashing plane. He was later found unconscious and treated at an army hospital. He suffered from some amnesia, continued to have fainting spells, and returned more than once to the site in a trancelike state. Soon, Irwin deserted and seemingly disappeared.

On April 1, a radio emergency call came from a C-118 plane with four men aboard (“we’ve hit something—or something hit us”) about an hour after takeoff from McChord Field AFB in Tacoma, Washington. Thirty minutes later, the plane crashed into the side of a mountain, leaving no survivors. Although the military sealed off the site, APRO found witnesses who had seen the plane in its final moments. All described two orange or yellowish objects closing in on the plane⁹⁵

THE STRANGE CASE OF MORRIS JESSUP

Morris K. Jessup wrote several popular books about UFOs. He was the first to use the term “UFO” in a book and was one of the earliest ancient astronaut theorists. In 1955, he published The Case for the UFO. Shortly after its publication, a paperback edition of the book was sent anonymously to the chief of the Office of Naval Research in Washington, D.C., filled with handwritten annotations that appeared to reflect a detailed knowledge of UFOs. There were three distinct personalities in the annotations, and it appeared that the book had been passed from person to person, in the form of an extended conversation. Later that year, the Office of Naval Research republished the book—with the annotations. Several hundred copies were then printed by the Varo Corporation in Garland, Texas.

The people at ONR seem to have been impressed by the mysterious annotations. The introduction to the Varo edition stated that the notations implied an “intimate knowledge of UFOs, their means of motion, their origin, background, history, and habits of beings occupying UFOs....” The notes referred to the building of undersea cities and of various types of ships used for transportation. The ONR introduction stated that terms such as mothership, home-ship, dead-ship, great ark, great bombardment, great return, great war, little-men, force-fields, deep freezes, undersea building, measure markers, scout ships, magnetic and gravity fields, sheets of diamond, cosmic rays, force cutters, undersea explorers, inlay work, clear-talk, telepathing, burning, “coat,” nodes, vortices, magnetic “net,” and many others are used quite naturally by these men.

The navy introduction concluded that the remarks and explanations of the unknown commentators “may be worth consideration.”

By early 1956, Jessup received two anonymous, strange letters post-marked from Gainesville, Texas, about sixty miles north of Garland. The author of the letters appeared to be one of the annotators of the book. The letters described something later known as the Philadelphia Experiment. According to the author (who wrote the letter in a bizarre English with copious and cryptic allusions to men of science such as Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and Michael Faraday), the U.S. Navy conducted an experiment involving Einstein’s unified field theory in October 1943. In the words of the author (all emphasis in original):

The “result” was complete invisibility of a ship, Destroyer type, and all of its crew, While at Sea. (Oct. 1943) The Field Was effective in an oblate spheroidal ishape, extending one Hundred yards (More or Less, due to Lunar position & Latitude) out from each beam of the ship. Any Person Within that sphere became vague in form BUT He too observed those Persons aboard that ship as though they too were of the same state, yet were walking upon nothing. Any person without that sphere could see Nothing save the clearly Defined shape of the Ships Hull in the Water PROVIDING of course, that that person was just close enough to see yet, just barely outside of that field. Why tell you now? Very Simple; If You choose to go Mad, then you would reveal this information. Half of the officers & the crew of that Ship are at Present, Mad as Hatters.

The author added that the ship, after disappearing from the Philadelphia dock, appeared “within minutes” in the Norfolk-Newport News-Portsmouth area of Virginia, and that the experiments were discontinued. The second letter expressed a desire for more work to be done in field theory in order to continue developing “the form of transport that the navy accidentally stumbled upon (to their embarrassment) when their [experimental ship] took off & popped up a minute or so later” in the Chesapeake Bay. According to his good friend Ivan Sanderson, these letters mystified Jessup, but did leave him feeling that there was too much in them to ignore wholly.