Ancillary Mercy полностью

As was the norm by now, most of the interesting events never made it to Dayton. On July 1, for example, an extraordinary sighting occurred in Valensole, France, by forty-one-year-old lavender farmer Maurice Masse. Masse heard a strange noise early in the morning and saw an oval object one hundred feet away in his field. Thinking it to be a prototype of some sort, he approached to within twenty feet of it to find that it was about fifteen feet long with a round cockpit. Supporting the structure were six legs and a central pivot about the size of a small car. Masse then saw two beings, completely hairless and very white, less than four feet tall, with extremely large heads, normal hands, and practically no mouth. They wore gray-green one-piece suits, small containers on their belts, and no headgear or gloves.

The beings appeared surprised when Masse came near and stopped their examination of a plant. One of them pointed a small tube at Masse, which paralyzed him while they looked at him with human expression in their eyes and made gurgling noises to each other. Masse remained conscious and unafraid and believed the beings were making fun of him. They entered their craft through a sliding door, and the object soon hovered, then ascended, then vanished at about sixty yards. Although it made a whistling sound as it departed, Masse was not certain if it vanished because of its incredible speed, or simply vanished. He remained paralyzed for another twenty minutes after the encounter and felt uncharacteristically drowsy for weeks. Masse was a former Resistance fighter, a successful farmer, and regarded as “absolutely trustworthy” by the police who investigated the incident. The object left holes in the ground which were examined by many people, including police.⁵³

Less than a week later, an extraordinary encounter took place at sea. On the night of July 6, while passing near Portugal, a lookout on the Norwegian ship T.T. Jawesta reported a bright, blue object that appeared to emerge from the sea, then rapidly travel northward toward the ship. He alerted the captain, first officer, and others, all of whom watched the silent object issue “tongues of flame” and make sudden turns at tremendous speed. Through binoculars, it appeared to be cigar-shaped with a row of lighted portholes. It reached an altitude of about one thousand feet and left a bluish trail. The sighting lasted a little more than half a minute. In a report to the Geophysical Institute in Bergen, Norway, the chief mate stated “with complete certainty that it was no question of an aircraft of conventional type, or rocket, or meteor, or ball lightning.”⁵⁴

On July 14, an object descended near an Australian space station (perhaps Pine Gap?), interfering with its tracking of Mariner IV. It was also observed by control tower operators at Canberra International Airport. On the sixteenth, a similar sighting was reported from near Buenos Aires.⁵⁵

Throughout late July, August, and September, citizens of Chile, Argentina, and Peru reported close-up sightings of UFO craft, landings (several of which left impressions in the ground), and small, human-shaped UFO occupants. In September 1965, the Argentine navy reported the occurrence of fifteen incidents since late 1963 in which UFOs had tracked its vessels and interfered with its equipment.⁵⁶

In the U.S., too, the air force was swamped with reports. Keyhoe wrote that by midsummer of 1965, the “debunking system had almost broken down.” Not exactly, since labored explanations continued to fly out of Dayton as rapidly as the UFOs themselves. But it was true that people were becoming less and less persuaded by the honesty of the air force effort to explain the UFO problem. By July, belief in UFOs had risen to 33 percent, up from 20 percent at the beginning of the year, and editorials were appearing in newspapers criticizing UFO secrecy and debunking policies. Hynek also called for a more systematic study of UFOs in a July 1965 letter to the air force. “I feel it is my responsibility to point out,” he wrote, “that enough puzzling sightings have been reported by intelligent and often technically competent people to warrant closer attention than Project Blue Book can possibly encompass at the present time.”⁵⁷

THE WAVE OF 1965: AUGUST

The pace of American UFO sightings increased during August, when the Blue Book team received 262 reports, surpassing most of the months (except July) during the 1952 crisis. Now, however, Blue Book’s explanatory methods were such that everything had to be explained, except a few token inoffensive sightings, and even these were exceedingly few—four, to be precise, or a mere 1.5 percent of reports for the month.