“I told you I checked on this myself,” Redell said, a little annoyed. “After Miles told me about it, I asked an engineer who’d been down there if it was true. He gave me the same story, figures and all. The first saucer was tracked by White Sands observers with a theodolite. Then they worked out its performance with ballistics formulas.”
Redell looked at me grimly.
“The thing was about fifty miles up. And it was making over fifteen thousand miles an hour!”
One of the witnesses, said Redell, was a well-known scientist from the General Mills aeronautical research laboratory in Minneapolis, which was working with the Navy. (A few days later, I verified this fact and the basic details of Redell’s account. But it was not until early in January 1950 that I finally identified the officer as Commander Robert B. McLaughlin and got his dramatic story.)
“Here are two more items Miles told me,” Redell went on. “This Navy expert said the saucer actually looked elliptical, or egg-shaped. And while it was being tracked it suddenly made a steep climb—so steep no human being could have lived through it.”
“One thing is certain,” I said. “That fifty-mile altitude knocks out the rotating disk. Up in that thin air it wouldn’t have any lift.”
“Right,” said Redell. “And the variable jet type would require an enormous amount of fuel. Regardless, those G’s mean it couldn’t have had any pilot born on this earth.”
According to Marvin Miles, this White Sands saucer had been over a hundred feet long. (Later, Commander McLaughlin stated that it was 105 feet.) If this were an American device, then it meant that we had already licked many of the problems on which the Earth Satellite Vehicle designers were supposed to be just starting. Their statements, then, would have to be false—part of an elaborate cover-up.
“If we had such an advanced design,” said Redell, “and I just don’t believe it possible—would we gamble on a remote-control system? No such system is perfect. Suppose it went wrong. At that speed, over fifteen thousand miles an hour, your precious missile or strato ship could be halfway around the globe in about forty-five minutes. That is, if the fuel held out. Before you could regain control, you might lose it in the sea. Or it might come down behind the Iron Curtain. Even if it were I smashed to bits, it would tip off the Soviets. They might claim it was a guided-missile attack. Almost anything could hap pen.”
“It could have a time bomb in it,” I suggested. “if it got off course or out of control, it would blow itself up.”