“No one knows what the saucers are as yet,” Dr. McLaughlin said. “They could be anything, and I’m willing to be convinced once the evidence is presented.”
Dr. Bart J. Bok of Harvard was on the fence: “After all,” he said, “all sort of things float around in space. But I’m not convinced the saucers are anything apart from the earth.”
Another Harvard astronomer, Dr. Armin J. Deutsch, took an oblique poke at True and me. “I don’t think anyone—and that includes astronomers—knows enough about them to reach any conclusions.”
After this came the comment of Dr. Carl F. von Weizacker—that billions of stars may have planets, and many could be inhabited.
Within a few days we had a huge stack of clippings, some supporting True, some deriding us. In the midst of all this, I read scientists’ comments on Einstein’s new unified-field theory, which had been printed about the time True appeared on the stands. A discussion by Lincoln Barnett, author of The Universe and Dr. Einstein, explained the basic premise—that gravitation and electromagnetic force are inseparable. As I read it, I thought of what Redell had said. If gravitation were a manifestation of electromagnetic force, was it possible that an advanced race had found a way—as unique as splitting the atom—to offset gravity and utilize that force?
It was during these first tense days that we ran down the White Sands story. This also ended another puzzle—the identity of the magazine that we had feared might scoop us. The race had been closer than we knew. The editors of a national magazine had learned of Commander McLaughlin and the sightings at White Sands. Two of the staff had carefully investigated the details. Convinced that the report was accurate, they had planned to run the story in an early issue.
Since True had appeared first with the space-travel story, the editors agreed to release the McLaughlin report for use in our March issue. The basic facts were in close agreement with what Redell had told me.
The ellipsoid-shaped saucer had been tracked at a height of 56 miles, its speed 5 miles per second. This was 18,000 miles per hour, even faster than Redell had said. The strange craft, 105 feet in length, had climbed as swiftly as Marvin Miles had described it—an increase in altitude of about 25 miles in 10 seconds.
Commander McLaughlin stated in his article that he was convinced the object was a space ship from another planet, operated by animate, intelligent beings. He also described two small circular objects, about twenty inches in diameter, that streaked up beside a Navy high-altitude missile. After maneuvering around it for a moment, both disks accelerated, passed the fast-moving Navy missile, and disappeared.
It is Commander McLaughlin’s opinion that the saucers come from Mars. Pointing out that Mars was in a good position to see our surface on July 16, 1945, he believes that the flash of the first A-bomb, at Alamogordo Base, a point not far from White Sands, was caught by powerful telescopes.