Chapter IX
E-M AND G-FIELDS IN UFO-LAND
The phenomenon of magnetism has always fascinated both scientists and laymen. Paracelsus believed that he could use a magnet to draw disease out from a person, transfer it to the ground, and thus cure the patient. Later practitioners believed that a sick person could regain his health by sleeping with head and feet oriented north to south so as to be in line with the earth’s magnetic poles. Laputa, the saucer-shaped floating island visited by Gulliver in his travels, was propelled by the attracting or repelling forces of a large magnet imbedded in the center of the island. In recent years magnetism has similarly been called on to account for some of the peculiar maneuvers allegedly performed by UFOs.
In the world of flying saucers an all-purpose electromagnetic (E-M) force, unknown to earth scientists, is supposed to be able to produce light and heat, disturb a compass, render an object radioactive, stop a wrist watch without damaging the man who wears it, interfere with the functioning of radio and TV sets, turn out the lights of automobiles, stop the action of gasoline engines, and aid in the creating of artificial gravitational fields (G-fields) around extraterrestrial spaceships.
UFOs equipped with E-M powers have occasionally been reported in France since 1954[[IX-1]], but they had rarely appeared in the United States until late in 1957 when freak weather in Texas, plus the birth of the space age, started a new wave of flying-saucer incidents. Few spectacular UFOs had appeared since the 1952 panic ([Chapter VII]) and the average citizen had almost forgotten about flying saucers. Then on October 4, 1957, when Sputnik I went into orbit and opened the door to outer space, people once more began to watch the heavens uneasily. Uneasiness became alarm a month later when, with American satellites still sitting on the launching pad, Sputnik II roared into space. A ball of fire floating over a field in western Texas provided the small stimulus needed to turn alarm into hysteria, and for several weeks people tended to see spaceships in every cloud and every unfamiliar light in the sky. The reasoning seemed to be that if man with his limited powers could launch satellites to orbit the planet, why shouldn’t interplanetary ships already be visiting the earth?
In the months of November and December the Air Force received more UFO reports than during the entire ten months preceding, and the reports had their highest frequency in the single week following November 2[IX-2]. For a period of about eight days, if all the stories were true, our skies were crowded with flying saucers.
Spaceships with electromagnetic powers roved from the Dominican Republic to Alaska; they stopped automobiles, turned off headlights, jammed radios and stopped clocks in cars, blurred TV sets in the home, dimmed the cabin lights in airplanes, and altered a speedometer to register a dangerously high speed instead of the legal sixty miles per hour. (Whether the driver in question offered this novel defense to a judge in traffic court is unknown.) Police in squad cars pursued UFOs in Elmwood Park, Illinois; Danville, Illinois; and Hammond, Indiana. In Brazil, an orange-colored, whistling UFO hovered near Fort Itaipu and first caused a temporary failure of the lights, then knocked out the generating plant for several moments. A driver in Santa Fe, New Mexico, saw a UFO that not only stalled his car but also stopped the dashboard clock and the driver’s own wrist watch. A driver in western Texas saw a UFO that, not content with stopping the engine and radio of his car, also magnetized the right half of the bumper and a part of the fender. One driver reported that his car and those of several other motorists had stalled near Cortez, Colorado; he had not thought of looking at the sky, but any saucer enthusiast could have told him that a UFO must have been hovering there.
In addition to these special models equipped with Medusa-like powers, other spaceships allegedly landed briefly at the military installation at White Sands, New Mexico; harassed a United States Coast Guard ship in the Gulf of Mexico; landed in Ohio and raised the radioactivity level of the ground; and stopped in Nebraska for repairs.
Stormy Weather in Texas
The new type of UFO with electromagnetic (E-M) powers first attracted notice in this country by allegedly appearing near Levelland, Texas, on the night of November 2, 1957, a few hours before Sputnik II went into orbit. A small town with a population of about 8000, Levelland lies on the plains of western Texas about sixty miles from Plainview, site of a famous meteor shower, and only twenty-five miles from Lubbock, which a few years earlier had gained national fame with its “Lubbock lights” ([p. 123]). The region is normally an arid one, but at the beginning of November it was experiencing unusual weather—electrical storms and rain (the month proved to be the wettest ever recorded in western Texas).
About 11:15 that Saturday night, a farmworker named Pedro Saucedo (or Saucido) with his friend Joe Palaz (also given in various printed accounts as Palav, Salav, Salaz, Salvaz) was driving home from Levelland. A few miles northwest of the town he had turned off Route 116 into a side road, when both men noticed a flash of light in a field at the right. Evidently unalarmed, he continued driving and talking until suddenly the engine died and the lights went out. While trying to restart the motor, Saucedo (the similarity between “Saucedo” and “saucer” presents a diverting coincidence) glimpsed over his left shoulder something that looked like a flaming ball or a fiery tornado drifting rapidly toward the truck. A veteran of combat in Korea, Saucedo reacted instantaneously to the blazing unknown. As he described the experience later that night, “I jumped out of the truck and hit the dirt because I was afraid. I called to Joe but he didn’t get out. The thing passed directly over my truck with a great sound and a rush of wind. It sounded like thunder and my truck rocked from the flash.... I felt a lot of heat.” Crawling out and seeing the object disappear in the direction of Levelland, he restarted the engine and drove back to Levelland to report the incident to the sheriff[IX-2].