Fry recoiled.
The voice softened and added, "Take it easy, pal, you're among friends."
After politely reading off the spaceman, or whoever he was, for scaring him, pal Fry and the voice settled down for a friendly moonlight chat. Fry learned that the voice was indeed that of a spaceman and they were down to pick up a new supply of air. After about four years of earth air transfusions, according to the spaceman, they would become adapted to our atmosphere, and our gravity, and become "immunized to your bi-otics." The craft, Fry was told, was a "cargo carrier," unmanned and built to zoom down and scoop up earth air.
The conversation went on, waxing technical at times, and ended with an invitation to look into the ship. Then the spaceman, possibly carried away by all the interest Fry was showing, offered a ride.
Fry accepted and they antidemagnetized off for New York City. Thirty minutes later they were back at White Sands.
Over New York City they came down from 35 to 20 miles and Fry could read the marquee of the Fulton Theater. "The Seven Year Itch" was playing.
He hadn't told the Air Force about his ride before because he was afraid he'd lose his job. But, at the press conference, he did plug his new book, The White Sands Incident.
By this time Adamski had already published his book Flying Saucers Have Landed and it looked as if Fry was going to cut him out. But Fry took a lie detector test on a widely viewed West Coast television show and flunked it flat.
His stock dropped as fast as it had risen but the decline was somewhat checked when a well known Southern California medium wrote to "her old friend" J. Edgar Hoover about the situation. Hoover, the story goes, shot back an answer—lie detectors are no good.
But the damage had been done. The "rigged" lie detector test had unfortunately relegated Daniel Fry, "engineer," "missile expert," "part owner of an engineering plant," and interplanetary hitchhiker to the bush league.