Major Donald Keyhoe, USMC pilot: "The Flying Saucers Are Real"
Written: Jan 02 '05 (Updated Jan 10 '05)
Product Rating:
Pros: First released in 1950, "The Flying Saucers Are Real" sold 500,000 copies.
Cons: None really, if you don't mind the lack of illustrations.
The Bottom Line: Keyhoe's best-seller about unidentified flying objects was one of the first books on the subject of "flying saucers." A skeptic who once worked with Charles Lindbergh, Keyhoe became a believer.
Don_Krider's Full Review: Donald Keyhoe - The Flying Saucers Are Real
On June 25, 1947, the Associated Press wire service reported the sighting the day before of "nine bright saucer-like objects" flying in the skies between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams in Washington state.
The sighting, by U. S. Forest Service employee and local businessman Kenneth Arnold, created quite a stir at the time. Arnold, engaged in flying his own plane in a search for a missing aircraft in the area, clocked the objects and estimated their speed at 1,200 miles per hour at an altitude of 10,000 feet. He believed each object, which looked like the military's then-semi-secret "flying wing," had a 100-foot wingspan.
To Arnold, reporting the sighting to government agencies was the thing to do and he thought nothing of it; in fact, his initial assumption was that they were jets or some secret government aircraft. As he told CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, "Their sighting did not particularly disturb me at the time, except that I had never seen planes of that type."
Arnold was quite surprised, then, when military intelligence interviewed him three times and suggested he had misidentified some natural phenomena. The government, they told him, had no such aircraft. The media, in turn, latched onto the story and Arnold's description of how the objects flew ("like they take a saucer and throw it across water") led some trendy newsman to coin the term "flying saucer."
Soon, everyone was seeing "flying saucers" coast-to-coast in the United States. Certainly, many sightings were simple misidentifications of explainable things in the skies, some were "mass hysteria," and some sightings were downright hoaxes, but a handful surfaced that made people wonder if there wasn't something concrete to be checked out in some of the reports.
The author:
After two years of sightings, "True" magazine hired a tough investigative reporter to evaluate the subject through his contacts in the Pentagon.
That man was retired Marine Corps pilot Major Donald E. Keyhoe, a graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy, a former chief of information of the Aeronautics Branch of the U. S. Department of Commerce and the former personal aide to the legendary pilot Colonel Charles Lindbergh (Keyhoe had written about Lindbergh for Popular Mechanics in 1927 and wrote the book "Flying With Lindbergh" in 1928").
Keyhoe, a total skeptic when contracted as a freelance writer for the investigative report ("as a pilot, I'd been skeptical of the flying disks"), began his investigation in May, 1949. When his story came out in the January, 1950, issue of "True" magazine, his report exploded with the "main conclusion: that the flying saucers were interplanetary."
In the following years, until his death in 1988, he would write five best-selling books on "flying saucers," also known as unidentified flying objects or UFOs.
He would also form the National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), becoming its first and long-time director.
NICAP's Board of Directors included Keyhoe's like-minded friends like Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoeter (first director of the Central Intelligence Agency), Rear Admiral H. B. Knowles, Major Dewey Fournet (formerly of the Air Force UFO investigation known as Project Blue Book), Indianapolis writer/radio newsman Frank Edwards, military men, scientists, ministers and astronomers.
The presence of a former CIA director on the NICAP board had some conspiracy theorists wondering aloud if NICAP had been infiltrated by the U. S. government.
Keyhoe's writings are even credited as source material for the 1956 science-fiction film "Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers," though Keyhoe's reports were based on fact and the film is totally fiction (famous for scenes of "flying saucers" crashing into the nation's most famous sites in Washington, D. C.). Keyhoe's writings do seem, however, to fear that UFOs may be potentially hostile, something the moviemakers apparently jumped on.
But it was his 1950 Fawcett Books release, "The Flying Saucers Are Real," an expansion of his "True" magazine article, that put him and the UFO subject firmly on the map. The book was a major best-seller, eventually selling an unheard of (for 1950, anyway) 500,000 copies. Long out-of-print, with copies selling for over $100 at internet auction sites, the book was reprinted in 2004 by Cosimo Classics in paperback at a more reasonable $12.95 cover price (the publishers website is at http://www.cosimobooks.com; the book is also available from Amazon.Com, among other online retailers).
The book:
"The Flying Saucers Are Real" by Major Donald Keyhoe is a 180-plus-paged oversized paperback in its 2004 printing by Cosimo Classics. There are no photos or illustrations.
There is no bibliography or index, though Keyhoe does reference all of his sources in the text.
The writing:
Donald Keyhoe writes for the masses. His style of writing flows along nicely with the author's thoughts mixed in with the facts; he seems to be analyzing the details he's reporting even as he writes them, something I've seen military men do many times --- it doesn't become bothersome and never interferes with what is a very interesting read.
Keyhoe's conversion from skeptic to believer is a fascinating one. His military background (originally trained as a Marine fighter pilot, he trained pilots between the World Wars and later flew, and wrote about, experimental aircraft for "True" magazine in the 1940's and 1950's) gives him an eye for detail. His contacts in the military, including admirals and generals he knew as friends, gave him a backdoor to the Pentagon's secrets at times.
Keyhoe takes us on a journey. His final conclusion that the military that schooled him was involved in a cover-up must have been a hard pill to swallow for a proud military man.
Recommendation:
Well worth a look if you have an open mind. The subject of UFOs has always been one of three things to people: some find it impossible to believe in the possibility of "flying saucers," others accept too many things as fact, and the third group, which I consider myself to be in, like to research and draw our own conclusions (I, frankly, don't know the answer, but the journalist in me loves the search for an answer; perhaps the mystery is more interesting than the solution of it, after all is said and done).
If you like a good detective mystery, this may be the book for you. It is a very interesting read, whether you decide to look at it as a serious study of the subject or as a good sci-fi story (not Keyhoe's intention, of course).
I would recommend the book for anyone over 13 years of age.
The true "review" section ends here, but I hope you continue on to read the cases that follow and I've tossed in a little "gift" towards the end of the review for those who read the entire article.
Some of the cases in the book:
Keyhoe was among the first, outside the military, to investigate the death of Captain Thomas Mantell.
Mantell, winner of the Distinguished Flying Cross for actions on D-Day in 1944, was 25 when he died on January 7, 1948, in a plane crash south of Fort Knox, Ky. He was a training officer in the newly formed Kentucky Air National Guard at the time of his death (the U. S. Army Air Forces had been seperated in 1947 from the Army to form the U. S. Air Force).
Mantell and three other pilots were ferrying four F-5l propeller-driven fighter planes from Atlanta, Ga., to Standiford Field in Louisville, Ky., when they received a message from Godman Tower at Fort Knox, Ky.
Police officers and hundreds of ground observers across a 175 mile area of Kentucky were watching, and reporting, "a huge gleaming object" in the skies above Kentucky. The state police contacted the Air Force's military police at Fort Knox, who then observed the object.
In Godman Tower, Air Force officers looked through binoculars at the object, which suddenly flew over the field and seemed to "hover." Colonel Guy Hix, base commander, watched the object from the tower as well, saying it looked like an "ice cream cone" with a red glow to it. All agreed it was "huge."
Godman Tower contacted the F-5ls that were then seen flying in. One plane left the formation to land due to technical problems, but the remaining three pilots, all without oxygen equipment, began searching for the object.
The Air Force specified at the time that no pilot should climb above 15,000 feet without oxygen due to the chance of blacking out from the lack of oxygen. Mantell's two remaining wingmen landed after climbing to this level, but Mantell, caught up in a "hot pursuit," continued to "risk it" and climb after the UFO. He reported, "I've sighted the thing. It looks metallic - and it's tremendous in size!"
Mantell, gunning his plane to 350 or more miles per hour, reported, according to Keyhoe's interviews with Godman Tower personnel, "The thing's starting to climb. It's at 12 o'clock high, making half my speed. I'll try to close in."
Mantell, way higher than he should have been without oxygen equipment, reported at 18,000 feet, "It's still above me, making my speed or better. I'm going up to 20,000 feet. If I'm no closer, I'll abandon chase."
It was Mantell's last report. His plane continued to climb to 33,000 feet. He certainly had blacked out from lack of oxygen by that time. The plane began flying in circles under its own power, then began its death spiral to earth, losing its left wing along the way.
The plane "bellyflopped" on impact; it apparently did not "skid in" like many crashed aircraft would have. Mantell remained strapped in his seat on impact and apparently never tried to bail out.
Mantell's cause of death was known --- lack of oxygen leading to a plane crash in which he died.
The object he chased, however, became the source of much conjecture. The Air Force initially suggested he had chased the planet Venus in the daytime sky, but its own astronomer, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, later rejected that explanation since Venus was, at best, barely visible that day.
The Air Force then tried "canopy relection" as a cause, but that wouldn't explain the ground sightings made of the object before planes were in the area.
Then the Air Force said it was probably a Skyhook balloon, which is a huge object in flight, cone-shaped in flight and tending to flatten out into a "disk-shape" at high altitude.
Keyhoe buys the explanation of Mantell's death, but not of what the pilot was chasing. His investigation revealed that the object continued northeast where an Air Force base in Columbus, Ohio, considered sending fighters after the object, but couldn't get them off the ground fast enough because the "balloon" was flying as "in level flight faster than 500 miles per hour" according to Air Force personnel. Keyhoe points out that balloons don't fly that fast even with a high altitude wind speed behind them.
Another case that fascinated Keyhoe involved two Eastern Airlines pilots, Captain Clarence Chiles (an Air Force lieutenant-colonel during World War II with 8,500 hours of flight time) and his first officer, John Whitted, a B-29 bomber pilot during WWII.
On July 23, 1948, flying from Houston to Atlanta in a DC-3 airliner, near Montgomery, Alabama, at 2:45 a.m. on a moonlit night, the two pilots saw what they thought was a jet plane diving on them.
Chiles veered his aircraft to the left. The object veered to the right, seperated by about 700 feet. As Chiles later reported, it was only then that "I saw it had no wings."
Since the UFO passed on the co-pilot's side of the plane, he had a closer look, and according to Keyhoe, Whitted reported later, "The thing was about 100 feet long, cigar-shaped, and wingless. It was about twice the size of a B-29, with no protruding fins."
Both pilots said the ship had an "eerie brilliance," which was like a "magnesium flare." They saw "no occupants," but at the speed they were travelling they weren't surprised by that fact.
Chiles reported, "An intense dark-blue glow came from the side of the ship. It ran the entire length of the fuselage - like a blue fluorescent light. The exhaust was a red-orange flame" that extended up to 50 feet behind the craft.
Both pilots reported seeing two rows of windows on the craft. They believed the UFO's pilot had seen them on a collision course and had veered because "he wanted to avoid us," convincing the pilots the ship was under "intelligent control."
The UFO then put on a burst of speed and climbed into the clouds and out of sight, with "its jet wash rocking our DC-3."
Chiles believed the wingless craft was flying at 500 to 700 miles per hour. He believed he saw a "snout like a radar pole" protruding from the object.
All of his passengers, save one, were asleep in the back of the plane. Chiles asked the one awake passenger if he saw anything. That passenger confirmed that he had been startled by a "strange eerie streak" of light outside his window. The passenger, seated on the plane's right side where the UFO had passed the plane, added that the light "was very intense, not like lightning or anything I had ever seen."
Initially, the Pentagon had no explanation. Strategic Air Command's chief, General George Kinney, told the press that the Air Force had nothing like the UFO the pilots described, adding, "I wish we did. I'd sure like to see that."
Keyhoe's research found that Air Force personnel in Macon, Georgia, saw a similar wingless object in their skies one hour after the so-called "Charles-Whitted Incident." Keyhoe also found that Air Force engineers, excited about such a craft, created blueprints for such a "space ship" within 48 hours of interviewing the pilots and had computed that Chiles' speed estimates were probably accurate.
While researching this case, Keyhoe found the lid of secrecy had clamped down. The pilots had been ordered by the Air Force to not talk about what they had seen, he had been told.
He encountered a similar situation when he interviewed Lieutenant George Gorman of the North Dakota Air National Guard.
Gorman had been widely reported in the press after an October 1, 1948, nighttime "dogfight" with a UFO. Gorman, like Mantell before him, was flying an F-51 fighter.
Gorman was at 4,500 feet when he observed a "fast-moving light" below him at 1,000 feet moving at about 250 miles per hour. It appeared to be blinking on and off, so Gorman assumed it was a the tail lights of a small plane.
Elsewhere in the sky, Gorman saw a "piper cub" plane (whose passengers also saw the object). Gorman noticed that he could make out the shape and wings of the "piper cub" in the moonlit sky.
Then Gorman's "light" passed over a field where a brightly lit night football game was going on. The object's silhouette against those ground lights revealed to Gorman "no shape at all around the light." This was confirmed by the air traffic controller in Fargo watching through high-powered night vision binoculars and by a second government observer in the tower.
Gorman dove on the object (hopefully after it was safely away from the football game), which veered away from his plane and climbed. He saw that "it was clear white and completely round - about six to eight inches in diameter." The description matched reports by American pilots over Germany during WWII who reported tiny lights trailing them that they called "foo fighters," which remain unexplained to this day.
Travelling at 400 miles per hour, Gorman began a 20-minute "dogfight" with the UFO, veering so sharply to turn with the UFO that he briefly "blacked out" once due to "excessive speed" in a turn. Had he, like Mantell, become so involved with a "target fixation" that he might also lose his life chasing a UFO?
The object climbed, pursued by Gorman. The object then dove on a collision course with Gorman, who dove as the object passed over his plane. Gorman then chased the object again. A second collision was avoided when the object "shot straight into the air."
Gorman climbed to 14,000, where his plane briefly stalled, then climbed to 17,000 feet, but the object had apparently had enough of the game and sped away until it was out of sight.
Gorman created some firestorms for the Air Force when he landed and talked to the press. He reported that the object appeared to be under "intelligent control." He also reported that he had considered ramming the object at one point, figuring that even if he crippled his plane he could still bail out and that the UFO would also be forced down.
Not liking Gorman's comments, the Air Force limited him in all future interviews to statements already made; he was to reveal nothing new to the press, or to Keyhoe.
The Air Force then said Gorman had chased a giant, lighted Navy weather balloon. Of course, "giant" weather balloons (hundreds of feet in diameter) didn't fit Gorman's description of an object 6-to-8 inches in diameter, nor were any balloons in the area when the press checked with the Navy.
Well, the Air Force said it was a meteor, or a comet, or fireballs, but its own astronomer, Dr. Hynek, shot those theories down at the time.
Keyhoe had the final say. Besides piloting airplanes, he had been a "balloon pilot" for the Marines. The Air Force, ignoring the sequence of events (the object at 1,000 feet climbing to 17,000 feet), then explained the balloon size problem as the object being a "leaking balloon" that had shrunk in size as it descended to 1,000 feet.
Keyhoe states that a "leaking balloon" loses its lift and couldn't climb from 1,000 feet to 17,000. "As a balloon pilot, I know this is impossible," he states.
Keyhoe further argues, with some amusement I think, that it was highly unlikely that a balloon, leaking or intact, could have reversed course, turned at sharp angles, dove and climbed at speeds faster than a pursuing F-51 fighter travelling at 400 miles per hour.
To Keyhoe's surprise, however, Gorman had other ideas about what the UFO was.
Before it was Project Blue Book, the Air Force investigation was called Project Saucer (it also was named Project Sign and Project Grudge at various times). The men from Project Saucer had talked to Gorman.
Gorman told Keyhoe after talking to Air Force investigators, "I might be talking about an official secret."
It was something Keyhoe had worried about. He and the editors of "True" magazine had already agreed that they would drop the story if "national security" was involved.
Keyhoe's conclusions:
In the end, Keyhoe decided "national security" didn't justfy what he considered to be the UFO cover-up (he became absolutely convinced of a cover-up in the late 1950s when a TV program he appeared on cut off his microphone; he had been warned not to deviate from Air Force approved topics in a show about UFOs, and when he did leave the approved script, there went his "sound").
Keyhoe's belief in the "interplanetary" option as the explanation of UFOs was based on his thorough research of 175 years of sightings. The reader must decide if his case is convincing or not.
Keyhoe had found UFO sightings going back into the 1800s (including one from 1897 describing a "saucer-shaped" aircraft) and came to believe the earth has been under interplanetary observation for a long time. He details these older cases, the "Foo Fighter" sightings of World War II and many of the 1947-1950 "wave" of sightings in "The Flying Saucers Are Real."
On the web:
How about watching a good UFO-based sci-fi film from 1974 starring Glenn Ford, David Soul and Bradford Dillman called "The Disappearance Of Flight 412" on DVD: http://www.epinions.com/content_167449562756
"The Flying Saucers Are Real" author Donald Keyhoe was a personal aide to Charles Lindbergh, the first American to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean to Paris in 1927. Keyhoe's interview with Lindbergh, "Lindbergh Tells Future Of Aviation," appeared in "Popular Mechanics" magazine in 1927 and is fascinating to read: http://www.charleslindbergh.com/plane/keyhole.asp
The Fund For UFO Research offers the Donald E. Keyhoe Award of $1,000 every year to the professional journalist (employed by a newspaper, magazine, TV or radio outlet) who makes an "outstanding contribution" to public understanding of UFOs: http://www.sources.com/Fandf/fandf27.htm
Just for fun (and to reward you for actually reading this long article, with my sincere thanks for the read): various awards (for any topic) for journalists and writers are listed at "Fame And Fortune": http://www.sources.com/Fandf/Index.htm
CBS Newsman Edward R. Murrow's interview with Kenneth Arnold, whose sighting started the UFO "wave" of 1947: http://www.project1947.com/fig/kamurrow.htm
Info on the Kenneth Arnold case (photos of Arnold, including one where he holds an artist's interpretation of the objects he reported, which looked more like the Air Force "flying wing" than a flying saucer): http://www.ufoevidence.org/History.htm
Official NICAP website, the group Keyhoe once headed which investigated UFOs: http://www.nicap.dabsol.co.uk/
This book is the first in-depth, authoritative look at the flying saucer phenomenon and is considered to this day to be one of the best books on the s...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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