spacecraft
- Leroy D. Cook
- The “Guide” And His Propulsion System
- Incident In Idaho
- Discovery In Mexico
- Propulsion Speculations
- Other References On Flying Saucer Propulsion
- Finding A Contactee
- George Van Tassel
- The CIA: Contactees, Investigators, And Abductees
- Direct Contact
1. Leroy D. Cook
In 1974, I moved to six acres of pristine wood and meadowland with a creek, in Trinity County, Northern California. A couple of weeks after I arrived, I met one of the neighbors, Leroy D. Cook, who had taken the time and trouble to drive down to my parcel of land in his 1950 Jeep. Just before he arrived, his Jeep hit a hole in my field hard enough to jar open the front door on the driver’s side. In a perfectly synchronous motion, Leroy turned off the ignition while leaving the vehicle in gear, and jumped out before the vehicle jerked to a stop. Leroy Cook had arrived.
Half startled and half amused, I waited to see what would happen next. With a combination of self-assurance and nervousness, he introduced himself, and I did likewise, and we sat down on some camp chairs and began to converse. I was from Los Angeles and he was from the country, which is where I had just moved. I needed to know what was going on out here, what to do to survive, and how to do it. For his part, Leroy wanted to know who I was and what I was doing here. As it turned out, he had a wealth of knowledge and experience about surviving in the woods, and was more than happy to tell me what he knew, and what to do.
For the next week or two, he came down almost every day to talk, mostly about surviving in the woods. Then one day he changed his tone of voice, became very serious, and told me about his contact with an alien being and a spacecraft. When he first began speaking, his voice quaked with emotion, not knowing what my reaction was going to be. When he saw that I was interested, he calmed down somewhat and began his story.
2.The “Guide” And His Propulsion System
Still breathing heavily, Leroy paused regularly to see what my reaction would be. I had none. I began asking questions. Encouraged, he continued his story. Leroy’s story was unfortunately very short. He was only able to recall that he had somehow been moved from the cab of his parked truck to the inside of what he referred to as “the craft.” He never called it a UFO. There was a man at his side, who, said Leroy, looked just like we do. The man, whom I will refer to as “the guide,” took Leroy on a brief tour of his craft, showing him the components of its propulsion system. Leroy remembers peering through a porthole and looking at a very large structure that was moving so fast it appeared as a blur. Later he learned that the structure was a donut-shaped ring with a radius almost as large as the entire craft. Leroy went on to name all of the ship’s components and equipment that he was shown by the guide. He dubbed this one the “orbiter.”
The guide did not “speak” to Leroy while they were touring the craft, but somehow Leroy picked up thoughts, ideas, and explanations about the craft. Leroy knew that the propulsion system was electronic in nature. Exactly what its details were he did not know at first, but he was soon to learn.
Leroy’s guide took him into what appeared to be a control room. Inside the room, there was a diagram of the ship’s propulsion system. Little did the guide know (or perhaps he did) that figuring out this diagram would become Leroy’s lifelong passion. From the diagram, Leroy saw that the rotating structure (the orbiter) was donut-shaped, and had permanent magnets mounted continuously around its inside. The poles of the magnets swept past a large number of stationary electrical coils as the orbiter rotated.
Looking at this strange piece of machinery, Leroy saw bolts of lightning being thrown into and through the orbiter. The bolts emanated from electrodes that were located between the stationary coils. As the orbiter swept past them, electrical energy discharged across the orbiter to what must have been another electrode on the other side.
Other details of the craft’s electronic system included a large energy generator that Leroy called a battery. It was located at the craft’s center. The remaining electrical components, coils, capacitors, and wires were located on a single deck that ran from the central battery to the rim, where the electrodes and orbiter were located.
Next, Leroy’s guide took him over and showed him a lighted control panel. The panel had a series of windows that were lit with colored lights. The guide looked at Leroy and he understood that the colors were an indication of the craft’s speed. In slow velocity mode, the color in the tube was red. As the craft picked up speed the color changed to first yellow, then green, and finally blue as it accelerated out of sight. When the tubes turned white, the ship was, as Leroy said to me later, “gone.”
After the tour, the guide turned to Leroy and said, “Everything can be understood with a measure of wisdom and understanding.” Leroy distinctly recalls these as spoken words rather than as impressions. This was the end of the encounter for Leroy, but the beginning of the rest of his life. The next thing that he remembered was that he was back at the wheel of his truck, but that it was now stopped on the side of the road in a turnout. He started the truck and finished his run into Lancaster, CA, uneventfully.
Leroy and I spent a great deal of time hanging around together. He was retired and I was on limited employment in a variety of local industries. He was congenial and friendly, and he trusted me. Toward others, however, he maintained a more defensive attitude. This was not so much because of his UFO sighting, but because of everything else that had happened to him in the course of his life.
I had departed L.A. looking for something different from a suburban lifestyle. I had spent many summers of my high school years and afterwards hiking and fishing in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. The air was very clean, and the water very clear. It was an ideal place to live. When a friend in L.A. said that a friend of his was selling a piece of mountain property in Northern California, I jumped at the chance to buy it. Now here I was, living on the land, and building a cabin.
If I was not able to figure out why I was here in the mountains, I was even less able to figure out why I had run across Leroy and his UFO story. People who have seen UFOs and communicated their feelings about the event(s), have said that their lives were changed forever. Clearly, this applied to Leroy’s life, but what about to mine? How come I had not had a close encounter while hiking in the mountains? How come him and not me? These are natural questions that reflect natural feelings. Years later, after I had my own close encounters, I, too, was asked the same questions by someone I was telling about them.
3. Incident in Idaho
Over the next ten years or so, Leroy thought a great deal about his tour of the craft. But he also had a life to live, and a wife and four children to feed, on the salary of a truck driver. Tiring of California, he spoke with a friend who had moved to Idaho to drive a logging truck. The pay was better, he said, and the cost of living was lower there. So Leroy took his family to Idaho, and got a job driving a logging truck.
Leroy learned the logging business while driving truck. Logging truck drivers have a small amount of downtime while they are parked at the landing (where logs are loaded). Leroy used it to meet people and make friends. One of them offered Leroy a partnership in his logging business, and Leroy went from truck driver to logger.
Leroy told me many logging stories that first summer in Trinity County. They were all interesting, but had little bearing on his encounter with the spacecraft. Perhaps this was the problem, as Leroy was unable to get neither the craft (and its propulsion system) nor the incident as a whole “out of his head” (as he said).
One day Leroy was felling trees with his partner and daydreaming about his encounter at the same time. Fallers (loggers who cut down trees) always work with at least one other man in case something bad happens, which occasionally does. Before dropping trees, fallers talk to one another about how they are going to cut the patch (group of trees), what trees to start with, to end with, etc. On this particular day, there was apparently a failure to communicate between Leroy and his partner. Leroy remembers hearing his partner’s chainsaw stop, followed by the “death moan” (the deep moan a tree makes as gravity begins to pull it down). But the tree did not go down where Leroy thought that it was going down. The last thing he remembered was it falling on him.
Unconscious, but still alive, Leroy told me that he had what would today be a brief OBE (out-of-body experience). He went through the tunnel and spoke with a man who said, “If you want to go, take my hand.” Leroy did not reach out and take the man’s hand. The next thing he remembered was waking up in the back of a fast-moving pickup. There was an excruciating pain in his back. Every time the truck ran over another rock in the dirt road, he saw white light inside his head.
The main trunk of the tree missed Leroy, but a branch about an inch in diameter had broken off and gone into his back. When he saw what had happened, Leroy’s felling partner rushed down the hill, picked Leroy up, carried him up to the landing, put him into the bed of his pickup, and was on the way to the closest town when Leroy awoke. The closest hospital and doctor were 60 miles away, but Leroy survived the trip.
The doctors in the emergency room were aghast. They had never seen a one inch tree limb sticking out of someone’s back, so close to his kidneys. They were afraid that Leroy would die. The entry wound was bleeding profusely. The tree limb had gone in directly over the kidneys, and had probably damaged them. Vital signs were low. He was slipping into shock. They made a decision. One of them grabbed onto the end of the tree limb and pulled. Leroy blacked out.
When Leroy woke up, he was under medication in a bed. The limb had been removed successfully, but x-rays revealed that a two-inch long sliver of wood had been left behind in one of the kidneys. Despite the presence of the sliver, the kidneys were functioning, and Leroy was released from the hospital. Soon, however, there were complications.
The sliver that was left in Leroy’s kidney proved his undoing. It came under constant attack by his immune system, which regarded it as a foreign object. Eventually, it was isolated and surrounded by scar tissue, but the infection never stopped entirely, the immune system kept dumping chemicals into the bloodstream to fight the sliver. These, in turn, produced secondary effects associated with persistent infections—nausea, headaches, etc.
For the rest of his life, Leroy felt weak and slightly sick all the time. He went to doctors to see if they could do something about his condition. They told him he had a case of low-grade blood poisoning. Whether it was caused by his immune system attacking the imbedded sliver, or by poor kidney functioning, or both, they did not know. Leroy did not have health insurance at the time of the accident, and as a result, had to borrow money to cover his continuing medical expenses. The doctors and hospitals knew that Leroy had only limited means of paying for the work that they did for him, and were not anxious to let him get too far in debt to them. The result was poor medical care. Leroy only gave me sketchy information on his medical condition, but from what he told me, it was apparent that he had not received adequate care, and as a result, his condition worsened.
There were times when Leroy showed resignation to his fate. Once or twice he even said that he should have taken the opportunity to leave when it was offered to him while under the tree with the limb sticking out of his back. Little did I know that he had only a few years left. Did he know? Perhaps.
“Here I am,” he said, “banged up. I’d better do something.” The “something” was to tell me as much of his story as he could in the time he had left. As the years passed, he would see me as often as possible and tell me more elements of his story.
In the four years that Leroy recounted his story, I took no notes. Asked later why I did not do this, I had no good answer. At the time, I was not aware that this is what a good journalist is supposed to do. Also, as often occurs when someone is trying to tell you something that happened several years in the past, they are unable to recall events unless the right moment occurs. Many times Leroy would start remembering things when we were doing fun things, like four-wheeling over the many old logging roads that crisscrossed the area. It was often a real adventure, not knowing whether we would get into something that we would not be able to get out of. Once we did, and that was when he told me about Cardoza in Mexico City.
Leroy lived with his debilitated physical condition from the time of the logging accident (1964 or ‘65), until October of 1978, when he died from a massive coronary at age 52. If Leroy had been injured in more recent times, he would have been treated much more quickly, as medical helicopters are now available, and the treatment he received would have been better because the quality of care for these types of injuries has improved immensely since the ‘60s. It is likely, for instance, that a surgeon who was capable of removing the wood splinter from his kidney would have been available. Also, in the event that his kidney functioning had been permanently impaired, he could have been put on dialysis more easily and more cheaply now than then. In either event, it is safe to say that he probably would have lived to a much older age.
Before the accident, Leroy spent only a small amount of time looking into the general subject of UFOs, and almost no time in working through the details of his actual encounter, but after the accident, his attitude changed. The accident had shaken him severely, and he now understood that his encounter with the spacecraft affected him in a big way, and that if he wanted to find any peace in the remaining years of his life, he would have to devote all of his time and resources to looking into his close encounter.
4.Discovery in Mexico
Leroy’s project to reconstruct the workings of the propulsion system of an advanced spacecraft began with a visit south of the border. In the years before the accident, Leroy had researched UFOs by reading everything that he could get his hands on. If he came across something of interest, something that pertained to his own encounter, he made a note of it and filed it away. One of these notes concerned an electronic technician by the name of Cardoza (I either forgot or was not told his first name). Leroy never said how he found out about Cardoza, whether from someone he talked to or something he read, but in either case, he had an address for him in Mexico City.
Leroy took a bus to Nogales and asked what the cost of a ticket to Mexico City was. The fare on the express train was over $200, but the local train fare was only $16, so he took that and spent several days traveling through every village between the U. S. border and Mexico City. It was, said Leroy, “the goat train,” and was filled with peasants traveling locally. You are not supposed to take local trains long distances, but Leroy did anyway. His poor physical condition made the trip difficult for him. The seats were hard. His coach was filled with bad odors. The train stopped at every village between Arizona and Mexico City. He arrived exhausted and began his search for Cardoza.
Leroy had purchased one of those Spanish phrase books that tourists often purchase before going to Mexico. He studied it on the train. It turned out to be indispensable for finding Cardoza. He first used it to find inexpensive lodging in an old hotel. After some rest, he decided to visit the National Museum before looking for Cardoza. This would give him some practice in using the phrase book. As it turned out, he did not need the book to locate the
National Museum, or any other popular tourist spot for that matter, as most of the Mexican people who provide services to American tourists spoke English.
Looking for Cardoza was one thing, finding him was another. After two days, and some degree of frustration, Leroy located Cardoza in an area on the outskirts of Mexico City. When he knocked on Cardoza’s door, he had no idea what to expect. Would they be able to communicate? Even if they did, would Cardoza tell Leroy what he was doing?
Cardoza’s English was much better than Leroy’s phrase book Spanish, but Cardoza was reluctant to talk much about what he was doing. After a short visit, Leroy left, saying that he would return the next day. If Cardoza would not speak with him he might as well leave, thought Leroy as he sat on the bus over to Cardoza’s house. Apprehensive, he knocked on the door. He was greeted warmly by Cardoza. Leroy knew that things would be okay.
Once Leroy got into the house, his narrative shifted to the outcome of his work with Cardoza. Leroy, like myself, was more interested in technology than in personal details, and he never told me what exactly transpired between himself and Cardoza. Instead, he cut to the chase and went to what Cardoza was working on, and what it had to do with the spacecraft technology that he was trying to figure out.
Cardoza, a freelance radio technician, was working on a device that beamed radio frequencies into a crucible of molten metal. After heating up the metal until it melted, Cardoza would turn on his radio transmitters. These, in turn, were connected to an odd-looking antenna that was bent into a spherical curvature that surrounded the crucible.
As the radio waves traveled into the molten metal, they heated it up. This slowed down the cooling process. Cardoza watched the metal closely as it cooled, adjusting dials that controlled both the frequency and the power of the radiated waves. At a critical point in the process, Cardoza exclaimed, excitedly, something to the effect that “this is it” and “we are there now,” and suddenly turned up the power dial.
Using his equipment, Cardoza was able to hold the metal in a molten condition for about an hour or so, after which he turned down the power and allowed it to solidify. Still fairly hot, he then removed the metal from the crucible and placed it into a second processing device, a large press. The press was driven by an electric motor that drove a heavy steel hammer into the molten metal. The press was able to deliver about 1000 psi (pounds per square inch) into the still hot metal.
This was all that Cardoza allowed Leroy to see of his metallurgy. He told Leroy to come back tomorrow. When Leroy returned, Cardoza gave him the piece of metal that they had processed the day before. Cardoza told Leroy that it no longer was common lead. He had converted it into a form of lead that was unknown to the world, and to scientists. He gave the piece to Leroy, saying that it was now his, implying that he should have it tested when he got back home.
Leroy arrived back at Atascadero, California, and took the metal down to a local metal shop that had furnaces for annealing and melting metals. Leroy did not have the money to pay the shop owner to run tests on the metal. However, he remembered that Cardoza had told him that it could not be melted in an ordinary furnace. He then bet the shop owner that he would not be able to melt the metal piece. The furnaces would melt any known metal, so the shop owner took the bet and put the metal into one of his furnaces.
The metal did not melt, even with the furnace turned up all the way. Amazed, the owner decided that something must be wrong with the furnace, so he took out Leroy’s metal and inserted a piece of steel. The furnace melted the steel easily in a short period of time, so the problem was not with the furnace.
The owner was now interested in the metal. After convincing himself that it could not be melted, at least in his furnaces, he placed it into a large 2,000 psi metal press. Once again the piece performed beyond the laws of what was known about ordinary metals. The press was not able to put a dent in it.
Mystified, Leroy left the metal shop owner and went over to a local gem and mineral shop, where he told the owner that he wanted to see if this metal piece could be cut with his diamond saw. The owner laughed and said, “Why sure,” and put it into the carriage of his diamond saw. He then adjusted the carriage so the metal piece was right up against the diamond circular saw. He turned on the saw and the metal began to move into the blade. Suddenly, though, it stopped, and would not go any farther. Surprised, the owner turned off the saw and examined the blade. The metal piece had stripped off all of its diamond coating. Angrily, he declared something to the effect, “What the hell is this stuff?” and asked Leroy who was going to pay for the ruined blade.
Leroy still did not have any money, so he left the shop in a hurry, and went home to think about what had just happened. He was amazed at what he had stumbled across. He was convinced that Cardoza had discovered a portion of the spacecraft technology that he was looking for. But what should he do with it? What could he do with it?
Leroy knew that Cardoza’s metals were supposed to be used in his spacecraft, but he did not know when or how he would be able to bring them into the project in order to build a working model of a UFO-type spacecraft. He put the metal in a safe place, thinking he would get back to it someday, and returned to work on the rest of his project, that of designing and building electrical components for the craft’s propulsion system.
Leroy understood that the properties of the metals that are used in the UFO spacecraft are important, but he was not aware of the details of their functioning. He was also not aware of how these craft fly (if you can call it that). Nor was I at the time.
Clearly, the most modern of our material sciences have not developed materials that either alter gravity or produce their own gravity, but if spacecraft are coming to visit earth from many light years away, they must be using an unknown technology. Once we come to the conclusion that UFOs are spacecraft from other solar systems, then we have no choice but to consider new ideas as to how exactly it is that these craft are able to travel here.
Later on, I learned that the metals that are used in the UFO spacecraft are not important because they are stronger, lighter, and melt at higher temperatures than those we are familiar with. They are important because they have superconducting and supermagnetic properties that produce the craft’s powerful electromagnetic fields, which, in turn, produce the force field that propels it through space.
In addition to the design of the craft’s propulsion system, Leroy worked on other components, one of which was its battery. Apparently, these craft (or at least this one) are not free energy devices. They use small amounts of electrical energy to produce the gravity they need to travel through space. Leroy told me that in the course of his investigations, he spoke with a scientist who worked on advanced electrical generating devices. One of these devices converted the energy of radioactive decay into electrical energy. Why it was not developed, I do not know, as it would have been a great alternative energy breakthrough, especially given the large volume of radioactive waste that is produced by our modern societies.
Leroy called the spacecraft battery the “prism cell.” It did use prisms, but this was the least important part of the battery’s design. This prism cell used a high energy isotope to generate electricity. The radioactive decay particles coming off the material went through an unusual solution of what Leroy called O-4. This is an oxygen molecule with four instead of two atoms. Ozone gas has three oxygen atoms; this has four. The radioactive particles in the prism cell battery were converted into electrical energy when they went through the battery’s O-4. Leroy further said that the radioactive atoms were immersed in a container filled with O-4.
5.Propulsion Speculations
It is likely that Leroy’s propulsion system was only electrical to the extent that electrical energy was used to produce a gravitational field. What happens with these craft is that their electrical energy is used to open up “holes in space” that the craft fall through. When an observer sees them falling upward they could in reality be falling downward into a hole that they have created with their propulsion system.
Another theory would be that the ship’s self-generated center of gravity pulls on the craft’s earth center of gravity. This was the explanation given to Dan Fry in his encounter at White Sands. As long as the generated gravity is greater than the prevailing (earth) gravity, the craft can use the former to defy the latter. In order to do this, the artificial gravity need only be located above the earth gravity, and the craft will be lifted upward.
Still another possibility is that the ship’s electrical currents are so strong that they distort the surrounding space, and that because of general relativity, this space distortion produces (is the same thing as) gravity. The ship is then propelled through space in the direction of its electrically generated gravity. But the ship can never get to the actual center of artificial gravity, because the space curvature is constant, and is always regenerating itself. As a result, the ship accelerates forever in the gravitational field.
6.Other References on Flying Saucer Propulsion
Not all, but some contactees have said that the beings they met during their UFO contacts gave them technical information. Some of this information can be found in Dan Fry’s book, Incident at White Sands. There is a simple explanation of how the craft’s artificial gravitational field propels it upward in this book. There is also an explanation of how the ship’s electric and magnetic fields, which occur at right angles to one another, develop a gravitational field that is at right angles to both of these fields.
Under today’s physical laws, if an electric and a magnetic field are at right angles, they produce a third force, known as a Lorentz force at right angles to both. Possibly the extraterrestrial in Dan Fry’s book was talking about this type of force. The Lorentz force, however, is electromagnetic, and it only interacts with charged particles. The force of propulsion that the extraterrestrial described to Dan Fry is a neutral force.
Scientists have a series of equations and calculations that show them how much energy is required to lift how much mass into orbit. When the combined masses of the rocket, its payload, and its crew, are added to the constantly declining mass of the rocket fuel, which is burned as the rocket ascends, the result is what we see on the launch pad today-large multistage rockets with small payloads and few crew members. When you look at a photograph of a small UFO, it is obvious that it is not using the same physics as the earth’s space program to get into outer space. Larger UFOs, such as the triangular shaped craft, might have sufficient room on board for a large payload of explosive chemicals, but their observed behavior also does not jive with that of a chemically-driven rocket.
The idea that UFOs do not use rockets to get into outer space is given further credence by the fact that these objects apparently move through the sky without the loud noise associated with chemical explosions, and without the brilliant exhaust trail as well. If chemical energy and Newtonian Physics do not get you very far into space, then what does?
The answer lies beyond our current understanding of physics, and this is a big problem. Indeed, it may be the single biggest problem in getting UFOs accepted. The energy that these craft use is not equivalent to the energy that is used by a rocket to blast itself away from the pull of the earth’s gravity. It is only equivalent to the energy that is required to open up a hole in the fabric of space.
The physics that is involved here is quite exotic, and only exists in a few references. But it does exist. In 1920, Einstein said that space “is not physically empty.” What he meant was that space contained something. Exactly what this something was (and is) Einstein did not know, but he postulated his general theory of relativity in order to describe and define it. This theory is not accepted by most physicists to this day, even though some of the predictions that Einstein made from it have been proven true. Most prominent among these was his prediction that light is bent by gravity. [Ref Here: Geometry And Relativity] [:sic]
Beyond the work of a few theoretical physicists, such as Einstein and Wheeler (Einstein’s student), there is little in the way of theory that can be used to describe the propulsion methods and systems of UFOs. The fact that there is no physics that describes their means of flight (lift, whatever) has put the scientists and engineers who believe in UFOs in an impossible position. Their situation is the same as the position of the general UFO investigator who, faced with government denial, continues to make the same claims. Perhaps these are equivalent situations. The government and military people responsible for the UFO coverup were probably told years ago that there was no physics that could be used to describe these objects, and so there would be no problem with physicists coming forth and saying, “Wait a minute here, there just might be a basis for this type of space flight.” With no physics, there is no space flight, and the coverup could be maintained indefinitely.
At the time that I was researching the solar motor, my knowledge of physics was limited. I had taken undergraduate courses in physics at UCLA, but these only covered basic theory, and did not go into the details of modern physics’ two most important theories, quantum mechanics and relativity. At first this was an advantage, because if you do not know that something is impossible, then you will not be discouraged in your attempts to understand it. Later, when I tried to explain the operation of the propulsion system in terms acceptable to modern physics, this advantage turned into a disadvantage.
As any physicist can tell you, electricity cannot be converted into gravity, or any other type of force, such as a nuclear force. At least as far as they know. There is only one effect that has the dual nature of having both an electromagnetic and nuclear force field. This is the decay of gamma rays during high energy nuclear reactions. During this decay, the energy of the gamma ray is converted into the mass of a positron-electron pair, and in the process, a small force, known as the weak force, can be detected. This reaction is so certain that the weak nuclear force is also known as the electro-weak force (or interaction).
The electro-weak interaction offers us the first clue as to the nature of UFO propulsion. Many UFO investigators, when examining what are called “landing sites,” have noticed that the ground is often scorched by something that is so powerful that it is able to penetrate into the soil for a distance of several inches. It has been speculated that, in order to do this, the craft, while close to the ground, must have put out large amounts of high-energy radiation. Either gamma rays or X-rays or both would qualify as suitable sources of radiation to produce this observed effect.
It was beginning to appear to me as if the propulsion systems of UFOs were large particle accelerators that produced particles that then decayed into, or were produced by secondary effects, nuclear force fields. Once produced, the craft was able to use its force field particles as a means of propulsion. If this is the case, then it is safe to conclude that the nuclear forces have the same origin as gravity, and can be used to open holes into the dimension that gravity is associated with and comes from. It is little wonder why most scientists will not even look at the UFO phenomenon. The idea of using the nuclear forces to push, pull, or otherwise move a craft through space would be way beyond the current laws of physics.
The most important feature of the UFO is not its electronic propulsion systems, which are easily reproduced. The key to their flight lies in the internal nature of the materials that are used to make them. We return to our narrative.
The discoveries that Leroy and Cardoza made in the area of materials science have not been duplicated to this day, and may not be for many more years. The type of spacecraft that we are discussing here are not constructed from ordinary materials that you buy off the shelf from a sheet metal shop. Instead, these materials must be put through a series of multiple crystallizations from a molten state. After several of these treatments, the materials begin to take on unusual properties. When several of the materials, most of which are metals, are brought into the correct pattern of alignment, rather like layers onto a substrate, they will produce a gravitational type force field when activated by electrical currents.
7.Finding A Contactee
Before meeting Leroy, I did not know anything about UFOs or extraterrestrial spacecraft. I had read nothing about them and knew nothing about them. But Leroy’s story had gotten me interested in the phenomenon, and I began to research the subject in the local library and bookstore.
The first books I came across in the library were on the experiences of George Adamski, Truman Bethurum, and Daniel Fry. These people are in a rather small group of people who are now referred to as “contactees.” I also read about the experiences of Betty and Barney Hill in Incident at Exeter. The Hills are now regarded as “abductees.”
Contactees are not just people who have seen, been close to, or interacted with the extraterrestrial beings associated with UFOs. They are people who have met and had conversations with e.t.s (extraterrestrials). Sometimes these took place in only a single incident (contact), such as was the case for Dan Fry, an engineer at the White Sands proving grounds in New Mexico, who spoke with an E.T. while on the grounds. The E.T. then showed him his small “scout craft” and took Fry on a short journey to the Moon and around planet earth. In other cases, such as those of George Adamski, or more recently, Billy Meier, they met and spoke with the E.T. several times over a period of months (the Adamski case) or years (the Meier case).
The conversations that contactees have with visitors from outer space are always congenial and pleasant, as if you were attending a church service for the first time and someone came up to you in the foyer, said, “hello,” and started a conversation. At some point in the course of conversations between an E.T. and their contactee, the E.T. usually gives the contactee reasons for the contact. Usually the E.T. tells the contactee that the time is right for contact between their civilizations, because we have progressed in our technology to the point where we are able to make it into space. Having accomplished this, it is now time for us to meet the neighbors. At some point in the conversation, the E.T. gives the contactee a brief evaluation of the current state of the earth’s environment, and also discusses the condition of our social and political institutions. In every instance that I have read, the people of earth are not given very high marks in either of these areas.
8.George Van Tassel
I liked what I was hearing from the contactees, and decided that I had to meet one of them as soon as possible. I told my older brother, who was living in Orange County at the time, that I was interested in flying saucers and wanted to speak to someone who had been involved with them. Somehow he came up with George Van Tassel’s name, and we drove together south toward Palm Springs to see him around the time of Christmas, 1974.
George was living with his second wife, Doris, in their double-wide mobile home on ten acres in Landers, California. The dome-shaped building that housed the “Integratron,” a device given to him, he said, by extraterrestrials, was located on the property a short distance from the house.
After introductions, my brother, George, Doris, and I sat down at the dining room table, which, served as an impromptu office, and began discussing flying saucers. I went immediately into the subject of the technology behind these craft and George reached into a cabinet and took out a model of a flying saucer.
George’s model saucer was about 2 feet in diameter, a few inches thick at the center, tapering out to nothing at the outside rim. A classic flying saucer, but just a model. George then pulled the saucer apart. We looked in and saw how the craft was organized. As in most small saucers, the crew compartment was much smaller than the entire saucer, and was located on the top of the saucer. The components of the ship’s propulsion system were on the main deck, which was below the crew deck. There was also another small deck below the main deck where the ship’s only mechanical unit, its electrical generator, was located.
At this point, I asked the obvious question. How does its propulsion system work? I had already explained to George that I was working with someone on this technology. In response, George immediately began to explain how the propulsion system operated. It was, he said, an electro-gravitational drive, based upon the Biefield-Brown effect.
I did not know at the time whether or not the Biefield-Brown effect had anything to do with flying saucer propulsion, but George believed that it did. After our meeting with George, I read an article on it, but was unable to find anyone who had built the device. Many years have passed since my meeting with Van Tassel, and now there is more data available on this effect. This is summarized in my paper on UFO propulsion systems.
In the course of more casual conversation, George explained that he had taken an early retirement from his aerospace job, and had moved out here with his first wife in the 1950s. Looking for someplace remote to live, they came across an ad for a lease on a government owned airstrip that was located next to Twentynine Palms Marine Training Area. The lease was free, its only requirement being that they had to live there full time. The airstrip was located next to a large rock called Giant Rock. After moving there, George built a house literally beneath the rock.
Shortly after George and Doris moved into their house under Giant Rock, he had his first UFO contact. One night late, he heard a faint humming noise outside his house. It was very quiet out there in the desert at night and the hum was noticeable. He looked out his window and saw a light coming from the opposite side of Giant Rock. He went out to investigate, and when he turned the corner going around the rock, he saw the ship, a small flying saucer, a scout ship. George had been expecting the visitation and was not startled by it. He walked up to the craft, but stopped when a voice (apparently from the inside) told him not to approach any closer or else he might be injured. In one of the books that I had read, Truman Bethurum also was told not to approach the spacecraft too closely, as its hull was still hot.
George stopped and began asking questions in the direction of the hovering craft. A brief conversation with the E.T. who was speaking to him from inside ensued. Not a great deal was said, but before the craft took off, the E.T. told George that he would be contacted again sometime in the near future.
Spacecraft visited George many times in his years at Giant Rock, and later in Landers, where he moved after his first wife died. He later married Doris. George had gone out to the desert to contact the “space people,” as he called them, and it had happened. After the contact, he started his UFO organization, and soon curious people were making the long drive out to Giant Rock to speak with him. Encouraged, he decided to have an annual UFO conference there. He would invite speakers, people could camp out, and he would get someone to set up food and other facilities.
George’s UFO conferences at Giant Rock ran from 1956 to sometime in the 1960s, when interest and attendance waned and they were discontinued. There was a brief revival as George had his last conference in July of 1977, not long before his passing in March of 1978 at age 68.
George’s UFO conferences were spurred on by the idea, popular at the time, that people from outer space would soon be coming to earth in large numbers. Most of the followers of the UFO movement of those days believed that “they” (the E.T.s) already had paid visits to many of our political leaders, and would soon be showing themselves more openly to the people. Towards the end of his life, which is when I met him, it was apparent from my conversation with him that George had changed his mind about when the space people were going to come down and meet the people. His position now was that the E.T.s had to change their plans and delay their arrival on earth because the people of earth were not yet ready to accept them. The delay, however, was temporary, and someday in the not too distant future, the people and government (if the two are still the same then) will be able to accept their presence.
George’s model flying saucer had three large spheres that hung below the craft on its outside. I had seen these spheres before in George Adamski’s photographs, and assumed that he must have either gotten them from him or had been involved with his own contact with an E.T. I asked him about this, and that was when he told us about his visitation.
George told us that he made the model to show to his visitors and guests how UFOs flew. Other contactees, such as George Adamski and Billy Meier, also built models of the spacecraft that they had seen, probably for the same reasons. This is ironic, because many UFO researchers have accused these and other contactees of taking photographs of model UFOs in order to deceive the public into thinking that they were real. While there is evidence that contactees built UFO models, there is no evidence that they did this for deceptive purposes.
The lack of proper investigation into the use of UFO model photos is one example of how mainstream UFO investigators have gone out of their way to distance themselves from UFO contactees. There are several others who have led to the development of a politically correct position that anyone who wants to be taken seriously by insiders in the UFO movement must adopt.
9.THE CIA (CONTACTEES, INVESTIGATORS, AND ABDUCTEES)
Almost every book about UFOs, particularly the ones that refer to events through a span of time, contains a reference to the Roswell, NM incident. This book is no different.
The Roswell UFO crash incident is the defining point of modern UFO history. In the future, when the existence of extraterrestrials and their spacecraft has been proven beyond a doubt, people will look back on this and say that this is where it all started. While the modern UFO movement might have begun with Roswell, it is not likely that extraterrestrials began their visits to earth at that time.
Supposedly, Roswell is important today because a spacecraft with small grey aliens crashed near there in July of 1947, and also because one or more dead alien bodies were recovered from the crash site, and also because at least one live alien was recovered as well. Certainly these are important events. But the most important thing that started at Roswell was “UFO-gate,” the great UFO coverup.
When reports that an unusual flying craft had crash-landed in the desert near Roswell came to the attention of the commander of the nearby military base, he sent out MPs and other soldiers to investigate. The commanding officer of the expedition, Capt. Jesse Marcel, reported back accurately as to what had happened. The base commander then released an official statement to the press that a flying disk of unknown origin had crashed near Roswell. The story was picked up by major new sources and was reported in several large daily newspapers. Soon a general was flying out to Roswell from Washington with another story that contradicted the original story of the base commander. The fix was in. The battle between the government and the UFO investigators and true believers had begun.
Once the government, or someone inside the government, decided to lie about Roswell, they had to go all the way and lie about every UFO incident that came to their attention after Roswell. Sometimes these lies were indirect and overt, in which case the technique of plausible denial was used. Sometimes they were indirect, in which case covert techniques were used to create disinformation. In either event, it is safe to say, after over 50 years since Roswell, that the government’s cover up of UFOs has been somewhere around 90% successful. But what else did we think was going to happen?
It is not my intention to chronicle all of the actions that the U.S. and other governments took in the years after Roswell, to first introduce and then to reinforce the idea that UFOs and aliens do not, did not, and cannot exist here on earth. One example will suffice.
One of the first disinformation theories that the government used was the idea that space travel between planetary systems is unlikely if not impossible because of the great distances involved, and because everyone in science knows that traveling faster than the speed of light is impossible. The government’s strategy here was to first find several distinguished scientists who all believed in this doctrine, and then to place them on an official-looking and official-sounding panel, and then to promote them as experts on contact with extraterrestrial life, referred to at the time as “extraterrestrial intelligence.” Thus SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) was born.
The people in government who thought up the idea of creating SETI served the purposes of the UFO coverup well. The scientists of SETI, not the people who were reporting UFOs and aliens, were now the experts on the subject of extraterrestrial contact. Yes, they said, it is very likely that in all of the billions and billions of stars that a few must have evolved intelligent life. And yes, it would be the height of arrogance to believe that we are the only intelligent beings in the universe or galaxy. But the idea that extraterrestrials were already visiting people on earth was sheer nonsense. With this type of public relations campaign, the government and their supporters in the scientific establishment pushed not just the UFO contactees but most UFO researchers out of the public eye and onto the back shelf of media obscurity.
Optimistic UFO investigators and believers often state something to the effect that, “We have to get past the coverup; we have to get past Roswell.” The reality is that we cannot get past the coverup unless the government tells the public what it knows about UFOs and E.T.s, or unless the E.T.s make their presence known in an unmistakable way.
There are also those who believe that the mainstream media that most people listen to will someday give credence to UFO stories or, for that matter, will at least report them accurately. But there is little chance of this happening either, unless overwhelming evidence of the existence of UFOs is presented to them. Until that happens, the media has little choice but to follow the lead of the government on something as important as extraterrestrial visitations.
When the early explorers of Western Europe came to the New World, one of the things they did was to contact the indigenous people. Usually they contacted their chiefs and leaders, but they also contacted ordinary people as well. If extraterrestrials were coming to earth would they not do the same thing? A small number of UFO investigators have stated that while serving in the military they discovered evidence, including top secret documents, that implied that there are people inside the governments of the major powers who know that extraterrestrial beings and their craft have been visiting earth for some time. These investigators also state that there have been contacts, official or unofficial, between the aliens and representatives of the major powers. If this is the case, would there not also have been contacts between ordinary citizens of these major powers and the aliens?
But was Leroy an abductee or a contactee? Or both? He had been taken, without his permission, into a flying saucer, but once there, instead of being subjected to medical examinations, he was instead treated well and was given a brief, cryptic explanation of a scientific nature as to the operation of the craft’s propulsion system. He never showed any signs of having been traumatized or otherwise abused during his time onboard the craft. In addition, he was able to recall all of the events that occurred during the encounter without having to be hypnotized. His encounter certainly was not similar to those of any of the abductees who have come forward to tell of what to most of them are harrowing stories of missing time in a hostile environment. Leroy appeared to be more of a contactee than an abductee. Gaining acceptance for his story would be difficult, but this was not my main goal. Like Leroy, I found the idea of a new form of space travel interesting all of the time, intriguing most of the time, and exciting much of the time.
Today, most UFO researchers regard information from contactees such as Adamski, Van Tassel, and Meier as unreliable at best, or fraudulent at worst. Mainstream media journalists take a similar position. Perhaps the contactees serve a purpose after all, providing a subject that all media are substantially able to agree on.
Most of the early contactees died years ago, and are therefore unable to defend themselves against the numerous charges of fraud that have been and still are being leveled against them. Ironically, the people who investigate and write about UFOs have been treated just about as badly by the mainstream press as the contactees have been treated by them. Obviously, this is a generalization, and not all UFO investigators disbelieve the contactees. Some, in fact, have stated words to the effect that it is possible that some of what the contactees are saying is true.
One may question what a contactee or, for that matter, anyone says based upon the nature of the evidence they offer, but it is not fair to cast dispersions on the honesty and integrity of people without giving them the opportunity to present their cases and to answer questions.
For my own part, I have read closely every word that I have been able to find about what any extraterrestrial being said to any contactee in hopes of finding even the smallest clue as to the technology of the UFOs. I can testify to the fact that of all the things that have been said, there is little that has any bearing on this subject. But there is some.
In the notes that Billy Meier wrote down regarding his conversations with a woman from a planet in the Pleiades (Samjase), there are several pages of descriptions of how the metals that are used in the construction of her spacecraft are prepared. Some of these bear a remarkable resemblance to the descriptions that Leroy gave me regarding his work with Cardoza on their attempts to develop spacecraft materials. This is interesting because there was no contact between Leroy and Meiers. Leroy did his work in the 1960s and Meiers did his in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The difficulty with trying to tell someone about the existence of extraterrestrial spacecraft that use an unknown technology is that the only way that you can prove it is to get them a piece of the technology. It does not matter how many pictures you take of UFOs. It does not matter how emotionally expressive you become about your contact/abduction. When it comes to something this new, you have to have to present something real, something material, such as an object.
Those who know that the government people responsible for UFO sightings are being less than forthright have little recourse through the mainstream media. The government still occupies the best ground, and the UFO people have been crowded onto a small ledge of credibility. If the mainstream media says that the stories of contactees are totally ridiculous, then most UFO researchers will adopt this position and concentrate on one that does not receive quite the same degree of ridicule. Contactees may be telling the truth, but one does not make a name for oneself in this field and achieve credibility by saying things to this effect.
If the government has material objects that could not have been manufactured on this planet, and has decided not to reveal that fact, then the task of convincing the general public as to the reality of UFOs becomes well nigh to impossible. When it comes to something as unusual, as unbelievable, and as bizarre as UFOs, what the government has to say carries a great deal of weight. Indeed, it carries most of the weight. If alien spacecraft are moving at will through our airspace, people have a right to know. Congress and/or the Attorney General should use their power of subpoena to obtain documents and testimony pertinent to the subject and, after scrutinizing the material to make sure that intelligence assets and agents will not be compromised by its release, disseminate the information to the public.
Obviously, the government is not about to do this, and until they do, the movement to inform the public about UFOs will not have a very great impact on either public opinion or government policy.
I have reported the story told to me by Leroy D. Cook as accurately as possible. We had many conversations between 1974 and 1978, and the nature of casual conversation and memory being what it is, I may have made some mistakes. At the time that we were speaking about these things, I made no attempt to keep track of the timeline of the events. I was mostly interested in technical data, and what notes I took reflected this. I am fairly certain of the 1954 date of Leroy’s initial contact with the UFO over Tehachapi Pass in California. I am less certain as to the date of his logging accident in Idaho, or of the dates pertaining to the sequence of events that led him into Mexico to work with Cardoza, and to his building and testing the solar motor. It is likely, however, that these events occurred during the 1960s.
I distinctly remember Leroy telling me that by 1970, he was no longer able to work and, that because of this, he had to move in with his mother and daughter. They decided to sell the family house in a more upscale part of California, and purchase land in remote Trinity County, where land was inexpensive. When I met them, they were living in a small cabin that was attached to two small trailers at either end. Part of the reason why Leroy had taken the initiative to make my acquaintance was that he needed someone who was in much better shape than he was to help him with his work, such as cutting firewood and building (eventually) a much larger house for him and his family. But Leroy was too sick to do much other than simple chores, and the house never materialized.
The deal that Leroy and I had was simple. On the material level, he would teach me construction skills and how to survive in the woods, something that few people from Los Angeles are prepared to do. I learned how to shoot a gun, skin out a deer, fall and buck large trees with a chainsaw, fix my own truck, and a whole host of things that I had only read about. Needless to say, without his help, my stay in the Trinity National Forest would have been a short one.
When Leroy discovered that I was interested in his UFO encounter, our deal was amended. He would tell me everything that he knew about the technology of the UFO spacecraft, and I could use it in any way I wanted.
He claimed that one of the scientists that he had contacted regarding his work was M. K. Jessup, who was a professor at UCLA. He said that he had given Jessup information on what he was doing with Cardoza and the solar motor. Jessup was one of the mystery figures of the early UFO movement. He published nothing, but did speak with a number of UFO investigators, including Gray Barker. Jessup turned up dead in his garage in West L. A. in 1959. The police said that they had found his body in the garage, where they also found the garden hose connected up to the tailpipe of his car, which was still running and pumping out carbon monoxide. Later in the 1960s, another scientist who was investigating UFOs, Jim McDonald, also turned up dead froma supposed suicide in the California desert. The story that was told was that he had gone out into the night alone and shot himself with a pistol.
When Cardoza turned up missing in Mexico, and Jessup now dead in his garage in California, Leroy began to fear for his own life and, from that point on, he was careful not to speak to anyone about what he was doing. Unfortunately, his fear also led him to destroy all of the blueprints, notes, and other records of his work.
As I listened to Leroy over the next two years, I took notes and was preparing a story on the solar motor. When he found out, he said that he did not want anything published on it with anything technical. This restriction limited his story to the initial contact with the UFO and its pilot. I wrote a 15-page document on what happened to Leroy during this event and sent it off to a UFO investigator at MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) who, upon reading it, promptly sent it back with a terse note stating words to the effect that there was nothing in the material that interested him.
Leroy and I attended a class on UFOs at a local Community College. The teacher taught business at a local high school, was interested in UFOs, and was a member of MUFON. One evening, Leroy told the class his UFO story, and the teacher suggested that we write it down together and send it to someone he knew in MUFON. I was not able to obtain permission from this person to mention his name, but we sent the story to him, and he replied that he was not interested in it.
If Leroy had allowed me to publish the technical part of his story, we probably could have generated a little interest in it. A few years later, I learned that when I dealt personally with a prominent UFO investigator and author, most of these MUFON researchers had little interest in contactee stories where people spoke with aliens from another planet.
It was apparent that I would have a difficult time getting Leroy’s story accepted by the mainstream UFO investigators. UFO stories were handled as if they were court cases that were to be judged on a preponderance of evidence. No one who told a story was to be believed unless corroborating evidence was presented and examined. Even when there were multiple witnesses, as there were when George Adamski met someone who stepped off a flying saucer in the California desert in 1956, the story that he told was widely regarded as a fabrication.
As far as MUFON, the most ideal UFO sighting was one that had multiple witnesses, all with impeccable credentials. Military and civilian pilots were preferred over others. All of this was understandable if you considered the climate of the times. The U.S. government had officially stated that they were not interested in UFO sightings. A new group of UFO investigators came onto the scene, the debunkers. These people purportedly investigated UFO sightings but, when they did so, they always came up with the same conclusion‒that these sightings were all cases of mistaken identity.
With the government throwing in against the reality of UFOs, with plenty of debunkers with good credentials coming onto the media scene, the mainstream UFO organizations, such as MUFON, were forced to concentrate on those sightings that would have the greatest credibility with the public. To some extent, this is still the policy of the major UFO organizations.
In addition to limiting UFO investigations to either multiple witnesses with maximum credibility (or both), there still seems to be an unwritten credo amongst the mainstream people that it is still not possible, even 50 years after Roswell, to state categorically that UFOs exist. Once you say that you still do not know whether they are real or not, you have prevented yourself from moving into the next level of UFO investigation, which involves the more complex problem of investigating and learning of the nature of the phenomenon.
To the mainstream investigators, the stories of people (the contactees and abductees) have made it more difficult to investigate UFOs. This is the reason why it took so many years for people to accept the stories of the abductees, and why, too, the stories of the contactees will probably never by accepted by the mainstream audience.
The debunking of contactees continues to this day. They are ridiculed as liars and frauds. The recent mass suicide of members of the Heaven’s Gate UFO cult did not make the stories of contactees any more believable. Media investigations of the cult have revealed that it was heavily involved in UFO contact. The mainstream media now had something involving UFOs that it could heap tons of media scorn upon. They could use one of the oldest propaganda methods known, that of guilt by association, to discredit the entire UFO movement. The debunkers would have more ammunition to fire at the UFO movement. Stung by the criticism, some of it valid, but all of it blown out of proportion, the mainstream UFO people came forth and reiterated their old doctrine on contactees. UFO cults, which have always been fraudulent or misguided, could now be dangerous as individual members, weak and self-absorbed, will follow a strong leader to the grave.
After three years, I realized that the chances of getting anyone interested in Leroy’s story were small. I told this to him, and he agreed, and also said that he had reached this conclusion himself years ago when he was working on the solar motor, and that he only continued because he personally wanted to see the project through to some conclusion. He expressed this once to me with words to the effect that, “I was only in it for my own knowledge.”
This may seem to be a rather defensive position to take, but one must remember that the vast majority of UFO investigators do not believe the stories and claims of the contactees. In order spend the time necessary to do justice to something as complex as Leroy’s stories, one must believe that those stories are at least plausible. If you are now a UFO investigator, and most of your peers believe that you are wasting your time, you will soon think this way yourself unless you can put some distance between them and yourself.
As the years passed, I adopted about the same attitude toward the UFO community as Leroy had. This was not a particularly good thing, as there are many fair-minded people in the movement who do not disregard what contactees say. It has taken many years for me to come to the point where I am able to believe that UFO investigations and investigators are okay.
I had been listening to Leroy’s story for about three years now. In order to continue doing this, I had suspended judgment as to whether it was true, or how much of it was true. I was hoping that it was true. Many people had written books or articles describing their encounters with UFOs. A few of these contained the same type of general technical information that Leroy was concentrating on. But no one that I was aware of had gone as far as Leroy and actually tried to reconstruct something as exotic as the propulsion system of a UFO. This put Leroy out on a limb, so to speak, and me out there with him.
I would have to have some type of validation from another source before I would come onboard as a true believer of either Leroy or any of the other contactees. As the old saying goes, “Ask, and you shall receive.”
10.DIRECT CONTACT
In the finest tradition of the contactees, I would contact “them” myself. In July of 1977, I set off for a wilderness area in the Trinity Alps, a mountain range in Trinity County, CA. I took along a wire wound notebook and several pens. If my idea was correct, I would see them. And so I did.
I hiked for a while and then stopped to rest. While resting, I wrote down my ideas about space travel, the laws of physics, what I learned from Leroy, and anything else that came into my mind. One evening after dark, I sat up out of my sleeping bag to look at the night sky. There was no moon, but plenty of stars, the Milky Way, and so on. In only a little while, I saw two bright orange dots come up over the rocky ridge of mountains that made up the horizon. I was barely able to see that they were elliptical disks. They moved in tandem at the same speed, maintaining a constant separation of about 30 degrees of arc in the night sky. They moved slowly and silently across the sky, and soon disappeared over the opposite ridge of mountains.
I had been contacted. Perhaps only a close encounter of the first kind, but contact nonetheless. In the months and years of listening to Leroy, I formulated a theory that the intelligent beings inside the UFOs could be contacted mentally. Later, I learned that this was not an original idea. Most contactees believed that this was behind their contacts, and most were told this by the beings who contacted them.