Empire unusual suggested

168 PASSPORT TO MAGONIA
by Tiffany Thayer. An American researcher, Orvil Hartle, has published
several accounts of early twentieth-century landings in his privately
printed book, A Carbon Experiment. Similar cases have been
noted during the 1947-1952 period: Captain Ruppelt, who was in
charge of the U.S. Air Force's investigations in 1952, considered himself
to be plagued by reports of landings, as he writes in his The Report
on UFO's, and his team conscientiously eliminated them. But it is
only when dedicated civilian researchers such as Leonard Stringfield
(author of Inside Saucer Post) and Coral Lorenzen of APRO started
independent investigations of the matter that proper light was cast on
the American sightings. Another American researcher, George D. Fawcett,
regularly publishes sighting summaries in Ray Palmer's magazine,
Flying Saucers.
Between 1963 and 1967, I have reexamined the totality of the general
files of the Aerospace Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) and
have extracted from them reports that had fallen into oblivion. In some
cases, I was able to initiate new investigations into some of the most
remarkable incidents, published here for the first time with this reference:
(Atic). The official procedure demanded that we delete the
names of the witnesses from such reports. In one case we had to delete
the name of the town itself.
Although we recognize as futile an attempt at the exhaustive compilation
of report: from all countries in the last one hundred years, we
did try to achieve the complete tabulation of French and Italian cases
for that period, paying very special attention to the year 1954. The
landings of 1954 have long appeared as the natural nucleus of any study
of this problem, for several reasons. First, most of the sightings were
made over rural areas of Western Europe, where a network of hamlets
and small towns exists that has no counterpart in more recently developed
regions of the world. A large number of detailed reports was
thus generated when a major wave swept from Belgium and northern
France to Sicily and northern Africa in the last four months of 1954.
These reports were often made by independent witnesses in neighboring
towns. The observers were well known locally, so that reliability
could be easily ascertained. The stories were told with considerable
naivete, because the reporters were country people who had never
heard of flying saucers. Valuable details, firsthand documents, and
personal interviews were promptly centralized by able researchers, such
as Charles Garreau, a professional newspaperman with La Bourgogne
Republicaine, a daily newspaper sold in the east of France.
In a pilot study of the 1954 observations done for the Flying Saucer
APPENDIX 169
Review special issue in 1966, we chose to limit our analysis to two
hundred sightings. About forty more cases will be found here for that
single year, and we feel this is by far the best-documented section of
the catalogue. Not only have all cases been reexamined for possible
errors, but the dates, times, exact places, number and names of witnesses
have been ascertained with a new degree of precision. I have
benefited here from the assistance of several researchers in France and
Italy, who must remain anonymous but to whom I here express my
gratitude.
The basic references for that period have been extracted from the
files of Aime Michel, who had himself worked from collections of
newspapers and files of letters from readers of the Paris press, made
available by the news media. We also used the collection gathered
before 1958 by such pioneers as; Raymond Veillith, the publisher of
Lumieres dans la Nuit, Charles Garreau, and Roger Vervisch. The
early compilation of similar data by the team of Ouranos under the
direction of Marc Thirouin was also most useful. The book by Carrouges,
Les Apparitions de Martiens, provided additional details, as
did the two books by Harold T. Wilkins.
For the post-1954 sightings the scene is entirely different. The Flying
Saucer Review was founded in 1955 and published articles by private
researchers such as B. Lc Poer Trench and Gordon W. Creighton, who
gathered and translated reports from the entire world, many of which
were later included in the book World Round-Up. Many South American
sightings reached the APRO group through Olavo Fontes. Mrs.
Coral Lorenzen has published these documents in her books The Great
Flying Saucer Hoax (1962) and Flying Saucer Occupants (1966) while
recent developments will be found in the third Lorenzen book, UFOs
over the Americas (1968). In Australia, Andrew Tomas, an early pioneer
of the field, gathered well-organized collections with the outstanding
team of the Australian Flying Saucer Review. In South America,
groups such as CODOVNI and SBEDV, working respectively in
Argentina and Brazil, publish regular information bulletins that cannot
be neglected. Similar societies are active in Belgium, Chile, Denmark,
Norway, Japan, New Zealand, and Germany. They have all contributed
sightings to our list, either directly or indirectly.
These sources provide continuity in the study for the entire period
until the recent dramatic rise in the number of reports, i.e., until the
end of 1965. Up to that date, we believe the catalogue contains a clear
majority of all reports in print, in national papers or in official files,
and the near totality of the observations of occupants that have con-