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THE VARO EDITION At ONR the book caught the interest of Major Darrell Ritter, who brought it to the attention of Captain Sidney Sherby and Commander 181 DEATH OF AN ASTRONOMER I believe it is important to take a new look at the Allende mystery of the late Fifties because it involves an eerie parallel with the Majestic 12 hoax, with the beliefs of Dr. Bennewitz and with the frightening delusions about Short Grays and other entities propagated today by men like John Lear, Bill Cooper, Bill English, and their followers. I have never published what I knew of the Allende case; my own correspondence with the man who exerted such a destructive influence on Jessup has remained buried in my files for the last twenty years. It was when I decided to try and understand who had manufactured the MJ-12 business that I became aware that this fabrication was only the latest in a series of devastating hoaxes that had claimed the sanity or even the lives of other well-intentioned explorers of the phenomenon. Born in 1900 on an Indiana farm, Morris Jessup studied astronomy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he served as Instructor in Astronomy and later as a member of the university's 1926 expedition to Mexico. It was in the mid-Fifties that he became seriously interested in flying saucers, publishing his book The Case for the UFO in 1955. Here was a scientist with a good background in astronomy and ar- cheology who was starting independent research about the phenome- non. Was he too unbalanced to pursue his investigations along a rational line? Or did someone have an interest in leading him astray? In any event, a copy of The Case for the UFO was sent anonymously to the Chief of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in Washington in late July 1955. Posted in Seminole, Texas, the paperback book was heavily annotated by three different writers, or more likely, a single writer using three different color pens. The annotations implied that the writers knew everything about UFOs, including where they came from and the secret of their propulsion!