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investigation, he had concluded that the UFO sightings themselves were actually irrelevant and were merely part of the larger paraphysical phenomenon. Vanannth AenAld tha aateenen AlAs eebhans aiebelne nn Benn 940 1047 Kenneth Arnold, the private pilot whose sighting on June 24, 1947, set off the first modern flying saucer scare, quietly investigated UFOs in depth for years, and then in 1955 he, too, issued public statements expressing his belief that the objects were actually some form of living energy and were not necessarily marvelous spaceships. In 1957, Ray Palmer started a new magazine called Flying Saucers. In the early issues he titillated his readers by hinting that he knew the secret. Then, in 1958, he published his conclusion that UFOs were not from some other planet, offering as an alternative a complex theory about secret civilizations with paraphysical or psychic ties to the human race. (As early as 1949, he had editorialized that saucers were extra-dimen- sional not extra-terrestrial.) He stubbornly stuck to his guns and published a number of small magazines devoted largely to the psychical aspects of the phenomenon. After a twelve-year struggle, his Flying Saucers had managed to build up a meager readership of only 4,000 paid subscribers and 6,000 newsstand sales despite nationwide distribution. It should be noted that Palmer completely dominated the tiny American UFO hobby for the first twenty years, publishing features designed to lure teenagers into the fold and keep the subject alive during the long, dull periods. He was a prolific writer and undoubtedly wrote more about the subject than anyone else. However, soon after his death in 1977 he was purged from the UFO history by the fanatical ‘‘nuts and bolts’? ET believers. Dr. Leon Davidson, a physicist who worked on the atomic bomb project, became interested in UFOs in the early 1950s. Because of his status, the Air Force permitted him to view official UFO photos and movies. Eventually he turned to investigating the bewildering contactee cases, and his trained mind soon detected a hoax. Like other objective researchers, he conceded that the controversial contactees were telling the truth as they knew it. He recognized that these people were being tricked through some hypnotic process, but he was unable to accept any para- physical explanation. Instead, he finally evolved a theory pointing the finger of guilt at the CIA. He speculated that the CIA was deliberately creating these events as a diversionary tactic in the Cold War. A very small proportion of the data did seem to fit this conclusion, but ultimately it proved to be insupportable. The organization launched by the CIA, NICAP, went broke in 1957 becuse ‘Townsend Brown blew the treasury on experiments in hypotheti- 38 / Operation Trojan Horse