Highly publicized UFO activity in the mid-sixties afforded Major Donald E. Keyhoe and other NICAP officials (broadcaster Frank Edwards high among them) the opportunity to appear on numerous TV and radio programs all over the country. Keyhoe received, for example, excellent variety show hospitality and exposure on such nationally syndicated TV programs as The Mike Douglas Show and The Merv Griffin Show. Maybe that's why his appearance on The Les Crane Show provided a contrast so dark and extraordinarily embarrassing that viewers flew into a rage, inundating ABC-TV with telegrams and letters of protest. While the following show excerpt continues to demonstrate the host's appeal for the laugh factor, the blog entry I post next time should tie up the paramount reasons for audience outrage in a neat little package.
CRANE:
We’ve got some pictures on the aerial phenomena we’re talking about. It’s up to you, you make up your own mind about the UFOs. NICAP [he again pronounces it kneecap], uh, NICAP supplied us with them. I like kneecap better! That’s a much catchier way of, you know, however, and I think they’ll show up pretty well on your TV set. First, this is a picture taken May 11, 1950, by Paul Trent of McMinnville, Oregon. It was examined and published by Life Magazine, and Life described him as an honest individual and said the negative appeared to be untampered with. Here’s another picture taken by the famous Paul Trent of Oregon.
Okay, August, 1951, one of the most famous American UFO sightings, in Lubbock, Texas. The photo was taken by Carl Hart, Jr., of a V-shaped light formation known as the Lubbock lights. The Air Force said it was a light reflected from a high-flying bird. That’s pretty weird! [Laughter]
Okay. Here’s an official U.S. Coast Guard photo taken by Shell Alpert in the Salem, Massachusetts Coast Guard station in 1952. He watched bright lights in the sky, watched them for a few seconds more, called in another Coast Guardsman and then took this picture. In 1964, the Coast Guard added this note to their caption on the picture, saying they have “no further explanation or information to add concerning this photograph, and no official opinion as to the identity or origin of the lights.”
Now, here’s a surprise. Take a look at this. This photograph was published in the official organ of the Royal Air Force, the RAF Flying Review, which the magazine said “seemed one of the few photographs of UFOs that does appear to be authentic.” The photograph was taken in Rouen, France, in 1954, and it looks identical with the Paul Trent photo we already showed you, taken thousands of miles away, four years earlier. . .
Here are a couple of pictures taken in 1957 over [unintelligible] in Japan. NICAP isn’t very strong on these, right Major?
KEYHOE:
That’s right.
CRANE:
You feel they’re the most dubious of the samples that you brought, but we thought we’d include them anyway to spend the time. Here’s a long-range shot of a Japanese capsule sighting and here’s a close-up of it. That could be anything, that could really be anything.
Okay, back to our country. Here’s a photograph taken on the Pacific Coast near San Pedro, California, in December, 1957, by radio officer T. Fogl aboard the British ship, S.S. Ramsey.
And a series of pictures off Brazil, by the Trindade Islands, as the unidentified flying object was in motion. These pictures were taken by a Marine photographer on a Brazilian ship, participating in the International Geophysical Year. I can hardly see anything there. Oh, I see, up in the corner, okay. . . oh look, there's a whole bunch of them (Keyhoe points out that there is only one). . .oh, I'm looking at the clouds, I thought I spotted four of them. It's contagious.
I think that’s enough, right? Oh, wait. There is one I do want to show you. Can you skip down to slide number 16? Okay, now, this is interesting. An aircraft company that we cannot name took this picture as a promotion picture for this airplane, the B-57. But they never published it!. And the reason why they never published it is because in the upper right hand corner there is something which showed up on the print of this picture which you can’t see in this picture, for which we’ll show you right now. {Enlargement shown] This is a blow-up of the upper right-hand corner of that picture of that B-57 airplane, and this picture was only recently submitted to NICAP, which estimates that it was taken between 1958 and 1960. Okay? That’s enough.
KEYHOE:
I think this has more weight to it than the other photographs which you might show. This is an official Air Force Intelligence sketch based on 3,000 reports, which described these things as disc-shaped objects, apparently metallic, which can maneuver at speeds up to thousands of miles an hour. Now, that was circulated secretly to all Air Force Intelligence sources at the very same time the Air Force stated they had no idea what these things looked like. This not only proves the secrecy, but also that they have a very good idea what these things are.
CRANE:
Well, all I can tell you, all I can reiterate again is that for the four years that I was in the Air Force, and a pilot, and I had secret clearance and all the rest of it and . . .
KEYHOE:
Well, what you don’t realize, probably, this document, “The UFO Evidence,” is based on an eight-year investigation. The board of governors of NICAP include admirals, generals, colonels, scientists, technicians, pilots - over 200 experts in this field. Many of them are top scientists. We’ve investigated over 5,000 - at least a thousand of these represent airline pilots of every major airline, and all the air services in the United States, tower operators, missile trackers. All of these people saw something, and sometimes the radar trackings compared them to visual.
BRYAN:
Professional astronomers, too, as you inquired.
KEYHOE:
That’s right.
CRANE:
Professional astronomers?
KEYHOE:
Professional astronomers.
CRANE:
That’s very interesting, and I’ll tell you why that’s interesting in a minute from right now.
[Commercial]
Continued in the next blog entry. “The Les Crane Show,” produced for ABC-TV, prerecorded program aired January 27, 1965.
