Margaret Mead, the well-known anthropologist once wrote “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world...” Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has! But the fact is this can work both ways. If a small group of committed individuals decide to cover something up, if they have the support of the government behind them, anything is possible. The UFO phenomenon is a good example of this.
On one side, we have government agents trying to cover up the phenomenon and on the other, we have a small group of committed men, who have been trying to expose the truth about UFOs since the 1940s. One such individual is the late crusading journalist and author John G Fuller, who refused to buy the
government lies about UFOs, and instead reported the incidents as seen by ordinary people. During the mid-1960s, he authored a number of UFO books and influential articles for the mainstream national press, most notably Look and Saturday Review.
In 1966, he published his widely read book, Incident at Exeter, which focused the public’s attention on a topic the American government consistently had tried to ridicule and dismiss. The UFO incident at Exeter is a classic close encounter of the first kind that occurred in 1966 near Exeter in New Hampshire.
Although many UFO sightings were reported from the area during that period one incident that involved a young man Norman Muscarello and two decorated police officers became very well known.
On September 3, around 2 am Muscarello was returning to his parent’s house in Exeter after visiting his girlfriend. He had recently finished high school and had enlisted in the Navy. He saw five flashing red lights from the nearby woods which illuminated the whole area. As the lights approached him, Muscarello became terrified and ran from the place, hitchhiking straight to the Exeter police station where he told his story to officer Reginald Toland who knew Muscarello and had observed his fear and agitation.
He immediately radioed police officer Eugene Bertrand who earlier that evening had met a woman in the highway who told him that her car was followed by an UFO with flashing red lights for 12 miles, before hovering over her car and flying away.
Now Bertrand accompanied Muscarello to the woods where they saw the UFO, which was described by Bertrand as huge, dark object as big as a barn with red flashing lights. The presence of the UFO agitated the horses which started kicking and made frightened noises while the dogs in the area started howling. Both of them observed the UFO hovering just 100 feet away at an altitude of 100 feet giving them clear visual of the craft.
When the incident was reported to the nearby Air Force base, they were told not to report to the press but by then the news had already reached the press. As usual the Air Force came up with a ridiculous
explanation that they had seen nothing more than stars and planets twinkling owing to temperature inversion the same explanation the Air Force had given during the UFO wave of 1952 which was rejected by both scientists and military pilots.
Fuller visited the area and thoroughly investigated this incident interviewing many witnesses before exposing the truth in his book which became a best seller. The Skeptical Inquirer, which acts as a disinformation agent for the American intelligence agencies, came up with an explanation for this incident in 2011 after Mascarello had died in 2003, which as usual was given prominence in Wikipedia.
This again proves the extent to which the American government agencies would go to deny the truth about UFOs.
(The writer is the Director of INSETS: Indian Society for Extraterrestrial Studies and also the author of ‘Accidental Apocalypse’)