Don’t Panic!

Despite conflicting reports, the Air Force believed in the flying saucers. The scares began in 1947 and as a responsible agency the Air Force had to start investigations. At various times they'd cautiously release some information; then there would be some hysteria and they'd hurriedly debunk the whole business as "mass hallucinations" and "crackpot theories" until the public had regained its balance, when they'd start letting out bits of truth once more. The nature and implications of the saucer sightings made this on-again-off-again policy necessary in dealing with such an unstable thing as a war-nervous, tensed-up population. If the truth about the saucers had been known, the entire truth, then the Air Force could have published it and the country would have accepted it in stride; but the mystery that clouded the strange ships was susceptible of too many interpretations.

In December of 1952 a blue-lighted saucer was sighted, without a shadow of a doubt, over Laredo, Texas. In January of '53 a whole V-formation of blue objects appeared over Santa Ana, California. These were military sightings and beyond question. There were many before and even more afterward. Some of them mentioned blue lights and some other colors, and the daylight viewings talked of silver metallic luster.

The first low-flying saucer to be reported authoritatively was that which flew over the Capitol in Washington at 11:18 a.m. on Saturday, Christmas Day, 1954. It was caught by the cameras that were making a telecast at that time of the festivities in Washington, and beamed without explanation all over the country. A few minutes later the screens of America's viewers went blank and then the President appeared to urge calmness and sanity. There was no question of mass hallucination and crackpot theories any longer. The saucer was perhaps three hundred feet broad; it was of the usual shape reported in previous sightings, round with a central cabin, and it was green in color. It had flown comparatively slowly, at an estimated 125 m.p.h. It had disappeared over the Potomac.

At 2:24 p.m. the President was on tv again. There was some commotion at the door of the room from which he was broadcasting. He turned his head and nearly one hundred million people who were jammed before television sets across the nation saw his jaw drop and his eyes bulge slightly with irrepressible awe. In about nine seconds a very curious group walked into camera range. There were half a dozen secret service men with drawn guns, and in their midst, the target of those watchful weapons, was the first of the green horde.

He was—the measurements were determined later—six feet seven and one-half inches tall. He was dressed in a green shirt and trousers, caught around the waist by a heavy belt on which were stitched a number of cabalistic designs; on the left breast were more of the same, a circle and three slim triangles. In a holster slung at the right side of his belt was a large revolver or pistol. It was what had been known in the old West as a half-breed holster, enabling the wearer to swing up the muzzle and fire the gun without jerking it free of the leather. The alien had his hands folded carefully across his chest. Had he made a single motion toward the gun, he would have been blown in two.

In proportions and frame he was very like a human being. His chest was deep and his legs and arms well muscled. His skin was a delicate, olive-green in hue, as those viewers with color tv could see. His face was normal, perhaps a bit stern in expression, but with the ordinary features of a man, except that he had only one eye. It was located immediately above the bridge of his nose; it was about four times the area of a human eye and almost round in shape, and its small pupil roamed swiftly to and fro as the alien walked slowly toward the President. The pupil of the eye was like a tiny animal in a cage, dashing from side to side, up and down, uncanny, incredible, and horrifying.

The cameras did not show his feet. These were somewhat like those of an ostrich, each having two enormous toes, naked, horny, and padded with thick layers of green fatty matter on the soles.

The tint of his skin could have been accepted as a mutation of the strictly human animal. The single eye, even, might have suggested a humanoid sport or far-future development. But the feet were utterly inhuman and even the most callous or most unimaginative among the citizens who saw him personally that first day agreed that the feet were terrifying.

The cameras were turned off after about twenty seconds. An announcer came on and spluttered some drivel about keeping cool and not losing our heads, spoiling the effect of these admonitions at once by a piercing, hysterical giggle.

Before a quarter of an hour had elapsed, there were minor riots and demonstrations throughout the continent. The worst of these were sparked by fanatic groups claiming that the end of the world had come. Others, scarcely less violent, went screaming that the Martians were invading us, that the White House had been captured "right on the television" and much more of such idiocies. In many places the militia were called out to suppress waves of looting and street fighting.

The Air Force, which had not been taken entirely unaware, since they had privately come to the conclusion some time before that the flying saucers were extraterrestrial, now flung a canopy of fighter planes, both jet and motor-driven, over Washington, and, somewhat later, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Birmingham and New York. Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities of strategic importance were likewise protected within a period of two hours.

The rioting was subdued by evening. Army trucks equipped with public address systems patrolled everywhere, repeating the warnings to keep calm and do nothing until official word was broadcast of our intentions toward the aliens and vice versa. Meanwhile the first of the green horde was given a comfortable room in the Pentagon, where he was kept under an unobtrusive but thorough twenty-four-hour-a-day guard, and where means of communication with him were speedily sought for.

In a matter of a day and a half, or, to be precise, at two minutes to midnight on Sunday the 26th of December, he articulated his first English word. It was "Yes." Shortly he proved that he had absorbed much more than this word, for he began making attempts at complete sentences around 2:00 a.m. on the 27th. He had been under the constant supervision and teaching of a corps of scientists, language experts, and assorted brain-workers; he had shown no desire for sleep during the thirty-six hours he had been on the ground, and had listened to and worked with the teachers all that time. He showed now a good rudimentary grasp of English. It was given as the official opinion that he had shown in this the intelligence of a human genius, although not of the very highest order, rating perhaps an I.Q. of 195.

In the eight-hour period following this he spoke with the President and assured him, partly in words and partly in signs, that the folk of the green saucers were friendly explorers from a distant galaxy. His voice was throaty and rather unpleasant, with a tendency to crack in the upper registers.

He expressed a desire to return to his saucer for some purpose which he could not make plain with his basic English. This was at 10:17 a.m. on the 27th. It was considered politic to allow him to enter the saucer alone. He did so, by a method which was unfortunately not communicated to the public later. Shortly the craft rose from the earth and shot rapidly out of sight in the direction of Mount Vernon. There was no jet exhaust detected in its take-off; it simply rose like an iron filing to a magnet, soundless and abrupt. For three days thereafter there were no reported sightings of saucers.

It was officially decided in this period that the green man with the single eye and bird's feet was not intent on mischief; he had been given an idea of how far we had progressed technically, in many fields, but the information was only what he and his kind could have discovered for themselves in the years'-long surveillance of the world which they must have been making. No secrets had been imparted to him and he had expressed nothing but cordiality and good will, though he had managed to tell the interrogators only a little about himself and his race and home planet, which when boiled down and analyzed came to this: his home was far away (of course it would be) and he was friendly.

After the three-day lapse, saucers were detected on radar screens all over the civilized world: rather too high for the usual reconnaissance, they came and passed in greater numbers than ever before. No planes reported them, their altitude being too great. This long-distance traffic worried the governments of every nation. It was capable of so many explanations that deduction was futile. The protective canopies of fighter planes remained over key cities in the United States and Canada, and to some extent over the capitals and industrial centers of the world.

Eight days after the tremendous influx of saucers, Russia issued her considered opinion. The green one-eyed man was a capitalistic hoax. No such creature existed. The radar blips were "a" natural phenomenon, "b" a secret weapon of the Soviet, "c" a secret weapon of America and or Britain, "d" a capitalistic hoax. Somehow the masters of propaganda made it appear that all four of these silly charges were true, notwithstanding their mutual cancellation.

Two days thereafter the green horde launched its attack, at 11:34 a.m. on Sunday, the 9th of January, 1955.