Albert Einstein replied to Albert Bender in a single sentence. “Having no experience and only superficial knowledge in the field,” the professor wrote, “I regret not to be able to comply with your requests.” Bender had written from Bridgeport to ask the most famous living physicist for his opinion on flying saucers. Einstein did not dismiss the IFSB or its question. He simply said he did not know. The January 1953 issue of Space Review reported this exchange under the headline “OUR PRESIDENT HEARS FROM PROF. EINSTEIN,” and moved on to the news.
There was a good deal of it. The IFSB’s second issue documents an organisation growing faster than its post office box could contain. Captain Edgar L. Plunkett, retired from the British 8th Army, had been appointed the Bureau’s first foreign representative. Plunkett was born in Bristol on Boxing Day 1903, had worked as a ship’s radio operator from 1922 to 1936, sailed into Norfolk and Newport News and Tampa and Baltimore, been rescued from the Dunkirk beaches by the French destroyer L’Incomprise on 1 June 1940, served three Western Desert campaigns, and received his commission in Palestine after the fall of Tunis. Now he was back in Bristol, working as a clerk, holding weekly meetings at his home at 71 Chedworth Road, Horfield, and planning lectures with an epidiascope for the local Toc-H club.
His letter to the membership fills page nine. He quotes Captain Eddie Rickenbacker (“Too many good men have seen Flying Saucers for us to dismiss them lightly as hallucinations”), theorises about electromagnetic lines of force between celestial bodies, and signs off “Yours fraternally.” People were contacting him: officers in the Armed Forces, members of the British Inter-Planetary Society, Aero-Dynamists, newspaper reporters. The BBC had mentioned the IFSB on one of its programmes, a detail reported in the next issue. The Bureau that had started as a Bridgeport hobby was becoming, however modestly, international.
At the same time, the Civilian Saucer Investigation of New Zealand wrote in. Established on 13 October 1952, the CSI was independent of government and military, run by a committee headed by H. H. Fulton (a sergeant in the R.N.Z.A.F.) and R. J. Lavaris (a member of the Territorial Air Force). They sent the IFSB a large map of New Zealand marking every reported sighting location. Fulton and Lavaris were made IFSB International Council members. In Puerto Rico, Luis Luhring of Punta Santiago accepted the position of island representative.
The issue’s sighting reports had gone global. RAF pilots over Topcliffe, Yorkshire, during Operation Mainbrace on 20 September 1952, tracked a silver circular object at 15,000 feet that swung like a pendulum and revolved on its own axis. Twenty townspeople in Gaillac, in the south of France, watched white circular objects in formation around something that looked like a giant flying cigar on 29 October; as the objects passed overhead they dropped threads of a bright white substance that “looked like glass wool and melted away almost as soon as it was touched.” In Oloron, twelve days earlier, a schoolmaster and about a dozen others had watched saucers surrounding a similar cigar-shaped object at 6,000 feet. U.S. troops on the western front in Korea reported spark-throwing “cartwheels” eighteen inches in diameter, moving in fifteen-foot circles. The Norwegian government said something resembling a saucer had landed on Norwegian soil.
Closer to home, the most substantial report in the issue came from Franklin, Indiana. On the morning of 28 July 1952, three objects appeared in the southeast sky and were watched for four hours and fifteen minutes by a group that included Capt. Lee Sloan, Patrolman Jack W. Moore, and Patrolman Kenneth Rund of the Franklin Police Department, along with civilian authorities and members of the United States Army. The police report describes three objects (one larger, casting a white yellowish light; two smaller, one orange, one reddish) executing barrel rolls, loops, and spins at estimated speeds between 1,500 and 10,000 miles per hour. The two smaller objects “made turns of 90 degrees and 45 degrees without losing any degree of speed, as well as dancing up and down as if someone was playing with a giant ‘yo-yo.’” At 5:11 a.m. the smaller objects merged into the larger one and the formation moved west and out of sight. Nine separate agencies verified the observation, from Edinburgh Police Department to Camp Atterbury to the Connersville State Police Post.
Franklin had become the IFSB’s model city chapter. Through the efforts of Louis Frahm, a local businessman, the town had assembled thirty members: policemen, a civilian defence director, librarians, mechanics, commercial pilots, bus drivers, students. They planned to form their own group with a chairman, secretary, and treasurer, and were pooling resources for a Graflex camera, a telescope, and eventually a radar set. No other American city had committed to the IFSB at this level.
On page eleven, George D. Fawcett, the IFSB’s International Council member from Mount Airy, North Carolina, published excerpts from a summary of his five-year investigation. He had been researching the phenomenon since the summer of 1947, interviewing astronomers, scientists, pilots, and guided missile experts. His first personal sighting was the orange disk-like globe over the Lynchburg College administration building on 6 July 1951, the same event he had reported as Sighting No. 1 in the inaugural issue. He had written a six-page college pamphlet, “The Flying Saucer Phenomena,” and lectured to groups in Lynchburg. At twenty-three or twenty-four years old, he was summarising his research as though retiring from it. He would continue investigating for another sixty years.
And on page eight, in a directory of new state representatives, between Ohio and Oregon, a one-line entry: “WEST VIRGINIA , Gray Barker, Box 981, Clarksburg.” No article, no profile, no editorial comment. Within two months, Barker would be appointed Chief Investigator of the IFSB’s newly formed Department of Investigation. Within three years he would publish They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, the book that introduced the Men in Black to the wider world. In January 1953, he was a directory listing from Clarksburg.
