By James H. Nichols

I could fully appreciate the lonely sentiment of a galactic farm-boy from ‘long, long ago and far, far away’. I was born a post-war baby-boomer to the flatlands of north-western Ohio. Raised to provincial, middle-class, small town sensibilities. Our humble village was a convergence of state roads and rail lines—an is land of humanity in a sea of cornfields, wheat fields and soybeans. Life there was bland, work-a-day tedium. The most excitement my rural kid-hood had to offer was watching the weeds grow. You can guess just how electrifying the notion of ‘flying saucers’ visiting from outer space was to the festering pre-adolescent imagination of an Ohio hayseed like myself! Of course, I never actually saw one, but just the same they were a big deal back in the ‘Fifties’, and somehow I knew they were real!

I was spellbound In those days by thrilling tales coming from California of a man named George Adamski, who claimed to be hobnobbing with men from Venus who tooled around the solar system in little bell-shaped saucers. Television held a grip on my fevered fancies as well with dazzling science fiction adventures like Space Patrol, Tom Corbett: Space Cadet and Captain Midnight. At the cinema too, there was Forbidden Planet, This Island Earth and War of the Worlds—all rich sustenance for a hungry young imagination languishing in a cultural ‘Death Valley’. At school I gleaned the Frank Edwards tabloid-pulp, paperbacks from my Weekly Reader book-club selections. Edwards was the ‘Art Bell’ of his day who collected bizarre tales of the paranormal and UFOs in books like, Stranger than Science, Strangest of All and UFOs: Serious Business. There was a palpable, imminent thrill that the secrets behind the UFO mystery would, at any moment, be revealed. I thrived on such stuff in junior high. The idea of beings from other galaxies dropping-in to have a look at the natives on planet earth seemed no more outlandish to me than an expedition of anthropologists dropping-in on tribes of pigmies in darkest Africa. Growing up with the science fiction notion that we shared the universe with other intelligent forms of life seemed a fancy as comfortable to me as my stuffed teddy bear.

Jim Nichols (left) with alien.

So imagine this kid’s thrill when early in the sixties, President John F. Kennedy announced the riveting mandate that within the decade the United States would launch men to the moon! Wow! In my lifetime, a centuries-old dream of the human race—to actually set foot on another world—would be realized! What an incredible time to be alive! Science fiction become living, breathing reality! This was mind-boggling! We can do anything!! Who knew, before long I could be tooling around the solar system in a saucer of my own! For ‘one brief shining moment’ we rode the wave of exultant, optimistic euphoria! Mankind’s first step toward setting sail into the vast, uncharted sea of space. A new generation of ‘Magellans’ seeking new worlds. At last, humanity would find a collective endeavor more meaningful, uplifting and rewarding than…war! Possibly we would join those other mysterious space-faring beings who dared to voyage the unknown…and perhaps we might even unravel the riddle of our own existence. Ah, the boundless, unfettered idealism of youth…!

More than thirty years now since the Apollo astronauts left the first human footprints in the lunar dust, it would seem, in truth, the loftiest achievement of Western Civilization was in fact… Wal-Mart!! Space travel was a ‘bust’! Striding forth into the new Millennium we discover the human species much prefers web-surfing, DVD’s and cell-phones! These days conquest of space is good for a few color pages in National Geographic or an occasional PBS documentary, but for the rest of the world’s millisecond, sound-bite attention span the thrill was short lived. Maybe it’s just as well we’re kept confined to this little speck of cosmic dust…

Well, after more than half a century of kicking around ‘third rock from the sun’, I guess I’ve grown a shade more cynical about the two-legged inhabitants that infest and dominate this world… What has become of us?

The optimism died. John Kennedy never lived to see the culmination of his stirring mandate to land men on the moon. He was murdered in cold blood on the streets of Dallas, Texas. In the ensuing years much of America’s gross national product, which could have gone to space exploration, was wasted in the meaningless, brutal carnage of the Vietnam war. And yes, NASA did successfully achieve a manned lunar landing by 1969, but by the time Apollo 13 was launched, the American public had become totally bored and blaise to the expensive novelty of space exploration. Is the rest of the universe ready for us anyway? Would any self-respecting, extra-terrestrial race abide these wanton, barbaric, earth hooligans trashing their neighborhood?

‘Flying Saucers’, the faded ‘fifties’ fad that seemed so full of promise, just got lost in the shuffle. The government launched a dour ridicule campaign to debunk the whole outlandish issue. Air Force ‘Project Bluebook’ the Robertson panel and the Condon Committee all officially concluded UFOs were either ‘temperature inversions’, ‘swamp-gas’ or the planet Venus… misidentified natural phenomenon or fevered imaginings of over-zealous ‘kooks’. Ultimately more pressing national issues dominated public attention, Vietnam, the Cold-war, civil-rights unrest and the space race. But, of course, UFOs never quite went away. Over the decades that followed the enigma simply compounded and not just benign sightings. More and more stories were surfacing of alien ‘abductions’ as well as cattle mutilations and crop circles—none of which could be satisfactorily accounted for or easily dismissed as ‘temperature inversions’! The mystery was becoming more complex and definitive answers only seemed further out of reach. The thrill of imminent solution had, by accident or design, become dulled to apathy in a morass of endless, frustrating confusion.

In 1968—just one year before the first actual lunar landing—filmmaker Stanley Kubrick joined talents with writer Arthur C. Clarke to produce the science fiction epic of the decade, 2001: A Space Odyssey. An inspired vision of space travel which would set the Hollywood standard for all cinematic space adventures to come. Originally released in sweeping, wide-screen Cinerama, Kubrick sought to capture the dynamic visual experience and awesome grace of space flight. But, his movie also revealed just how politically sensitive the issue of disclosure of an extra-terrestrial reality was viewed by the government. As it turned out, this was not just ‘Hollywood’ fiction! The movie scenario deals with the discovery of an alien ‘artifact’—an imposing black monolith—on the moon’s surface, and the social dilemma that such a finding presented to the space agency. An arbitrary decision was made. The public at-large was determined unfit, as yet, to face the reality of life off the earth, hence truth of the monolith was covered-up. 2001 was lending keen insight into the real attitudes and policies our national leaders harbored toward the issue of extra-terrestrial disclosure.

Now, as a kid, all through school I’d been raised to believe that mankind, over countless eons, had wriggled-up out of the fetid, primal ooze to become evolution’s unparalleled pinnacle of living intellect. Wasn’t it obvious? And at the very apex of human intelligence was All-American, technological ingenuity and know-how! The mighty Apollo rockets, with engines spewing fire and thunder, hurtling intrepid pilots into space seemed undeniable proof that indeed human ingenuity was unsurpassed. Well, upon closer inspection I was to learn the human race was not as altogether enlightened as I’d been led to believe. In 1960, just as the fledgling National Aeronautics and Space Administration—NASA—was poised to initiate manned rocket launches, a government study suggested that despite our technological advances, the rank-and-file of the public at-large was not ready to face the potential discovery of extra-terrestrial life—an inherent risk of space exploration. A panel of scientists and sociologists at the Brookings Institution filed a report, Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs, which concluded the human race was, perhaps, still too medieval and reactionary to deal with space ‘aliens’! Exposure to an off-world culture relatively more advanced than ours could possibly precipitate the "disintegration" of our social structures. Most vulnerable to the negative impact of an ‘alien’ reality were fundamentalist religions and the science community—both steeped in their own rigid orthodoxy. The study noted how throughout human history there are instances where primitive cultures collapsed when confronted by cultures relatively more advanced. This posed a paradox for NASA—though we possessed the technology to set foot on other worlds, did we possess the emotional capacity to cope with any ‘alien’ kin we might find there? The Brookings Institution study further suggested "withholding" public disclosure of extra-terrestrial discoveries might serve as a useful option. Perhaps Kubrick’s paranoid computer HAL in 2001 was a chilling warning to us all—emotionally erratic human is becoming obsolete! Our machines are ready to face the unknown…but we’re not!

Based on the mind-set of the Brookings Institution report, it would seem "withholding" disclosure has been the ‘official’ policy in play with regard to the UFO issue all along! Years of denial, confusion and obfuscation suddenly make perfect sense!

Former Special Assistant to the Executive Director of the CIA, Victor Marchetti, outlined the official bureaucratic posture toward ETs in Above Top Secret, an investigative report by Timothy Good…

Thinking back to my kid-hood thrill of anticipation that the secrets of ‘flying saucers’ would be revealed at any moment, I scarcely grasped it was a notion doomed from the start. Very likely those ‘secrets’ were, and still are, jealously guarded by a cabal of privileged elite, cloistered in the highest echelons of the inter-connected labyrinth of government, defense and corporate agencies. An elite that quite possibly has on-going interaction with one or more extra-terrestrial groups—but then we’ll never really know!

When all is said and done, does earth-human really want to know? Once my youthful idealism, a nostalgic remnant of the ‘Fiftes’, quite naturally assumed everyone would want to know all about the staggering reality of beings from outer space. But, now I’m not so sure. I think my fellow creatures are far more content with their Wal-marts, their Super-bowls, and their Disneylands. The only ET worth consideration is the cuddly one invented by Steven Spielberg. The daily grind of grubbing for paychecks and creature comforts has numbed our sense of wonder. The ‘flying saucer’ fad has dwindled to a fifty year legacy of only circumstantial evidence, crammed with endless anecdotal, eyewitness accounts—which sadly amounts to no proof at all. There’s still no rock-hard, indisputable evidence, no smoking-gun—only a murky quagmire of conjecture, controversy and confusion. Ergo: UFOs do not exist!

So, after these many years, I’ve come to the sobering, weary conclusion my exuberant youthful anticipation to learn the ‘truth’ about UFOs will likely never be realized—but at least--I finally know…why!