by Robert Renaud

The morning of February 4, 1964, started out like most others here in Massachusetts. Outside, bitter cold, and a myriad of stars sparkling overhead in the profusion of the winter day.

To the west, the huge figure of Orion dominated the sky, and one could easily see in this constellation the form of the Hunter. Below it, Sirius, the Dog Star stood out singly among those of lesser brilliance. The rest of the winter’s star-figures occupied their places in the celestial panorama–Auriga, Gemini, Taurus and, to the northeast the king of the heavens, Leo.

Inside the house it was just another night. I was listening to Bob Diamond on WKBW in Buffalo and reading through my account of the January 4th contact, looking for the mistakes one doesn’t see immediately while writing.

I had just begun page 30 when the music in the headphones stopped short. I thought nothing of it until a powerful carrier rammed into the set and filled the phones with a soft low hum. At this point, I dropped the pencil, turned down the volume slightly and switched on the small transmitter to my left.

I had barely picked up the mike when a familiar voice came through—that of Orii-Val. He said: “Alen, Bob. Don’t switch on your unit as we will be but a minute. We ask that you be ready to go with us in ten minutes. We have a very special surprise for you this morning You won’t need any heavy apparel as you will be outside but a moment. Orii-Val, out.”

Station WKBW popped back in, and I sat there for a moment wondering if maybe I had been imagining things. The decision on that was an easy one as I am not prone to hallucinations. Quickly, I removed the ear phones and shut down the now-warm transmitter. In a few moments all was ready, and there was nought to do but wait for their coming.

I went outdoors and the time passed quickly. I spent a few moments studying the stars and hardly noticed the arrival of a huge disk. This craft must have been all of 200 feet in diameter, and it was completely dark. It stood out for its very blackness like a great gaping hole in the star fields. As I watched it, a hole appeared near one edge and, seconds later, a small ship flashed out and dropped to Earth.

It landed on the driveway twenty feet away, and when its top dome slipped open, I could see Orii-Val inside, motioning me to hurry. As I was climbing aboard he said: “We must go quickly, there is an auto approaching at a good speed.”

To the south, the bright glow of the car’s lights was moving in about a half-mile away. When I was seated, the top shut without a second to spare as Orii thrust the elevation control forward. We shot upward with a pronounced jerk, just as the car’s headlights flooded the driveway with light.

We were aboard the large ship five seconds later. The little craft slipped into one of the three stalls in a room on the outer rim of the craft. The ceiling curved over our heads in a solid expanse of glowing material. There was a definite arc on the wall before us, rather than its being flat. I assumed that it enclosed a circular room, and I was partially correct in this. We deboarded and went through a door in this wall. Rather than emerging into a large room we came upon a hallway that curved off in both directions. We went down the hall to the left and shortly came to a doorway, labeled “control room”. Going through, we walked the length of a small corridor and then emerged into a fairly large room.

It was circular in shape, about fifty feet in diameter. The ceiling was ten feet high, and of white lumiglow. There were no windows, but several telescreens mounted in the wall served as well, if not better. They showed the outside terrain quite clearly, much brighter than it really was. In fact, I found the cameras were extremely sensitive in weak light. There were six of these screens placed hexagonally around the room, corresponding to six wide-angle cameras outside, which covered such an area that their pick-up areas overlapped.

The main control panel was actually quite small—only about ten feet long. It was operated by a man and a girl, and they were setting a series of buttons.

I turned my gaze to one of the screens in time to note that we were rising rapidly, and I took note of the rest of the room. The walls were of the same flat blue color that I had seen so often in the rooms of the two bases (Massachusetts and Pacific). Here and there were documents and pictures, and directly opposite the door was the glorious painting of Ageless Life. This one seemed to have a unique beauty to it. It was almost alive in its realism. Every feature of the face was defined sharply. The individual hairs on the head could be distinguished. The eyes were very expressive. In them one could see great wisdom and compassion. I found it difficult to break my gaze from this singularly arresting portrait. These are not photographs, but are the painted conceptions of Deity by many excellent artists.

The floor was covered with wall-to-wall carpeting of slate-gray hue and a very fine texture. The pile was extremely dense. It had just enough springiness underfoot to give the impression of walking on the finest of oriental rugs, and the sensation was extremely pleasing.

Between the panels were potted plants of several varieties, including two not unlike our palm trees in miniature. None of them bore blossoms of any sort, but their presence nevertheless added beauty to the room.

In the center of the room there was a column about six feet in diameter. I found that it contained a variety of equipment, as well as a ladder to reach the upper observation deck. We did not go up there at this time. All together there were eight people aboard—six men including myself, and two young ladies. Except for me, they wore the type of uniform I described in an earlier account. The average height of the men was 5’11” and the girls about 5’6”. One of the girls blond “Venus”’ the other a dark Spanish-like brunette, with sparkling coal-black eyes and a flashing smile. She spoke with a noticeable accent, though I cannot place it as being similar to any that I’ve heard.

The men all had brown hair, but their eye and skin color varied. The eyes were blue or black; the skin from light tan to deep tan.

Soon after we began to ascend, three of the men left with one of the young ladies into a room somewhere on the ship. The ship ascended for about five minutes, then stopped. Looking at the screens, I could see that we were some phenomenal distance upward. I was about to ask when the girl said: “Our present altitude in 5,000 miles.” Now there is speed for you—up a thousand miles a minute or 60,000 miles an hour!

Orii spoke: “This craft, as you see, is designed for deep-space travel at velocities up to and even exceeding the speed of light—the maximum being around ten million miles per second. We don’t often push it to the limit, as that takes power; usually about one million miles per second, for interplanetary travel. At present we are merely hovering above Earth, rather than orbiting it. We have come up here for a very specific reason. If you will follow me, we can be about it.”

As we left the room, I mediated on how they flung about numbers like a million miles per second with the same abandon that the owner of a dragster would talk about 100 miles an hour. Here, we have been led to believe the speed of light is the top end of velocity, and that there is no chance of reaching even that. Now, I am told that going over it is no more spectacular than our jets breaking the sound barrier. Our scientists have much to learn, that is for sure. Indeed, our present propulsion systems wouldn’t allow ultra-light velocities. Their systems, however, are as far above ours as the X-15 is above the Wright brothers’ first plane. When we discover for ourselves the control of gravity and magnetism, then we will go farther in one year than we have in the last fifty.

We followed the hallway farther around to another door leading into another small room, about ten feet square. Once inside, I saw a row of lockers on the left wall. Orii went to the end one and opened it. Then he opened the next one and called me over. I was fairly stunned at the contents. Space suits!

Orii took out the two suits and laid them on a table. He quickly explained a few features, then asked me to follow his every motion of putting it on. It took about five minutes with the instructions being given as we went along.

I was now dressed for whatever was to come. The suit itself was of a metallic material which seemed seamless except for the opening to put it on. It shone like polished silver and was extremely comfortable. The flexibility was truly amazing, considering that I was told that no meteor smaller than one-fourth inch could penetrate it. It contained air conditioning, breathing apparatus, communications, and a variety of meters and instruments for temperature, air pressure, humidity, radiation, etc.

The helmet was about half glass and half metal. This glass was most interesting in composition. It could stop meteors up to a half-inch in diameter; it shielded against ultraviolet and infrared radiation; it minimizes radiation of all types. Most interesting of all, its density changes with light intensity. Our scientists have developed a similar material which gets darker as light brightens. This, however, unlike ours, reacts within milli-microseconds. One can look directly at an atomic explosion, then turn his head and see the stars in the sky, if at night. This glass gives an absolutely constant light intensity under all conditions, losing this effect only when the light goes below the minimum change value.

Getting back to the story—we left this room and went around to the main exit. Orii went up to a control panel and pressed a button. The large circular entrance opened in iris fashion, revealing a sort of tunnel, illuminated by an unseen light. We climbed down a ladder about ten feet, then went into the first of two airlock doors. He pressed another button on the wall. The iris slid closed above us and the door before us opened. When we had gone into this chamber, he closed it again, and reached over to switch on my communicator. This done, he told me to turn on my air controls and handed me a small tubular device, explaining that it was jet propulsion unit for travel out there (see figure 28 below).

Then he told me: “I am going to reverse the gravity in here to orient us correctly.” So saying, he flipped a switch and I felt myself suddenly standing on the ceiling, if you could say that a cylinder has a ceiling, for our feet were now against the floor of the control room. He pressed another button and the air in the chamber was suddenly evacuated. The immediate effect was a ballooning of the suit, making movement a trifle less easy. I also noticed a sudden deadly quiet. While I was thinking on this, Orii opened the outer door and we went through to another chamber. I looked up and saw another iris door, opening slowly. A few seconds later, there was nothing but infinity above us.

We climbed “up” the ladder and, at this point, I shall lay claim to being the first Earthman ever to experience the awe of real space. We were now standing on the bottom of the ship—our magnetic boots holding firmly. I shall attempt to describe the indescribable.

The ship’s axis was parallel to Earth’s surface, so that our beautiful globe was off to one side. It seems we were over the morning twilight area since the darkness was about half-way across the globe (see figure 27 below). There was a fuzziness about the scene which must have been due to the deep atmosphere, I could, however, make out the two Americas and the islands along the eastern coast of North America. In the air were a number of cloud areas drifting ever so slowly in their courses. Everything had a definite blue-green tinge.

As I swept my gaze across the lighted surface and came into the night zone I could see glowing patches in many places. These were the big cities. Orii pointed to one spot in particular, barely visible. “That is Pittsfield, your home town.” At that I received a great “charge”; my home town was visible from this far up. Ah, what wonder! This is fame, of a sort. Out in the ocean I noticed a number of tiny specks of light, moving very slowly. They were ships, seen from 5,000 miles up.

When I could wrench my attention from this spectacle, I turned to look at the moon. Now, you may look at it on a very clear night and it seems like a mass of detail. Friends, let me tell you! Its edge was defined so sharply that one could make out the small projections that were mountains on the rim of the sphere. The twilight area was very clearly visible, with a number of mountains and craters making spectacular shadow and light patterns.

The detail was what you would expect to see through a telescope, with craters innumerable, and maria (seas) with their mountainous rims and pockmarked surface as bold as you will. Orii told me: “With a pair of good binoculars, you can see as much from up here as a 6-inch reflecting telescope would show you on Earth’s surface. With that same telescope up here, you could never hope to see all of the detail.” I believe it.

Here is man’s target for tomorrow—the one body in all of space that fires the imagination of both the elite and the layman; that draws men to it like an irresistible magnet. It is the sphere to which has been ascribed all sorts of mysterious abilities. It can cause insanity. It can affect plant growth. It can change men to werewolves. Ah me, the things that are blamed on this splendid white orb!

My attention turned away from the moon into the deepest of space. The stars were in their utter glory, shining with unwinking steadiness, in numbers to defy tallying. There are red ones, blue ones, yellow ones, white ones. There are double stars; there are star clusters. There are bolts of light that are other galaxies, millions of light years distant. All of these so close it seemed you could reach up and pluck them from the sky, one by one, yet really so far away it would take a man a lifetime to reach the nearest without the fantastic drives that propel our brothers to and fro in mere seconds. Orii pointed to his home star (sun), Korena, faintly visible, a definite blue color.

I looked a long time at this point of light. In my mind I could see several worlds about it, teeming with human life. (Korena has 12 planets; only 7 of them are inhabited, total 15 ½ billion.) I could see people living at a leisurely pace, unworried by threats of war and violence; unscathed by the ravages of disease; unaware of the possibility of poverty, of hunger, of anger, of hate. I can picture a beautiful world where all is at peace, where everyone loves all others, where everything is for the good of the people, where men have reached a state of true light and consciousness.

I can picture a world of green grass, trees, flowers, bubbling brooks, blue lakes, vast seas. I can see a splendid blue sky, with fleecy clouds drifting lazily overhead. Occasionally a bird flies by, singing a joyous song. Beneath it a garden where bloom a variety of beautiful flowers. I can see a young girl of about ten years skipping down through this festival of color, stopping occasionally to smell a fragrant blossom, to watch a humming-bird flitting about, to wonder at a butterfly preening itself on a leaf. She has no worries, her family is happy, her friends are happy, her world is happy. They have learned to love and live in the way that men should live. Hers is a world of beauty, and joy, and love. No one wants to blow her and her people to oblivion. No one has time for hate. They are too busy being good, kind, citizens of the universe.

I turned again to face my own world. It, too, is beautiful. It has its flowers, its trees, its birds, its brooks and lakes. It has little girls who skip through gardens, enchanted by the great loveliness of nature. It has one difference; on it is hate; on it is distrust; on it is prejudice; on it is war. It has its poor, its sick, its hungry. It has despair. It has men, women, and children doomed to lives of hopelessness.

On my Earth there is no true love; there is no awareness of the universal truths; people do not live in harmony with nature. On my Earth men fight, men claw; men whose noble destiny is evidenced by outsiders who ride in ships that flash by in the night sky, are not interested in giving of themselves. They only want, at any cost, even to the taking of life. They are greedy; they are envious; they are desperate.

“Who cares about the rest of mankind, as long as I get what I want?” This is our philosophy.

This, then, is our task. We must bring our terrestrial brothers up from the pit of darkness, and into the warmth and light of truth and love. We must make them radiant in their goodness. We must not be satisfied until mankind is at peace with himself and with nature.

Turning again to the stars, mentally I could see innumerable worlds whirling in eternal orbits about those sparkles in the blackness. Then I noticed them–”the fireflies”–the specks that were seen by our astronauts, though first by Adamski, were flitting about us in every direction. I asked about them. Orii replied: “They are of many sorts. Some are phosphorescent dust, glowing in themselves, some are ice crystals, shining by refracted and reflected sunlight. Some are microscopic flakes of stone, and some are just plain energy. Most of it you would call meteoric dust. It comes from many sources, among them comets, the wreckage of the sixth planet (Maldek) and the incalculable millions of tons of loose material floating about in space waiting patiently for a home of its own. It can present a hazard if in great enough quantity. Our ships have shielded force fields to deflect it.”

As he was speaking, a sudden loud “ping” came from the top of my helmet and threw my head slightly forward. Orii said: “That was your first contact with one of those tiny little interstellar missiles, the micrometeors. They may be small, but at speeds in excess of 100,000 miles per hour they pack a load of kinetic energy. One of them, the size of a pea, could go right through the hull of an unshielded ship. The one that hit you was, perhaps the size of a pinhead.” Man! What a monster!

Speaking of meteors—it occurred to me that I should be able to see them in the atmosphere from 5,000 miles up. I was right. As I looked at the night side of Earth there were occasional streaks of light burning their way into universal history in their brief bursts of glory. I noted a moving speck of light going across the globe, apparently well above it. “The Echo balloon satellite”, said Orii. Fascinating!

Finally, I turned cautiously to face the furnace of this system, old Sol. The glass in my helmet darkened as I turned, until I was looking directly at this ball of light. Friends, this is an inspiring sight. In the center a glowing sphere, mottled with occasional freckles that we call sun-spots. Out from it in all directions is its “atmosphere”, the chromosphere and the evasive thing that astronomers would give their eye teeth to see from here—the corona. Usually, it is visible only during solar eclipses. Up here, it is the standard view.

Very occasionally, one could see a prominence pop out of the surface. Each time, I could see more energy released than the entire Earth uses for a day or more. If only this great ball of superpower could be harnessed! Orii had no comment. I looked once again to the stars and turned down my communicator. Everything was quiet. It was an unearthly kind of quiet; it was easy to listen to my heart beat, to hear the blood flowing in the vessels in my head; a quiet unnerving calm.

Under the noises of my own body, I heard the voice of Orii-Val leaking through the communicator, which I turned up quickly. He said to me: “Bob, we must go in again for now. However, the opportunity for you to do this type of space observing is yours for the asking, and if possible, we will oblige. I myself have been out in space many times, and yet each time, I get a renewed thrill, and my understanding deepens with each thrill. I can well imagine your feelings at this time. I recall how I made my first venture into the vast nothingness of deep space. There are times when I think I could spend eternity just contemplating on the universe, its order, and its breath-taking splendor and beauty.

“We had best go in now. Time is growing short and you must be returned home before you are missed.” We went back inside the way we had come out, and I was silent all the way back home. After such an experience, what can you say?

As I stepped out of the tiny craft back on Earth, I looked upward, beyond the air, beyond the clouds. I had been standing up there a few moments ago; now I was back on Earth again, a bit more enlightened. I watched the tiny craft slip into the huge black hole in the sky (the large ship) which shrank and vanished into the far reaches of space.

Excerpt from Flying Saucers Close Up