Aviation

"Pilots take no special joy in walking: pilots like flying. Pilots generally take pride in a good landing, not in getting out of the vehicle."

"The air is the only place free from prejudices. I knew we had no aviators, neither men nor women, and I knew the Race needed to be represented along this most important line, so I thought it my duty to risk my life to learn aviation and to encourage flying among men and women of our Race who are so far behind the White race in this modern study."

"Ours is the commencement of a flying age, and I am happy to have popped into existence at a period so interesting."

"Fleets are not confined to the ocean, but now sail over the land. … All the power of the British Navy has not been able to prevent Zeppelins from reaching England and attacking London, the very heart of the British Empire. Navies do not protect against aerial attack. … Heavier-than-air flying machines of the aeroplane type have crossed right over the heads of armies, of million of men, armed with the most modern weapons of destruction, and have raided places in the rear. Armies do not protect against aerial war."

"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there, I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air…. Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace Where never lark nor ever eagle flew— And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, and touched the face of God."

"The saying ‘Getting there is half the fun’ became obsolete with the advent of commercial airlines."

"“No airship will ever fly from New York to Paris. That seems to me to be impossible. What limits the flight is the motor. No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping, and you can’t be sure of finding the proper winds for soaring. The airship will always be a special messenger, never a load-carrier. But the history of civilization has usually shown that every new invention has brought in its train new needs it can satisfy, and so what the airship will eventually be used for is probably what we can least predict at the present.”"

"People are gradually beginning to realize that these sightings are not bunk. I thought it was bunk until I saw one … Now don't tell me I had been drinking tequila, or that I was seeing spots before my eyes! … you did not offer any explanation for the saucers. Thus far, there certainly is no adequate explanation. All I can say is that if one ever actually sees one, he has seen the most awe-inspiring, strange and unaccountable sight that he'll ever see in his lifetime. … Space does not permit me to go into detail as to why the object was not a balloon, a kite, a plane, or some such object. … I have lost so much sleep thinking about the contraption, I wish I had never seen the darn thing in the first place."

"It is with considerable disappointment you cannot give the explanation of these aircraft as I felt certain they belonged to our government. They have apparently meant no harm, but used as an instrument of destruction in combination with our atomic bomb the effects could destroy life on our planet. ... We have not taken this lightly. It is to us of very serious concern, as we are as interested in the welfare of our country as you are."

"If our government knows anything about these devices, the people should be told at once. A lot of people out here are very much disturbed. Some think these things may be from another planet. But they aren't harming anyone and I think it would be the wrong thing to shoot one of them down – even if it can be done. Their high speed would completely wreck them."

"… well, right here we’ve seen something, I’ve seen something, hundreds of pilots have seen something … in the skies. We have dutifully reported these things. And we have to have 15 million witnesses before anybody is going to look into the problem … seriously? Well this is utterly fantastic. This is more fantastic than flying saucers or people from Venus or anything as far as I am concerned."

"The (British) government took the threat of UFOs so seriously in the 1950s that UK intelligence chiefs met to discuss the issue, newly-released files show... Ministers even went on to commission weekly reports on UFO sightings from a committee of intelligence experts... the papers also include a wartime account claiming prime minister Winston Churchill ordered a UFO sighting be kept secret to prevent "mass panic"... the latest batch of UFO files released from the Ministry of Defence to the National Archives shows that, in 1957, the committee received reports detailing an average of one UFO sighting a week... The files also include an account of a wartime meeting attended by Winston Churchill in which, it is claimed, the prime minister was so concerned about a reported encounter between a UFO and RAF bombers, that he ordered it be kept secret for at least 50 years to prevent "mass panic". Nick Pope, who used to investigate UFO sightings for the MoD, said: "The interesting thing is that most of the UFO files from that period have been destroyed... But what happened is that a scientist whose grandfather was one of his [Churchill's] bodyguards, said look, Churchill and Eisenhower got together to cover up this phenomenal UFO sighting, that was witnessed by an RAF crew on their way back from a bombing raid...The reason apparently was because Churchill believed it would cause mass panic and it would shatter people's religious views."

"With hundreds of thousands of nebulae, each containing thousands of millions of suns, the odds are enormous that there must be immense numbers which possess planets whose circumstances would not render life impossible... I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilization here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures, or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time."

"[I wonder whether the work the EO did covering the Arnold sighting may have been the pinnacle of press coverage of the UFO phenomenon, and whether the coverage has been in decline ever since. Today’s press coverage of UFOs is lamentable.] For the life of me, I cannot understand why members of the press are not clamoring for information about the UFO issue. [The disinterest of the press] is even more interesting than the apparent presence on our planet of the UFOs themselves."

"Some years ago I had a conversation with a layman about flying saucers — because I am scientific I know all about flying saucers! I said "I don't think there are flying saucers'. So my antagonist said, "Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it's impossible?" "No", I said, "I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely". At that he said, "You are very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible then how can you say that it's unlikely?" But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. To define what I mean, I might have said to him, "Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence." It is just more likely. That is all."

"Anyway, I have to argue about flying saucers on the beach with people, you know. And I was interested in this: they keep arguing that it is possible. And that's true. It is possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it's possible or not but whether it's going on or not."

"Aliens are currently all around us, and are watching us all the time. They are not hostile towards us, rather, they want to help us but we have not grown enough in order to establish direct contact with them.”"

"Decades ago, visitors from other planets warned us about where we were headed and offered to help. But instead we, or at least some of us, interpreted their visits as a threat, and decided to shoot first and ask questions after… The veil of secrecy must be lifted and it has to be lifted now, before it is too late."

"They are very much afraid we might be stupid enough to start using atomic weapons again and that would be very bad for us and them as well... We are polluting our waters and our air, and we are playing around with these exotic weapons… and they [space brothers] don't like that. They'd like to work with us to teach us better ways, but only, I think, with our consent."

"(How do you answer UFO skeptics?) I get them to read my books and others; because there’s so much literature on the subject, that it is just amazing. And the skeptics, by large, have never done any reading on it. And it’s just like, take any other subject, physics or something that you are not familiar with, you can be skeptical of some of the rules and things people say if you haven’t taken time out to learn about it.... You have to read the books and get the evidence, and then you can check it out for yourself."

"There’s all kinds of proof, but only if you know where to look and taken the trouble to go and look... The United States government is the principle villain. Why is a good question, you should ask them, because basically, at a hearing we held a couple of years ago in Washington, the consensus of the witnesses at the hearing, of whom I was one, was that it was power and greed. They cover it up under the cloak of national security, but we all, I think the consensus of all of us who gave evidence there was that it had nothing to do with national security, it was a cover story to keep people from demanding answers, and that the real reasons were power and greed."

"Recently, the press has been filled with reports of sightings of flying saucers. While we need not give credence to these stories, they allow our imagination to speculate on how visitors from outer space would judge us. I am afraid they would be stupefied at our conduct. They would observe that for death planning we spend billions to create engines and strategies for war. They would also observe that we spend millions to prevent death by disease and other causes. Finally they would observe that we spend paltry sums for population planning, even though its spontaneous growth is an urgent threat to life on our planet. Our visitors from outer space could be forgiven if they reported home that our planet is inhabited by a race of insane men whose future is bleak and uncertain."

"After a couple of years of intense research into eyewitness accounts of dramatic flying saucer sightings and encounters, it started to dawn on me, dimly at first, that science is not a democracy. It doesn’t really matter how many people have reported observations if the observations make no physical sense. We don’t take a vote to see if flying saucer attributes, such as antigravity, force fields, and speeds of thousands of miles per hour in the lower atmosphere, are technically achievable. Such features either exist or they do not, and they are judged on compatibility with existing proofs and the results of confirmatory research. There are many strange and even unbelievable phenomena that have been proven and re-proven to exist in the nuclear physics model of the universe, but the capabilities of your common flying saucer are not in this set."

"Along with the briefcase with the nuclear codes, the President of the country is given a special ‘top secret’ folder which is entirely devoted to the extra-terrestrials who visited our planet. The report is provided by the special secret service which deals with the extra-terrestrials in our country."

"I happen to be privileged enough to be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomenon is real, although it’s been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it's leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it."

"I've been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes - we have been visited. Reading the papers recently, it's been happening quite a bit."

"Hypnotism will become more and more a tool of scientific investigation. Telepathy will be proven without a doubt, and utilized, sadly enough in the beginning, for purposes of war and intrigue. Nevertheless telepathy will enable your race to make its first contact with alien intelligence."

"When science progresses on various planes, then such visitations become less accidental and more planned. However, since the inhabitants of each plane are bound by the particular materialized patterns of their 'home,' they bring this pattern of camouflaged vitality with them. Certain kinds of science cannot operate without it. When the inhabitants of a plane have learned mental science patterns, then they are to a great degree freed from the more regular camouflage patterns … the flying saucer appearances come from a system much more advanced in technological sciences than yours. So strong is this tendency for vitality to change from one apparent form to another, that what you have here in your flying saucers is something that is actually not of your plane nor of the plane of its origins. What happens is this: When the 'flying saucer' starts out toward its destination, the atoms and molecules that compose it (and which are themselves formed by vitality) are more or less aligned according to the pattern inflicted upon it by its own territory. As it enters your plane, a distortion occurs. The actual structure of the craft is caught in a dilemma of form. It is caught between transforming itself completely into earth's particular camouflage pattern, and retaining its original pattern."

"Unknown aerial objects have in fact been observed over many of our nuclear weapons bases and other nuclear facilities, and in some cases the appearance of these objects coincided with compromising the operational readiness of our nuclear weapons… If they wanted to destroy them, with all the powers they seem to have, they could have done that job. So I personally don’t think that it was a hostile intent."

"What struck me more than the book's UFO stories, however, was the common thread weaving among them of breathtaking alterations in consciousness associated with the experiences – sensations of leaving the body, of flying through the air or being "carried along by the wind," and receiving "startling and novel insights into the nature of reality" that reverberated thereafter with profound, life-changing effects."

"(Gardner) writes about various kinds of cranks with the conscious superiority of the scientist, and in most cases one can share his sense of the victory of reason. But after half a dozen chapters this non-stop superiority begins to irritate; you begin to wonder about the standards that make him so certain he is always right. He asserts that the scientist, unlike the crank, does his best to remain open-minded. So how can he be so sure that no sane person has ever seen a flying saucer, or used a dowsing rod to locate water? And that all the people he disagrees with are unbalanced fanatics? A colleague of the positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer once remarked wryly "I wish I was as certain of anything as he seems to be about everything". Martin Gardner produces the same feeling."

"These left me in no doubt that something was trying to communicate with us, but that direct communication would be counterproductive. It seemed to be an important part of the scheme to create a sense of mystery."

"Do you know why I can't stand ufologists? Because with very rare exceptions they are stupendously, hopelessly, spectacularly incompetent. And with their noisy incompetence they do nothing but make ridiculous a field of inquiry that could be serious if only they stopped talking nonsense and mistaking every blurred pixel for a trip out of town by the Venusians. If, then, journalists, instead of uncritically reporting the aforementioned nonsense, deigned to have a moment of critical sense instead of being whores of the click, ufology could finally become a science instead of a nonsense. Not at all. [...] Formulating hypotheses is the duty of every researcher; But the true researcher also goes one step further, which is to try to discard hypotheses that are not supported by the facts and to put them to the test, instead of jumping to conclusions. That's what's wrong with ufology: it's loudly propagandized by people who are so enamored with their worldview that they ignore the most basic methods of verification; so fervent that they are able to write down what they should do and then not do; so fixed on the single track of their own thought that they do not notice their mistakes and instead accuse others of not having an open mind; They are so self-centered that they get when someone dares to point out their mistakes. Few escape this model [...]. Feel, fufologists [...], but it's not my fault that you write rubbish and make a fool of yourself. And get, journalists, but it's not my fault if you publish any nonsense without verifying it. (Paolo Attivissimo)"

"Denzler, Brenda (C.E.2003). The lure of the edge: scientific passions, religious beliefs, and the pursuit of UFOs. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-23905-9."

"Hynek, J. Allen (C.E.1998). The UFO experience: a scientific inquiry. Da Capo Press. ISBN 1-56924-782-X."

"Vallée, Jacques F. (C.E.1991). Confrontations: A Scientist's Search for Alien Contact. Random House Value Publishing. ISBN 0-517-07204-1."

"Klass, Philip J. (C.E.1983). UFOs: The Public Deceived. Prometheus Books. ISBN 0-87975-322-6."

"Sheaffer, Robert (C.E.1986). The UFO Verdict: Examining the Evidence. Prometheus Books. ISBN 0-87975-338-2."

"Graff, Garrett (C.E.2023). UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There. New York: Avid Reader Press. ISBN 9781982196776. OCLC 1407420009."

"Rutledge, Harley D. (C.E.1981). Project Identification: The First Scientific Field Study of UFO Phenomena. Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0-13-730705-5."

"According to the theory of aerodynamics, as may be readily demonstrated through wind tunnel experiments, the bumblebee is unable to fly. This is because the size, weight and shape of his body in relation to the total wingspread make flying impossible. But the bumblebee, being ignorant of these scientific truths, goes ahead and flies anyway—and makes a little honey every day."

"For I dipt into the future far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales; Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue."

"Let brisker youths their active nerves prepare Fit their light silken wings and skim the buxom air."

"He rode upon a cherub, and did fly: yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind."

"Wal, I like flyin' well enough," He said, "but the' ain't sich a thundern' sight O' fun in't when ye come to light."

"Darius was clearly of the opinion That the air is also man's dominion And that with paddle or fin or pinion, We soon or late shall navigate The azure as now we sail the sea."

"The birds can fly, an' why can't I? Must we give in," says he with a grin, "That the bluebird an' phœbe are smarter 'n we be?"

"It is in the nature of the human surveying capacity that it can function only if man disentangles himself from all involvement in and concern with the close at hand and withdraws himself to a distance from everything near him. The greater the distance between himself and his surroundings, world or earth, the more he will be able to survey and to measure and the less will worldly, earth-bound space be left to him. The fact that the decisive shrinkage of the earth was the consequence of the invention of the airplane, that is, of leaving the surface of the earth altogether, is like a symbol for the general phenomenon that any decrease of terrestrial distance can be won only at the price of putting a decisive distance between man and earth, of alienating man from his immediate earthly surroundings."