Robert I. Sarbacher, dated November 29, 1983, addressed to Mr. William Steinman, a UFO researcher who had inquired about Sarbacher's s government consulting activities during the late forties. The letter has been offered for publication, but to date has not been fully exposed except in the journal of the Mutual UFO Network, a group of people, many of them scientists and academics, interested in serious study of the phenomenon. The letter was also referred to and quoted in Omni. As Dr. Sarbacher died on July 26, 1986, a few days before I became aware of his letter, I was unable to interview him, but I discussed his case with Mr. Barry Greenwood. co-author of Clear Intent, who had had extensive discussion with him. These discussions revealed that Dr. Sarbacher did not appear to know more than he stated in his letter, but he was quite certain that the facts he did relate were as he remembered them.
Dr. Sarbacher was a Department of Defense Research and Development Board consultant during the Eisenhower administration. Educated at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and Princeton, he is the author of Hyper and Ultra-High Frequency Engineering, Research Accrediting at Military Establishments, and the Encyclopedia Dictionary of Electronics and Engineering.
This last book is considered a fundamental contribution to science.
He has been dean of the Graduate School of the Georgia Institute of Technology and has participated as a consultant for the Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies, in Tennessee, and the navy, as well as the Department of Defense. He has held many corporate directorships, among them as director of the General Sciences Corporation and the Union Life Insurance Company.
Dr. Sarbacher writes, in part:
Relating to my own experiences regarding recovered flying saucers, I had no association with any of the people involved in the recovery and have no knowledge regarding the dates of the recoveries ....
About the only thing I remember at this time is that certain materials reported to have come from flying saucer crashes were extremely light and very tough. I am sure our laboratories analyzed them very carefully.
There were reports that instruments or people operating these machines were also of very light weight, sufficient to withstand the tremendous deceleration and acceleration associated with their machinery. I remember in talking with some of the people at the office that I got the impression these "aliens" were constructed like certain insects we have observed on earth....
I still do not know why the high order of classification has been given and why the denial of the existence of these devices.
All I can say is that I remember very well the eidetic image. I described the joints of the creature I saw as "insectlike." And my hypnotic transcripts continually refer to my impression that I was dealing with creatures that moved like insects. I did not know of Dr. Sarbacher and his letter until August 9, 1986, months after I had my experiences.
The combination of Dr. Sarbacher's recollections and my own memory of how the visitors acted and treated me may provide insight both into why they are so secretive and why they have been so seemingly indifferent to our rights and dignity with their forceful abductions.
If the visitors are indeed insectlike they could be organized as a hive, and not only as small as I saw but also as light as Dr. Sarbacher recalls being told. They may be no physical match for us, not even in fairly large groups. In addition, it could be that there is very little sense of self associated with individual members of their species. Taken together they might be very formidable, but separate individuals may be almost negligible. If their mind is also a hive structure, it could be that their language is more a biological function than something learned. Maybe it is like the language of earth's hive insects: a complex combination of movements, smells, and aural output. There may even be more to it; one of the greatest of biological mysteries is how hives function, and whether or not a hive can have a group mind.
I will briefly illustrate the profundity of this enigma. There has been a study of bees under way at Princeton for some years. A part of this stud was designed to determine how quickly a hive coup find a food source if it was moved. Each day the food source was moved a measured distance. It was soon discovered that the bees would be waiting for the food source at its anticipated location before it was moved.
What a truly intelligent hive mind might have achieved, and how it communicates with itself and others, may be very hard to know.
My second piece of evidence that the government may know more about this than it is saying is a small but telling one, a press release that was issued in July 1947. In that month an incident took place on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, that is the granddaddy of all the "government has a UFO/alien bodies" rumors. Throughout 1947 there were many reports in the New Mexico newspapers of odd lights. But the first modern flying disk sightings, near Mount Rainier, Washington, had been heavily publicized at the time, and some of the New Mexico sightings may have been a result of confused observations of two V-2 launches at White Sands. One took place on June 12 and another on July 3.
However, on the evening of July 2, something was seen by members of the public in the skies over Roswell and reported locally. This object was brightly lit and crossed the skies in a northwesterly direction. On July 8 the Roswell Army Air Base issued a release which was published, among other places, in the San Francisco Chronicle. The release was Issued by public relations officer Lieutenant Walter Haut, on order from the base commander.
The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 9th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff's office of Chaves County.
The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff's office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel of the 509th Bomber Group Intelligence Office.
Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher's home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.
Later a report was issued to the effect that this disk was a crashed weather balloon.
Maybe it was although it is odd that a crashed balloon would have retained enough of its tension to appear to anybody, even briefly, to be anything other than a flaccid plastic bag and some tinfoil.
Under the headline DISC: SOLUTION COLLAPSES the Chronicle reported that General Roger M. Ramey had stated that the wreckage was "a high-altitude weather observation device" that "consisted of a box kite and a balloon." Later in the same story General Ramey is reported to have said that it was a "starshaped tinfoil target designed to reflect radar." Since General Ramey claimed to have the debris in his office, it is strange that he could not seem to settle on an identification for it. Weather balloons, box kites and radar stars were all familiar to air-base personnel in the late forties, and Air Force officers on active duty would have been unlikely to mistake them. Even less likely to be confused on this matter would have been a working base commander such as Colonel William Blanchard, whose order led to the base press officer issuing the original press release claiming that the debris was a crashed disk. The debris was picked up by air intelligence officers Jesse Marcel and "Cav" Cavett — two more men who would have been unlikely to misidentify items like weather balloons and radar targets.
It seems possible that the debris may have been what the officers who originally saw it thought it was — and what they naturally told the press. They were obviously ignorant of General Ramey's cover-up plans.