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| The Windsor Daily Star, August 20, 1954 |
By Bob Shiels
Over in Detroit, they take their flying saucers seriously.
More than 400 Detroiters, and a few from Windsor, assembled in the banquet room at the cross-river Veterans' Memorial Building last night for a meeting of the Detroit Flying Saucer Club.
IKE ON SPOT
Those who had seen them told about the flying saucers that they had scrutinized, and the gathering applauded a plan to petition President Eisenhower demanding that he make public all available information on saucers and interplanetary travel.
Delegates arriving at the banquet room were given an opportunity to buy illustrated magazines and books entitled, Aboard a Flying Saucer." "The Saucers Speak!" and an edition of "Weird Science Fantasy" devoted to a review of the flying saucer menace.
Delegates - there were enough of them that the management had to bring in extra chairs to accommodate them - were welcomed by the club's president, Henry Maday, an amiable, soft-spoken individual sporting a bright yellow tie.
"We're not looking up into the sky." Mr. Maday complained. "That's the trouble. We should be looking up into the sky, and what are we doing?"
Many of the delegates stepped forward to say that they were doing just that. They told the assemblage about the flying saucers that had come under their personal scrutiny.
Two young ladies reported on how they had seen an illuminated object flit across the sky from horizon to horizon in less than a minute. They said the junket was completed without a sound being audible down here on earth.
A Detroit man said that he had witnessed U.F.O.'s (Unidentified Flying Objects) on three separate occasions. Three oval shaped objects flying in tight formation had been "the color of raspberry jello cut in thin slices."
He had seen a mysterious blue and white object keeping pace with a jet airplane, and on one occasion he had been the witness of no less than 30 U.F.O.'s in formation above the Detroit district.
THEN THERE WERE THREE
Mrs. Geraldine Beavers had seen something that was truly hair-raising. There had been four round, white objects in the sky. Then one of them nipped over and united with another. Then there were three.
Laura Marxer, vice-president of the club, conceded that "a group as unprecedented as this one" would be the object of a good many "horse laughs," but she noted that the club at least gives frustrated citizens who have been trying to tell about their flying saucers a chance to hold forth before a sympathetic audience.
She said that the club is working out an agreement with the newspapers to have reports of flying saucers channeled through the club's executive to assure that they are authentic. She urged everyone to report any flying saucers that "look like they will hang around" long enough to allow a photographer to get a picture.
Significance of flying saucer reports was interpreted by A. B. Reeve, graduate of a leading American university and a recognized authority on the subject of U.F.O.'s.
"Friends," ejaculated Mr. Reeve, "we're entering a new age. We're entitled to a few horse laughs at the start, but beyond that stage we have to face some very startling things."
Objects appearing in the sky, he said, represent a science and technique far beyond engineering and scientific accomplishments on this earth. People will have to readjust their outlook to take in the revolutionary idea that it is possible for objects to change shape and disappear altogether before mere mortals' eyes.
IS THAT US?
The thought that space ships can travel at speeds of 1,000,000 miles an hour, he pointed out, attains credibility when you consider that the earth, revolving about the sun, keeps earthlings moving at all times at the dizzy pace of more than 600,000 miles an hour.
After hearing a woman report having seen one too many stars in the Big Dipper one night, the gathering considered a proposal to ask President Eisenhower to let the public in on what the flying saucer situation is all about.
The club will seek 5,000 signatures on a petition to the president telling him that the "magnitude and importance" of flying saucers warrants the American government giving the public all the information available about them.
The night's deliberations hit a responsive chord. Two Windsor women still were talking about it on the way back to Canada on the tunnel bus.
"I could have sworn," one of them said, "that I saw a flying saucer. I looked up in the sky and saw this great big light..."
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