Please accept our Best Wishes for Mother and Child.
0
FSR in 1957 was like a child with attention-deficit-disorder in a toy shop, if one wishes to be as charitable as possible, or an adult with MPD, several personalities of which were fantasy-prone. My feeling is that the charitable characterization is the one which applies to most of it---flying saucers were a great mystery, and not at all solved yet for them.
The pictures above show the big kids having fun outdoors on a flying saucer night out, with Desmond Leslie [perhaps the only one in the picture who "already knew the answers"], acting out his somewhat absurdly posed role of pointing to an alleged saucer in the sky with one hand while pointing to a drawing of an Adamski scoutship with the other.
FSR was open to all comers at this time, and probably that was OK for the moment. As we know, NICAP, whether they were ultimately right or wrong, crystallized too early around a narrow range of the phenomenon for "political" reasons and the character of its leader. Of the let's say four [NICAP, APRO, FSR, CSI-NY] major civilian players in the english-speaking world, APRO and CSI-NY straddled the most rational middle ground, taking things as they came, but with crap detectors functioning at high enough levels to be seriously critical of the obviously bogus. Which of these approaches one feels most sympatico to oneself is of course a matter of our own biases.
I personally like CSI-NY, but feel the wider-open door of APRO to be very useful in getting the "unexpected" so that analysis can be done at all. Ted Bloecher's approach to CE3s [in later years] would have been an ideal model if anyone [in the general UFO-seeing public] would have been able to locate his "door" as a spot to deposit their reports. This has always been why I am not as critical of overly-enthusistic UFO hawkers in today's field [if they are still part of the community in the sense that they are willing to share information].
They serve as "welcoming entries" for cases, even including the most strange. It's a tough line to walk: open enough to encourage high-strangeness reporting, but having personal standards rational enough to not lead people astray. FSR overdid it on the "openness" element, but in the end it was understandable [especially for the moment] and harvested a whale of a lot of intriguing reports. [This is the great value of MUFON today and no one should take that away from that organization. If the Journal would hold up the other end of this difficult stance (rational editorship and filtering), the more conservative elements of our community should stand and applaud.] But we live in an imperfect world and so must continue to talk with one another if we are to utilize all our strengths. FSR didn't do the critique part that well, and it's happened very few times in UFOlogy's history.
Still, very solid things showed up in FSR. They reported on the stunning press conference of Keyhoe's Naval Academy buddy, chief of Naval research into missiles, Admiral Delmar Fahrney, wherein he launched NICAP as a public force. Fahrney left little doubt that he felt that the evidence was overwhelming that the flying disks were real, and not the product of Earth technology, and had intelligence behind them.
FSR came to the wrong conclusion [thinking that this plus Ruppelt plus the UFO film heralded a great revelation of facts by the military], but were properly informed and impressed by Fahrney, nevertheless. FSR was also aware of the release of Project Blue Book Report#14. This document is a whole story in itself, and no one in the UFO community realized what was behind its release. [they thought they knew but did not].
BBR#14 was released not just because Air Force irritant, Dr. Leon Davidson, was making noise, but because the Blue Book debunkers [George Gregory{project BB chief}, Francis Arcier{Chief BB consultant}, Lawrence Tacker{Pentagon "UFO Spokesman} and the Pentagon's Congressional liaison] had decided that it could be used as a weapon against Keyhoe and similar thorns in their side. Paradoxically, just like the Colorado Project report later, everybody read it as they wanted to--nay-sayers saying it said nay, and yay-sayers saying it said yay. [even Ruppelt was read this way]. Weirdly, almost everyone was celebrating.
Source
