As I've mentioned (ad nauseam) over the past year, the military draft came after me in the sixties and I instead enlisted in the Air Force, thus absent from the Syracuse area from 1968 to 1972. However, while home on leave briefly in late 1969, I was rummaging one day through the used book section in the basement of a popular book store when I spotted a book entitled, The Intelligent Man's Guide to Flying Saucers by T. M. Wright. What a title, I thought, assuming it to be just another worthless debunking volume of nonsense.
But it wasn't. Actually, the author provided a reasonably fair assessment of the UFO situation as it stood in the sixties. Further, to my surprise, Wright, like myself, was born in Syracuse, and in researching his material had referenced many of the same people I previously contacted in my teenage years regarding the "great Northeastern power blackout" of 1965. His book saw publication in 1968, a time when my life was in turmoil because of the military, and I was certainly in no position even to know of its existence. Still, a book and author involved with considerable information about Central NY UFO activity of which I was unaware seemed unlikely. Yet, there I stood in a musty store basement, thumbing page by page through this used volume, a reliable research project published widely by A.S. Barnes unfortunately, its tainted, odorous fragments stuck around long enough to exert an unfair influence on UFO research. The warm milk and, of course, the hangnail.
Wright himself has gone on to write numerous novels, is written about extensively and even has a web site for his fans. I never did locate him in the earlier years, though a brief reading of a writer's interview with him indicates that he currently does not believe UFOs exist. Nevertheless, when he wrote his first book Wright did leave the door open a crack regarding the extraordinary nature of the UFO phenomenon in his conservative, though powerful, closing words:
"The chances of extra-terrestrial contact, however small, must not be ignored. The evidence seems clear that life on Earth is not unique, and that we cannot go about our business unnoticed, or undisturbed."
