Books: Heavenly Bogeys

FLYING SAUCERS-SERIOUS BUSINESS by Frank Edwards. 319 pages. Lyle Stuart. $5.95.

INCIDENT AT EXETER-UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS OVER AMERICA NOW by John G. Fuller. 251 pages. Putnam. $5.95.

Unlikely as it seems, Unidentified Flying Objects (unlikely as they are) may well have resolved the conflict between religion and science.

Religion, by one Webster definition, is the object of a pursuit arousing "religious convictions and feelings such as great faith, devotion, or fervor," and science, by another Webster definition, is "accumulated and accepted knowledge which has been systematized." The two come together in the field of the UFO, where writers on the subject certainly show great faith, devotion and fervor in their efforts to have the objects regarded as part of accepted and accumulated knowledge.

Frank Edwards, a sometime radio commentator, is perhaps the most fervently devout believer in UFOs, not as mere meteoric oddities or psychic phenomena but as the creations of technically superior beings from parts unknown. His evangelistic style is homiletic, catechetical and religious in tone (the promise of an unprecedented revelation to the merely human race has the strangest effect on the nonbeliever). At any rate, the mixture of science and religion is curious, as if Billy Sunday had undertaken a sermon on the subject of the binomial theorem.

"The day of the denouement cannot be far away," Edwards warns. But before the reader is quite prepared to meet this day, he must accept a weird record of incidents in which hundreds of people at different times and in different parts of the world have seen something buzzing about in the sky, silently or with a low humming, shining by day or glowing by night, scorching the earth or disturbing the water under its burnished bottom, sometimes plunging into the sea or a river, but mostly zooming off, presumably back to where it came from.

Sleight of Hand. Only the most bigoted proponents of the doctrine of common sense will dismiss these "sightings" as illusory. On the other hand, only those unusually gifted with credulity will accept the Edwards account of them, which offers an explanation more unlikely than the phenomena. For example: "Why were there virtually no UFO sightings from 1926 to 1946?" Obviously "they" (the occupants of the UFOs) were improving the design, which seems to beg the question of whether the UFOs had occupants and were designed at all.

Edwards not only undertakes to explain UFOs as the work of extraterrestrial beings but, by a singular logical sleight of hand, uses UFOs to explain extraterrestrial beings. Thus UFOs can explain parts of the Book of Genesis, which admittedly takes some explaining. Those "angels" in Genesis 19 were "not necessarily of celestial origin" but were some kind of space men, and the "giants in the earth in those days" who mated with women (Genesis 6:4) clearly refer to beings from out yonder.