Walking at night in the desert, Daniel Fry saw an oblate spheroid 30 ft in diameter settle to the ground 70 ft away. He was about to touch the hull when a voice warned him not to, as it was still hot. The voice proceeded to tell him that he had been chosen for contact because of his scientific background and his open mind. He was invited to board the saucer, and was taken for a ride to New York City and back, consuming only 30 minutes. Such high accelerations are possible, he was told, because the accelerating force, like gravity, operates on the passenger's body as well as on the craft. Fry's host, the humanoid, identified himself as A-lan, a descendant of the inhabitants of the sunken continent Lemuria. A-lan again contacted Fry on several subsequent occasions.
Daniel Fry, an engineer, stepped in.
At a press conference to kick off the International Saucer Convention in Los Angeles, Fry told how he had not only contacted the spacemen two years before Adamski and Bethurum, he had actually ridden in a flying saucer.
It had all started on the night of July 4, 1950, when engineer Fry was temporarily employed at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico.
It was a hot night, and with nothing else to do, Fry decided to take a walk across the desert. He hadn't traveled far when he saw a bluish light hovering over the mountains which rim this famous proving ground. He paid no attention. He'd heard flying saucer stories before and just plain didn't believe them.
But as he watched, the light came closer and closer and closer, until a weird craft came silently to rest on the desert floor not seventy feet away.
For seconds, Fry, who had seen missile age developments at White Sands that would have dumfounded most laymen, merely stood and stared.
The object, Fry told newsmen, was an "ovate spheroid about thirty feet at the equator." (Fry has a habit of drifting off into the technical). Its outside surface was a highly polished silver with a slight violet iridescent glow.
At first Fry wanted to run but his rigid technical training overrode his common, natural urges. He decided to go over to the object and see what made it tick.
He circled it several times and nothing broke the desert silence. Then he touched it.
"Better not touch that hull, pal, it's hot," boomed a voice in a Hollywoodian tone.
Fry recoiled.
The voice softened and added, "Take it easy, pal, you're among friends."
After politely reading off the spaceman, or whoever he was, for scaring him, pal Fry and the voice settled down for a friendly moonlight chat. Fry learned that the voice was indeed that of a spaceman and they were down to pick up a new supply of air. After about four years of earth air transfusions, according to the spaceman, they would become adapted to our atmosphere, and our gravity, and become "immunized to your bi-otics." The craft, Fry was told, was a "cargo carrier," unmanned and built to zoom down and scoop up earth air.
The conversation went on, waxing technical at times, and ended with an invitation to look into the ship. Then the spaceman, possibly carried away by all the interest Fry was showing, offered a ride.
Fry accepted and they antidemagnetized off for New York City. Thirty minutes later they were back at White Sands.
Over New York City they came down from 35 to 20 miles and Fry could read the marquee of the Fulton Theater. "The Seven Year Itch" was playing.
He hadn't told the Air Force about his ride before because he was afraid he'd lose his job. But, at the press conference, he did plug his new book, The White Sands Incident.
By this time Adamski had already published his book Flying Saucers Have Landed and it looked as if Fry was going to cut him out. But Fry took a lie detector test on a widely viewed West Coast television show and flunked it flat.
His stock dropped as fast as it had risen but the decline was somewhat checked when a well known Southern California medium wrote to "her old friend" J. Edgar Hoover about the situation. Hoover, the story goes, shot back an answer--lie detectors are no good.
But the damage had been done. The "rigged" lie detector test had unfortunately relegated Daniel Fry, "engineer," "missile expert," "part owner of an engineering plant," and interplanetary hitchhiker to the bush league.
With Adamski and Bethurum on the stage and Fry peeking out of the wings all hell broke loose.
Daniel Fry claims to have flown aboard a flying saucer. Explanation: hoax.