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The Fifties by David Halberstam Villard Books, NY, 1993 |
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significance of this popular history of the decade of the nineteen
fifties is not what's in it but what is absent from it. The author
is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist of such books as The Best and the
Brightest. His latest book is almost eight-hundred pages long.
However, there is not one mention of the UFO phenomenon in it.
UFOs or flying saucers as they were popularly known were big news in the
nineteen fifties, especially 1952, when they were sighted over
Washington, B.C. and fighter planes were sent to intercept them.
Front pages of newspapers told of "Flying Saucers Over the White House".
Our local UFO organization has researched newspapers from that decade
and found numerous UFO stories. Yet Halberstam has completely
ignored this phenomenon and left it out of his book. This is a
form of censorship. Even if he believes UFOs were mass hysteria or
hoaxes, it was still a newsworthy phenomenon that occupied the minds of
millions of Americans in that decade. This reminds me of a map I once saw that was made by one of the Arab nations of the Middle East. The map was accurate and detailed in every way except one - it had a blank spot where Israel should have been. This Arab nation so hated Israel that it denied its existence even on a map. The belief that ignoring a subject will make it go away is wrong. Omitting Israel on a map doesn't make Israel go away, and likewise ignoring the fact that millions of people in the nineteen fifties saw UFOs doesn't make UFOs go away. When will liberal journalists wake up to the fact UFOs are a real phenomenon deserving of scientific study? A part of our history is being censored by omission of the UFO phenomenon in history books. Whether or not you believe UFOs are real doesn't matter, but when ten percent of the population claims to have seen UFOs, this is a phenomenon worthy of mention. |