From: rthieme <rthieme@mixcom.mixcom.com>
Subject: MacArthur 1955
Organization: Milwaukee Internet Xchange BBS, Milw, WI (414) 241-5469
Date: Tue, 19 Jul 1994 04:04:39 GMT


Someone asked about a statement by Douglas MacArthur about interplanetary
war. I checked the NY Times index for 1955 and found this article on page 7
of Saturday's paper for October 8, 1955.
Mayor Achille Lauro of Naples had spoken with the general and reported that
he said: "...another war would be double suicide and that there is enough
sense on both sides of the iron curtain to avoid it."
	"He believes that because of the developments of science all the
countries on earth will have to unite to survive and to make a common front
against attack by people from other planets."
	The politics of the future will be cosmic or interplenetary ... a
thousand years from now today's civilization would appear as obsolete as the
stone age.
	So ... is the general speaking out of knowledge of interplanetary
visitors, something he knows to be a fact? Or is he merely speculating
philosophically (as was his wont) about where things will be in 1000 years
...
Difficult to say, isn't it? One time frame is the immediate aftermath of
World War II and his belief that neither side will start World War III,
which is near-term ... and the other is the Big Picture of how we'll look in
a thousand years.
	BTW, it is interesting to read the accounts in the NY Times of the
first sightings of "flying saucers" in 1947, the Roswell exaplanations, and
numerous other sightings in the first major post-war wave. How differently
the mass sightings were treated then, both by the air force and the press.
There are hundreds of credible sightings, and there are numerous instances
of "belief systems"
resisting the incursion of new percepts for which no concepts fit.
	In July 6, 1947 NY Times there is a wonderful article to the effect
that "an artificial moon may circle the earth" within several decades. This
professor of astrophysics at Yale goes on to say that humankind will set
foot on Mars before landing on the moon because "Mars has an atmosphere and
the moon has none. On Mars a space ship could glide gently to the surface."
Dr. Spitzer goes on to say that intelligent life probably lives on Mars and
may have already visited the earth. The wonderful thing about articles like
this is that we forget so quickly what it was really like to live within
such a different paradigm such a short time ago.

rthieme@mixcom.com
MUFON State Director, Wisconsin
-- 
rthieme@mixcom.com