These little men, unlike Adamski’s, spoke any language.

“You name it,” they’d quipped to Bethurum, “we speak it.”

In a newspaper article that was voted “Best Read of 1953,” Bethurum told how the little men he met had been more cooperative and had actually taken him into their saucer, a huge job 300 feet in diameter and 16 feet high.

Once inside, Bethurum had met the captain of the “scow”—­a true leader of men.  Aura Rhanes was her name and she was a Venus de Milo with arms and warm blood.  “When she spoke her words rhymed.”  They chatted and Bethurum learned that he was on the “Admiral’s scow” the command ship of Clarion’s fleet of saucers.

All in all, Bethurum made eleven visits to Aura’s scow.  Each time they’d sit and talk.  Bethurum told her about the earth and she told of the idyllic, Shangri-La type planet of Clarion—­a yet undiscovered planet which is always opposite the moon.

But before too long, both Truman Bethurum and George Adamski had to move over.  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.