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.

One could say that everyone tried to get into the act, but I’d rather think that each colony of space people tried to promote their own candidate.

In England, one Cedric Allingham met a Martian on the moors.  In France, Germany, the United States, Portugal, Brazil, Spain—­ everywhere—­people “too uneducated to pull a hoax” met green men, dark men, white men, big men with little heads, little men with big heads and men with pointed heads.  They wore motorcycle belts, baggy pants, diver suits, and were naked.

One lady proudly announced that a Venusian had tried to seduce her and within days another snorted in disgust.  A Martian had seduced her.

Then Adamski took a hop through outer space and back.

Saucers poured forth words of wisdom via radio, light beams and mental telepathy.  All of these messages were duly recorded on tape and sales were hot at $4.50 per 10-minute tape.

Not to be outdone by any other lousy planet, the Venusians picked up a young man from Los Angeles and actually took him to Venus.  Not once, but three times.

He packed in audiences by telling how he had been contacted one night and asked by a “strange man” if he would go on an important mission.  Afraid, but not one to shirk his patriotic duties, he met the stranger at a prearranged spot and was whisked off to Venus.  During a high level conference up there he was given the word:  Tell the earthlings to lay off their atomic weapons, or else.  They’re killing all our doves and we make our flying saucers out of the feathers our live doves shed.