The Riley Crabb Revelations - Part IV
By Raymond A. Keller, PhD, a.k.a. “Cosmic Ray,” the author of the international awards-winning Venus Rising Series, published by Headline Books and available on Amazon.com, while supplies last.
Venus Rising: A Concise History of the Second Planet
Final Countdown: Rockets to Venus
Cosmic Ray's Excellent Venus Adventure
Lady Columba Venus Revelations
Riley Crabb believed the executives of the multinational oil corporations feared that revelations concerning UFO propulsion would put their companies out of business. Illustration source: CBS News.
Fight the Power!
In Riley’s Flying Saucers Uncensored, the ufologist noted that, “The owners of the multi-billion-dollar oil industry must be shaking in their boots right now.” The Hawaii-to-California transplant understood that the power structure behind these mega corporations was based on well-defined, well-understood, profitable uses of both chemical and thermodynamic terms. After Riley lectured on the subject of flying saucers at the Masonic Temple in Cleveland, Ohio, in the spring of 1963, a young, handsome, managerial-type junior executive and engineer rushed up to the podium asking him if he could quickly view the UFO slides from the beginning. The eager young fellow apologized for having been unavoidably detained earlier in the evening and wondered if it would be OK for Riley to rerun the slide show for him. Riley, always ready to help another arrive at a satisfactory understanding of cosmic concepts, ran through the slides again.
To Riley’s surprise, the young man debunked all of the alleged UFO photographs, explaining them all away very rationally. He described Riley’s pictures as “either fakes, photographs of natural objects misinterpreted, or light aberrations in the lens of the camera.”
Riley was somewhat miffed at the belligerent attitude of the young executive. “What makes you such an expert on UFO photograph identification?” Riley Crabb wanted to know.
“I’m an engineer for the Standard Oil Company of Indiana,” replied the gentleman as he handed Riley his business card.
“Oh, I see,” said Riley, adding, “Well, how come Standard Oil is all of the sudden so interested in flying saucers?”
Smiling easily, the young executive replied, “We’re interested in all kinds of things, Mr. Crabb.” He also volunteered that, “We even have a satellite tracking station of our own.”
Of course, for 1965 it was quite impressive that a private concern like Standard Oil of Indiana would have its own space program, regardless of just how “minor league” it may have seemed at the time. Riley suggested with a hint of laughter, “For picking up an occasional flying saucer, too?”
The young man chuckled, but failed to confirm or deny anything with regard to Riley’s question, thereby leaving more unanswered questions than before they started their conversation.
With that, Riley continued in his same vein of asking similar questions. “I suppose you would be keenly interested in some radical new source of power, such s that apparently demonstrated by the UFOs.”
“We certainly would,” Riley replied, also reconciling in his own mind that playing ball with the oil company executive might be the key to greatly expanding human awareness of Earth’s place in the galactic communion of life forms. There was definitely more that this gentleman knew about the flying saucer mystery, and Riley was persistent enough in his attempts to pry more information about of him while he still had the chance.
Of his meeting with this controversial young oil engineer, Riley opined that, “That was about all he said. But I knew, and he knew, that a cheap, radical new source of power would make the gasoline engine obsolete! It would take care of the smog problem, too! Of course, you people here in San Francisco don’t have smog! Only in Los Angeles!
“By the way, Standard Oil of Indiana is one of the most profitable properties belonging to the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, we see that there are both business and religious reasons why flying saucers are not welcome in the skies of the United States.”
Riley really picked up a hot potato with his flying saucer talk. He wondered whether he should continue with it, for if he was going to take that route, he had better prepare himself for an encounter with the mysterious “Men in Black,” the ones he had heard so much about in UFO circles. After he had given this same presentation in San Jose, California, two space age technicians approached him and wanted to take a look at his notes on “Rockets and Missiles,” the ones reviewing Murtaugh’s controversial Detroit, Michigan, talk.
One of the young men informed Riley that, “We can scarcely believe it. Frankly, I am surprised that this was even published.” The other mumbled something about the German rocketeer, Wernher von Braun, wondering what he knew about the source of power for the flying saucers.
Riley subsequently learned that just a few days before his own appearance in San Jose, von Braun was in nearby San Francisco for a meeting of space scientists speaking on the staggering costs of sending a manned rocket flight to Mars by 1982. At that time, in 1965 the gross national product of the United States was around $700 billion. Wernher von Braun surmised that if the value of our annual national output continued to increase at its present rate, then the projected $200 billion cost for a manned Mars mission would put no greater strain on the overall economy in 1982 than the projected $40 billion would be for the manned Apollo Moon landing then scheduled to take place five years hence in 1970.
But insofar as conventional rocketry was concerned, Riley felt that, “We’ve gone about as far as we can go with the use of burning gases. This is what rockets use. This is what our automobiles use, and it is a real money barrier. Yet, if we are going to continue to progress and grow as a nation, we must have definite goals for the exploration of space beyond 1970.”
Therefore, while Riley did not disagree with von Braun insofar as the United States expanding its space program beyond the Moon in the years following 1970, he was decidedly of the opinion that more economical and viable sources of propulsion needed to developed and implemented for the success of future space missions to the other planets of the solar system and further out to other solar systems. Riley continued, “The old ways have got to go if we are going to grow! And one thing which has helped to shake up the thinking of orthodox science is the flying saucer. As these UFOs have zipped across our skies at fantastic speeds, smug self-satisfaction has been rudely disturbed in many places.
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Keep reading this column, for in Part V of the Cosmic Ray’s series of articles, “Riley Crabb Revelations,” a little-known but actual interview conducted by an associate of the Borderland Sciences Research Associates of San Diego, California, with an inhabitant of Agartha, a cavernous world in the interior of the Earth, that took place on 1 July 1955, finally emerges from the deep and dark caverns and into the bright light of day.
