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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.
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.