The world of UFOlogy is rife with stories like this. I found this one and decided to take a closer look at it. Please pardon my breaks in the narrative for my analysis. I have a bad tendency to interrupt people in the middle of what they are saying when it makes no sense.

Daniel W. Fry (1908-1992)

Daniel W. Fry chronicled his initial flying saucer contact experience in The White Sands Incident (1954). His report began —

White Sands Proving Grounds, July 4, 1950.

Tonight I joined the ranks of the F. S. B. (Flying Saucer Believers). Not only have I seen one, I have touched it, entered it, and ridden in it. Also, if I can still trust my senses, I have communicated at some length with the operators.

Now that it has gone, and I am back in my quarters, it seems more and more incredible that it could really have happened. With all the scientific brain and talent that is available at White Sands Proving Grounds, why should I, a simple technician, be chosen, either by chance or design, to be the first human of the present day earth, to ride in a true space vehicle? The improbability of the event is so great that I have almost begun to doubt my own sanity. Naturally, if I were to attempt to convince anyone else that I rode in a “saucer” tonight, I would soon find myself occupying a nicely padded cell in the nearest Booby Hatch. Still this is the greatest event in my life, and I can’t keep it entirely to myself, so I am writing this down exactly as it happened while it is still sharp and clear in my memory.

A brief biography about Fry was included in the book that included the following.

Mr. Fry has been employed for the past five years by Aerojet General Corporation, the world’s largest developers and manufacturers of rocket engines.

During the years of 1949 and 1950, Mr. Fry spent most of his time at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, where he was engaged in setting up instrumentation for the testing of a series of very large motors.

Fry’s experience at White Sands included watching the landing of an “ovate spheroid about thirty feet in diameter at the equator or largest part” and “shaped more like a soup bowl inverted over a sauce dish.” The event occurred at the “almost deserted army camp” after Fry missed a bus. He decided to take a walk after the air conditioning in his room stopped working. A voice communicated with him when he touched the “polished metal” of the craft. A “crisp voice” that “came out of the air at my side” warned him not to touch the hull. Here are some excerpts of what the voice divulged during the ensuing conversation, as recalled by Fry.

“The hull has a field about it which repels all other matter. The field is very powerful at molecular distances but diminishes by the seventh power of the distance so that the force becomes negligible a few microns away from the hull. Perhaps you noticed that the surface seemed very smooth and slippery. That is because your flesh did not actually touch the metal but was held a short distance from the surface by the repulsion of the field. We use the field to protect the hull from being scratched or damaged in landing. It also lowers air friction tremendously when it is necessary to travel at high speed through an atmosphere.”

Um, this is true of all matter. A simple fact of physics is that though it feels to you like you are touching a solid object, you are not. Take two magnets and try to touch them south to south or north to north. Yes with enough force you can do it, but at the atomic level it is a different story. All atoms are enclosed in a shell of electrons. All electrons posses the negative charge and the repel each other. What feels like contact to you is an interaction of electric fields of varying strengths. Highly advanced aliens would know this.

Also, if their field behaved as they claim, I believe the craft would also be invisible, repelling photons which have mass, if as they claim it repels all matter. Back to the story.

“The best way that I can explain it to you is to say that exposure of the human skin to the force field causes the skin to produce what you call ‘antibodies’ in the blood stream. For some reason which we don’t yet fully understand, these antibodies are absorbed by the liver, whose function they attack causing the liver to become greatly enlarged and congested. In cases where the skin is exposed to the field for a minute or more death is practically certain.”

“What we need are minds sufficiently open to receive evidence (even though that evidence be contrary to all preconceived opinion) and minds sufficiently agile to assimilate that evidence and arrive at logical conclusions. The fact that, in spite of being in circumstances completely unique in your experience, you are listening calmly to my voice and making logical replies, is the best evidence that your mind is of the type we hoped to find.”

A fairly typical statement that sets up any person who questions as an unbeliever. Commonly employed by faith healers the world over.

“When you say that you happen to be here by the merest accident, you greatly underestimate us.”

“I can make my meaning plainer by an analogy. A man seeking scientific knowledge is like an ant climbing a tree. He knows when he is moving upward, but his vision is too short to encompass the entire trunk. The result is that he is likely to get out on a lower limb without realizing that he has left the main trunk. All goes well for a time. He can still climb upward and even pluck a few of the fruits of his progress, but soon he begins to become confused as the solid branch suddenly begins to break up into myriads of twigs and leaves all pointing in different directions. So the seeker of knowledge finds that the great ‘Basic Laws’ which have always been so unshakeable, now begin to divide and to point in opposite directions. The scientist comes to the conclusion that he is nearing the limit of the knowledge which can be conceived by the mind and that all physical laws ultimately become purely statistical. When he has reached this point he can make further progress only by following a line of abstract mathematical reasoning. This is like travelling on a train in one of your subways. You will probably eventually arrive at your destination, but since you cannot see where you are going along the way, you have no way of being sure that there was not a much shorter and easier way to get to the same place. Your science is now in this position. For example, your scientist is now obliged to state that the electron is at the same time both a particle and a wave motion. They attempt to rationalize this by saying that the electron is a particle in a wave of probability. This is a condition which cannot be visualized by the mind and the only means of progress are through the subways of abstract mathematics.

“The fundamental truths are always simple and understandable when viewed from the proper perspective. So the branch becomes simple and understandable as a ‘branch’ when viewed from above on the main trunk. In short, what your science must do if it is to continue to progress, is to go back down the limb on which you are trapped to the point where it joins the main trunk and then start up again. This we can and will help your people to do, but only if they wish it and are able to follow the path which we will point out.”

“We are not here to assist any nation in making war but to stimulate a degree of progress which will eliminate the reasons for wars on Earth, even as we, some thousands of years ago eliminated the reasons for conflict among our own people.”

They are clearly having great success.

The voice described the craft as “a cargo carrier with remote control” having “a small passenger compartment with several seats which are plain but quite comfortable.” The voice specified, “I am not in this craft. I am in the central, or what you would call the ‘mother ship,’ which is at present some nine hundred miles above the surface of your planet.”

This is how Fry described his entry into the craft.

Then I heard a single click come from the surface of the ship, a small but sharp click such as might have come from the operation of a single arm relay or a small solenoid, and a portion of the hull just to my left, moved back upon itself for a distance of several inches and then moved sideways, disappearing into the wall of the hull, leaving an oval shaped opening about five feet in height and three feet wide. I moved over to the port or hatch, whichever it might be called, and ducking my head slightly, advanced into the opening. Because of the curvature of the hull of course, my head was inside the craft while my feet were still on the ground.

The compartment into which I was looking, occupied only a small portion of the ship’s volume. It was a room about nine feet deep and seven feet wide, with the floor about sixteen inches above the ground and the ceiling slightly over six feet above the floor. The walls were slightly curved and the intersections of the walls were bevelled so that there were no sharp angles or corners. Of course, the wall nearest me, through which the opening led, was the hull itself and had the same curvature inside and out. This wall was about four inches thick and it was into this wall that the door or hatch had been drawn. The room’s four seats resembled ‘body contour chairs’ except that they were somewhat smaller than the ones to which Fry was accustomed.

In the center of the rear wall, where it joined the ceiling, there was a box or cabinet with a tube and lens which resembled a small moving picture projector, except that there were no visible film spools or any other moving parts. Light was coming from this lens. It was not a beam of light such as would come from a moving picture projector but a diffused glow which, while it did not seem especially bright still furnished enough light for comfortable seeing.

The light changed to become a “viewing beam” that was a violet color. “The beam spread over the door, through which I had come, and the door disappeared . . . It was as though I were looking through the finest type of plate glass or lucite window.”

Fry provided an account of being taken to New York City and back in a period of approximately one half hour. He was able to view the light pattern of the city at night from about twenty miles up. When Fry inquired about the speaker’s name, the response indicated that the name ‘Alan’ “is nearly the same as my given name which is A-Lan.” One of the many surprising disclosures was: “. . . I ransacked your mind as perhaps no mind has ever been ransacked before. I think I can fairly say that I know much more about you than you know about yourself.”

At one point during the interlude Fry noticed “a simple design imprinted in the material of the seat . . .” Alan was then quoted as saying, “Oh, I see you have noticed the symbol and recognized its significance.”

“Yes,” I said. “Anyone who has ever read to any extent would recognize the symbol of the tree and the serpent. It is found in the original inscriptions and legends of every race on earth. It has always seemed to me to be a peculiarly earthly symbol and it was startling to see it appear from the depths of space or from whatever planet you call home.”

“These are things which I had hoped to put off until our next contact,” Alan said. “There is so much to tell and so little time. Our ancestors came originally from this earth. They had built a great empire and a mighty science upon the Continent which your legends call ‘Mu’ or ‘Lemuria.’ At the same time, there was also a great empire upon the Continent of Atlantis.

There is no Science behind Lemuria. It was an attempt to explain the propagation of Lemurs around the Pacific Rim. Some people proposed a vast sunken continent which once connected those disconnected islands and continents on which Lemurs can be found. Plate tectonics and evolution have long since replaced an idea that was of no particular value at its inception.

Because of its similarity to the story of Atlantis, it caught the public imagination. There is no evidence of such a place, renamed Mu by new agers because the supposed ancients would have had no reason to call their continent “Lemuria.”

“There was rivalry in science. Friendly at first, but becoming bitter with the years, as each nation flaunted its achievements in the face of the other. In a few centuries their science had passed the point of development which exists here now. Not content with releasing a few crumbs of the binding energy of the atom, as your physicists are doing now, they had learned to rotate entire masses upon the energy axis. Under the circumstances, it was inevitable that the two nations should eventually destroy each other, just as the two major nations of the earth of today are preparing to do.”

Typical Cold War era Sci Fi B-movie jargon. Found in Disney’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “This Island Earth,” and a dozen others. And a common message from the Astral Projectors (Projectiles? Projectites? Projectonauts?)

After leaving the craft, Fry recounted the craft’s departure.

The door had closed behind me and as I turned, a horizontal band of orange colored light appeared about the central part of the ship and it leaped upward as though it had been released from a catapult. The air rushing in to replace that which had been displaced upward, impelled me a full step forward and almost caused me to lose my balance. I managed to keep my eyes on the craft while the band of light went through the colors of the spectrum, from orange to violet. By this time it was several thousand feet in the air and as the light passed through the violet band the craft disappeared entirely from my sight.

First question:
I thought the craft repelled all matter so it had no friction moving through the atmosphere? Where did the vacuum effect come from?
Second question:
If I am mistaken about that (as an unbeliever like me certainly could be,) this is White Sands, New Mexico, that is to say, the desert. That much of an updraft would, with certainty, have raised a cloud of dust that would obscure his vision, not to mention likely leave andy living thing gasping for breath. Yet he describes nothing such to be the case.
I’m a nit picker.

A strong sense of depression settled over me then. I felt as though my work and my life had lost all of its significance. A few hours before, I had been a rather self-satisfied technician setting up instrumentation for the testing of one of the largest rocket motors ever built. While I realized that my part in the program was a small one, nevertheless I had felt as though I were at least travelling in the forefront of progress. Now I knew that the motor, even before it was tested, was pitifully obsolete. I was a small and insignificant cog in a clumsy and backward science, which was moving only toward its own destruction. For a long time I stood in the sand, looking from the crumpled path of brush up to the stars.

The White Sands Incident was published in a softcover edition by the New Age Publishing Co. of Los Angeles. More information about Daniel Fry is available at Sean Donovan’s danielfry.com, including free Internet editions of books by Fry, an audio interview of Fry with Ben Hunter (sixth on page), photographs, the complete contents of all editions of Fry’s Understanding newsletters, and a “Controversies” page.

Something that I have in common with Daniel Fry is that I spent much of my early life residing in Pasadena, California. Fry was brought to California in 1920 when his guardian was his maternal grandmother. He was married in Pasadena in 1934.

A video of a “1950s missile launch” at White Sands Proving Ground may be viewed here.

Hints of faith healing, hints of religiosity, hints of apocalypse but with just enough hope to keep going on. Its all there, an interesting story, despite its flaws. Possibly good for the read as a case study of human psychology, but I doubt little more. Certainly not evidence of visitation.