In 1954 Frances Swan, a housewife in Maine, began producing Automatic Writing attributed to entities named AFFA, said to reside on Uranus, and PONNAR. Both names had already appeared in George Hunt Williamson’s The Saucers Speak (1954). Her neighbour, a retired rear admiral, carried the material to officials, and Naval Intelligence and Air Force personnel interviewed her.
The episode reported in The Invisible College is the July 1959 sequel, in which intelligence officers, CIA representatives and a Naval Intelligence representative are described transcribing such messages themselves, asking to see a craft, and believing that they saw one, with a radar sector blocked at the same time. Jacques Vallee presents it as the reductio that his own field cannot dismiss, because the people taking dictation held clearances.
The sourcing needs stating plainly. The account traces to Major Robert Friend, then head of Project Blue Book, speaking on camera in the 1974 documentary UFOs: Past, Present and Future and in the accompanying book, rather than to any released document. No memorandum under this name appears in the CIA’s public UFO collection, the participating officers have never been named, and in Friend’s own telling the sighting was not corroborated. What survives independently is Donald Hanlon’s observation that in the Enochian language of John Dee’s angels, AFFA means “empty”.
Connections
Automatic Writing · Project Blue Book · Jacques Vallee · The Invisible College · Triple Coverup · Contactee Movement · Robert Friend