deClermont’s History of Gamma

It was the latter part of July l949.  I had lost the position where I had worked for the previous eight years and my new pursuit of selling Real Estate was doing poorly.  We owned a small farm and I worked it at night and on the one day a week that I had off from the business but the farm produce brought low returns for the effort expended.  Business in general was slow

Since I returned from military service my health had been poor and I reluctantly faced the prospect of extended ill health, probably for the rest of my life

My life was at low ebb that evening as I wandered around the farm under the stars.  I tried to correlate my thoughts and plans and considered many problems as I roamed through the fields.  The summer night was fine and clear, but the Cicadas were warning the countryside of an early autumn.

I was in one of those melancholy moods that had become an integral part of my life.  Cycles of depression would pass over me like clouds and they appeared to have no connection with specific incidents in my daily life.  My awareness of   these moods made them no easier to contend with and at such times my primary desire was for privacy.

As often happened during my solitary walks I finally found myself on the crest of the hill at the highest point of our farm.  As I stood there gazing at millions of twinkling stars the many recent reports of strange objects in the sky crossed my mind.  The fashionable attitudes on the subject ranged from amused tolerance to outright ridicule.

I was among the minority who patiently awaited further evidence, unwilling to disbelieve completely but unable to support our belief with tangible proof. I did not find it hard to believe that somewhere in the myriad of stars and planets were other inhabited worlds and beings with civilizations as advanced or probably more advanced than our own.

Considering approximately one hundred billion suns in our galaxy.  Any of these suns may have one or more planets in a solar system of their own.  It seems impossible in the face of this realization that only our infinitesimal planet contains life.

We must also acknowledge that, in spite of all our scientific advances, the world’s best kept secret is the origin of mankind.

For these reasons and many others I found it easy to accept the idea of beings on other celestial bodies who had acquired knowledge and accomplished scientific feats superior to our own.  Once this possibility is granted the probability is easy to accept.

There are many other scientific findings, which lend credence to the probability of extra terrestrial life such as the finding of fossils in meteoric iron by Otto Hahn, the Nobel Prize winning German chemist.

In this frame of mind and from my vantage point viewing the cloudless sky with its millions of visible stars, I wondered if these beings had solved all of their problems.  Since their mere presence in our skies proved that their scientific knowledge exceeded ours, had they found a way of life devoid of economic trouble and ill health?

It seemed logical that they must have advanced along sociological lines at a relatively similar rate to their scientific achievements and that they might have within their grasp the solutins to many of our problems.

I was not only concerned with my personal problems, for at that time there was considerable tension in all parts of the world.  Having gone through one major global war, the mere thought of another shocked me and I wondered if these people had a solution to this greatest problem of mankind.

I’d like to make it clear that I am not apologizing for my thoughts, nor rationalizing.  It is only through my complete frankness that the reader can understand my motivation for that which followed.

As a result of these speculations it occurred to me that our petty bickering a futile attempts at solving our problems might be obviated with the help of these people of the flying craft.  If we could only contact them it might solve many things.  Once the idea formed in my mind, I felt impelled to pursue it further.

As I stood there on the crest of the hill gazing over the vast multitude of heavenly bodies, conditions were conducive to complete concentration and mental isolation from all other things.  The location was extremely quiet, situated as we were in a rural section of New Jersey.  There was no sound to interrupt my train of thought except the occasional insects and night birds.

I considered the matter from all angles and tried to decide how one would manage to make contact with the inhabitants of a foreign celestial body or space ship.

Many factors complicated the idea, such as the language barrier, to mention the most obvious and probably the most insurmountable.