PLANES AND SAUCERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 891, 31 August 1956, Page 14

PLANES AND SAUCERS

THE MOUCHOTTE DIARIES, by Rene Mouchotte; Staples Press, English price 15 /-. REPORT ON UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS, by Edward J. Ruppelt; Victor Gollancz, English price 18/-. AWNS may be politely stifled at the mention of yet another book of fighter-pilot memoirs. Has this Rene

Mouchotte really anything to add to the long tally of reminiscences-some agonisingly alive, some tongue-tied to trivialities? The book says nothing new, indeed. But it’s a superbly unconscious self-portrait of a rare man. Mouchotte had no Gallic cynicism" but a burning, single-minded passion for the freedom and the glory of France. Naked patriotism shocks us, the self-conscious British, but the Latins see no shame in it. Mouchotte wore no mask of flippancy or disillusionment. The measure of his skill and personality is that he was the first Allied airman chosen to command a purely British squadron, and he went on to command a purely French fighter wing, and to meet his death in 1943 lading it into action. This was the end he had foreseen, calmly and without dismay. I rank this book as equal to Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy as the best personal record of this aspect of the air war. Mouchotte’s grimness and glory are queer contrasts to the comic extravaganza of America under the shadow of the Flying Saucer. From 1951-53 Mr. Ruppelt was Head of the American Air Force Organisation set up to investigate the Saucers, and the gist of his message is that about 20 per cent of the Saucer reports from trustworthy witnesses defied all the efforts of scientists and intelligence men to explain them by natural causes. But bitter attacks on the moguls of the Pentagon and on his predecessors in the investigation, coupled with a strident note of hysteria throughout the book, suggest that Mr. Ruppelt was a bad choice for the job, The book is shoddy reading, but it contains one point of interest and hope for the roman-tically-minded, A symposium of leading American scientists, after discussing the unexplainable «reports, refused to sav that visitations from outer space could be dismissed as "impossible." To those of us who cherish a wild belief in the little space-hobgoblins this is encourag-

ing.

G. C. A.

Wall