The Ufologists That Time Forgot: Wade Wellman

Manly Wade Wellman, Jr. was born November 13, 1939, the son of a giant, the noted fantasy and science fiction author Manly Wade Wellman. His father's work included contributing to magazines such as the legendary Weird Tales alongside H.P. Lovecraft,  C.L. Moore and Robert E. Howard. The son, instead of using his full name,  he went by Wade Wellman, perhaps to try to create his own identity and step out of his father's shadow.

Weird Tales, Nov. 1943

A Rising Star

1958, from his senior year at Chapel Hill High School

In the early 1960s as a college student, Wade Wellman had a serious interest in UFOs, and was an active member of the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena, (NICAP). He was passionate about the topic and corresponded as an advocate to promote Congressional hearings into the study of UFOs, writing to people and institutions such as US Congressmen and Time magazine.

NICAP's UFO Investigator, Oct. 1961

The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper for the University of North Carolina carried Wellman's series of articles on UFOs which included key case information and a discussion of the credible- and incredible literature on the topic- which he was very critical of. 

The Daily Tar Heel, Sept. 21, 1960

A Cyclopean amount has been written on flying saucers since the first modern reports in 1947. The balance of this is crackpot writing which gets most of the attention and deserves none of it. There is, for instance, George Adamski, who claims to have flown with people from Saturn. Or Frank Scully, who says the saucers are ships from Venus. Or Gerald Heard, who, in an undeservedly famous book entitled Is Another World Watching, credits the saucers to super bees from Mars. And, of course, there are always the perennial claims of personal contact with people or semihuman monsters from other worlds — and, perhaps worst of all, the ridiculous term "flying saucers," a hindrance to any real study. 

Yet, despite the flood of nonsense which seems deliberately calculated to rob the subject of thoughtful attention, there are innumerable people who have seen real UFO's (Unidentified Flying Objects) and who won't be duped by the crackpot writers, or by the hollow USAF denials, or by the sneer: "He says he saw a flying saucer." 

Archive of The Daily Tar Heel, with Wade Wellman's UFO columns.

Wellman took the topic seriously, and also wrote about the effort by NICAP and others to petition the US government to investigate the UFO matter more thoroughly. In a postscript to the series,  he wrote an article about his first visit to NICAP's office and his meeting with the director, Donald Keyhoe and assistant, Richard Hall.

NICAP was the conservative end of the saucer spectrum, but Wellman also wrote for the UK's Flying Saucer Review, which was far more tolerant of the kind of Contactee "crackpots" that he and NICAP thought were keeping the UFO topic on the marginal fringes. Wellman's articles were much more grounded, and despite his youth, his work was appearing alongside writers like John Keel and Jacques Vallée. His FSR articles included:

Extra-Solar UFOs, March-April 1962
The UFO Sledgehammer, Jan-Feb, 1963
Phobos and Deimos, May-June 1963
The Psychology of Scepticism, Sept-Oct. 1963
Two Types of Scepticism, May-June 1965 
Sense and Speculation, Sept-Oct. 1965

Another thing that shows Wellman's earnestness about to the UFO topic was his contentious correspondence with the notorious UFO skeptic and debunker, Harvard Astronomer, Dr. Donald Menzel. Among the UFO correspondence in Menzel's files, Wellman's letters are there alongside names like Hynek, Sagan and Keyhoe.

American Philosophical Society, Menzel's UFO papers

According to Michael Swords, the exchange was a running debate by mail, one of "barely controlled civility." Swords says, "Wade Wellman and Donald Menzel resorted to introducing their letters to one another with 'Dear Duck' and 'Dear Weedy, referencing Wellman smoking pot, after a few exchanges---Menzel started this 'upmanship' by the way." Wellman thought Menzel was in denial of the extraterrestrial reality. In his article, on Menzel, "The UFO Sledgehammer" in the Jan-Feb, 1963, Flying Saucer Review, Wellman wrote, 

"It seems regrettable that so great an astronomer cannot leave the door open wide enough to back out gracefully when the full truth emerges. If our first landings on the moon run up against alien bases, Dr. Menzel may find his position slightly embarrassing."

Menzel and Wellman shared another interest besides UFOs; their love of fantastic fiction. Menzel contributed the cover for the issue of Galaxy magazine that also featured Wellman's poem, "The Martian Surface." It was a collaboration of sorts. When Menzel introduced it elsewhere, he wrote, "The following sonnet, written at my suggestion by Wade Wellman, interprets Martian life as we may expect to find it."

Galaxy, Sept. 1969

Graduating college seems to have cut into Wellman's UFO research time, but also he had other interests including, literature, writing poetry, space exploration, vampires, fantasy and science fiction. His 1963 thesis for the University of North Carolina, was titled '"Literary Treatments of the Vampire." Wellman graduated from UNC in 1964 with a Master of Arts degree, and in 1965 he was an instructor in English at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point. In 1967, he was an English instructor at Boise College in Idaho, and he published a 131-page collection of his poetry, November Wind, from Golden Quill Press.

An awkward visit to the UK

In late 1966, Wellman visited the UK, and part of his trip there was for the purpose of examining UFO files. At his site devoted to writer John Keel, Doug Skinner published some information on Wellman's visit to the UK home of Charles Bowen of the FSR:

Many readers of The Mothman Prophecies will remember a disturbing “Man In Black” named “Tiny,” who visited a family in New Jersey in 1967. (It’s in Chapter 8, if you want to look it up.) John sent a detailed report of this encounter to other researchers shortly after it happened... One of these researchers, Charles Bowen (the editor of Flying Saucer Review), wrote back to say that Tiny reminded him of an unpleasant UFO buff who had visited him the year before.

Bowen's letter to Keel about the visit states: "In November I received a letter from Wade Wellman who announced that he was flying over to England to do research in the British Museum (checking on a manuscript about vampires!)." Wellman arrived on Dec. 10, 1966, and Bowen found the large young man to be very strange, both in appearance and behavior. "He often broke into poetry... reciting it as though he had learnt it computer fashion. He drank the best part of a bottle of my Martini & got himself well sloshed — & ranted on about poor misunderstood Hitler etc. etc... I thought he was a schizo." The next day, when Wellman finally got around to asking to see FSR's UFO files, Bowmen lied, saying they were at his office in order to get rid of him.

Apparently Wellman had not been able to afford the trip himself and it was financed by his parents. Sadly, this episode seems to show that there were serious problems early in his adult life.

Flying Saucers Farewell

The end of the 1960s was a rough time for the UFO business. As Don Berliner explained, in 1967, NICAP had about 14,000 members, but trouble was coming. Assistant Director Richard Hall left NICAP, and the negative conclusions by Dr. Edward Condon's University of Colorado study on UFOs paved the way for the closure of Project Blue Book.

Regarding Wellman's warning about finding alien bases on the moon, we don't know how he reacted to this cartoon, but it appeared in the newspaper above an editorial that set him off.

Pat Oliphant cartoon as published in the Dubuque Telegraph Herald, Jan. 17, 1969

The Iowa newspaper, the Dubuque Telegraph Herald, Jan. 17, 1969, carried an opinion piece by William Hines, "UFO Buffs Launch A Paperback Barb." Hines' key points:

• If a person is absolutely certain that John F. Kennedy's assassination was the work of a conspiracy, or that the earth is flat, or that flying saucers come from outer space, no study however scientific and no report however official will ever persuade him to the contrary. 

•  The other day (Donald) Keyhoe called a news conference at Washington's National Press Club to trumpet his objections to the Condon report and –  ever so incidentally – to plug a paperback book just published by a colleague.

•  Keyhoe's dissent to the Condon report was the usual farrago of insinuation allusions and almost -truths that reporters have grown accustomed to at NICAP press conferences.

• Leave the Keyhoes to the boob tube, the paperback shelves and the barbershop reading racks, and keep them out of the science classroom. Then perhaps we will all muddle through somehow after all.

The article caught Wellman's eye. He saw it as a "furious attack on Donald Keyhoe," and his scathing reply was printed four days later.

Dubuque Telegraph Herald, Jan. 21, 1969

Things didn't go Wellman's way. Don Berliner on how the Condon report heralded the end of an era:

"...public interest dissolved. NICAP's membership rolls shrank, the bank balance dwindled and operations had to be cut back. In the summer of 1969, with the membership already down below 8,000, there was a 50 percent cut in staff... The closing of the Air Force investigation seemed to have killed public interest." 

Donald Keyhoe, under pressure from the board of directors, resigned from NICAP.

Fantasy and Science Fiction

Wellman's UFO writing had trailed off in the 1960s, but into the 1970s, he wrote poetry, essays and stories for fantasy and science fiction magazines, much of it in the dark spirit of Weird Tales, while other poems looked to the wonders of outer space. His best-known work is the collaboration with his father on a series of Sherlock Holmes science fiction stories that pit the detective against H.G. Wells' Martian invaders from The War of the Worlds. In the resulting 1975 book, Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds, Wellman explained how the project came to be:

I suddenly began to ask myself—wondering, indeed, why I had never thought of it before—how Holmes might have reacted to H. G. Wells's Martian invasion. I determined to write a story on this subject and, since I am primarily a poet, felt obliged to ask for assistance. My father agreed to collaborate, suggesting that another Doyle character, Professor Challenger, be included. Our collaboration, "The Adventure of the Martian Client," was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for December, 1969.

The magazine introduced Wellman as "a published poet who is presently professor of English at Clarke College (Iowa)." The first story was followed in March 1972, by "Venus, Mars, and Baker Street," and a third in May 1975, "Sherlock Holmes Versus Mars." With those three stories and some additions and revisions, it was published in September of 1975 by Warner Books.

Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds had mixed reviews, and the Wilson Library Bulletin called it a "collision of Baker Street and outer space," but the premise alone captured the imagination of many readers around the world. The book was translated and published abroad,  and more recently, reprinted as The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: War of the Worlds in 2009. The book made a lasting impression. It can be said that The War of the Worlds was the first UFO story, so it's fitting that Wellman called in the ultimate detective to investigate on the case.

His Last Bow

Wade Wellman seems to have dropped out of Ufology about the time NICAP withered, but he was heard from again about twenty years later, in a call to CUFOS. Jerome Clark, UFO historian, wrote, 

"I spoke with him on the phone once, probably in the early 1990s, when I was at the Center for UFO Studies office in Chicago researching my UFO Encyclopedia. Wellman called... He told me he was living in Milwaukee and working... I knew who he was — he wrote some essays for FSR, and I was aware he was Manly Wade’s son — and I recalled Charles Bowen’s story, which he’d related to me not long after the notorious encounter. So I was on my guard. Wellman seemed normal enough, however. I don’t recall much of the substance of the conversation, except that one point he expressed admiration for Donald Keyhoe’s prose."

There's more than a hint that Wellman suffered from some mental health and chemical dependency problems, but it's not clear just when it all began. The 1960s were a tumultuous time that included a lot of young people radically experimenting with drugs and sex, and it's worth noting that few stories about dark poets have happy endings. Wade had a troubled relationship with his parents, and reportedly, treated them horribly. Apparently, the Wellmans loved Wade and continued to support him financially, but disapproved of his personal life. 

Wade's father died in 1986, and his mother Frances died in 2000. In a tribute to Manly Wade Wellman, fantasy fiction scholar Steven R. Trout wrote that, "Manly’s own son Wade seems likely to have been a disappointment to him, as David Drake reports he was living in a 'charity hostel' because of substance abuse issues at the time of his mother’s death." 

A Postscript

When the first Holmes vs the Martians story appeared in the Dec. 1969 Fantasy and Science Fiction, it included an epilogue by Wade Wellman, "A Postscript by the Junior Collaborator." He described how he concieved the idea for the story, but his final two paragraphs touched on the UFO topic.

The depth and magnitude of Wells's idea is increasingly relevant as the years go by. It seems to me that the UFO's may well represent a technology as far above human civilization as we are above the communities of jungle animals. Their observations of the earth might be likened to a zoological team observing zebras in the jungle. Again, a human being watching a UFO hover in the air may be in the position of a baboon watching a hovering helicopter. I strongly suspect that this is the case. But, whatever the reality behind the UFO's may be, I feel that our emergence into space must inevitably, at some time, bring us into contact with "minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish," to quote again from Wells's own text. We must not refuse this challenge, but even so I am disturbed by the efforts now being made to signal other worlds. Years ago an unnamed space scientist was quoted as saying that, to certain alien races, we might be "the finest beef animals." He knew his H. G. Wells, and that his warning was unheeded is a reproach to the poor alertness of his colleagues.

In any case, the conquest of space and the UFO surveillance are the beginning of events which will broaden our horizons tremendously, whatever their final outcome. It is for this reason that every thinking person should study Wells's original idea and apply its significance and implications to our own time.

-WADE WELLMAN  

The later version published introducing the Holmes book dropped all references to UFOs.

Wellman had recommended the writing of Otto O. Binder (science fiction, comic book and UFO author) in his angry 1969 reply to the Dubuque Telegraph Herald, and Binder dedicated his 1972 historical fiction novel, The Forgotten Colony, "To Wade Wellman for the new light he shone on Benedict Arnold and his military genius."  Binder remembered him again in another book. Mankind: Child of the Stars was a 1974 non-fiction book exploiting the "Ancient Astronauts" fad. It carried an introduction by Erich Von Daniken, with his name appearing on the cover above that of the authors, Max H. Flindt and Otto O. Binder. A poem by Wellman opens the book, possibly his last published words on the UFO subject.

To the Authors 

We search with humbled thoughts and reeling brains 

For stellar footprints, cosmic legacy, 

For signs of visitors from distant lanes 

Who bred this race in dim prehistory, 

And wonder if these watchers of the earth, 

These strange observers from a stranger port, 

Evolved us from the brutes to foster mirth, 

Created us in fancy and in sport. 

The mighty structures of a dateless age 

That hold their stories thoughtfully concealed 

May still become an open lamplit page 

In which these riddles show themselves revealed; 

And we, who strive to open and to rob 

The secrets, face the laughter of the mob. 

                                                      – WADE WELLMAN

Captured Flying Saucers: The North Hollywood Disc, July 10, 1947

July 10, 1947, The News-Palladium from Benton Harbor, Michigan reported an Associated Press wire story:

North Hollywood, Calif., July 10 - A saucer-shaped mechanical contraption, resembling a chicken-brooder top with a few gadgets added, was found in a geranium bed at the home of construction engineer Russell Long last night and the first official reaction was from Fire Battalion Chief

Wallace E. Newcombe, who looked at it skeptically, and said:
"It doesn't look to me like it could fly."
Long called the Van Nuys fire department and excitedly pointed to the metal saucer, 30 inches in diameter, which he said had been belching smoke from two exhaust pipes and emitting a blue-white glare.

The Southeast Missourian, July 10, 1947

The Federal Bureau of Investigation had a look at the device:

FBI file begins at page 60 of this PDF.

This news stories shows that Russell Long's discovery of a counterfeit disc was just one of many in the first few weeks of 1947's flying saucer fever.

San Bernardino Sun, July 11, 1947

"Among the many "hoax' saucers was this fraud found in a North Hollywood yard. It was made of galvanized iron, a radio tube, a piece of pipe."  Saturday Evening Post, May 7, 1949 

Fire Battalion Chief Wallace E. Newcombe, "It doesn't look to me like it could fly."

PROJECT 1947 - Saturday Evening Post - May 7, 1949 
"What You Can Believe About Flying Saucers" 

The object was determined to be of Earthly origin, but the identity of the hoaxer was not determined, so in that regard, the case remains unsolved.

As with so many of the most interesting UFO cases featured here at The Saucers That Time Forgot, Project Blue Book has no file on this incident.

Gen. Curtis LeMay on UFOs over Ancient Egypt

General Curtis LeMay was a larger than life figure who rose to prominence through his command of bombers in the second World War, and and afterwards for his development of the United States’ armed warfare during the Cold War. For an overview of his military career, see the biography at the Air Force’s site. 

Time, Sept 4, 1950

To UFO buffs, Gen. LeMay is best known for his role in the anecdote that Senator Barry Goldwater told. Here’s a version of it in a Goldwater letter from April 22, 1980. 

Many years ago when I first heard that the Air Force was putting together what materials they could on the on a unidentified flying objects, I asked General Curtis Lemay if I might visit the room at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where these items are stored. He told me in no uncertain terms that I could not visit it and, furthermore, that he could not visit it either. After that I just left it alone and forgot about it. However, I believe that the material has now been spread around into different archives of the Air Force.   (File 1980-3 at PresidentialUFO.com) 

By 1994, the story was expanded to include Goldwater wanting to know about a captured alien spaceship.

“I called Curtis LeMay and I said, ‘General, I know we have a room at Wright-Patterson where you put all this secret stuff. Could I go in there?’ I’ve never heard him get mad, but he got madder’n Hell at me, cussed me out, and said, ‘Don’t ever ask me that question again!’” Larry King show, 19994, CNN

The Horse's Mouth

Second-hand stories are not as good as direct quotes, but over his many years of service, Gen. LeMay didn't say much about UFOs. What little he did say is worth looking at carefully. An indirect, but on-the-record passage from Saturday Evening Post,  May 7, 1949 “What You Can Believe About Flying Saucers” (Conclusion) by Sidney Shalett:

“Lt. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, now the tough-minded Strategic Air Command boss, was particularly rough on saucer reports when he headed up the Air Force's research-and-development program at the height of the scare. He put his weather expert on the trail, and substantial proof was uncovered that one out of six of the then current crop of reports could be traced to a certain type of aluminum-covered radar-target balloon then in wide use. LeMay said nothing for publication, but soon thereafter, when a certain lieutenant colonel gave out a lulu of a story on how he, too, had seen flying saucers, the general rebuked him blisteringly by telegram ... and sent, it collect.”

Remarks at a Rodeo

Two military celebrities were invited as guest of honor to festivities in Tucson, Arizona, Curtis LeMay and General Roger Ramey, famous in ufology for being involved in a 1947 New Mexico flying saucer misidentification case.

LeMay, (L) and Ramey

Tucson Daily Citizen, Saturday, February 25, 1950 Page 7, 
Top Officers Of Air Force Tucson Guests 

Two of the U. S. air force's top officers, Lt. Gen. Curtis E, LeMay and Maj. Gen. Roger M. Ramey, fly into Tucson today for a week end as special guests of Davis-Monthan base and the Tucson Chamber of Commerce... High lights of their visit include... a box of honor at La' Fiesta de los Vaqueros (Tucson Rodeo) Sunday afternoon.” 

La' Fiesta de los Vaqueros 

Eight years later, a comment made that weekend by Gen. LeMay on flying saucers was resurrected, in a story titled, "Maybe There Is A Santa Claus?" Summarized here from Loren Gross' UFOs: A History 1958 March - April:

The Arizona Daily Star printed: "When, in an interview here in Tucson, Sen. Barry Goldwater said he believed in flying saucers, he presumed something that his boss in the Air Force, Deputy Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis Le May, former chief of the Strategic Air Force, once denied in an interview in Tucson a few years ago. At that time, when General Le May was asked if he thought there was such a thing as flying saucers, his answer to the Arizona Daily Star was: 'Of course I do, they were first discovered by the Egyptians more than 2,000 years ago.' He then went on to explain that every incident of flying saucers had been investigated by the Air Force, and that in each case a reasonable explanation was found that discredited completely the existence of any such things as flying saucers." (Arizona Daily Star, April 11, 1958)

That is one of the most confusing articles we’ve ever seen on UFOs, but further research reveals it to be a seriously mangled misquote of what LeMay had said. Closer to the truth is the Associated Press story run at the time in the Arizona Republic, Monday, February 27, 1950, Page 4, and rerun the next day, Tuesday, Feb. 28, 1950,  Page 12

 Gen. Curtis LeMay, asked what he thought about flying saucers, replied: 

"The best information in my opinion on them is to be found in a book written by an Englishman explaining numerous such mysteries. He says that the first flying saucers were seen in Egypt about the year 3,000 B. C."

The article closes with some more of his comments, clarifying his position:

LeMay said the air force took the matter seriously enough to make a thorough scientific investigation at Wright Field, Dayton, O. This investigation, he said, showed that there was some other explanation, like a weather balloon or a meteor, where the witnesses were telling the truth. "And," he added, "some other witnesses were just lying in giving their testimony.”

Arizona Republic, Feb. 28, 1950

Interesting quote, but despite the fact that almost any mention of saucers was newsworthy, it didn’t catch on at the time. 

LeMay wasn’t prepared for a press conference, and may have just been speaking of the top of his head. There were no (non-fiction) books published on flying saucers until later in 1950, and it was even later before skeptical ones appeared. It’s most likely he used he used the phrase “flying saucer” in the generic context as an aerial anomaly. However, the “explaining such mysteries” part is odd, too, since most books on weird things were more about exploitation than explanation.

Major Donald Keyhoe's famous article "The Flying Saucers are Real" in TRUE Magazine dated January 1950 suggested that saucers had been coming here for centuries, and that was evidence they were real, spacecraft here to observe us.

"... True found that such reports have been recorded for more than 175 years... Advocates of the 'long observation' theory believe that only a few round trips by space visitors have been made in the past, because of the travel time required."

LeMay's quote seems intended to say just the opposite, that people have been seeing unknown things in the sky since at least as far back as 3,000 B.C., meteors, comets and other natural occurrences. LeMay was saying, the flying saucers are not real.

Whose Book did LeMay cite?

The last part of LeMay's remarks about the Air Force saying there was standard policy, but not the part about Egypt. There's no reference in the Project Blue Book files to anything similar. What book? “ ... written by an Englishman explaining numerous such mysteries.”

There was a piece in a 1947 science fiction magazine published by Ray Palmer that connected Egypt with saucers. It's an interesting footnote, but not connected to LeMay's comment. The artwork for the story carried the blurb, "Will the ancient gods of Egypt and other lost civilizations come back in time to avert an atom war?" From "Son of the Sun." by Millen Cooke (as Alexander Blade) illustrated by James Settles.

Fantastic Adventures Vol.9. No.7. November 1947. 

Egypt? Many early flying saucer articles looked back a few centuries comparing other aerial mysteries to saucers, and a few even connected them to the Bible, like the wheel described in the Book of Ezekiel. In fact, that's the only reference to ancient times in Edward J. Ruppelt,'s 1956 on the AF's investigation, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects:

"Did UFO reports actually start in 1947? We had spent a great deal of time trying to resolve this question. Old newspaper files, journals, and books that we found in the Library of Congress contained many reports of odd things being seen in the sky as far back as the Biblical times. The old Negro spiritual says, 'Ezekiel saw a wheel 'way up in the middle of the air.' We couldn't substantiate Ezekiel's sighting because many of the very old reports of odd things observed in the sky could be explained as natural phenomena that weren't fully understood in those days."

Asking around, I've gotten a number of suspects, but most authors didn't fit the timing; only books published prior to Feb. 1950 could work. What follows are the best candidates located that remain as possibilities.

Rupert T. Gould, author of Oddities and Enigmas is a strong candidate. He's British, the topic and time fits, and it's plausible that LeMay would actually have read this author. There seems to be nothing on Egyptian "saucers," though. Gould writes about the “Canals on Mars,” but otherwise about the closest he gets to UFOs is a discussion of the Tunguska event in the chapter, “The Siberian Meteorite,” of his book, The Stargazer Talks.

R. DeWitt Miller's Forgotten Mysteries was out in early 1947, and can almost be considered the first UFO book, with its chapter “Enigmas Out of Space.” It told of aerial apparitions from centuries past, but it featured none over Egypt, and Miller was an American. The book was cited in the media in connection with the flying saucer mystery and helped lay the foundation for the ancient astronaut notions.

Charles Fort? Not English, not explaining mysteries, but a good possibility. Fort’s books contain many accounts of UFO-type stories, but most of those were collected from newspaper accounts, not ancient history or legends. LeMay could have been familiar with Fort, though, even if it was second-hand. We know the Air Force examined Fort’s works, even though their astronomer, J. Allen Hynek, regarded them as "highly dubious."

https://www.fold3.com/image/1/11885611

Gould, Miller, and Fort are the top three candidates for the "Englishman" with Egyptian saucers, but none quite match.  Searching for the book has stumped the experts so far. Besides searching individual volumes, databases and newspaper archives and the project published in 1969 to assist the government's Condon Committee's UFO studies was also consulted. UFOs and Related Subjects: An Annotated Bibliography, which the Library of Congress describes as "Compiled by Lynn E. Catoe of the Library's Science and Technology Division, the bibliography was produced with support provided by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, a unit of the Office of Aerospace Research, the research agency of the U. S. Air Force." It's a great source to locate early saucer literature, but no matches were found. (Link to the PDF of Catoe's bibliography.

Joshua Blu Buhs of the Fortean history blog From an Oblique Angle suggests Rupert T. Gould as the best fit, but with a dash of imagination from LeMay: "...I'll bet that LeMay conflated what Gould wrote with other stuff in the papers--there had been a number of articles mentioning flying saucers that might date back for centuries." That's possible, or LeMay may have been confusing the writings of Rupert T. Gould and Charles Fort. 

Saucers in ancient Egypt would later enter ufology in 1953 by way of a hoax, a fleet of “fire circles” described in the “Tulli Papyrus.” The tale surfaced in the Fortean journal, Doubt, and was assimilated into saucer lore, included in Desmond Leslie and George Adamski’s Flying Saucers Have Landed.

Conclusively identifying Gen. LeMay’s source may not bring us any closer to solving the UFO mystery, but it’s interesting to know what literature influenced the thinking of the leaders in charge of the US Air Force. 

If this unidentified volume is not already included in the bibliography of important Fortean and UFO books, it deserves to be. If you can help clear up the identity of LeMay's the mystery book, please send us a note at The Saucers That Time Forgot.

https://www.fold3.com/image/1/12427804

 Epilogue

Popular Science, January 1966 article, “Why I Believe In Flying Saucers” by MacKinlay Kantor. It contains an excerpt from the book he co-authored with Gen. LeMay, Mission with LeMay: My Story. Comparing it with his 1950 comments, it seems clear that while he may not have believed in the reality of flying saucers, he didn't think all the people who reported seeing them were kooks.

Popular Science, Jan. 1966
http://www.nicap.org/waves/1966PSWhyIBelieve.pdf

For more history and speculation on the role of General Curtis E. LeMay in the UFO story, see the 2012 book, UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry.

A big STTF thanks to all that offered help and suggestions in fielding suspects, especially researchers Barry Greenwood, Martin Kottmeyer, Clas Svahn , Jason Colavito, and Joshua Blu Buhs.

P.S.  Some early suspects that have been eliminated:

The Flying Saucer by Benard Newman, 1948. n Englishman, and the topic is right, but the book is fiction and there's nothing about ancient UAPs. Notable for being the first flying saucer book, however, it's a thriller about a hoaxed invasion by scientists manipulating peace on Earth.

Worlds in Collision by Immanuel Velikovsky. This crackpot book does mention as the planet Venus as a comet in ancient Egypt, but it's unlikely reading material for LeMay, and eliminated for being published in April 1950, two months after his comments.

The Riddle of the Flying Saucers: is Another World Watching? by Gerald Heard was published in the UK in 1950, but not in the US until 1951.  It's also missing the crucial Egypt material.

Harold T. Wilkins was English, wrote several sensational "non-fiction" about pirate treasures, lost civilizations and Atlantis (before turning to saucers in 1954). He would be just the sort to connect Egypt to aerial wonders like flying saucers, but no contemporary text doing so has been located.