1956:

Audiences fill two rooms at the Vancouver Art Gallery, spilling out into the hallway, and taking up every available seat and space, as the Vancouver area Flying Saucer club plays host to Daniel W. Fry, “the man who touched a flying saucer.”

“A room was reserved for 150,” the Vancouver Sun reports, “but half an hour before his lecture began the crowd overflowed into a second room and into the halls. People shared chairs, sat on the floor, jammed into every inch of standing space.”

Fry, a former explosives supervisor at the infamous White Sands Proving Ground, claims to have been contacted on multiple occasions by an extraterrestrial creature named Alan (pronounced “A-Lawn”), who shared with him information of physics, the history of civlization, as well as the secrets of Atlantis and Lemuria.

“It was the evening of July 4, 1950, when a flying saucer whisked him from the desert to New York,” the Sun reports. “He had just missed the bus that was tot take him to Las Cruces with the rest of the campt to see a fireworks display. The trip to New York and back took 30 minutes. He was in bed before the other men returned to White Sands.”

Fry, who has published a book about his experiences, shown a number of 16mm films of his UFO encounters, and enjoyed considerable fame as a result of “The White Sands Incident,” will go on to create “Understanding, Inc,” an organization dedicated to “preparing [humans] for their inevitable meetings with other races from space”, and spearhead the fledgling “contactee” movement.

However, Fry will also fail a lie-detector test about the incident, and subsequent analysis of his amateur films will prove them to be faked. He will eventually retire to Alamogordo, receiving a “Doctorate of Cosmism” from a mail-order company in London.

“The stocky associate of men of outer space told this tale with a straight face Thursday night,” the Sun reports. “Not one person in the crowd that jammed two rooms in the Art Gallery laughed. They didn’t even smirk.”

 

IMAGE: Construction of the Vancouver Courthouse (now the Vancouver Art Gallery), circa 1907. Image Courtesy of the Vancouver Archives.