Lift Off
“The seeing that is believing and the believing that is seeing make of the world we make for ourselves a haunted habitation. We are remarkably adept at believing what we have never seen — and at seeing what we have come to believe.”
Wendell Johnson, Your Most Enchanted Listener
In 1953 a CIA panel met to review evidence for UFOs and to consider possible dangers to US national security. As a 13 year old, I was sure UFO’s were hovering over our neighborhood, and spent time scanning the sky hoping one might land nearby. Exploring the fields and hills around my house at night, away from streetlights, I turned off my flashlight, looked up and waited patiently. After an hour or so looking at the stars, I trudged home. One evening after returning, I read in a science magazine that starlight traveling 186,000 miles a second can take many years to get from a star to the earth. I wondered how stars could be so far away?
Even more bothersome to me, the article said many of the stars I saw weren’t there anymore. Their starlight was emitted so long ago that by the time it reached my eyes, some of them had burned out or moved to different places in the sky. So the starlight I saw was light from the past. All this was strange and fantastic in my mind. If it was true, then the universe was an incomprehensible place. Anything might be possible. If I couldn’t believe my eyes, then what was real? With a seemingly infinite number of stars and other worlds in outer space I also believed what I heard on the radio, saw on television and at the movies. There were alien beings from other planets flying around observing earth. If the CIA was concerned, so was I.
My comic book heroes at the time were Superman, Superboy and Captain Marvel, who could fly by spreading their arms and jumping into the air. I wanted to fly as well, not in an airplane, but all by myself like my superheroes. Superman could fly “faster than a speeding bullet” and I wondered how fast that was. Reality and fancy were then not completely separate for me, even at 13.
To fly I knew I’d need some sort of machine because I was an avid reader of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines which had many articles about such devices. Being ignorant of the history of flight however, I was doomed to repeat many documented failures of the past. I tried attaching somewhat contrived “wings” to my bike and pedaling down a steep hill as fast as I could, but it didn’t get me off the ground even an inch. The left “wing” just came off and I fell and scraped my knees. I climbed up on our very low roofed garage with makeshift glider wings like canopies on my arms and repeatedly jumped off. (I put a mattress on the driveway as a cautionary tactic.) I didn’t actually think I’d be able to fly, but hoped to at least glide a little. I dropped like a rock on every jump, eventually spraining my ankle.
Even though it was four years before Russia launched the world’s first satellite and many years before space travel became routine, I knew that in outer space, one could float. I wanted to get up there to do just that. I made many drawings of space ships that had metal floors and the occupants wore magnetic shoes to allow them to walk clumsily around. But they could float from place to place if they took off their shoes. Dozens of these drawings were pinned to the walls of my room.
All the homemade flying machines described in Popular Mechanics and Popular Science were too complex, and my interest shifted to balloons, blimps, and kites. I was an avid kite flyer, but saw no way of flying by myself using a kite. Parasails didn’t exist in the early 50s, and wouldn’t be available until 1961. But there was a war surplus store in downtown Redwood City that was my favorite place to buy odds and ends with my allowance and other money I earned working in the neighborhood. It’s where I would buy the broken Geiger Counter, compass, knife and canteen for my atomic war survival kit that I made when Kruschev was banging his shoe at the UN promising to bury the USA. In 1953 the surplus store sold weather balloons that had expired – they were too old to be used. When inflated they were about the size of a small one car garage. I spent a good deal of the money I had saved and bought four of them and then took up a collection among my friends and purchased helium in a returnable tank. The plan was to fill up all four balloons and attach them to the lightest aluminum lawn chair we could find, sit in it, and simply float above the neighborhood. I could feel myself up there, looking down on the roofs of houses.
I didn’t really think carefully about what we were doing and my high school physics didn’t help much with our plans. A little reflection would have made it obvious that four large weather balloons filled with helium wouldn’t lift a boy, and probably only a very light lawn chair. I think I had a notion of this but it really didn’t matter. I had to try. I wanted so badly to fly, or at least run holding on to those four helium filled balloons and leap into the air like my comic book heroes. Even if I slowly floated back to the ground, it would be enough of a thrill. That seemed a possibility.
The afternoon arrived for our first flight. We had to wait for a calm windless day, and when it came we assembled in a field with our balloons, the chair and the helium tank. We filled one balloon. It was rather unwieldy to handle because of its size and I was disappointed not to feel even a little bit lighter when I held onto the cord we’d tied on the end. We continued with hope however, and inflated all of them and tied them to the chair. It lifted off the ground, but then came back down. Then it went up a few feet, and then came back down again. Clearly it wasn’t going to work if we sat in the chair. Disappointed, I took all the balloons and held the cords in my hand and jumped up. I came right down and the balloons bounced around above me. I didn’t get the feeling of weightlessness that I’d hoped for. Our dreams of flying were dashed on the spot.
Glumly we sat around wondering what to do. I had the idea of attaching a camera and somehow triggering it to take pictures above the clouds so I could see what it would have looked like if I’d flown, but I couldn’t figure out how to do this and get my camera back. So instead we attached four plastic covered messages explaining our experiment, one to each of the balloons, with my address on each, asking anyone who found it to send it back to us and tell where they lived. Then we let them go. Those huge balloons went up very fast and we watched and watched until they turned into tiny spots and went through the clouds. It was like a rocket launching. We felt we’d accomplished something, even if we didn’t fly. It would have to be sufficient. Now we would wait.
In the next week I anxiously checked the mail for a response from some exotic place in South America or Australia where I hoped at least one balloon message had come down. Nothing appeared. After three weeks it seemed clear that nothing would come, and then it did. It didn’t come from an exotic place as I wished, but from San Antonio Texas. Someone had found our message attached to the remains of a burst balloon and had returned it to us, telling us exactly where and when they found it. I was most excited and couldn’t wait to tell my friends who had helped in the launch. We hadn’t been able to fly, but our message did fly a very long distance. I calculated carefully and found it had traveled over 1,700 miles. We were astonished. I carefully wrote a reply thanking the individual who had sent the information to us, and again began to look for more popular science magazine articles on personal flying machines. If a balloon could go the distance, I reasoned that I should, somehow, be able to get up and go at least a few hundred feet in the air.
It was easier to fantasize about flying than actually doing it, so I spent much time at the movies. I enjoyed the Buck Roger’s weekly serialized films on weekends at a theater downtown, and was only slightly discouraged by the wires I could see holding up the rocket ships that Larry “Buster” Crabb flew around in. The movie Destination Moon (1953) had a spaceship that appeared like those described in Robert A. Heinlein’s early books about spacecraft and I was a Heinlein fan. Many films in the 50’s were about aliens, spaceships and flying saucers and “War of the Worlds,” H.G. Wells story about a Martian invasion fascinated me. All these films fused my interests in flying with my interests in creatures from outer space. My belief in the reality of flying saucers became more certain, even though I’d never seen one. 
In 1955 I began launching my own rockets made from kits I bought at the hobby store. Most of the motors for these were single-use engines, with cardboard bodies and lightweight molded ceramic nozzles, which had black powder motors that we ignited with a battery and an electrical connection from a distance. The propellant could be very brittle and develop hairline fractures which sometimes causes the propellant to burn much more quickly than it should, causing the motor to explode. We had to stand some distance away when setting these off. But it was thrilling to see them shoot skyward so rapidly when they worked.
I made my own rocket plane by fitting one of my airplane models with a carrier for small carbon dioxide cartridges that my parents used to make seltzer from plain water. These charging seltzer bottles were common in the 50’s. I punctured the back of the cartridge in my rocket plain with a hammer and nail, and sent the model shooting across our back yard on an attached wire. I tried other ways of propelling it as well, including gunpowder I obtained by cutting open hundreds of firecrackers purchased in San Francisco’s Chinatown. I also ground up match heads that I sliced off several boxes of matches with a razor blade. Unfortunately, some of these efforts ended up causing terrible explosions that damaged my hearing. But my interest in making rocket fuels remained unabated. It wouldn’t end until I was about 23 years old and got to see first hand what would happen when a real rocket blew up.
I thought I might detect an alien civilization sending signals to earth and built a long antenna, which went from one side of the house to the other. I nailed a two foot wooden support at each end of the roof peak, i.e., on both sides of the house, and then strung a piece of heavy copper wire from one to the other. I put glass insulators between the wood and the wire, right near each support. The result was a 40 foot wire across the roof, insulated by glass at each end. I attached a drop wire, covered in insulation, to the end of the antenna nearest my bedroom and led it down the side of the house to my room window. Pulling it through the window I attached it to my crystal set. It was my own personal search for extra terrestrial life. The result was spectacular I thought! Though I didn’t know where the stations were coming from, listening on my headset, I heard hundreds of foreign languages, music, short wave signals and pulsing noises coming from, I knew, very far away. Of course I wanted to hear other worlds in distant galaxies, but I wouldn’t have known one if I heard it. My father didn’t like the looks of my antenna on top of his house, but he let it stay there.
I graduated from high school in 1957 the same year that the Soviet Union launched Sputnick. It was an exciting time for me because the space race was on and the government was pouring money into science and science education. I went to college and got a degree in chemistry about four years later and in 1962 had an immediate job offer from Aerojet General Corporation in Sacramento where I would become a research and development chemist in a solid rocket propellant lab. I would finally get to make real rocket fuel. Aerojet at the time was the free world’s largest site for rocket engine development, testing, and production. It’s still there today as Aerojet’s headquarters and site of missile and space propulsion operations.
In the short time I worked there in the early 1960’s the era of space exploration began in earnest. It was a time of intense activity and excitement with Aerojet rockets eventually propelling Gemini missions into space and Aerojet’s Apollo Space Propulsion System placing astronauts in orbit around the moon and bringing them home again. I worked on propellant for the 220 inch solid rocket that was a contender for part of the propulsion system for the first moon launch and I also worked in the Polaris and Minuteman programs as well. The 220 inch solid rocket never became a reality because the propellant, just like the propellant in my models, had a tendency to form cracks. But smaller solid rockets and boosters became mainstays in the space program.
My job at Aeroject was to mix experimental batches of rocket propellant and test them for their mechanical properties and burning rate. The propellant itself was gray and had an oatmeal like consistency. We poured it into ice cream cartons and cured it in hot ovens out on the grounds of the plant where it slowly became a rubbery stretchable solid. When it was completely cured it would be cut into pieces and the testing could begin.
The mixing took place by remote control behind protective shields. The larger batches of 60 or more pounds were done in bread mixers. We would add the ingredients to the mixer in the appropriate sequence and then retreat to a bunker with a remote video camera where we could watch, and then turn on the mixer. Every so often we’d turn it off, go in, open the container and scrape down the sides of the chamber with special non sparking spatulas made of beryllium. It got to be routine and repetitive, I didn’t get to choose my projects, and it was more hazardous than I realized. In the labs and the field we were in contact with rocket propellant all day long and though rare, occasionally there were accidents. If a large amount of material exploded, the result was devastating. Even a one pound batch could cause terrible damage. I was near both large and smaller incidents and saw the ambulance and the wounded.
These events were enough to prompt me to leave Aeroject in 1964 and return to graduate school at the University of California where I got a Ph.D. in 1967. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Dundee in Scotland, I came to the University of Vermont as an assistant professor of Chemistry in 1969. My fascination with rockets and outer space ended in the 1970’s as I had new interests in organic and medicinal chemistry and developed these in a more formal academic environment.
On sabbatical leave from the university in 1982, I finally saw my first flying saucer. I was living then in a Middle Eastern city on the edge of a desert. Sitting out on the balcony of our apartment late one night looking out over barren rock and sand, I spotted a bright saucer shaped, lighted object hovering about a half mile over the desert. In a few minutes it was joined by two more, and they moved together about a half mile to the right and then up higher where they seemed stationary. I got out my camera and started taking pictures with the lens set to stay open to catch the weak light. I took two whole rolls of film, and I wasn’t the only one to be amazed. My neighbors came out on their balconies to look and take pictures as well. The objects stayed there over 40 minutes before they disappeared. I was told the next day that what I had seen the night before was probably military night maneuvers using flares. I suppose that’s likely, but I want to believe otherwise. So I will.
My teenage years were an exciting time in my life. I’m glad I got through them with most of my faculties intact. My imagination and curiosity had free rein then. There seemed no limit to what I could try to do or imagine. Nothing seemed impossible, even defying gravity. This freedom and breathing space vanished when I went to college, graduated, and finally went to work at the university. My early years remain a high point in the trajectory of my life. They were filled with mistakes, blunders and missteps, but I remember them as joyful times. Now 60 years later, on summer nights when I’m caught up in work and the daily chores of living, I sometimes go outside, lie on my back on the grass and look up at the sky. The feeling of wonder and excitement still returns. I’m always hoping to see something amazing.
