A Fire Officer’s Guide to Disaster Control: An expert works outside his expertise, and is attacked by UFOs
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By Andy Kaiser
Article ID: 131
The Fire Officer’s Guide to Disaster Control is a massive, 600-plus page book detailing various emergency scenarios and how to respond to them. As the Fire Department is the first service to arrive at many emergency situations, the book is a quality guide for crisis response and management.
It’s co-authored by William Kramer and Charles Bahme. Both authors have a short bio, and each is the resume of a superhero. Each man has dedicated his life to fire and disaster management, both in training others and by direct field experience, which, I assume, involved lots of physically dangerous situations. Between the two authors, we have active duties in World War II and the Korean War, college and professional-level instruction, and appearances for national and international audiences. They’ve worked with high-level United States agencies like the U.S. Supreme Court and the Department of Defense. In essence, they’ve done more to help people and have saved more lives than many of us could ever hope to achieve. These men are true real-world heroes.
There’s something strange, however, about the book’s second edition, published in 1992. As you browse through it, you’ll be impressed with the scope and detail, with chapter headings like “Organizational Structure and Incident Command”, “Communications and Information Management”, “Catastrophic Fires”, “Civil Disorders and Riots”, “Weather-Related Natural Disasters”, “Transportation Disasters”, “Mass Casualties and Mass Evacuation” and “Aftermath and Recovery”.
And then you come to Chapter 13. It’s titled “Enemy Attack and UFO Potential”.
I’m going to guess that UFOs are generally not associated with nationally-used emergency training materials. Maybe the Fire Officer’s Guide just chose poorly for the chapter heading. That’s the way it looks at first: the chapter begins with a brief analysis of warfare, and mentions the United States’ entry into World War II, with the attack on Pearl Harbor. There are logical definitions of war, mentions of Grenada, Lebanon, the Persian Gulf, and the United States’ “cold war” with the Soviet Union.
Next we have causes of war with plenty of sobering examples. These include chemical warfare, biological warfare, bombs both conventional and nuclear, and detail of perceived and probable effects of a nuclear attack.
Then, almost twenty pages through the chapter, we get to the good stuff with a heading that reads, “The UFO Threat – A Fact”.
You might say this chapter is meant to teach proper response to human behaviors, and is not about alien attack remediation. Or you may say it’s meant to react to Earthly UFOs, like stealth technologies from another nation visiting our airspace. Nope. The authors are talking about aliens: green-skinned, big-headed, silver-jumpsuit-wearing aliens. Or at least that’s what I assume. And my assumption of the alien’s appearance is as valid as the book’s claim we need to watch out for an alien attack. That is, there is no evidence to justify either statement.
Why did the authors pick aliens and UFO attacks? Why stop there? Why didn’t they have another section for Biblical Armageddon and the final battle between good and evil? You know, something like “In the event of the heavens raining from the sky and most everyone being killed, the most important thing is to first establish a sense of calm and order.”
You don’t think Armageddon is appropriate? I should keep things realistic? Then what about other Earth-changing disasters, like the Large Hadron Collider creating deadly black holes? Or what if the Sun decides to vomit out a planet-destroying solar flare? Why not plan for these? They’re just as applicable as a UFO attack. Granted, the LHC is an unfair example, having been created years after this edition of the Fire Officer’s Guide. But you get my point.
The results of an actual UFO attack – wake up and smell the humans
Now consider logistics. Consider the Earth being invaded by a UFO-piloting alien race.
We wouldn’t stand a chance.
This isn’t like in the movies, where a brilliant computer geek could somehow hack the alien computers and kill all aliens from a centralized point. Our only hope is that any visiting aliens are friendly.
We are humans. We are almost exclusively Earthbound. We’ve only just begun to explore beyond our own planet, and have very limited methods for doing so. Now enter a race that’s capable of not only leaving their own planet, but one that is able to cross light years – a celestial road trip that physics tells us would take thousands or millions of years to complete. At best, any race with this kind of technology and lifespan would watch us the same way we watch birds using tools to harvest their food: “Yes, Zoltar. That is a tool user. Barely. And they are nowhere near our capability. Let’s eat them for breakfast.”
When we look at the big picture, with the reality of the aliens’ technological level, there would be no point in fighting back. That leaves me with only one question: which line do I stand in to be eaten?
The Fire Officer’s Guide is a serious, expert-level, life-saving book, but there is a flaw in the oddly-inserted, UFO-focused Chapter 13. Published in 1992, this chapter reads like it was written in the UFO heyday of 1950s America.
I argue that the UFO section is not appropriate. Why was it included? Here’s a quote from Chapter 13. The person referenced – Charles Bahme – is one of the authors:
“Throughout this book, many of the references to actual events are based on the experiences of both of the authors. However, in this area of UFOs and their potential, we are relaying largely on the research and experiences of Charles Bahme. Chuck has made a considerable study of this subject and is acquiring many publications and VCR tapes to augment his library on this and related phenomena.”
In the book’s acknowledgements, we see a note of thanks from William Kramer, the other author. He thanks “James Craig, for contributions to chapter 13″. James Craig, unfortunately, proved impossible for me to research in the time I had for this article, particularly with the name being so common. However, Chapter 13 references other people, like Dr. Allen Hynek and Frank Edwards. Hynek is an interesting study on this own – he was a popular UFO researcher whose opinions have alternated between UFO debunking for Project Blue Book, to being open to the possibility of extradimensional and extraterrestrial life. Frank Edwards was a radio show host and author. He wrote many books promoting UFOs, psychic abilities and strange events that are weird but supposedly true.
The Fire Officer’s Guide’s Chapter 13 references books with titles like “Aliens from Space, The Real Story of Unidentified Flying Objects“, and “UFOs Over America“. The whole of Chapter 13 has the premise that UFOs – the kind with aliens from other worlds – are real and are visiting the Earth. The book’s references are hardly impartial or critical. To them, UFOs are a common reality. The section headings include “UFO Missions”, “UFO Hazards”, “Force Field Impact”, “Communications Disruption” and “Regional Power Blackouts”. I want to stress this isn’t theoretical – the authors treat the subject seriously and specifically, as illustrated by this paragraph:
“…UFOs may not only have the power to control some of our military and industrial establishment’s highly technical scientific hardware, they may also possess the ability to impose pain and control over people who attempt to attack them, even to the extent of ‘liquidating’ them in one way or another.”
Conclusion
Charles Bahme, the author who supplied the bulk of the UFO chapter, says this in his preface:
“A wise old philosopher, in his American Bible, said long before I was born that the best service any book can offer is to make you think for yourself. His name was Elbert Hubbard, and I agree with him. In so doing, you are bound to come up with even better ideas for disaster control than we have offered here. We hope that you will share them for the next edition.”
It appears that the authors did indeed pay attention to ideas and recommendations. In succeeding editions of The Fire Officer’s Guide to Disaster Control, all information on malevolent alien UFOs has been removed.
This is what happens when you let the views of one person override a consensus. It’s one thing to fight for a cause in the face of adversity. It’s a completely different thing to insert those views where they just don’t belong.
References
Gelman, Rita Golden and Seligson, Marcia. 1978. UFO Encounters. New York: Scholastic Book Services.
Kramer, William M., Ph.D and Bahme, Charles W., J.D. 1992. Fire Officer’s Guide to Disaster Control. Saddle Brook, NJ: Fire Engineering Books and Videos (A Pennwell Publishing Company)
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