D135 Letter from the typist to Sesma.

Mr. Fernando Sesma Manzano

Madrid

Dear Sir:

First of all, and since I do not sign this letter, I want to remind you who I am. You will surely remember that I went to your house some months ago to bring you some extraordinary photographs which could be seen perfectly in colour and in relief.

I write many of the pages they send you. You know whom I mean. They dictate to me and I type the sheets. They gave me an errand which I gladly carry out.

These gentlemen have had to go abroad, although their chief or director told me they would come back after a few days, because something important has happened in connection with a matter that does not concern us. He gave me several instructions regarding several gentlemen in Barcelona, Madrid and Valladolid to whom we usually write. As regards you, he said I should apologize to you for this interruption.

I have not spoken to you again, Mr. Sesma, since that afternoon when I visited you, do you remember?, because they have demanded the greatest discretion from me. Since then many things have happened, and sometimes I am burning with the desire to tell someone, because it seems I am going to go mad.

Apart from my wife and you, I have only spoken about this matter with a doctor who is a professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Madrid, to whom they send sheets and sheets more frequently than to you. This gentleman, whom I see often because he gives me for them some little rectangular glass slides with coloured spots in the centre, is convinced, as I am, of the truth of this matter.

I have to struggle on my own, not knowing which way to turn, between how fascinating this matter is and the anguished fears of my wife, who, you know what women are like, thinks something bad is going to happen to us, and more than once, with her nerves, she has been on the point of ruining everything and telling her mother. She has got it into her head that it is a matter of espionage, influenced by the cinema or who knows what!...

This matter, Mr. Sesma, is fascinating. I myself do not know whether I am awake or dreaming, were it not that my wife sees them with me at home every week and that I have proofs which some day I will reveal and which nobody will be able to deny. I have the names and addresses of all the gentlemen for whom I type their dictations; besides, I know another individual who, like me, writes letters for them, a young typist who says he does not want to know anything and is visibly frightened, but I am sure he will speak when it is all over.

There is also this doctor I have told you about. I know why he does not want to expose himself and publicly acknowledge that he has dealings with them, and he himself has also asked me for discretion and has tried to pay me, although I did not accept, because it is enough for someone to ask me please to keep something secret for me to do so without compensation. But I am sure that this gentleman at least will not leave me looking like a liar about certain things I keep quiet about.

When I went to your house, Mr. Sesma, and God knows I did not know you, and I was the first sceptic for many weeks afterwards.

They began by making themselves known as Danish doctors who were in Spain for I don't know what about a seminar on endocrinology. They dictated to me many things which I could see were not about medicine but about mathematics, and you know that mathematics has nothing to do with medicine. (it is true that some things were about medicine, but very few). The day they gave me those photos I brought you I was amazed, you know I confessed it to you; I even talked about the matter with a photographer neighbour of mine, who did not see them and said it was impossible to see relief without an optical device.

Little by little, from the nature of the writings, I realized that they were hiding something strange. At that time only the tallest of them came, who is called DA number 3. The director I met later: He is called DEI Number 98.

All this smelled pretty bad to me. On the one hand the way of speaking (later I learned why). The names accompanied by a number, the way of taking precautions. It was a grave matter of conscience, for I struggled between what my wife and I believed was a duty to report this matter to the authorities, and on the other hand the promise made to these gentlemen, who paid and pay me splendidly. I also saw in them something of nobility, of humility and kindness which you cannot understand if you do not know them.

We at once ruled out that they were mad. I have had proofs, Mr. Sesma, that we are facing the greatest case in History.

They carry a device that is about a quarter of the size of a gas lighter. With it you hear conversations in the room with a perfection and intensity I have never heard in any tape recorder. If you saw the screen they carry, the size of a diary, you would be amazed. They say that, although independent, it is operated by the previous device. It is something marvellous. I have seen on it my little office and us talking as in a film. The colour was perfect and everything had a depth like in the photos I showed you. If I tell this, they will say I have read it in fantasy novels of the future; tell me if it is not enough to believe that everything these gentlemen say about UMMO (as they call their Planet) is true.

Look, Mr. Sesma, I am not very educated, I admit it, I am a commercial teacher, and to understand them well you have to be a professor like that gentleman I mentioned. But you are left open-mouthed hearing them talk. One afternoon we spent nearly three hours talking about the French accounting system. They knew the coding of accounts of this system and gave me a critique of it which I could no longer follow; they speak, for example, of the carbon-copy accounting system as if they practised it every day; they speak of the PERT system applied to office rationalization just as they do of the working of a punch machine or of a sorting machine of those used for office statistics work. About other things I do not understand I might perhaps say: "They are spinning yarns, taking advantage of my not understanding...!" but about this subject I know something! (as you will understand from my profession).

My God, if I told my boss or my office colleagues who teaches me certain things that leave them astonished, the next day I would be sleeping in a mental hospital.

Sometimes I tell myself: it cannot be, these men must be lying or I am dreaming, or they belong to some secret organization or some sect of the Masons, because I do not believe madmen capable of inventing those devices they carry.

I have already swallowed several books that talk about flying saucers but I got nothing clear out of them, because they do not mention the Planet Ummo at all. There is something that astonishes me in one of them. I do not know whether you will have read it; it is called "El gran enigma de los platillos volantes" ("The great enigma of the flying saucers") and they sell it in the Espasa Calpe bookshop on the avenida de José Antonio. On page 429 there is a drawing of a saucer that came down at Aluche and which the whole press talked about (they have told me it is from Ummo); well then: I was astonished to see that in the drawing there appears, on the underside of the saucer, a symbol that is theirs. I swear to you, Mr. Sesma, that it is theirs. It is true that a horizontal bar is missing for it to be exact, but it is the symbol of UMMO, because I had seen it on them even before that saucer arrived (you will remember that my visit was before the news the newspapers gave at the time).

Besides a proof that I have (and which I will bring out some day in case anyone wants to contradict me), these gentlemen have been seen by my wife, they have been seen by my brother-in-law, although we have not told him who they are, but he is very intrigued, and they have been seen by my concierge, for whom my wife has had to find an explanation to justify why they come to my house.

What I cannot explain, among other things, is the patience they have writing to people. There are weeks when I type up to thirty sheets. There is also an administrative assistant I have spoken with, and although he will not let anything slip and is visibly frightened, he must write his share too, and we do not know whether they have anyone else!

I send the envelopes, and sometimes they give me sheets written on more than three different types of typewriter. I cannot tell you names, but the correspondents are of various professions. There are many professors, an engineer from ICAI, an industrial engineer, a police commissioner, a professor of medicine, a very well-known playwright, two priests, two assistant engineers, several writers, the wife of a pharmacist, another lady, an astronomer... At first there were only a few, professors in Barcelona and Madrid, then it was you, then a priest, and there are more and more. Sometimes they write only once and do not send him anything again. They dictate to me the most varied things you can imagine, from astronomy to biology; I have suggested they buy an IBM machine that has a head for writing mathematical signs, because that is what costs me most, since there are signs that have to be done by hand, and Greek letters, but they smiled and said that the machine could be identified at once, because few are sold.

There are some strange things. Why, Mr. Sesma, do gentlemen who know so much and are so intelligent not learn to type, and risk one of us betraying them? I am not going to do it, but they cannot be sure of that.

Besides: What do they gain by writing? If they want to be believed, why do they not show proofs to everyone? It would be enough for people to see what I have seen, or for them to let journalists see the famous photos you know, or simply let themselves be seen.

But it is enough to observe them a little! When they speak to strangers they move their lips a little to put people off the scent, but I have seen them speak with that strange voice they have and they do not move their lips. They say (and I believe it) that they have a device in their throat; well then, I say that a doctor who examined them could verify that they are not lying. What better proof! When I have told them this they have smiled and do not answer.

Why so much hiding? I'd say the government would not do anything to them, on the contrary! This is what makes me most suspicious. Why do they hide? Why do they not seem to worry when the people they write to pay no attention to them?

Sometimes they seem to me of such naivety that they seem backward, were it not that their enormous culture does not square with that explanation. How are the gentlemen they write to (some of whom are not exactly nobodies) going to believe that they are men from another planet? The least they can take them for is cranks. In this my wife is right, and that is what she bases that espionage story on.

But can you imagine spies writing letters to people? .

Well, Mr. Sesma, I do not know what is going to happen in all this. If I had found anything criminal in their conduct I would already have gone to report them. Besides, the police must know them, because I have written to a police commissioner. If they do not act, there must be a reason. If the Government does not act, there must be something, and we are not going to be more papist than the - Pope...

Yours faithfully,

Forgive me for omitting the signature.

I believe you understand.