An Early UFO Mystery: Where Did Gen. Curtis LeMay Get His Ancient Astronaut Information in 1950?

​Since there was no new episode of Ancient Aliens this week, I am left with a bit of space to fill. Here in Albany, we’re enjoying some unusual summerlike weather on this first weekend of fall. I will confess to feeling a bit lazy, and the fringe history crew seems to be unusually quiet this week. I guess I could write about David Wilcock’s recent claim that unknown forces attempted to murder him by cutting his brake lines, but then I’d have to discuss his claim that this was related to alleged UFO contactee Corey Goode’s allegation that these same forces are responsible for Child Protective Services investigating his admittedly unstable household—after all, he pretends that he spends half his time traveling from his living room to outer space while his kids are presumably sleeping upstairs. (Nothing resulted from the investigation, according to Wilcock, and both men allege that one of their many enemies made a false report to CPS as a malicious attack on Goode.) But the whole thing is just so sad in light of Wilcock’s discussions of his mental health issues that I do not  feel comfortable giving this story too much space. Wilcock, for what’s it worth, also now claims that the Jewish world conspiracy tried to recruit him as a double agent against Goode, through the offices of the Rothschild Jewish world controllers. It just gets sadder and worse from there, and the folie à dieux of Wilcock and Goode two depresses me greatly.

​Instead I will present a mystery, for which I do not have the answer. Yesterday, a reader of my blog asked me for help identifying the source of an ancient astronaut claim made at the dawn of the UFO era, and I wasn’t able to identify the source. Perhaps one of you knows!
 
On February 27, 1950, the Associated Press moved a story out of Tucson, Ariz. In which Air Force general Curtis Lemay, later George Wallace’s vice-presidential running mate, opined on the subject of flying saucers while attending a rodeo with other members of the Air Force. He told the AP reporter that he had read a book that mentioned the prehistoric roots of flying saucers: “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 story ran in the Arizona Republic on Monday, February 27 and in other newspapers around the state on Tuesday, February 28.
 
The question is what book LeMay was referring to. The first books on flying saucers such as Donald Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucers Are Real were not published until later in the year, and so far as I know, none of them made mention of UFOs in ancient Egypt. The closet I could find was Keyhoe’s reference to Velikovsky’s claim that the Egyptians recorded the passage of the “comet” Venus. Could this be what he was referring to?
 
The phrasing LeMay used, which implies that the flying saucer passage was just one among many mysteries contained in the book, suggests a different type of volume altogether, more like an omnibus of the unexplained, but I have not been able to find a source for LeMay’s claim.
 
The first connection between ancient Egypt and UFOs that I knew of arose over the so-called Tulli Papyrus in 1953, the likely hoax papyrus document that heavily implied that fireballs seen in the ancient Egyptian sky were flying saucers. I am not aware of a book that made a connection to ancient Egypt prior to that. My gut instinct is that, given the Air Force and FBI investigations into science fiction writers and their connection to UFOs, he might have been misremembering something he read in a magazine like Amazing Stories, which carried supposedly nonfiction columns on Fortean mysteries. However, since I lack and encyclopedic knowledge of everything published in the pulps between 1947 and 1950, I couldn’t say with any certainty.
 
I would be interested to hear if anyone knows of a more specific source that LeMay might have been referring to.