UFO's

[onetrack]

Wikipedia gives a different version of Saburo Sakai's severe injuries when he was shot by an American gunner. There's no mention of a hole in his skull and a there's even a photo on the Wiki page showing Sakai after he landed, after that particular event.

 

It's been reported that the major book about Sakai, "Samurai", co-written by the Americans, Martin Caidin and Fred Saito, produces glorified versions of a number of Sakai's combat events. Caidan is a screenwriter and author of more than 50 books, many of which are quite fanciful fiction, so I guess his writing style would lend itself to typical American over-glorification.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saburō_Sakai

 

"Sakai sustained serious wounds from the bombers' return fire. He was hit in the head by a .30 caliber bullet, which injured his skull and temporarily paralyzed the left side of his body.^[22] The wound is described elsewhere as having destroyed the metal frame of his goggles and "creased" his skull, a glancing blow that broke the skin and made a furrow, or even cracked the skull but did not actually penetrate it. Shattered glass from the canopy temporarily blinded him in his right eye and reduced vision in his left eye severely. The Zero rolled inverted and descended towards the sea. Unable to see out of his left eye because of the glass and the blood from his serious head wound, Sakai's vision started to clear somewhat as tears cleared the blood from his eyes, and he pulled his plane out of the dive. He considered ramming an American warship: "If I must die, at least I could go out as a samurai. My death would take several of the enemy with me. A ship. I needed a ship." Finally, the cold air blasting into the cockpit revived him enough to check his instruments, and he decided that by leaning the fuel mixture, he might be able to return to the airfield at Rabaul.

 

Rabaul, 8 August 1942: A seriously-wounded Sakai returns to Rabaul with his damaged Zero after a 4 h 47 min flight over 560 nmi (1,040 km; 640 mi). Sakai's skull was creased by a machine-gun bullet, he was blind in one eye, and his face was swollen and burned by exposure to the wind through his shattered canopy. Sakai walks towards the flight operations building as he insisted on making his mission report before accepting medical treatment.

Although in agony from his injuries^[23] Sakai managed to fly his damaged Zero in a 4 h 47 min flight over 560 nmi (1,040 km; 640 mi) back to his base on Rabaul by using familiar volcanic peaks as guides. When he attempted to land at the airfield, he nearly crashed into a line of parked Zeros, but after circling four times and with the fuel gauge reading empty, he put his Zero down on the runway on his second attempt. After landing, he insisted on making his mission report to his superior officer and then collapsed. Nishizawa drove him to a surgeon. Sakai was evacuated to Japan on 12 August and there endured a long surgery without anesthesia. The surgery repaired some of the damage to his head but was unable to restore full vision to his right eye. Nishizawa visited Sakai, who was recuperating in the hospital in Yokosuka hospital."

[Old Koreelah]

21 minutes ago, onetrack said:

Wikipedia gives a different version of Saburo Sakai's severe injuries..

Who knows what actually happened. I tend to believe the bloke who was there, but his co-writer would have been under pressure from publishers to spice up the storey.

 

Despite being a long-time supporter of Wikipedia, it sure ain’t perfect. Just about anyone can contribute text and it’s often cut severely by the army of volunteer editors, who tend to err on the side of conservatism- they sure aren’t kind to alternative interpretations of historic evidence.
 

That said, Wikipedia is rated as more reliable than many mainstream sources. 

 

21 minutes ago, onetrack said:

Nishizawa drove him to a surgeon…

Nishizawa deserves a book of his own. He was revered by his comrades and I believe he stopped counting his victories after a hundred or so. Like so many war stories, his demise was farsical: he and other airmen were being relocated in a DC-3. The nervous pilot couldn’t get the overloaded plane off the ground, so the Zero master took the controls. The crash killed Japan’s best.

[spacesailor]

I had a Full set of ' encyclopedias ' fairly old in the end ,  ( secondhand ) but it had many items wrong .

Including spelling . Spellchecker anybody !  .

No way to check or correct it 

And I was wrong with it as well  ( after using it ) to educate myself .

I tore out the story pages & kept them to this day, before throwing it out

spacesailor

Edited June 13, 2023 by spacesailor
More added

[Old Koreelah]

2 hours ago, spacesailor said:

I had a Full set of ' encyclopedias ' fairly old in the end ,  ( secondhand ) but it had many items wrong .

Including spelling . Spellchecker anybody !  .

No way to check or correct it 

And I was wrong with it as well  ( after using it ) to educate myself .

I tore out the story pages & kept them to this day, before throwing it out

spacesailor

Me too Spacey.  I’m currently sitting in front of my bookshelf which contains the Encyclopaedia set I grew up with. I fondly recall reading most from cover to cover, so kept them. 

[red750]

We have a full set of World Book Encyclopedias plus at least 6 year book updates, bought when the kids were in school. Haven't been looked at since, and piles of junk on a table in front of the bookcase so we can't get at them.

[spacesailor]

But how old do you call OLD .

Mine were New , before I was conceived. 

Must have been prewar ! , So 1936ish .

I did do the check , many years ago .

spacesailor

[Old Koreelah]

On 13/6/2023 at 12:12 PM, onetrack said:

It's been reported that the major book about Sakai, "Samurai", co-written by the Americans, Martin Caidin and Fred Saito, produces glorified versions of a number of Sakai's combat events…

Sorry to go back to this post, but that statement deserves further examination.

Should we accept every claim made by Allied forces and dismiss those of the former enemy? Amongst all the misinformation and propaganda of war, quite a few acts of chivalry by our enemies have been ignored by history. 

There are precedents for Allied servicemen being awarded gallantry medals in the recommendation of their German foes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_Trigg)

but Japanese efforts have not been so successful.

One of Sakai’s sixty-odd victories led to him trying to get recognition for the bravery of his victims, an Australian bomber crew. He honoured these men; our own authorities didn’t. 

 

https://pacificwrecks.com/aircraft/hudson/A16-201/panorama_1998.html

[Old Koreelah]

Back on topic:

 

[red750]

 

Please explain the simiarities.

[Marty_d]

Vaguely humanoid shapes who happen to be looking left. The hats are different shapes,  some have a beard while others clean shaven, one has an earring.

It'd be more appropriate to ask why there's so many differences,  if your premise is that they're related.

[willedoo]

They look like different variants of NASA test monkeys.

[willedoo]

But on a more serious note, maybe they're all symbolic of a human in the womb. Representing life, or some deep meaning like that.

[facthunter]

Don't forget those images have been "selected".  Nev

[onetrack]

The only similarity I can see is they're all in a seated position. I'm surprised that none are sporting gigantic penises - usually a favourite theme of the idol-worshipping image creators.

[willedoo]

9 minutes ago, onetrack said:

The only similarity I can see is they're all in a seated position.

When I saw the image, the first thought that popped into the head was of Yuri Gagarin crammed into that little round Vostok-1 space capsule (hence the reference to NASA test monkeys).

[Old Koreelah]

[Marty_d]

Exactly.  This is where conspiracy theorists are caught in their own argument.  You can't have the government being totally inept at everything except covering up <insert insane theory here>.

[old man emu]

On 16/03/2023 at 12:51 PM, facthunter said:

One break in it and WE would not be here as we are

Off to a side street, but ... It nearly happened.

Recent DNA research suggests that at one point the total number of humans was reduced to a very low number resulting in an evolutionary bottle neck.

The Toba eruption was a supervolcano eruption that occurred around 74,000 years ag at the site of present-day Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia. The Toba catastrophe theory holds that this event caused a severe global volcanic winter of six to ten years and contributed to a 1,000-year-long cooling episode, leading to a genetic bottleneck in humans. It is hypothesized that the eruption resulted in a severe reduction in the size of the total human population due to the effects of the eruption on the global climate. According to the genetic bottleneck theory, between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, human populations sharply decreased to 3,000–10,000 surviving individuals.

 

We have seen the effects of Mankind's recent destruction of many species by a number of means, and watched as our attempts to reverse total extinctions have slowly increased the sizes of devastated populations. If a population consists of very few breeding pairs, then the gene pool is more of a puddle. 

 

Sorry to be way out of sequence. Just to remind you. the discussion back then was about humanoid aliens, and as part of it, Facthunter said, "WE are certainly the most complex of animals but insects are harder to kill. octopuses have better eyes. Dogs can smell things better  Sharks don't get cancer and so on. We have evolved from things that go back to the beginning of ALL life. One break in it and WE would not be here as we are.  Nev"

 

I hope that gives context to this post.

[Bruce Tuncks]

That's obviously true, OME, but I say so what! Of course we went through some bottlenecks, or else we would not have evolved.

Nowadays, it would be very hard for any real improvement ( eg smarter) to make an impact on the population, there are just  so many of us around.

What is going to be really interesting will be to find other life, particularly if it has never been related to us. Mind you, I reckon that mars, for example, is too close to the earth for genuine quarantine to have worked, so we will need to wait for real exo-planet stuff I guess. ( I am only thinking of bacteria here , although little green men would be wonderful.)