"...Ufologist Jerome Clark uncovered an extraordinary item from an old 1939 newspaper.

"On a day in the late summer, 1939, a military transport left the Marine Naval Air Station in San Diego, California, for routine flight to Honolulu," Clark wrote in FLYING SAUCER REVIEW.  "About three hours afterwards several urgent distress signals sounded from the plane and then silence.  Later the craft came limping back to execute an emergency landing.  When Air Station personnel entered the plane, they found every man of the crew, including the copilot who had lived long enough to pilot the craft back to its base, dead of unknown causes (researcher Charles Berlitz related elsewhere that they had been mutilated - Branton)."

Keel continues quoting from the old article:

"Each of the bodies carried large, gaping wounds, and the outside of the ship was similarly marked.  Air Station men who touched parts of the craft came down with a mysterious skin infection.

"One of the most puzzling aspects of the whole affair was that the .45 automatics carried by the pilot and copilot as service pieces HAD BEEN EMPTIED, AND THE SHELLS LAY ON THE FLOOR.  A smell of rotten eggs pervaded the atmosphere inside the plane...  Mysterious skin infections and rotten egg odors (hydrogen sulfide) are phenomena familiar to all UFO researchers.  It would seem that the transport was attacked -- apparently without provocation -- by some sort of strange aerial intruder."