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  • 2005-08-17 (xsd:date)
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  • Did General Douglas MacArthur Predict an Interplanetary War? (en)
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  • This item is a difficult one to classify: It's literally false as worded, because the person named didn't speak the specific words attributed to him at the time and place claimed (or at any other time and place). However, by combining things the same person said at different times and places, one could come up with a reasonable approximation of the original statement. The subject here is a quote attributed to a 1955 West Point address by General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, in which the famous military man supposedly mused about the next war being an interplanetary one. That alleged quote has since been cited in a variety of works and web sites related to UFOs and extraterrestrials and still surfaces in newspapers and other publications from time to time: However, General MacArthur did not deliver a speech at West Point that year, nor is there any record of his specifically stating an opinion that the next war would be an interplanetary one. The confusion started with comments reportedly made by MacArthur when he was paid a private visit at his residence in New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel by the Mayor of Naples, Achille Lauro, in October 1955. The following day Mayor Lauro relayed the gist of their 45-minute conversation to the press, maintaining MacArthur had expressed a belief that someday (perhaps as far as 1,000 years in the future) the people of Earth might find themselves facing an extraterrestrial confrontation: According to Lauro, the only comments MacArthur made about the next war were that he had no idea what form it would take: Some newspapers (such as the Chicago Tribune) played up the sensational aspects of Mayor Lauro's remarks, reproducing only a brief portion of them under headlines such as MacARTHUR FEARS SPACE WAR. Several years later, on 12 May 1962, MacArthur delivered a speech (commonly known as the Duty, honor, country speech) to the cadets of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on the occasion of his receiving the Sylvanus Thayer Award, during which he once again alluded to the possibility that mankind might someday face an extraterrestrial foe: So, General Douglas MacArthur did suggest the notion of an eventual interplanetary war on at least a couple of occasions; one of them was in 1955, and one of them was during a speech at West Point. But he never stated it would be the next war fought on (or by) Earth, or that it was likely to happen in any timeframe outside of the very distant future. (en)
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