Podcast UFO

Robert Powell joins Podcast UFO to discuss the controversial May 8 UFO file release and why SCU says much of the material lacks the metadata needed for real scientific analysis. We discuss over-classification, AI-assisted UAP research, the Aguadilla case, government transparency, and the growing involvement of academia in UFO studies. Robert also previews the SCU 2026 Conference in Toronto featuring Christopher Mellon, Dr. Randy Bostick, Kevin Knuth, and many others. SHOW NOTES

Martin Willis & Dean Alioto speak with Bogna Konior, author of The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, about the surprising connection between artificial intelligence, the internet, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Drawing from the dark forest theory, she explores the idea that true intelligence may remain hidden, avoiding detection in a potentially hostile environment. The conversation covers whether the internet itself is a form of first contact, how AI may already be learning from human communication, and why advanced intelligence might choose silence over expression. This thought-provoking discussion challenges how we think about AI, communication, and the possibility that contact may already be underway in ways we do not fully understand. SHOW NOTES

John and E.J. Craig, a husband and wife UFO research team based in Colorado, discuss their new platform UFO Track, designed to detect and report UAP activity in real time. Instead of relying on after the fact sightings, their system alerts nearby users instantly so multiple witnesses can observe and document the same event. We talk about their sensor technology, triangulation methods, and the idea of proactive disclosure, empowering the public to help gather meaningful data. It is an interesting look at how coordinated, real time reporting could shape the future of UFO research. SHOW NOTES

In this episode of Podcast UFO, I’m joined by Miguel Sancho, executive producer of the HISTORY® series The Proof Is Out There® and author of Evidence of the Extraordinary. We discuss how his team evaluates UFO sightings and unexplained phenomena using a mix of journalistic rigor, scientific analysis, and expert review—revealing that most cases can be explained, while a select few remain truly puzzling. Miguel also shares insights from his book, exploring how our perception of reality can be challenged by experiences that don’t fit conventional explanations. From AI-generated hoaxes and government disclosure to credible UFO cases and even mysteries in our oceans, this conversation takes a grounded look at what holds up under investigation—and what still defies explanation. SHOW NOTES

Martin Willis interviews filmmaker Ron James, Head of MUFON Media, about his new documentary Accidental Truth: Next and the current state of UFO Disclosure.Ron shares behind-the-scenes insights from Washington, D.C., including conversations connected to lawmakers such as Tim Burchett and Kirsten Gillibrand, and discusses whether the ongoing UAP narrative is true transparency, or a controlled rollout. Topics include Congressional hearings, limited vs full disclosure, missing scientists, MUFON’s role behind the scenes, and how the UFO subject may be shifting beyond “nuts and bolts” into deeper questions about reality itself. Ron also previews Accidental Truth: Next, premiering June 1 at Contact in the Desert and streaming June 2. SHOW NOTES

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  Last week, Nick Pope, full name Nicholas George Pope, passed away on April 6th at the age of 60. A fixture in the UFO scene, Pope first gained notoriety with his 1996 book, Open Skies, Closed Minds. Besides providing an overview of UFO history up to that point, the book has an autobiographical account of his time as the head of the “UFO desk” at the Ministry of Defense from 1991 t0 1994. After the book came out, he became a go-to “UFO expert” whenever an authoritative comment was needed to punch up a news story. He maintained his interest and a media presence and was sought after as a speaker at conventions and a commentator in various documentaries. By the time of his passing, he was a well-known personality in the UFOtainment industry, having appeared regularly on Ancient Aliens and at Contact in the Desert. In the midst of his notoriety and association with the more sensationalistic aspects of UFOlogy, his commentary seemed to be heartfelt and true to his actual beliefs. According to Pope in his book, he was a skeptic before he was assigned to the “UFO desk” in Secretariat (Air Staff) Department 2A at the Ministry of Defense. He had been with the MoD since 1985, and personnel were shifted to different sections every three to four years as a matter of policy to give them “a breadth of knowledge and experience.” When he was assigned to deal with UFO reports, he took it upon himself to learn as much as he could about the subject, and the comprehensive historical overview in the book shows the depth of his research. Besides studying UFO history, Pope reached out to British UFO researchers, such as Timothy Good who wrote the Foreword of the book, and established relationships with organizations such as the British UFO Research Organization. This set him apart from his predecessors and helped diminish the us-and-them perception between the MoD and the British UFO community. Pope’s assignment came when The X-Files was popular and he describes his co-workers calling him “Spooky” and whistling The X-Files theme when passing him in the hallway. He was fully aware how unusual his job was, and when Focus, the MoD’s in-house journal, started a regular feature on unusual jobs within the organization, he was the first person to be profiled. Pope presents cases he looked into, and the most notable of these was what has become known as “The Cosford Incident” which involved over 30 reports to the MoD of bright lights over the Southwest England in areas that included RAF Shawbury and RAF Cosford, overnight from March 30-31, 1993. According to him in his book, the MoD was “asked to take part” in the production of a Central Television program on UFOs. While such a request would normally have been refused, Pope persuaded his superiors that it would be good to explain the Ministry’s policy on UFOs on camera and “lay to rest a few misconceptions.” On April 24, 1994, he was interviewed by producer Lawrence Moore and “freely admitted that many of the cases on file cannot be explained today in conventional scientific terms.” Just before his book came out, Pope made his first BBC Television appearance on the Newsnight program. A segment was devoted to him and his book and begins with an actor dressed like him on a shadowy office set reading from the book over ominous background music. The actor reads from the section describing cases Pope looked into, and witness interviews are presented covering incidents in Bonnybridge, Scotland, and Dorset, England. Pope is then interviewed, and he is remarkably confident and articulate in this very early television appearance. The interviewer, Peter Snow, is noticeably taken aback when Pope says that he is “convinced by the sheer weight of evidence” that some of what are seen in the sky “are extraterrestrial in origin.” After moving on from Sec (AS) 2a with what he describes in the book as a promotion, Pope continued investigating UFO reports in his spare time, and there is an early account (page 14 of the pdf) of one of these in the article by Mike Merritt headlined “Expert in UFO Probe on Isle” published in the November 4, 1996, Sun. According to Merritt, “Top UFO hunter Nick Pope is probing a mystery mid-air explosion which sparked a massive search nine days ago.” Pope is quoted as saying, “This sighting off (the Isle of) Lewis could be a UFO – I would not rule it out until I look at the reports I have asked for.” The caption under his picture at the top of the column reads “Pope… former MoD man,” which is inaccurate because he was still with the MoD at that time. Pope left the MoD in 2006, and in 2007, the Ministry made the decision to release its UFO files. Pope describes this on his website, Nick Pope in the section titled “MoD UFO Files.” According to him, there were three reasons for the decision: the French had released their UFO files that year, it would be good P.R., and there had recently been a huge number of Freedom of Information Act requests for UFO-related documents. Pope describes the laborious process of review, redaction, and digitizing which led to the first group of documents being released in 2008 and the final group in 2019. As for his involvement, Pope says that the staff at the National Archives asked him to select cases to highlight in the media, and that he did “literally hundreds” of interviews across all media “and thus became the public face of the file release project.” As can be seen in the section titled, “Spokesperson” on his website, Pope embraced his fame as a “UFO expert” and capitalized on it working in film, television, video games, and advertising. Besides his appearances on sensational programs such as Ancient Aliens, in 2019, he began appearing as a regular guest on The Basement Office with Steven Greenstreet starting with the first episode which premiered on May 29th. While still advocating for the extraterrestrial hypothesis and displaying obvious enthusiasm when discussing cases that he has a personal interest in, his commentary is restrained and well-informed. Pope wrote a total of six books in his lifetime which include three books on UFOs, two science fiction novels, and one action thriller. Besides Open Skies, Closed Minds, his other two UFO books are The Uninvited, a book about abductions published in 1997, and Encounter in Rendlesham Forest written with John Burroughs and Jim Penniston (both USAF Ret.) about the reported lights and UFO landing near RAF Woodbridge in 1980 that was published in 2014. R. I. P. | Check out Martin’s Tribute HERE

Join Martin Willis and UFO Jack for the premiere episode of UFO Headlines, a new monthly series covering the latest developments, controversies, and breaking stories in the world of UFOs and UAP. In this episode, we explore alarming drone incursions over U.S. military bases, including activity near strategic nuclear assets, and discuss what this could mean for national security, along with the ongoing mystery surrounding the disappearance of Major General William Neil McCasland and other unusual cases involving scientists and defense-related personnel. The conversation also dives into explosive claims circulating in Washington, including alleged hybrid programs and statements from members of Congress, while taking a critical look at the controversial “Buga Sphere,” Dr. Steven Greer’s upcoming event, and the broader issues of credibility, evidence, and misinformation in the field. We also touch on NASA’s Artemis mission, strange aerial anomalies observed during launches, and the growing push for transparency, including efforts to release additional UAP footage. This is a wide-ranging, candid discussion blending skepticism, curiosity, and real-time analysis of today’s most talked-about UFO topics, and UFO Headlines airs the first Thursday of every month so join us live and be part of the conversation. SHOW NOTES

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  Screenshot Throughout the 1950s and 60s, major science-based UFO organizations in the United States, and especially the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, looked down on contactee claims as ridiculous and unworthy of their time. This started to change as the 1970s got underway, due in part to the ideas put forward by Jacques Vallée and John Keel, but by the 1980s, things started going back to the way they were, at least in the United States. Investigators in other countries, however, stayed open to such reports, and in this week’s blog, we’ll look at a 1983 case from Brazil as it was presented in the British publication, Flying Saucer Review. In the Vol. 29, No. 4, April 1984 issue of FSR (page 10 of the pdf), there is a translation from Portuguese by Gordon Creighton of an article by Marcos Bedin that appeared in the December 18, 1983, O Estado out of Florianópolis, Brazil. It’s presented under the headline “A New Brazilian ‘A. V. B.’” The initials stand for Antônio Villas Boas, who claimed (page 5 of pdf) in 1957 that he was taken aboard a craft where he had a sexual encounter with an alien female. According to the article, 49-year-old father of six, Antônio Nelso Tasca, was well-liked in his former community of Chapecó where he had worked as an announcer at Radio Chapecó. Three years prior to the time of the writing he left Chapecó and went to work in various locations. He had a good reputation and was “well-known for his impeccable honesty.” He ended up in Barreiras where he became a cattle rancher. At around 8:00 p.m. on December 14, 1983, Tasca was driving alone on a road that led to route BR-282 at Chapecó. When he was about 1,000 meters from a Coca-Cola factory, he felt an urge to stop. He pulled over and parked about 5 meters from the road and saw a stationary object up in the air to his right. He got out of the car and walked towards it and saw it was circular, lit from the inside, and emitting beams of white light. According to Bedin, “He at once realized it was a UFO or ‘flying saucer,’ such as he had read about in dozens of books on the subject.” Feeling he was brave enough to handle a meeting with whatever might be occupying the craft, Tasca continued walking until he suddenly felt strong waves of heat. Thinking this might be some sort of radioactive emission, he turned around and started towards his car but only made it a few steps before a shaft of light came down and pulled him up into the craft at an “unimaginable speed.” He was terrified, and in the midst being taken, he went unconscious. When he woke up, he was lying naked in a dark place feeling constricted and sensing a lack of air. His first thought was that he had been buried alive. He was then gradually able to move his legs and arms and breath with difficulty. The darkness and oppressiveness filled him with a terror such as he had never felt before and he broke down into tears. He then felt small hands or claws touching his body and realized that two or three creatures were examining him. After a while, the creatures left and then the space he was in became lit up. Still terrified, Tasca saw he was in a room with no sharp angles and no indications of any doors or windows with the walls and ceiling being the source of the light. Tasca saw his clothes lying nearby on the floor and he went to put them on when a door opened in a wall and “a very beautiful small woman came in, a woman with delicate skin and light-coloured clothing.” The italics are Creighton’s and he seems to be using them to emphasize where Tasca’s story is reminiscent of Boas’s. Tasca is quoted describing her: “She was an enchanting woman, with wide-set eyes like Bruna Lombardi – eyes extending backwards in the oriental style.” He said she was wearing something similar to slippers on her feet and that her clothing resembled pajamas. According to Bedin, as a flood of questions welled up in Tasca’s mind, before he could say anything, a telepathic link was established, and the woman told him her name was Cabalá from, in Bedin’s words “the world of Agali.” She said he had been chosen to be given a message for the people of Earth, in Bedin’s words, “warning against destroying the planet and against other typical malpractices of Earthlings.” Tasca asked her why he, a person of no influence with no special traits should be chosen to receive such a message, and the woman replied, “Because you have always believed in the existence of higher civilizations. Because you have always desired to have contact with me, and because you have a cosmic mind.” After this, in Creighton’s italics, it is explained that an incident followed that Tasca didn’t want to reveal because “it would create problems of a personal nature for him and he therefore prefers to keep silent about it.”  Tasca said that he would leave a complete account of what took place with his children before his death. Tasca warned Cabalá that his memory was bad, and she assured him that he wouldn’t forget the message. She went over to a crescent-shaped desk coming out of the wall (the only furniture in the room) pressed a button, and a “sort of monstrance” holding a “diadem” rose out of the floor. Cabalá placed the “diadem” (described as yellow, red, and green, and having eight sections), on Tasca’s head, gave him the message, and told him to repeat it twice. After that, Cabalá told Tasca the message would never be removed from his mind and then “the extraterrestrial woman took her leave of him, raising aloft her right hand with open palm.” Creighton added an asterisk and his footnote reads “Just as A. V. B.’s little lady did!” In fact, Boas reported that his “little lady” pointed at him, her belly, the ground, and then at what he believed was the southern sky. The room went dark, and Tasca felt himself being conducted to another room by the creatures that had examined him. He lost consciousness, and when he came to, he was lying on a rock on top of a small plateau next to the BR-282. A diesel factory was nearby and when he was able to muster up the strength to make his way down, he went to the factory. Someone in the office agreed to notify his family, who had already called the police, and when Tasca went to his car he found them and the police waiting for him. Screenshot At his son’s home in Palmital, Tasca’s family noticed there were what looked like burn marks on his back, one of which was “W” shaped. He was examined by Dr. Júlio Zawadscki who gave a statement that he was mystified by the marks, as they caused Tasca no pain or any other symptoms associated with first or second-degree burns. The first person Tasca approached to deliver Cabalá’s message was Bedin. According to Bedin, Tasca sat down at a typewriter in the newspaper office in Chapecó and “instantly produced” the text that follows in the article for more than half a page. As is typical of contactee messages, there is a warning against the use of nuclear weapons and it is explained that a “total nuclear war will drive the Earth off its celestial orbit and cause grave disturbances to life on neighbouring worlds, some of them worlds existing in dimensions of which terrestrial man still has no inkling.” There are instructions to abolish imperialism, preserve human reproductive functions, and not engage in potentially disastrous experiments with genetics. Finally, it is promised that the “Masters of Supreme Wisdom” will come back to Earth, establish a paradise, and resurrect the dead “within the beam of the four Xis.” A translation of the article without the message is included in the February 1984 UFO Newsclipping Service (page 14 of the pdf) and Tasca’s case is included in the UFO Related Entities Catalogue where there is an abundance of additional information.

Blog by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  Amidst the many assorted descriptions of UFO-related entities, silver-suited humanoids, sometimes with antennas, show up in many reports. They are described repeatedly in the 1976 Center for UFO Studies publication by David Webb, 1973 – Year of the Humanoids, and there were several reports during the 1977 flap in what has been called “The Welsh Triangle” that we wrote about recently. In this week’s blog, we’ll look at a couple of cases from the Southern United States, the second of which became quite well-known. In the January 4, 1981, issue of The Robesonian out of Lumberton, North Carolina, there is an article (page 7 of the pdf) by Tim Lewis headlined “Shining Silver Man Stalks Forest Acres Area.”  According to Lewis, the previous Tuesday at around 10 p.m., a couple had just exited Barker Ten Mile Road when they saw a round flashing light near the turnoff at Bee Gee and McLeod. As they got closer, they were able to determine that the light was located in a vacant wooded lot. They turned onto McLeod Street, and a shiny figure came out of the bushes waving its arms as if it was signaling them to stop. They thought better of it, sped up, and continued on. Lewis tells the reader that he did some research after hearing the story and found an article in the Robesonian files that described multiple reports of the same sort of figure. There is a reprint of the article headlined “Area Residents Report Sighting UFO Sunday.” According to the article, dated December 30, 1974, county dispatcher Fred Barnes said there were four calls from residents who said they  saw an “object or subject wearing a silver and black suit and wearing some kind of helmet.” They all said that when they saw it, it jumped into the bushes at the intersection of Forest Road and Barker Ten Mile Road. There were also reports of a white object with bright lights over Forest Acres. Four deputies investigated and didn’t find anything. Lewis notes that that the events reported in both instances occurred in the month of December around the time of a full moon in the same area. He then goes on to describe other strange reports received by the staff at the paper. According to Lewis, there was a series of recent reports from residents living along a railroad track going through Forest acres involving loud wailing and voices speaking in a foreign language. About two weeks prior to Lewis’s article, a resident said she saw a figure run from her yard into the woods. When her husband went outside to investigate, he found a set of fence posts had been pulled out of the ground. Lewis has this to say about the effort involved: “Evidently, this had to have taken super-human strength to have pulled fence posts out of the ground bare-handed.” During the “Year of the Humanoids,” on October 17, 1973, 26-year-old, recently-elected Falkville, Alabama, Chief of Police Jeff Greenhaw reported an encounter with a silver-suited humanoid and had four Polaroid photos to back it up. A comprehensive examination of the case can be found in the blog by Mark Russell Bell headlined “Detailed Report of Jeff Greenhaw’s Falkville Incident Alien Encounter Testimonial” posted on August 4, 2020, at metaphysicalarticles.org. Along with reproduced articles on the case from Official UFO Magazine, Bell includes one from the October 19, 1973, Birmingham News and one from the November 16, 1973, Decatur Daily. His source for those was the 1975 book by Ralph and Judy Blum, Beyond Earth: Man’s Contact With UFOs. The originals are available with a subscription at newspapers.com and the Decatur Daily website. According to the Birmingham News article headlined “Falkville Chief Says ‘Howdy’ to Spaceman,” Greenhaw was at home when he received a call from a woman who told him, in the reporter’s words, “that a spaceship with flashing lights had landed in a field west of the city.” Because there had been “numerous reports” of UFOs in the area, Greenhaw took along a camera as he drove to the site. As he was driving down a gravel road, he saw a human-shaped creature standing in the middle of it. The creature walked towards him, and Greenhaw took four photos. He said “I was scared stiff.” The creature was covered in a material like tin foil and had an antenna on top of its head. Greenhaw said, “It moved stiffly, like a robot, and didn’t make any sounds.” Greenhaw turned on the blue flasher on top of his car, and the creature turned around and took off running down the road. Greenhaw said, “I jumped into my car and took after him, but I couldn’t even catch up with him in a patrol car. He was running faster than any human I ever saw.” Greenhaw told the paper he received multiple calls the day after from people who said they had seen UFOs in the area during the time of his encounter. His wife is reported to have laughed the incident off, and Greenhaw commented, “She wouldn’t be laughing if she saw what I saw.” There is a follow-up article in the November 16, 1973, Decatur Daily. Headlined “Falkville Police Chief Resigns Under Pressure,” it describes the unfortunate events in Greenhaw’s life following his encounter. Besides being asked to resign by the mayor, his car engine “blew up,” his wife divorced him, and his mobile home burned down. Greenhaw is quoted describing his situation: “So now I’ve lost my car, my wife, my home, and my job, and I guess I’ll just have to go where ever I can to find another job. I had planned to stay in Falkville in spite of all of the problems I have been having, but now it doesn’t look like I can.” The four photos made the rounds among UFO enthusiasts and were used on the cover of Beyond Earth. Georgia-based NICAP Investigator Marion Webb looked into the case and a report is presented on the front page of the October 1974 UFO Investigator under the headline “Police Chief’s Nightmare: Real or Contrived.” According to the article “an official received word of a rumor that several firemen from a nearby community may have collaborated on a hoax which involved their ‘borrowing’ silver firefighting uniforms.” Webb managed to acquire such a suit, added aluminum foil to the hood and feet, and had his picture taken wearing it. While there were similarities to Greenhaw’s photos, Webb found it difficult to move in the uniform, which contradicts Greenhaw’s claim that the creature outran his car. Webb speculated that Greenhaw had only gone a short distance before spinning out in the gravel, which is a detail that shows up in Bell’s blog. Greenhaw stayed away from public exposure for most of the remainder of his life, but gave an interview in 2020 to Red Water Filmworks. In the recording posted on YouTube, he describes coming upon the creature and saying “something to the effect (of) ‘howdy stranger,’” and getting no response. He says he initially thought someone was “pulling a prank” but that “things just started that was so strange.” He said that the creature moved stiffly with “no bending of the arms and legs…” Describing its running after it turned away, he said it was “like it had springs on its feet or something.” Greenhaw added that almost to the day, 10 years later, someone broke into his house and took the four photos, along with his service revolver and shotgun. He said he thought it was “really weird” that the only three things he had with him that night should turn up missing.      

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  Timothy Green Beckley Among UFO enthusiasts, in between the serious, science-based researchers and the crackpots, there are people who enjoy the mystery for the fantastic tales and the colorful people it spawns, as well as the social interaction with the like-minded. One of the first examples of this sort of person was Gray Barker, who became known for his 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. He became good friends with James W. Moseley, who would become well-known as the publisher of Saucer Smear magazine, and the two of them became notorious for pranking and poking fun at what they considered their over-serious peers. As the 1960s got under way, a group formed around Moseley, who was based in Fort Lee, New Jersey. This included Allan Greenfield, Eugene Steinberg, and Timothy Green Beckley. Of these, Beckley, Like Barker, would become a prolific publisher of UFO-related material, and in 1978, he started putting out UFO Review, which was a tabloid-style newspaper chock full of UFO news, reports, interviews, and lurid ads for UFO books, UFO merchandise, new age self-help guides and related paraphernalia. Timothy Green Beckley left this planet on May 31, 2021. Records of his age at the time of his passing range from 65 to 69. According to the IMDb, he was born on March 4, 1952, as Jeremy Stone. In addition to his interest in the paranormal, he was an actor in and producer of soft-core porn/horror movies and was known to fans as “Mr. Creepo.” He wrote and published many books on the paranormal with a definite sensationalized bent and was active in the community up until his death. According to what is believed to be his self-authored bio, “Tim Beckley had so many careers that even his own girlfriend didn’t know what he did for a living… Timothy Green Beckley has been described as the Hunter Thompson of UFOlogy by the editor of UFO magazine Nancy Birnes.” His bio contains the claims that his life was saved by an invisible force at the age of three, he started having out of body experiences at the age of six, he had his first UFO sighting at age ten, and had two more after that in the course of his life. As near as we can tell, the first issue of UFO Review, “Collectors Edition,” Vol. 1, No. 1, came out prior to June 1978. The month and day are not noted anywhere, but there is a 1978 copyright as well as a notice for the 15th Annual National UFO Congress in Cleveland (organized by Moseley) in June. The front-page headline is “Top Secret UN Committee Probes Startling Case of Mexican Doctor Who Claims: ‘I Examined a Live Space Alien,’” which sits over a photo purported to be “startling photographic proof” that “UFOs have a base beneath Lake Ontario.” Inside, on page 2, is “On the Trail of Flying Saucers” by Timothy Green Beckley–Mr. UFO. It starts off with the heading, “Welcome Aboard,” and Beckley proceeds to tell the story of his motivation for creating the newspaper and the process of bringing it to life. According to Beckley, it occurred to him that while interest in UFOs was “at an all-time high,” there weren’t many “sources to turn to for legitimate information on this vital subject.” He assures the reader that those who are aware of his 15 years of research “will instantly recognize my sincerity when it comes to getting to the bottom of the mystery and placing before the public all the information that is available.” UFO Review ad. Beckly says “one of the main reasons” that the paper is being put out at this point in history is that the public is hungry for the truth and that Close Encounters of the Third Kind, “has ignited a spark that has turned into a full-blown flame and it is up to someone to kindle the fire before it goes out.” Beckley says he has been busy “spreading the word” in areas where UFO stories wouldn’t be touched and proudly announces that two of his articles will be appearing in Swank and Knave. Beckley then relates how “a well-known New York City publisher” hired him and his staff at Global Communication to put together a UFO magazine and then told him to drop the project because he, the publisher, had done some research and had found that UFO magazines don’t sell very well. Beckley explains that he tried in vain to make the argument that the magazines didn’t sell well because of poor distribution and then opted to publish a magazine with his own money in the economical tabloid form. To the right of Beckley’s article there is an ad for three of his books: Book of Space Brothers, a book of “alleged communications from space;” Subterranean World, covering the theory that some UFOs come from an underground base populated by descendants of the people of Atlantis; and People of the Planet Clarion, about the claims and messages of contactee Truman Bertherum. The lead story about the UN committee hearing about the examination of the alien is on page three. This would have happened just before the presentation at the UN on UFOs organized by Lee Speigel (listed as UFO Review’s chief of field investigations staring with issue number 3) at the behest of Grenada Prime Minister Eric Gairy. According to the report, a Mexican doctor in Guadalajara was visited by a man who said he was very ill. Upon examination, the doctor saw that the man’s skin was unusually pink and that he had no hair follicles except for those on his head. The man then said he had wanted to be examined to prove he was not human and proceeded to say that Earth had been visited regularly by beings from other planets and that there was concern about our slow development. The doctor felt obligated to report the encounter to “someone in authority” and Ambassador Francis Redhead of Grenada “was called in to investigate the matter.” The doctor was subsequently “invited to UN headquarters to tell his story.” The Centerfold Story is “Flying Saucers & Big Foot are Related!” by Jim Barnett. Barnett presents cases where Bigfoot creatures and UFOs were reported in the same area around the same time. Under the centerfold artwork by Dick Massa, the reader is told that it’s available as a poster for $3.80. For Gray Barker fans, there is what would be a recurring column by him called “Chasing the Flying Saucers.” In this first one, Barker describes waking up in his West Virginia home on January 9th to see 12 inches of snow covering the area, making breakfast, and opening the West Virginia Reader. He describes a report involving four women spotting a classic saucer while driving. The driver described tears starting to flow uncontrollably from her eyes upon spotting it. Barker describes rescuing the bacon he was cooking before it burned and then satisfying his hunger with some cinnamon rolls before digging into other reports from S.A.U.C.E.R.S. (Saucers and Unexplained Celestial Events Research Society) which was Moseley’s group that often had him as its sole member. He then presents the details of some more cases and ends describing a discussion of a case with a woman from his office, which might give the reader the impression that he makes his living as a professional UFOlogist. Right in the midst of the article on page 12 there is an ad for books by Barker and saucer related tape recordings for sale describing him as “one of the top UFOlogists in America.” UFO Review lasted until issue 39, which is the “official program” for the 1994 National New Age, Cosmic Conspiracies & UFO Conference held from May 20-23 in San Diego, California. Beckley was the organizer and speakers included Jim Moseley, Dr. Frank E. Stranges, and Sean David Morton. The keynote address was given by Vince Davis, who was notorious as one of the “Gulf Breeze Six.” Despite the sensationalism and the silliness contained in the paper throughout its existence, there are reports of some noteworthy cases. If nothing else, UFO Review provides a look into the popular, unabashedly commercial side of UFOlogy at that time.

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  In 1977, there was a flap in the area of St. Brides Bay in Pembrokeshire, Wales, that involved reported sightings of craft and humanoids. The most well-known incident involved 14 Broad Haven Primary School students running inside to tell their headmaster that they had seen a yellow cigar-shaped craft land in a field. On February 17, three staff members reported they saw the same craft. The story made national news thanks to British UFO Research Association investigator and UFO Investigators Network correspondent Randall Jones Pugh, and a flap began that would result in the area being referred to as “The Welsh Triangle.” A lesser-known case involved an entire family that reported a series of strange events which Pugh covered in articles published in issues of Flying Saucer Review and the BUFORA Journal. In April, while driving, Pauline Coombes and three (out of four) of her children were reportedly chased by a football shaped UFO. Later that year, in October, Coombes, her four children, and her mother reportedly witnessed a craft and humanoids that behaved in an especially bizarre manner. It came out that all sorts of strange happenings were said to have been occurring on the family homestead called Ripperston Farm. Journalist Clive Harold got close to the family and wrote a book about their experiences titled, “The Uninvited.” In the Vol. 23, No. 1, June 1977 issue (page 6 of the pdf) of Flying Saucer Review (page 6 of the pdf), Pugh includes Coombes’s report in “West Wales Roundup,” just after his article on Broadhaven. He presents the details from an article (in which he named as a “local UFOlogist”) by Hugh Trumbull that was published in the April 14, 1977, edition (page 15 of the pdf) of the Western Telegraph. According to the article headlined, “Chased by a Flying Football,” Coombes had seen three UFOs that year. In this instance, she was driving near Little Haven with her three children, when her 10-year-old son, Keiron, saw a light coming down towards them. He described it as yellow, about football-sized, with a beam coming out of the bottom. The object followed along the side of the car, hopping over hedges, for over a mile. When they reached the farm, the car’s engine and lights died. They went to get Coombes’s husband, Bill, but the object was gone by the time he came out. Pugh wrote an article covering a sighting Coombes and all four of her four children said they’d had, along with her mother, on October 30, 1977. It’s headlined “Stack Rocks Humanoid Display” and was published in the Vol. 23, No. 6, April 1978 issue (page 8 of the pdf) of Flying Saucer Review. According to Pugh, they were pulling up to the farm in their car when Coombes’s mother drew her attention to something in the sky. Coombes stopped the car and everyone got out to look. They described it as a “round, flat disc, whitish in color” moving towards the sea at what Coombes estimated was at around 200 feet “at the speed of a motor-boat going fast across the bay” or at about 20-30 mph. It came down to about the height of nearby Stack Rocks, maintained the same speed and then went into the side of the islet and disappeared. Coombes said she and her mother expected an explosion, but there was none, and “both women were quite adamant that ‘it just disappeared into the rock.’” The entire group crossed two fields to get to the water’s edge.  The water between them and the islet at this point was only about 400 feet wide, and as they approached, they saw what they first thought were, in Pugh’s words, “two skin-divers going about their business in the deep waters around the Stacks.” They then realized that the heads of the figures were elongated and much larger than a normal human head. Coombes described them as “rectangular in shape with the corners rounded off.” When asked if she was sure they weren’t divers or fisherman, Coombes said that while “they were human in shape, they were definitely not human beings.” They watched for about 15 minutes as, in Pugh’s words, “the silver-clad humanoids moved about on the uneven surface of the Stack Rocks.” Pugh points out that the islet rises “abruptly” to a height of about 80-100 feet and that the surface of the rock is such that it would require a good deal of caution in order not to fall off. Coombes said they saw “a door opening and shutting fairly rapidly on the right-hand side (the Broad Haven side) of the rock face.” The door seemed to be about the same size as a normal household door, had a “shimmering haze” around it, and the space behind it was “quite black.” It opened and closed, in Pugh’s words, “much as would the sliding doors of a serving hatch in a restaurant,” and the group saw a “silvery clad humanoid” repeatedly come into view and leave as if it was walking up and down some steps. The other figure moved across the rock face as if it was a smooth surface and even seemed to walk on the water. Eventually it went out of view behind the left side of the islet towards the sea. The other figure then vanished “abruptly” along with the door. According to Pugh, he and BBC news reporter David Allen interviewed Coombes and the children on December 1st. One thing that came out was that Coombes took a different road home that day and “could not fathom why she decided to take that particular route.” Pugh tells the reader that he is convinced that Coombes “has a psychic ability to see things not normally visible to other people” and mentions there being a paranormal aspect to the farm without going into specifics. As for Coombes’s credibility, he reports that she stuck to her story and was prepared to take any test that would prove she wasn’t imagining things. Pugh ends his article relating a sighting of his own through his bedroom window overlooking St. Brides Bay, Pembrokeshire. According to him, he saw a crescent-shaped object with a tube sticking up about 3 feet and a dome on top sitting in a field. As he pulled aside the curtain exposing the light from his room, the object took off vertically at great speed. The Coombes family shows up repeatedly in reports published in the BUFORA Journal throughout 1977 into 1978. In the Vol. 6, No. 2, July-August 1977 issue (page 16 of the pdf) Pugh says the family reported seeing a  7-feet-tall silver-clad humanoid looking in at them through their living room window. Coombes can be seen on YouTube describing this to a group of visitors at her farm. In the Vol. 6, No. 1, January-February 1978 issue (page 17 of the pdf), there is a report by Pugh that on May 17, 1977, Coombes’s twin daughters, Joanne and Layann, saw a silver-suited being walking around on the farm that then went through a hedge and a barb-wire fence and disappeared. He says they also saw “a silver-white ‘platelike object’ with a red light” that landed, put out a stair ramp, and ejected a box down it. The stairs then retracted, the door shut, and the craft took off. The family investigated and found no box but did find large footprints in the area. In the meantime, the twins and Coombes’s eldest daughter Katrina are said to have shouted out to the adults as they had seen a craft similar to the first one fly into the water by the Stack Rocks. Pugh wrote a book about the flap with Fredrick “Ted” William Holiday titled The Dyfed Enigma that was published in 1979. The Uninvited by Clive Harold published that same year focuses on the events reported at Ripperston Farm which were said to have also included televisions exploding and a herd of cows being mysteriously transported from a locked field to a neighboring farmyard. Pugh can be seen talking about the events he investigated here.

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  In 1980, The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William Moore was published. In the book, on page 103 of the first printing, there is a bad photocopy of a photo showing two soldiers escorting a small creature. One of the soldiers is carrying a suitcase-shaped object that seems to be a respiration device, as there is a hose going from it to the creature’s mouth. The photo is said to have “reportedly first surfaced in Wiesbaden, Germany.” In 1981, Wiesbaden resident Klaus Webner took it upon himself to investigate. He wrote an article presenting his findings that was published in the September 1981 issue of The Probe Report, put out by the Britain-based Probe UFO Research Organization. In the book, the photocopy is presented with the caption “Alien from Another World or Elaborate Hoax?” The reader is told that it, along with the “artist’s interpretation” on the preceding page, is being published “without comment about whether it may or may not pertain to certain significant aspects of the Roswell Incident.” According to the authors, “an unnamed informant” gave the original photo, which he said he bought for a dollar, to FBI agent John Quinn at the New Orleans field office. They say the photo “purports to show an alien survivor of a UFO crash in the custody of two U.S. military policeman.” Lastly, they say that it got “limited publicity in West Germany in the 1940s” and was met “with skepticism by U.S. officials of the then-existent Allied Military Government.” In his article headlined “The Strange Case of ‘Mister X,’” Webner describes Berlitz as “inventor of the Bermuda Triangle and mystification man of all things which are surroundable [sic] with the haze of mystery, and realisable [sic] in hard cash.” He describes the book as “nothing more than a mixture of far-fetched speculations, fantasies and false information.” Webner didn’t have to look far to establish the origin of the original photo. According to him, he found an article in “the archives of the local newspaper Wiesbadener Tagblatt” that had three photos under the headline “Flying saucers over Wiesbaden. A Giant Flying Disc Crashed at the Bleindenstadter Kopf. Crew Member is in Protective Detention. No Cause for Panic.” According to Webner, the article reports that a “crew member” had been taken into protective custody after a search for a saucer that had crashed overnight near Wiesbaden. He says the detainee is described as a “strange creature with only one leg moving about a rotating plate. His arms come to an end in four stubby fingers.” It reportedly had “large glaring eyes” and an oval-shaped head. The creature, called “Mr. X” in the article, was said to have been taken to the Neroberg Hotel where it would be taken for daily walks between “14 and 15 hours” in order to get used to our atmosphere. A search for other crew members was said to be ongoing. The photo used in the article showing the creature in custody is presented in Probe. The reproduction in Probe is of much better quality than the photocopy seen in The Roswell Incident, but they both come from the same source. Webner tells the reader that the article was published on April 1, 1950. According to him, on April 15, 1981, he was able to talk with the reporter and the photographer. The reporter was Wilhelm Sprunkel, and he told Webner that the whole thing was an April Fool joke. Sprunkel wanted to make the photo as realistic looking as he could, so he called the local U.S. liaison officer (we presume he told him his plan) and asked if he could “borrow” two soldiers. The officer laughed and said he needed to get permission from the commanding officer. The commanding officer also laughed and said he needed to get permission from headquarters in Heidelberg. Permission was granted, and Sprunkle proceeded with his plan with the help of photographer Hans Scheffler. First, Sheffler created fake saucer photos using pictures he took of “light fountain glasses from Wiesbaden’s cure house pond.” He cut out saucer shapes and stuck them on photos that would provide a background. One of these, showing two saucers over the Market Place Church, is reproduced in Probe. For the creature, Scheffler enlisted the aid of his five-year-old son, Peter. One of the soldiers held a jerry can and Sheffler painted in the “hose, breathing gear, horror head, griffin hands, one leg and foot-plate.” The source of the photos was given as “3 TRANSLAG/USA PHOTOS” which was invented by Sprunkel using the name of a local business. The story caused a sensation, and the American Wiesbaden Post reprinted it along with the photos. Sprunkle got a call from a female journalist who wanted to buy the copyright for the Mr. X photo, and it took Sprunkle around 20 minutes to convince her that the story was a joke. The Wiesbaden Tagblatt published a confession on April 3rd under the headline “Tuchtig Reingefallen!” which Webner translates to “Good Letdown!” and Google translates to “Fell Right In!” As for how Moore and Berlitz got ahold of the photocopy, Webner says it was discovered by UFO Information Network affiliate Barry Greenwood. According to Webner, UFOIN had “acquired a bundle of FBI photocopies” thanks to the Freedom of Information Act. Because the photocopy was in such bad shape, another UFOIN affiliate, Lawrence Blazey, made the “artist’s impression.” He says, “William Moore ordered this material for his book The Roswell Incident and Mister X was born for the second time.” Webner says his investigation was easy, as there were only two newspapers in Wiesbaden. According to him, he was told by employees at Wiesbadener Tagblatt that neither Belitz nor Moore had contacted anyone at the paper and neither had anyone else. He tells the reader that Sprunkle, Scheffler, “and even Mister X himself, Peter Scheffler are still employed there.” Webner’s research resulted in the paper publishing an article on April 22, 1981, headlined, “A Tagblatt April Fool Joke in the files of the FBI…” Webner laments that his name wasn’t mentioned. As for the Roswell story, Webner concludes that “the latest research says” that “‘Crashed flying saucers’ and ‘crew members on ice’ are fantasies and not facts!” https://archive.org/details/charles-berlitz-william-l.-moore-the-roswell-incident-1980_202012/mode/2up

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  As anyone who has looked into the subject of UFO-related humanoids knows, reported creatures come in all shapes and sizes. Some are more unusual than others, and a pair of creatures said to be seen in Italy in 1978 definitely stand out. In the Vol. 28, No. 6, issue (page 15 of the pdf) of Flying Saucer Review, there is an article by Antonio Chiumiento headlined “An Encounter with ‘Rat-Faces’ in Italy.” The article was translated from Italian and Chiumiento is described as an “Investigator and member of the board of directors of C.U.N. (Italian National UFO Research Centre, Turin.)” According to Chiumiento, on the morning of November 24, 1978, 61-year-old Gallio resident, Angelo D’Ambros, went to get some firewood in nearby Gastagh. At about a quarter before noon, he turned to put down a branch he had been chopping up when he “was gripped with horror” upon seeing two creatures looking at him that were “extremely close.” They were hovering about 40 cms above the ground and D’Ambros estimated that one of them was 1 m 20 cm tall while the other was 1 m. They were “extremely thin,” and had yellowish skin that was tight to where D’Ambros could see large veins on the head and hands of the larger creature that was closest to him. Their heads were bald, smooth, large and pear-shaped, and they had “enormous” pointed ears that stuck straight up. They had no eyelids and large, sunken white eyes. Their noses were long and almost went below their lower lips, and they had large mouths with a long, pointed tusk at each end. They seemed to be wearing dark, tight overalls, and sticking out of the sleeves and leggings were huge hands and feet that were out of proportion to the rest of their bodies. Their ring fingers were bigger than the others, and their nails were long. As D’Ambros stood frozen in terror, the smaller creature began moving back and forth in rapid leaps between D’Ambros’s left and right side as though gliding and without moving its feet. As it did so, there was the sound of air displacement and the rusting of vegetation due to its ears brushing the lowest branches of the trees nearby. D’Ambros managed to overcome his terror enough to shout “Help!” as loud as he could. He then got the strength to ask the creatures who they were and what they wanted with him. It was of no use as he only got “incomprehensible mumblings” from the smaller creature. Suddenly, D’Ambros’s attention shifted to the larger creature that had remained almost motionless about a meter away from him. The creature grabbed the billhook (also known as a “sling blade”) D’Ambros was carrying at a spot that had no cutting edge and attempted to take it from him. D’Ambros became determined not to let the creature have it, as it was his only defense should they should prove hostile. D’Ambros tightened his grip, and the creature grabbed onto the tool further down, at which point, D’Ambros felt what seemed to be “a slight electrical shock.” The creature made one more attempt using both hands, and D’Ambrose felt what was clearly another shock go up his arm. D’Ambros became “furious” as the creature refused to give up, and he used his free hand to grab a large branch he had cut and was ready to hit the creature. Both creatures, seeming to recognize the threat D’Ambros posed to them, “fled instantly.” D’Ambros recovered “his normal calm” and then, compelled by curiosity regarding the origin of the creatures, ran after them “as fast as he could along the mule-track along which they had come.” Finally, in a clearing, he saw a disk-shaped metallic object with a dome on top standing on four legs. The upper part was red, and the lower part, separated by a white band around the middle, was blue, while the legs were aluminum grey. Without the legs it was about two meters high and four meters wide. As soon as D’Ambros spotted the craft, he saw the hand of one of the creatures closing “from inside the dome, a sort of trap-door by drawing it backwards.” The craft then took off silently at an angle at great speed while putting out a “burst of red flame.” It quickly went out of sight behind some fir trees. When D’Ambros got home, he kept his story to himself but was so disturbed that he skipped his lunch. He then decided to confide in his son in law, Luciano Munari. The next day, Munari got someone to go with him and went to the spot where D’Ambros said he’d seen the craft. At the site, Munari saw a 3.5 m circular area of grass that was blackened more from oil than burning and swirled flat in an anticlockwise direction. When he touched the grass, his hands stayed clean. He also saw two impressions that were U-shaped, 20 cm long, 3 cm wide, and 3 cm deep, and some bushes that had been uprooted, “this being the result of the displacement of air as the ‘object’ departed.” Many of the local townsfolk didn’t believe the story and Munari decided to photograph the site as proof. Unfortunately, it snowed, and he wasn’t able to get back there until December 3rd. He went with some of the non-believers who helped him clear away the snow, and he took some black and white photos that didn’t show the details of the impressions very well. He tried again with color film on the 10th and circled the marks with yellow paper to make sure they’d show up. The photos are not included in the article. Thanks to “an initiative of Munari,” the story made the local paper, Giornale di Vicenza, under the headline, “I Was Attacked by Two Martians: They Wanted My Billhook.” After it appeared, D’Ambros was swarmed with curiosity seekers and local UFO enthusiasts. The billhook’s blade reportedly had an imprint about the size of a pinky, and the cutting edge had turned red. Local UFO “students” took it for testing but brought it back when they found that the lab work would be too expensive. Munari told Chiumiento that D’Ambros started using it again, and that the imprint and discoloration were no longer visible. According to Chiumiento, he (he uses what I assume is the royal we) found out about the case when a “fellow investigator” sent him the article. He went to Gallio in the fall of 1979 and was told by the D’Ambros family that the site was still blackened, but he wasn’t able to see it for himself because it had snowed. He went there again in February 1980 and got a statement from Munari who said he believed his father in law’s story, and that he had read UFO Report by J. Allen Hynek. He said he saw there was a resemblance between the marks he saw and the marks pictured in photos in the book, which Chiumiento identifies as photos of the Socorro landing site. Chiumiento made several visits and established that D’Ambros and Munari had good reputations. He compares the creatures reported by D’Ambros to the ones reported in the 1955 Kelly-Hopkinsville case. He then includes descriptions of five more sightings in the area around the same time, including one where a witness gave photos he’d taken, along with the negatives, to a man identifying himself as an Air Force officer who “was never seen again.” Chiumiento predicts that the Gallio case will become as well-known as the Kelly-Hopkinsville case and argues that it supports the theory “which asserts the presence here of UFO occupants of unknown but in any case non-terrestrial origin.”

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  On January 20, 2026, Francis Lee Ridge passed away. His contributions to UFO investigation and research spanned six decades, and thanks to his efforts, a treasure trove of historical UFO-related material is available to anyone with an internet connection. According to Ridge’s bio at nicap.org, he was born on October 13, 1942. In 1960, he became an active investigator as head of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena Indiana Subcommittee and remained in that position until 1970. In 1970, Ridge began a project called MADAR (Multiple Anomaly Detection and Automatic Recording) which he continued throughout his life. He created detection and recording systems to gather data on geomagnetic, electromagnetic, and background radiation anomalies and monitored them at his home in Newburgh, Indiana. In April 2016, “a new idea was conceived to create a network of affordable devices.” This resulted in the creation of the MADAR-III DataProbe system with the help of MADAR member Rich Vitello and his team at ARUFON after a “costly and disastrous false start” in the fall. By May 2018, the system was operational, and as of 2023, there was a network operating with 221 members operating 168 sites (56 of which were “DAS-equipped”) throughout the world. In 1972, Ridge became Indiana state section director for the Mutual UFO Network and state director in 1986. He was also a field investigator for the Center for UFO Studies. He investigated hundreds of cases and created the Regional Sighting Information Database which, as of the last update in 2023, had 4,000 entries covering the area of Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. He also ran the UFO Filter Center doing computer studies on regional and nationwide sightings. In 1997, Ridge was authorized to start work on a website for NICAP. The site contains a wealth of information for historical researchers including NICAP casefiles, biographies, chronologies, publications, documents, and links to other resources. Ridge was project coordinator for The Nuclear Connection Project, which focused on UFO reports around nuclear sites, and in 2006, he led a re-investigation into the Mantell case which concluded that “Mantell was chasing a real UFO.” The report in book form, titled The Mantell Incident: Anatomy of a Re-Investigation was published in 2010. Along with a link below the bio to the Mantell book, there is a link to his 1994 book Regional Encounters: The UFO Center Files, and his 2021 book CAP POINT: A series of staggering events with global implications for everyone on planet earth.  At the bottom is a position statement regarding the UFO mystery: “There is no question or doubt that most UFOs are actually IFOs (Identified Flying Objects). For the subset of events that cannot be explained, there is a small group of sightings that demonstrate solid objects under intelligent control. I am convinced that these objects are somebody else’s craft. Although I cannot prove that the intelligence behind the phenomena is ET in nature, I consider the ETH to be the least unlikely. I also feel that there is a nuclear connection (or one that indicates a cause and effect relationship with serious world events that could lead to a nuclear threat) and that the evidence in the form of military sightings indicates we are being observed and are obviously scientifically and militarily inferior to this presence.” In Ridge’s “detailed” biography, also found on the NICAP website, there is much more information regarding his activities. There are also links to his afore-mentioned books and several papers written by him. An updated version now begins with his obituary written by his friend Phil Leech. Francis Lee Ridge made a huge contribution to UFOlogy and his efforts are greatly appreciated, particularly by those of us who are passionate about the history of the subject. R.I.P.    

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  In 1969, Passport to Magonia by Jacques Vallée was published. Its central thesis is that there may be a link between folklore, particularly stories of the Fae folk, and UFO lore. In the Vol. 25, No. 6, issue (page 25 of the pdf) of Flying Saucer Review, there is an article by Eileen Morris headlined “The Winged Beings of Bluestone Walk” covering a case that certainly seems to support Vallée’s ideas. According to Morris, a “necessarily brief” version of the story told by Jean Hingley first appeared in the January 12, 1979, edition of The Dudley Herald. She says she met Hingley and her husband “a number of times” both at their residence and at her own, and describes them as “honest, hard-working people.” She took notes and used them to type up Hingley’s version of events and then had Hingley read it. Hingley was “satisfied that it is accurate.” According to the account written as if Hingley was telling it in the first person, she lived “in a small council house in Bluestone Walk, Rowley Regis, near Birmingham,” with her husband, Cyril, and their Alsatian, Hobo. On January 4, 1979, it was a cold, dark morning, and there was snow on the ground as she saw her husband off to his job at a cement works (she worked at a company that made soundproofing for cars). She was at the back door of the house that opened out to the road, and as her husband drove off, she noticed a light from the area of the garden. Thinking her husband had left the light on in the car port on the other side of the garden, she walked over to it with the dog to check and saw that the light was off. She turned to go back to the house and saw an orange light over the garden that turned white and lit up the whole area. She went into the house through the back door and there “was a sound like Zee… zee… zee…” as three “beings” floated through the door and went past her. The creatures were between 3 and 4 feet tall, glowed brilliantly, “had wonderful wings,” and were about a foot above the floor. Hingley was terrified and grabbed onto the steel sink in the kitchen. She was “frozen” with her mouth wide open and unable to speak. The dog went over to his water bowl “swaying from side to side.” His hair was sticking out “like a hedgehog’s,” and he seemed as if he was drugged. He then lay down on the floor, “stiff, with his eyes open.” “After a while,” the fear seemed to go away, and Hingley felt as if she was lifted up. She felt like a different person as if she was “in Heaven,” and seemed to float into the “lounge.” She was warm, even though the doors were wide open. She was blinded by a bright light and covered her eyes. It seemed to her that the creatures were reading her mind: “It was like a light or an X-ray penetrating my mind.” She could hear their artificial Christmas tree shaking. She took her hand from her eyes and could see the creatures shaking the tree. The light surrounding them was dimmer as if they had turned it down. They were “slim ‘men,’” and were wearing “silvery-green tunics and silver waistcoats with silver buttons or press studs.” They had pointed hands and feet covered with the same silvery green and wore pointed caps, also of that color, “with something like a lamp on top.” Covering their heads were transparent helmets. Their faces were waxy, white, and corpse-like, and they had “black diamond” eyes and thin mouths. Their wings were large and oval-shaped, glowed with “rainbow colours,” and were covered with dots Hingley describes as being like “‘Braille’ dots.” The creatures floated around and touched everything in the lounge. Hingley was finally able to speak and said “Three of you and one of me. What are you going to do? What do you want with me?” The creatures all touched the buttons on their chests and their voices then seemed to come from there. They all spoke together and said, “We shall not harm you,” and when Hingley asked where they came from, they said, “We come from the sky.” The creatures shook the tree again, and “the little fairy fell from the top.” Hingley wanted to pick it up but wasn’t able to move. She explained about the tree, Christmas, and Jesus, and the creatures said they knew who Jesus was. Hingley saw the creatures looking at the Honour list in the Sunday paper on the table. She explained that the people listed had been made lords, and the creatures replied, “There is only one Lord.” Hingley then told them she was just a working woman and suggested that they should go see the Queen or a “real lady.” They said, “You are a lady.” The creatures then sat on the couch and “bounced like children,” causing Hingley to say in a sharp tone, “Be careful of the furniture.” They “put the light up,” and she became concerned that they had the power to hurt her, and she felt she should be friendly. She said “I can’t call you ‘creature,’ so I shall call you ‘gentlemen.’” She started to say, “Nice to see you! Nice.” They replied saying, “Nice.” The creatures floated around the room with their wings fluttering “gently” and made no sound. They went through a door and “folded their wings behind their backs like pleated fans,” went upstairs, and then came back. They picked up some tapes, looked at cigarette packs, whiskey, and sherry on the sideboard, and Hingley asked, “Do you want a drink?” They replied, saying “Water,” three times. Hingley went and filled four glasses so she could drink with them and show that the water wasn’t poison.  When she brought the glasses in on a tray, it felt as though the tray was “magnetized towards them.” They took the glasses, seemed about to lift their helmets, and then “put the ‘power light’ on,” so she wasn’t able to see them drink. When they put the glasses back, they were empty. A long discussion then followed in which the creatures told Hingley they’d been to Australia and New Zealand to talk to people there, and no one seemed to be interested. Hingley asked if she should “tell people on Earth about it,” and they said, “Yes.” They told Hingley that everyone goes to heaven, and “It’s a man’s world,” and Hingley said she hadn’t been to chapel “for a year or two.” They said there was “no need to worship in synagogues,” and Hingley tells the reader that she didn’t know the word for the Jewish place of worship until her husband told her. Hingley then offered the creatures some mince pies, and they “each lifted a mince pie from the plate as though their hands were magnetic.” Hingley saw they were looking at the cigarettes again, and she decided to demonstrate how people smoke them. When she lit one with a match, the creatures leapt back as if they were scared and then floated out the door. Hingley put out the cigarette and ran after them asking them to come back. Outside, she saw them, still holding the mince pies, get into an orange cigar-shaped craft that was 8-10 feet long and about 4 feet high. It seemed to be covered with shiny plastic, had port holes, “a scorpion tail” on the back, and a “kind of wheel” on top. Once inside the ship, they flashed the lights twice and took off heading towards Oldbury. In the aftermath, Hingley found that the tapes the creatures had touched were ruined by distortion. She was left with sore eyes for a week and had to wear dark glasses. She felt ill and had to take a leave from work. As strange as this story is, Morris assures the reader that Hingley told it to people from the following organizations who went to her house: The Oldbury Police, the West Bromwich Police, and the UFO Studies Investigation Services. The case is mentioned in Northern UFO News No. 57 (page 4 of the pdf), and the reader is told that the case is being investigated by UFOSIS and UFORA under the supervision of Mark Pritchard and Martin Keatman and that “landing marks in the snow were seen and photographed.”    

By: Albert Wain In 2015, while handling an inspection claim for damaged furniture in Buffalo, New York, I met with a client at his home. He was around eighty years old and wore a cast on one arm. As we walked through his condo inspecting the damaged pieces, he explained that he was battling bone cancer in his arm and that his wife of many years had recently passed away. At one point, he brought me into a room lined with photographs of various aircraft. He told me he was a retired Air Force officer who had flown many combat missions in Korea and Vietnam. This, he explained, was his room of memories. He spoke easily about his time in the military, and it was clear he was enjoying the conversation. When we finished the inspection, I asked if we might sit for a while and visit before I headed out. He smiled and said, “That sounds nice.” We discussed his wife and the life they had shared, his military service, and I shared a little about my own life as well. Because I’ve always had an interest in the UFO topic — and because he seemed receptive — I decided to ask. “So,” I said, “have you ever seen anything up there you couldn’t quite explain? A flying saucer or something like that?” “You mean like a spaceship, or something like that?” “Yes,” I replied. He looked up at the ceiling for a few moments, his eyes moving back and forth, then said, “Nope. Not that I recall. Some of the other pilots and I would see these things called contrails and couldn’t figure out where they came from, but no UFOs.” I was, of course, disappointed and was about to move on to another subject or get ready to leave when his demeanor changed. He stared at me with a look that suggested he wasn’t sure whether he should tell me something — or whether I would even believe him. “I’ll tell you something that happened while I was with another pilot at an officers’ club in Korea,” he said, “if you’re interested.” “Yes, of course,” I said. He told me they had been sitting at a table with two young pilots they met that night, playing pool and drinking beer. As the evening went on, the conversation drifted through careers and the usual pilot talk. At some point, the two young men mentioned that their first assignment out of flight school had been Roswell Air Base. “My friend and I chuckled a little,” he said, “and one of us asked, ‘Oh, isn’t that where the flying saucer supposedly crashed?’” Both men went silent. Their expressions turned serious. They looked around the room nervously, then at each other, and back at us. Finally, one of them spoke quietly. “They were there,” he said. “We saw them.” They tried to get the young men to explain, to tell them more, but neither one would say another word about it. “And I guess,” he added, “that’s all I can tell you as well.” My visit ended shortly after that, and I moved on with my business and with my life. In reflection, I cannot speak to the sincerity of the two young airmen from Roswell. But I will never doubt the sincerity of the story I was told by a very fine older gentleman — and a patriot.

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  The cattle mutilation mystery and its association with UFO activity didn’t get the attention of researcher investigators until the 1970s. There is an article on page 2 of the March 1975 APRO Bulletin, headlined “More on Mutilations,” discussing the findings of APRO Field Investigators Bill Pitt, Lee Spiegel, and Kevin Randle. It was the opinion of APRO at the time that “no satisfactory evidence has emerged which links UFOs to mutilated animals.” The first mutilation to get the public’s attention was that of a horse named Snippy found by its owners in the San Luis Valley of Colorado on September 8, 1967. Shortly after that, in his article (page 8 of the pdf) in the July/August 1968 Flying Saucer Review headlined “West Virginia’s Enigmatic Bird,” John Keel mentions that cow and horse mutilations are “now common” in the midst of sightings of the Mothman and UFOs in the area around Point Pleasant. However, there is a report far earlier than this that, by most accounts, appeared in the April 23, 1897, Yates Center Farmer’s Advocate. This involves a mystery airship caught in the act of abducting a cow right in front of prominent Woodson County, Kansas, citizen Alexander Hamilton (not the one on the 20-dollar bill).  While the Advocate article remains elusive, Redditt user Remseey2907 found an article in what appears to be the Globe Democrat that includes the details of and references the Advocate article. According to the Democrat article dated April 26th and headlined “The Airship Steals,” Hamilton, a farmer who lived near Yates Center, said that “last Monday at 10:30 o’clock,” (April 19th) he and his family “stood mute in wonder and fright” as an airship appeared and proceeded to, in the reporter’s words, “swoop down upon the cow lot and steal a 2-year-old heifer.” Backing up Hamilton’s story is an affidavit signed by eleven prominent citizens, including a sheriff and a justice of the peace, stating that they believe Hamilton’s story “to be true and correct.” The details of the story are presented in Hamilton’s words. According to him, “we were awakened by a noise among the cattle.” He got out of bed, went to the door thinking that his bulldog “was performing some of his pranks,” and was astonished to see an airship coming down over his cow lot “almost forty rods from the house.” He called his son, Wall, and his tenant, Gid Heslip, and after grabbing some axes, they “ran to the corral.” When they were about fifty yards from the ship, it was no more than thirty feet above the ground. Hamilton describes it as cigar-shaped, about 300 feet long, with a carriage underneath “made of panels of glass or other transparent substance, alternating with a narrow strip of some material.” The rest of the craft was dark red. It was brilliantly lit from within and had three external lights: “an immense searchlight,” and two smaller lights, one red and one green. The searchlight was pointed directly on Hamilton and the others and then “a great turbine wheel about 50 feet in diameter, which was slowly revolving below the craft, now began to buzz…” The craft rose up, and when it was about 300 feet high, it appeared to be hovering over a two-year-old heifer that seemed to be stuck to a fence. They went over to her and saw there was a half-inch red cable tied in a slip knot around her neck that went up to the ship. They tried to free the cow but were unable to, and they watched as the ship rose up and carried the cow away towards the southwest. According to Hamilton, Link Thomas of Coffey County, about four miles west of LeRoy, Kansas, found the hide of the cow, along with its head and legs, in his field on Tuesday. Hamilton was able to identify it by his brand on the hide. This story got widespread public exposure thanks to Frank Edwards’s bestselling 1966 book, Flying Saucers–Serious Business, and Jacques Vallée included it in his 1965 book, Anatomy of a Phenomenon, and his 1969 book, Passport to Magonia. It seems, however, that the story was a hoax and how this was discovered is told in detail by Jerome Clark in his article (page 94 of the pdf) headlined “The Great Airship Hoax,” published in the February 1977 issue of Fate magazine. According to Clark, “the truth about the affair” came out in an article published in the January 28, 1943, Kansas newspaper, the Buffalo Enterprise. A week before, the paper had recounted Hamilton’s original tale, and this prompted Ed F. Hudson, who had been the editor of the Farmer’s Advocate in 1897, to write a letter to the Enterprise. According to Hudson, he had just installed a small gasoline engine to replace hand power on his “old Country Campbell press” and invited friends, including Hamilton to watch it operate. Hudson explains the origin of the story: “Hamilton exclaimed, ‘Now they can fly,’ hence the airship story that we made up.” Clark says the Enterprise article was discovered in 1976 by an American correspondent of Fortean Times Editor J. M. Rickard. Rickard sent Clark a copy, and Clark got a letter seeking confirmation published in the September 16, 1976, Yates Center News. This got a reply from Donna Steeby of Wichita, Kansas who said that her 93-year-old mother, Ethel L. Shaw, had heard the story from Hamilton, himself. Shaw provided Clark with a statement. According to Shaw, when she was about 14 years old, she was at the Hamilton house with Mrs. Hamilton and their daughter, Nell, when Mr. Hamilton came in and said “Ma, I fixed up quite a story and told the boys in town and it will come out in the Advocate this weekend.” Mrs. Hamilton was “rather shocked” by the story but the girls weren’t bothered “as we felt it was just a fabricated story.” Shaw goes on to say that “it seems there were a few men around who had formed a club which they called ‘Ananias’ (Liars’ Club).” To her knowledge, the club broke up not long after the story was published. She adds that the men who signed the affidavit “knew it to be a falsehood but simply went along with it for the fun.” According to Clark, Lucius Farish had an article about the case published in the April 1966 issue of Fate in which he proclaimed “this case (is) one of the most astounding to be found on record!” The editor’s note at the end of Clark’s article states: “Lucius Farish has asked us to convey his apologies to Fate readers for his unwitting role in publicizing this fallacious incident.” Thanks to Redditt user tweedboltmegacorp for posting the link to the Fate issue.  

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  For many people growing up in the 1970s (of which this writer is one), seeing a UFO documentary was their first in-depth look into the subject. These films often came along with books tied in, and major publishers such as Bantam were getting onboard. More and more people were willing to accept the idea that UFOs were worthy of serious consideration, and this meant that more and more people were willing to spend money on movies and books covering the subject. What had formerly been mostly confined to a subculture of enthusiasts, was now becoming a somewhat profitable entertainment industry. Indeed, it may come as a surprise to some readers, but between the summer of the saucers in 1947, and 1968, there were only two documentaries made in the midst of all the science fiction saucer films that became popular starting in the 1950s. The beginning of the 1970s wave of UFO documentaries can be traced back to the 1968 book Erinnerungen an die Zukunft (Memories of the Future) by Erich von Däniken published by Econ-Verlag in West Germany. The book not only whetted the public’s appetite for UFOs and aliens (especially ancient ones), but opened up the doors for all things strange and mysterious, including Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, ghosts, and lake monsters. The book was translated into English and published in 1969 by Souvenir Press in England as Chariots of the Gods? and under the same title in 1970 by Putnam in the United States. It made The New York Times bestseller list and was the source (along with von Däniken’s second book published in 1970, Return to the Stars) for a film with the German book title. This was produced by Berlin-based Terra-Filmkunst, directed by Harald Reinl, and released in West Germany in 1970. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Film. In 1972, the English version, Chariots of the Gods (note the lack of the question mark), was released in the United States by Sun International Pictures. According to the website the-numbers.com, which lists it under its German title, it ranked 25th in all-time highest grossing documentaries and had grossed $25,900,000 as of this writing. Past guest: Erich von Däniken 1935-2026 Before becoming a successful author, Von Däniken’s future didn’t look so bright as he came into adulthood. According to the introduction of an interview with him presented on pages 51 and 52 of the August 1974 Playboy magazine, his father took him out of Catholic school when he was 19 and apprenticed him to a hotelier. This was after he was convicted of stealing money from a camp where he worked and an innkeeper. He was given a four-month suspended sentence, and a psychiatrist who examined him said he showed a “tendency to lie.” After sticking with the apprenticeship “for a while,” he ran off to Egypt, got involved in a sketchy jewelry deal, and wound up being convicted of fraud and embezzlement upon his return. This time he served nine months in jail, and he told Playboy that he had experienced a vision there but didn’t see fit to share the details. Von Däniken returned to the hotel business as a manager. For the next twelve years, on vacations, he traveled the world and gathered material for his book. Law officials began to wonder how a man of his means was able to afford this and found that he had obtained $130,000 in loans by “falsifying hotel books.” He was convicted on charges of fraud and embezzlement and spent a year in prison. At the trial he was described as a liar and a criminal psychopath by a court appointed psychiatrist. As it turned out, jail served him as a writer’s retreat. His book was published in Europe by then, and was a best seller, so he was able to easily pay off the $130,000. While doing his time, he wrote his second book, and continued his career as a writer after his release. As of this writing, his biography at daniken.com states that he is the author of 49 books which “have sold at around 70 million copies and have been translated into 32 languages.” According to the “Books” section of the site, his “last and final book,” Notizen aus meinem Leben (Notes of my Life) was published in 2024. The movie set the tone for 1970s UFO docs. It opens with a shot of outer space for the title sequence and then moves into footage of Mount Palomar observatory as the narration begins. The soundtrack was done by German composer Peter Thomas, who, like Ennio Morricone, the Italian composer best known for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, became renowned for his creative use of a variety of sounds and instruments. For Chariots, Thomas made use of orchestral and jazz styles with electronic beeps and burbles sprinkled in throughout. Interspersed with footage taken from all over the world, there are talking heads with academic titles offering speculations on alien intervention in not only our architecture, but also our culture, religion, and genetic makeup. The success of Chariots spawned a series of movies in the same vein. For television, it was re-edited, Rod Serling was hired to do the narration, and it aired in 1973 as In Search of Ancient Astronauts. Serling also did the narration for The Outer Space Connection, created by Alan Landsburg Productions and released in theatres in 1975. Besides rehashing the ideas from Chariots, it veered into other realms of the mysterious, including the Bermuda Triangle “mystery,” which had captured the public imagination thanks to Charles Berlitz’s 1974 book The Bermuda Triangle. Then, in 1975, William Shatner hit the big screen in Mysteries of the Gods. This was based on Von Daniken’s 1974 book Miracles of the Gods and was another movie made in Germany (produced by Terra-Filmkunst, directed by Harald Reinl) and redone for American release with Shatner’s narration and added footage of him interviewing “experts.” This includes what may have been the first big-screen appearance of a crystal skull, and a prediction by Jeanne Dixon that the Earth would be visited by aliens in August of 1977. Von Däniken’s theories and claims were challenged early on, notably in two books: Clifford Wilson’s 1972 book, Crash Go the Chariots, and Ronald Story’s 1976 book, The Space Gods Revealed. Carl Sagan wrote in the forward of Story’s book, “I know of no recent books so riddled with logical and factual errors as the works of Däniken.” Von Däniken commented on his critics for Playboy and is quoted in the introduction: “I’m the only author who has really frightened the critics. Other writers sit at home and wait for miracles. I’m making miracles.” Von Däniken passed away on January 10th.  

Simulcast on YouTube, Facebook & Twitter | Tuesday, January 20, 2025 @ 11:00 AM EST (-5GMT) Podcast UFO will be attending and livestreaming a historic press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2026. 11:00am – 1:00pm ET. For the first time publicly, Dr. Italo Venturelli, a leading Brazilian neurosurgeon, will describe his direct hospital contact in 1996 with a living, non-human intelligent being following the infamous Varginha incident. Multiple Brazilian witnesses, medical professionals, and officials will present first-hand testimony regarding the reported crash of an unidentified object, the capture of non-human entities, and the subsequent involvement of Brazilian authorities and the U.S. Air Force. Organized by investigative journalist and filmmaker James Fox, the press conference will introduce new medical, forensic, and governmental evidence, including testimony from Dr. Armando Fortunato, the forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy of a military police officer allegedly injured during the incident. The event coincides with the release of Fox’s new documentary Moment of Contact: New Revelations of Alien Encounters and follows growing calls for transparency after The Age of Disclosure. This press conference aims to present unprecedented data, encourage mainstream discussion, and prompt further governmental investigation into non-human intelligence encounters.

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  The first feature-length UFO documentary was titled, appropriately, Unidentified Flying Objects with the subtitle, The True Story of Flying Saucers. It was produced by Clarence Greene and released in 1956. Researcher Robert Barrow devoted a blogspot.com site to it titled UFO: The True Story of Flying Saucers and posted from June 2008 until July 2025. In his June 12, 2008, post, “The Driving Force: Clarence Greene,” Barrow includes a statement “signed” by Greene, but he tells the reader that he found it on the web “uncredited.” According to Greene in his July 26, 1967, statement titled, “UFO: Why I Made Unidentified Flying Objects,” one night in August of 1952, a friend called his attention to something in the sky Greene describes as “a sphere of light.” They watched it for about five minutes as it moved, stopped, made turns, and then moved off over the horizon. He later learned that members of the Ground Observation Corps had also observed it. The next morning, he told his partner, Russell Rouse, and the Greene and Rouse production staff about it. He became aware of the ridicule factor around UFO reports and felt empathy for witnesses who had been victims of it. He tells the reader he “was at a complete loss to understand why there seemed to be such a determined effort to suppress all news of Unidentified Flying Objects by what seemed to be a planned campaign of skepticism and scoffing.” Notably, at the time, there was an intense public interest in UFOs following sightings, both visual and on radar, of UFOs in Washington, D.C., airspace over two successive weekends beginning July 19, 1952. This was followed by a press conference held by the Air Force to answer questions about the events. The first head of Project Blue Book, Edward J. Ruppelt, describes both events in his 1956 book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. According to him, the press conference “was the largest and longest the Air Force had held since World War II.” As fate would have it, as Greene was preparing to make his film, Ruppelt was in California working as an engineer for Northrop Corporation. Al Chop, the former public information officer at the Pentagon who dealt with UFO inquiries, was also in California working in public relations for Douglas Aircraft. This is according to James W. Moseley in his 2002 book, Shockingly Close to the Truth: Confessions of a Graverobbing UFOlogist. Moseley interviewed both men together in 1953. Al Chop was in the radar room at Washington Airport on July 26th and observed the unidentifieds firsthand. According to Greene, he met with Chop, and once Chop was convinced that Greene was going to do a serious film, he gave Greene “a breakdown on Project Blue Book.” Then, Chop and “certain newspaper men” arranged a meeting with Ruppelt, and Ruppelt got onboard. Chop and Ruppelt served as uncredited technical advisors but were featured in news articles about the film. Greene found out from “some newspapermen” that there were rumors that the Air Force had motion picture footage of UFOs. Greene “confronted Chop and Ruppelt,” and they confirmed the existence of the films, which were designated by the Pentagon as the “Utah” and “Montana” films. The Utah film had been shot by Navy Chief Photographer Delbert C. Newhouse, and the Montana film by Nicholas Mariana. Green got in touch with both men, saw their films, and was able to have them “analyzed by scientists and film experts” who concluded that the objects seen were genuine unknowns. Greene was told by Chop and Ruppelt that this was also the conclusion of Air Force and Navy scientists. Mariana and Newhouse appear, along with their footage, in the film. Besides having the help of Chop and Ruppelt, Greene also managed to get Major Dewey Fournet involved, who was the senior officer in the radar room during the D.C. flap. Fournet was the liaison officer between the Pentagon and Blue Book. However, even with the involvement of these three men, there was no cooperation from the Pentagon. In fact, then head of Blue Book, Captain George T. Gregory, expressed concern that the movie would bring on 1952-level public relations headaches for the Air Force, and he wrote the following memo dated May 17, 1956, which can be found in the 40-page Blue Book file on the film: “This film may stir up a storm of public controversy similar to that which USAF was subjected to in 1952 with regard to UFOs, as a result of the unwarranted sensationalism generated by so-called ‘UFO experts’, writers and publishers…” He also says that in a series of meetings held with advisors, including J. Allen Hynek, “and other pertinent personnel,” it was agreed that ATIC should review the film before its release “for purposes of ‘countermeasures,’” meaning that an official comment should be prepared and “kept in readiness” for the inevitable queries. A year after undertaking the project, Greene now had the task of putting a film together. This involved “months of interviews with saucer sighters, scientists, Air Force personnel, law enforcement officers, airline pilots, in fact, with anyone who had something to contribute in the way of legitimate information.” Greene points out that the process of verifying all the information down to the minute details often took weeks. As for the filming process, he says, “It was practically a tour of the entire country.” The film ended up being more docudrama than documentary, and the screenplay by Francis Martin tells the story of the flying saucer/UFO mystery and Air Force investigation mostly from the point of view of Chop, played by Los Angeles newspaper reporter, Tom Towers. The rest of the cast is made up of non-actors as well, and it’s often painfully obvious. Ruppelt is also portrayed. Unidentified Flying Objects is a black and white film and starts off with the title and credits over a background of a cloud-filled sky that changes with each new credit sequence. The music is generic and of the flag-waving variety, and continues in that vein throughout. After the opening, a narrator describes the June 24, 1947, sighting by Kenneth Arnold that kicked off the saucer craze that summer, as a re-enactment, minus the saucers, is shown. Then, there is a long sequence covering the Mantell incident, also with re-enactment, which is said to have motivated the Air Force to initiate Project Sign. As an example of a credible witness who reported a sighting, American Airlines pilot, Captain Willis Sperry is presented, who tells his story of a UFO encounter 30 miles out after taking off from Washington, D.C. After Sperry, the narrator states that on January 9, 1950, “the press reported that Project Sign was closed.” At this point, over 17 minutes in, Tom Towers takes over the narration as Al Chop, and Chop’s story begins with him visiting his old newspaper office in Dayton, Ohio, after his discharge from the marines. His “good friend” and former editor gives him a tip that there’s an opening for a public information officer at Air Material Command. Chop says it was due to his editor’s suggestion that he “walked right into the middle of the flying saucer story.” He then goes on to take a PIO position at the Pentagon. In the course of his employment, he is shown the Montana and Utah films, and ends up experiencing the Washington, D.C., flap up close and personal. At the end his story, in voiceover, Towers/Chop sums up how what he has seen and experienced has affected his beliefs regarding UFOs: “For me, the evidence indicates intelligence behind the control, and by now, the belief that their source was interplanetary was no longer incredible.” The Utah and Montana films are then shown for the second time with analysis in text and voiceover, and the movie ends with the questions: “If they cannot be identified as objects known to man… What are they?” “If they are not man-made… Who made them?” “If they are not from this planet… Where are they from?” Despite the Air Force’s concern, its “countermeasures” were unnecessary. The film opened to mixed reviews and did poorly in the box office, and there wouldn’t be another feature-length documentary film dealing with the UFO subject until 1968’s Chariots of the Gods.    

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  For many people growing up in the 1970s (of which this writer is one), seeing a UFO documentary was their first in-depth look into the subject. These films often came along with books tied in, and major publishers such as Bantam were getting onboard. More and more people were willing to accept the idea that UFOs were worthy of serious consideration, and this meant that more and more people were willing to spend money on movies and books covering the subject. What had formerly been mostly confined to a subculture of enthusiasts, was on its way to becoming the profitable entertainment industry it is today. What may may come as a surprise to some readers is that between the 1947 summer of the saucers and 1968, there were only two documentaries (if any readers know differently feel free to comment) made in the midst of all the science fiction saucer films that became popular starting in the 1950s. What is thought to be the first flying saucer/UFO documentary was released in 1950 as an approximately 9 ½ minute short titled The Flying Saucer Mystery. It was re-released in 1952 with added footage that brought it up to around 12 minutes. Both releases were produced by Telenews, which had a chain of 13 theatres in major cities throughout the U.S. that only showed newsreels. According to the December 20, 2019, post on The Science Fiction Encyclopedia website, the film (which release isn’t specified) was lost until the 1990s. The producer, director, and screenwriter are unnamed. The release dates coincide with two significant events in flying saucer/UFO history: in 1949, Donald Keyhoe had his article, “The Flying Saucers are Real,” published in the January 1950 issue of True magazine, and in 1952, a press conference was held to field questions from the press about UFOs in Washington, D.C., airspace over two successive weekends in July. Edward J. Ruppelt describes both events in his 1956 book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. According to him, it was “rumored among magazine publishers” that Keyhoe’s article “was one of the most widely read and widely discussed magazine articles in history. As for the 1952 press conference, he says it “was the largest and longest the Air Force had held since World War II.” It seems as though the article was the inspiration for the production of the movie, as Keyhoe appears as the final commentator. After the introduction by the narrator (name unknown), commentary by Keyhoe’s Annapolis classmate and friend, Adm. Calvin Bolster, and testimony by Arthur Weisberger about his July 21, 1950, sighting of three saucers over Tucson, Arizona, the first “authenticated” saucer photos taken by Paul Trent in McMinnville, Oregon, and the first motion picture footage shot of a saucer in Louisville, Kentucky by TV cameraman for WHAS, Al Hixenburg, are shown. Then, the narrator brings up the argument by “many authoritative sources, including U.S. News and World Report,” that the saucers are jets developed from a 1945 experimental Navy fighter, and a photo is shown of the Vought XF5U-1, also known as the “Flying Flapjack.” He points out that there had been no publicly known improvements made on the V-2 since the war and asks, “Are the saucers the secret descendants of the V-2?” We then get to Keyhoe, and he has this to say: “After a one year’s investigation, I believe that the flying saucers seen by veteran airline and Air Force pilots are objects from another planet.” The narrator closes saying that “Commander McLaughlin” (Robert B., USN) agrees with Keyhoe, and a model built for an episode of the television show, We the People, based on his observations is shown. The model was the basis of the illustration of the saucer on the cover of Keyhoe’s 1950 book, The Flying Saucers are Real. In 1952, things changed in a big way as far as saucers were concerned. The Air Force had revitalized what was known to the public as “Project Saucer,” and Project Blue Book was born out of the ashes of Projects Sign and Grudge. Ruppelt was the person in charge and he recounted his experience in his book. According to him, he was the person who came up with the term, “Unidentified Flying Object,” and its acronym, UFO, is pronounced “yoofo.” Just as Ruppelt was settling in, Blue Book got hit with a full-on nationwide flap starting in June that culminated in sightings, both visual and radar, of UFOs in restricted airspace over Washington, D.C., on two successive weekends starting July 19th. Ruppelt and the rest of the Blue Book staff first heard about the sightings from newspaper reports, but the Air Force public information officer who handled UFO inquiries, Albert M. Chop, was in the Air Route Traffic Control radar room at Washington Airport on July 19th and experienced the events first hand. One episode in particular was all the UFO blips disappearing from radar the moment that jets scrambled to intercept appeared. The re-release of The Flying Saucer Mystery was announced on August 23, 1952, in Billboard magazine, and it was distributed to a broader audience by Sterling Films. Most of the footage was new, as was the narration. It was updated to reflect the current state of the mystery. There is a clip of General James A. Sanford speaking at the press conference saying, “We can say that the recent sightings are in no way connected with any secret development by any agency of the United States,” followed by Keyhoe saying, “With all due respect to the Air Force, I believe that some of them will prove to be of interplanetary origin.” Additional witness reports include August C. Roberts describing a saucer photo he took saying, “I think it was from outer space, but friendly,” and East German refugee (and former mayor) Oskar Linke and his daughter who claimed to have both seen a saucer and its crew while they were still in East Germany in 1950. Frank Scully appears, who had, in 1950, just after Keyhoe, published the second-ever flying saucer book, Behind the Flying Saucers. He adds some unique commentary. Speculating on the nature of intelligent beings on other planets he says that they might be more “mature,” might have made it to the other side of their “atomic age,” and might “have been souls that were never fogged up like Adam and Eve” making them perfect and immortal. According to him, if this was the case, “the idea of the Air Force telling them to shoot them down is idiotic.” Some of the footage used in both releases of The Flying Saucer Mystery, such as that of Sanford and Keyhoe, shows up in documentaries from the seventies on. What’s noteworthy, and may be a factor in the dearth of UFO documentaries throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, is that in 1953, the CIA convened scientific advisory board known as the “Robertson Panel” recommended that the UFO subject be downplayed in the interest of national security. One of their concerns was that public hysteria could overwhelm communications and offer enemies of the United States an opportunity for a sneak attack. Even so, one producer, Clarence Greene, was so moved by his own UFO sighting that he was willing to risk ridicule and produce the first feature-length UFO documentary. Next Week: UFO: The True Story of Flying Saucers. For more information and related news clippings, see the excellent site The Saucers that Time Forgot.    

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  Throughout 1954 in France, there was a wave of humanoid reports that received national and international press coverage. That same year, Italy experienced a wave of its own that didn’t get nearly as much attention, although one particular case has since become a classic. A detailed account (page 12 of the pdf) of the case and a follow-up investigation 18 years later is presented in the Vol. 18, No. 5, Flying Saucer Review. Jacques Vallée included a brief account in his catalogue titled Une Siècle d’Atterisages” (a Century of Landings) published as a series in Lumières dans la Nuit starting with the April 1969 issue and ending with the February 1970 issue. However, according to editor Gordon Creighton, “so far as I am aware, no full description of it has ever appeared in English.” The account, by Sergio Conti, appears on page 11 (page 14 of the pdf) under the headline, “The Cennina Landing of 1954.” It was translated by Creighton from Il Giornale dei Misteri No.17, published in August of 1972. According to Conti, on the morning of November 1, 1954, Rosa Lotti nei Dainelli, a 40-year-old mother of four, left her farm to go into Cennina. It was a Catholic feast day, and she planned to visit the church and cemetery there. She brought a bunch of flowers for the altar of the Madonna Pellegrina (a procession for her had taken place the night before) and was also carrying her stockings and good shoes so she wouldn’t get them dirty. As she walked barefoot on the path to town that went through fields and thickets, she came upon a strange object. Conti includes quotes from Lotti describing it that appeared in three publications: “A sort of double cone, over 2 metres high and about a metre wide in the middle.” (La Nazione Italiana, November 2, 1954.) “Like two bells joined together at their bases.”  La Settimana Incom, No. 24, Year XV.) “The object was very swollen out in the middle and pointed at the two ends. It seemed to be covered with leather.” (Il Giornale del Mattino, November 2, 1954.) A quoted portion of the La Nazione Italiana article adds the details that it made no sound, shone like polished metal, and had a glass door in its lower part, through which, Lotti could see two child-sized seats. According to Conti, as Lotti stood there in astonishment and curiosity, two little creatures with friendly expressions came out from behind the object and walked towards her. She described them as about one metre tall; wearing helmets, grey overalls, and short grey cloaks. Over the overalls, they wore doublets with small buttons that were, in her words, “like shining stars,” along with pants that were tight like long underwear. Lotti is quoted as saying, “they were very fine looking, even though rather old.” In what seemed to be a friendly attempt to strike up a conversation, they gesticulated and spoke in a “lively” manner. According to Lotti, they sounded “as though they were Chinese,” using the words “liu,” “lai,” “loi,” and “lau.” Conti provides more details of the creatures’ faces including “magnificent eyes, full of intelligence,” and noses and mouths like those of humans except that their upper lips were curled and exposed their teeth. Their teeth are described as “short (as though they had been filed down) and somewhat protruding, like the teeth of rabbits.” He adds that, “Their ears were hidden under two leather discs, and there was a band around their foreheads, also of leather.” According to Conti, they grabbed the flowers (carnations) and one of Lotti’s stockings (black), and after “she remonstrated timidly” the older looking one handed back all but five of the flowers. After examining “the structure of the flowers with an air of curiosity, and laughing all the while,” the older creature wrapped the flowers in the stocking he kept and threw the bundle into the craft. The creatures then stepped back from Lotti and each took a circular object from the craft. The objects were wrapped in something that looked like, but wasn’t, newspaper. They put the objects under their arms and turned towards her, but she had taken the opportunity to run away when their backs were to her. When she looked back, the creatures and the craft were gone. At this point Conti cites the November 2, 1954, “La Nazione Sera.” The remainder of Conti’s account seems to come from the La Nazione Italiana. According to Conti, Lotti arrived in Cennina gasping for breath, terrified, and unable to remember what had just happened. She apparently recovered her memory (it seems she got it back in church and told her story to the parish priest, as Conti says at the end of the account) because the next thing Conti tells the reader is that she reported her experience to Brigadier Rocco Benfanti and Corporal Nello Focardi of the local Carabinieri (Italian national police) and repeated it for officers of the Búcine region. Her report got out, and Carabinieri investigators ended up examining the location amidst many curiosity seekers. A hole was found where Lotti said she’d seen the craft, but any possible footprints had been wiped out by the throng. The bonus in this report is that Conti provides details from a follow-up investigation conducted 18 years later by the Prato UFO Study Group. According to Conti, its members visited the site, found corroborating witnesses, and interviewed Lotti. Lotti stuck to her story, but made some corrections to what was reported in the press. She said that she only experienced fear after the encounter, and she described the craft this way: “In the thickened part of the spindle, it had two port-holes, on opposite sides to each other, and in the centre, between them, there was a little door, enabling me to see, inside, two little kiddie-chairs set back to back, each of them facing towards one of the port-holes.” Lotti said that the creatures’ lips were not curled, but normal, and emphasized that their faces were “well shaven.” She said they took all the flowers and that none were returned; that only the older creature brought out an object; that it was round, dark brown, and looked like it was wrapped in cardboard; and that the creature held it up to his chest and pointed it at her as if he was taking a photo. Finally, she said that as she was running away, the creatures and the craft were still there when she looked back. As for the corroborating witnesses, according to Conti, one reported seeing something land, one something taking off, and one something flying in the air, all in the area of Lotti’s reported encounter. But for Conti, the most impressive corroboration came from an investigation in March 1955 by the Giornale del Mattino: Ampelino Torzini, a student in a junior elementary class in Ambra, had written in a class scrapbook that while tending to their pigs, he (then age 6) and his brother (age 9) had, in Conti’s words, “seen a lady ‘chatting with the men’ and that he had seen the ‘spindle’ but had mistaken it for an animal.”    

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  In 2019, U.S. Navy pilot Lt. Ryan Graves began speaking publicly about regular encounters by flight teams starting in 2013 with UFOs. On July 26, 2023, he testified before congress and said that on one occasion, two jets were forced to make evasive maneuvers to avoid a collision with an object he described as a clear sphere with a black cube inside. By the time of the hearing, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office headed by Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick had looked into these types of reports, and in May of 2023, Kirkpatrick informed NASA’s UFO advisory council that AARO had about 800 instances of “metallic orb” UFOs. This is according to a January 24, 2024, Science Times article by Caleb White headlined “Cube in a Sphere UAP Could Be ‘Aliens’ or ‘Next Generation’ Spherical Drones, Pentagon Former UFO Chief Says.” In the article, Kirkpatrick is quoted saying, “There’s a large number of people, pilots, others, who have said, ‘Hey, I saw this giant sphere. It had a cube in it. I don’t understand it. It must be an alien.’ Well, actually, no, there’s a number of papers out. The most recent one was from the University of Singapore, I believe, where the next generation of drones that are being built are spherical.” One of the papers he might have been referring to is one by Ying Hong Pheh, Shane Kyi Hla Win, and Shaohui Foong that was published in Drones 2022, 6 (9), titled, “Spherical Indoor Coandă Effect Drone (SpICED): A Spherical Blimp sUAS for Safe Indoor Use.” It describes and has an illustration of the drone, and it is a good match for what was being reported. While this is a very plausible explanation, a report of a similar object from 1960 obviously predates this technology, and the Air Force investigation under Project Blue Book resulted in a conclusion that some might find less than satisfying. The 1960 case got a paragraph (page 7 of the pdf) in the September 1960 APRO Bulletin and the date is given as September 20: Denver, Colorado. Object described as disc-shaped, or spherical, enclosing a square object with lights alternately flashing red, white and green lights [sic] was reported by FAA agents and many others in southwest Colorado. FAA employee at Eagle, using an inclinometer estimated object was 37 miles above earth. It appeared to hover for 30 minutes, then moved off to southwest. First seen at 9:35 MST. Among observers were two Frontier Air Lines pilots. A news clipping from an un-named paper out of Grand Junction, Colorado, of an Associated Press story is included in the July-December 1960 portion (pages 97 and 98 of the pdf) of the Loren Gross compilation titled The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, UFOs: A History. Gross lists the date and time of the incident as September 28, 1960, between 9:35 p.m. and 10:35 (?) p.m. The description is short (FAA detects “space object” that hovers 30 minutes), and the reader is referred to the clipping dated 9/29/60 on the next page. According to the AP article, headlined “Flashing UFO is a Mystery in Southwest: Spherical Flying Saucer Enclosing a ‘Square’ Reported to AF,” the night before, reports of a UFO “flashing red, white and green lights” came from FAA offices in Grand Junction and Eagle, Colorado; as well as from Farmington, New Mexico. An FAA spokesman said the reports had been forwarded to NORAD at Colorado Springs. At Eagle, an FAA employee used an inclinometer and estimated that the UFO was 37 miles above the earth. First seen at about 9:35 p.m. MST, it seemed to hover for around 30 minutes before moving off towards the southwest. Other witnesses included two pilots, one in a military jet and one flying for Frontier Airlines. The spokesman described the object as appearing to be a sphere enclosing a square object with the lights seeming to come from the square. Because it was reported to the Air Force, there is a Project Blue Book file on the case. The Project 10073 Record Card gives the date as September 28, 1960, and the location as Grand Junction. The summary of the sighting is the same as in the AP article except that the object is said to have been reported as being stationary for 20 minutes and the total length of the sighting is said to have been 40 minutes. The conclusion is listed as “Temp Inversion,” and in the comments there is this typed explanation: The sighting gives all indication of being due to atmospheric refraction. There is this handwritten correction initialed by J. Allen Hynek under it: Stellar scintillation possibly. This caused by turbulence, not inversion. If motion was real, cause is not inversion. A document headed “MEMORANDUM FOR RECORD” has more details. According to this, a phone call was made to the home of a witness (name redacted) in Grand Junction, “and the following information was acquired.”  The first report of the object was from Farmington, New Mexico, where it was observed at a bearing of 35º. It was also reported from Eagle, Colorado where it was seen at a bearing of about 225º. The witness in Grand Junction saw it at a bearing of 100º, made a triangulation and determined that it was over Gunnison, Colorado. The witness said there was a B-52 refueling in Deadwood and that when the aircraft was contacted, “a reply was made to the effect that the object could be seen.” After refueling, the plane changed course and headed for the object, but once the it was in the area, the pilot reported to Denver control that they saw nothing. The last paragraph of the memorandum has the description of the object as it appears on the record card as do the first three paragraphs of the report written by then head of Project Blue Book, Lt. Col. Lawrence J. Tacker, who was notorious as a debunker and made his anti-saucer feelings clear in the 1960 book, Flying Saucers and the U.S. Air Force. The remaining four paragraphs explain that weather data obtained from the Air Weather Service at Asheville, Carolina, showed there was a temperature inversion in the area, that these are known to produce “looming mirages, and that this is what was responsible for the reports. Check out this seasonal blog by Charles Lear! Thanks to UFO Jack for this week’s blog suggestion.

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  In last week’s blog, we looked at a case from Spain that involved three airmen who were stationed at a Spanish Air Force base near Talavera La Real. It was investigated by Juan José Benítez who wrote a report (page 4 of the pdf) and sent it to Flying Saucer Review. The report was translated into English by Gordon Creighton, and it was published in the Vol. 23, No. 5, February 1978 issue. According to Benítez, the three airmen, José María Trejo, Juan Carrizosa Luján, and José Hildago were on guard duty after midnight on November 12, 1976. Trejo and Carrizosa were in their sentry boxes, and Hildago was on patrol with a German Shepherd. At around 1:45 a.m., Trejo and Carrizosa heard what sounded like radio interference, which then turned into a piercing, high-pitched whistle that hurt their ears. The whistle started and stopped repeatedly, and the two men, armed with Z-26 quick-firing rifles, searched the area where it seemed to be coming from. They then saw a light that looked like a flare high up in the sky that lit up a wide area. Hildago came by with the dog and he had also seen the light. They were joined by a corporal and two support guards, and they went to do a search. After hearing branches breaking in a stand of eucalyptus trees and sending the dog in repeatedly, they saw a luminous green figure that was about three meters tall with what looked like a helmet on its head, long arms, thick body, and it didn’t seem to have any legs or feet. The men described it as being like a bobbin or a spindle. Trejo went to fire, was unable to move, and then felt weak and fell to the ground yelling, “Down! They’ll kill us! While he was on the ground, the world around him faded away as his vision slowly failed. Carrizosa and Hildago fired 40-50 shots, and the figure vanished. The next day, 50 men searched the area and found no cartridge casings on the ground or bullet holes in the wall that was behind the figure, even though it was determined “by Air Force experts” that the men’s rifles had been fired. Over the next month, Trejo’s vision failed repeatedly and after multiple hospital stays and tests he was told he had “a nervous maladjustment.” At the end of his report, Benítez tells the reader that Trejo, 21, “has experienced no further abnormal symptoms.” There is a follow-up report (page 11 of the pdf) on this case in the Vol. 30, No. 6, August 1985 FSR. Editor Gordon Creighton says in the introduction, just before the reprint of the original report, that FSR is not normally able to offer follow-up reports on “all these weird happenings, 99% of which are never referred to again by anybody!” After the reprint, “Part Two: New and Dramatic Material on the Case at Talavera La Real” is presented, translated from French. It was written by Geneviève Vanquelef and originally appeared in the November/December 1984 Lumières Dans La Nuit, No. 245/246. According to Vanquelef, a cassette tape without a case was found in the baggage compartment of a French train running from Geneva to Port Bou. The railway employee who found it, gave it to Michel Rouanet, who he knew was enthusiastic about taping music. When it was played, it was found to have a conversation in Spanish, so before erasing it, Rouanet, who was French, played it for his wife, who was Spanish. What she heard was “a lively discussion about UFOs, blinded soldiers, a dog burnt to death, etc.” As it turned out, Rouanet belonged to the Béziers-based Orion UFO Investigation Group, and he took the tape to a meeting where one of the members translated it into French. Research indicated that the conversation was about the Talavera case, an account of which was published in the August/September LDLN No. 187. What was on tape was an interview that was clearly done on the train where the tape was found, as announcements for stations on that line were heard. According to Vanquelef, the person being interviewed was Trejo, and after providing a summary of the case from “Jacques Scornaux’s story as given in LDLN No. 187,” she presents transcripts of portions of the tape. There are major discrepancies between Trejo’s account on the tape and the account as reported by Benítez and Scornaux, but Vanquelef ignores most of them. Vanquelef describes a discussion of “vital energy” with Trejo expressing the idea that this energy is controlled by “something” that is operated by “someone.” The interviewer asks if Trejo had seen “this someone” during a séance, and this is his reply: No. During my military service on guard duty. I saw a machine about 100 metres wide, as big as a football pitch. I had my rifle and I had a dog with me. I saw a million lights underneath it. A door opened, held by an individual. I wanted to shoot. I received a discharge, the sort that leaves you blind! The dog leapt into the air, and was burnt to death before it touched the ground again. After an interruption, Trejo starts the story from the beginning. It’s similar to the original account except that he says he and his fellow airmen left “the guard room” after hearing “intermittent noises, like a radio,” and then saw “an explosion of light brighter than the Sun.” According to Trejo “all the lads turned out,” thinking there was an attack on the base, and the corporal, as opposed to Hildago, came up with a dog and asked if they had seen anything.  Trejo says they tried to contact the base “but there was no telephone, no electricity, no radio contact.” As for the figure, Trejo describes it this way: A glass globe on his head, a sort of astronaut’s space-suit, all made of metal, of a green, phosphorescent colour…  Arms and the rest of the body much bigger… At the end of the final transcription, Trejo claims to have gone through some changes: After this contact I felt an intense development of my brain, I experienced a sensation of superiority, of quickness of mind…  It happens to me that I re-live moments that are past, or that will come in a thousand years’ time… One has the power to travel mentally… I had never had any premonitory dreams about what has happened to me… But at present, I often have extrasensory perceptions about my future… However, I’m not a daydreamer, I prefer the present, action, studying people, society, animals… In the last part of her report, Vanquelef addresses two discrepancies between the accounts. One is Trejo saying that the electricity and phone failed, and the other is Trejo failing to mention his first hospital visit after his blindness. As for his “psychic transformation,” Vanquelef notes that Trejo has “an admiration (very suspect) for the unparalleled power of this ‘extra-human’ intervention.” She asks, “Do contactees become ‘manipulatees’?”      

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  In the Vol. 23, No. 5, February 1978 Flying Saucer Review, there is a report (page 4 of the pdf) out of Spain headlined, “Encounter at Talavera.” It was written by Juan José Benítez and translated by Gordon Creighton. Benítez got the story from the main witnesses who were three airmen stationed at a Spanish Air Force base near Talavera la Real, close to the Spanish-Portuguese border. He describes the case as “simply staggering.” Benítez explains that the incident occurred on November 12, 1976, and that he got the story firsthand from the witnesses, but kept the details to himself because the three men involved had still been in the service “until a short time ago.” According to Benítez, at around 1:45 a.m., José María Trejo and Juan Carrizosa Luján were in their sentry boxes on guard duty near the fuel depot of the Talavera Air Force Base and Jet Aircraft School a few kilometers from the city of Badajoz. Their boxes were 60 meters apart and they both heard what sounded like radio interference, which then turned into a piercing, high-pitched whistle that hurt their ears. After a few minutes, it stopped, and then started up again five minutes later, this time near Trejo’s box. Trejo called for Carrizosa to come over and both men searched the area armed with Z-26 quick-firing rifles. The noise stopped and started again as before and finally went silent. They then saw a light that looked like a flare high up in the sky. It lit up a wide area “over towards Badajoz” and then vanished after 15-20 seconds. After a few minutes, José Hildago, who was on patrol with a German Shepherd, came up to Trejo and Carrizosa and asked them if they’d seen the light and they said they had. They were soon joined by a corporal and two support guards from a nearby hut, and it was agreed that they should do a search of the area. Moving along the wall that surrounds the base, they headed for the fuel stockpile. As they were coming up on a sentry box that was under construction “they experienced a sort of ‘whirlwind,’” that Trejo said in his account, was localized in a particular spot. They then heard branches breaking in a stand of nearby eucalyptus trees and let the dog loose. The dog ran in, and the men stood ready with their rifles for a short time, but heard no barking from the dog. The dog staggered back and acted as if “‘something’ or ‘someone’ had thrashed him and terrified him.” They sent the dog back in “four or five times” and he came back the same way every time. One of the men is quoted (Benítez rarely specifies which man throughout) saying, “His ears seemed to be hurting. . .  he was whimpering. . . Then, when he returned to us for the last time, he started circling round us.” This is described as part of the dog’s training. By circling the men, he was using his body as a barrier in the presence of a threat. Trejo sensed that someone was behind him and “felt cold shivers run through his stomach.” He turned around and saw a luminous green humanoid figure that was about three meters tall and about fifteen meters away. The men said that it seemed to consist entirely of small points of light which were brighter on the periphery. It seemed to have a helmet on its head, long arms, thick body, and while it was on the ground, it didn’t seem to have any legs or feet. The men described it as being like a bobbin or a spindle. Trejo was “paralyzed with astonishment and terror” and took what he estimated was 10-15 seconds to react. He made the decision to shoot at the figure, and at that moment, “he felt as though he was totally bound and shackled.” He felt weak and fell to his knees, and as he did, he yelled, “Down! They’ll kill us!” As he shouted, the other two saw him fall to the ground and saw the figure. Trejo ended up face down on the grass, and the world around him seemed to fade out as his eyesight slowly failed. Carrizosa and Hidalgo fired 40-50 shots at the figure, and in the instant they started, the figure either vanished in a flash according to one of the men, or faded like the image on a television screen after it’s turned off according to another. They heard the whistling noise again, which lasted for fifteen seconds this time, and then there was silence. Trejo told Benítez that he thought it was strange that he started to fall the moment he decided to fire on the figure. When asked to explain why he thought this, Trejo said, “It seemed as though that ‘being’ had guessed my intentions. But how could that be possible? How could that ‘thing’ have known that I was just about to pull my trigger?” Trejo said that Hildago and Carrizosa helped him up and he felt a pain in his chest that lasted about 20 minutes. The sound of the shooting put the whole base on alert and the men were faced with the difficult task of explaining what had happened. The next day, fifty men went over the area and found no cartridge casings on the ground or bullet holes in the wall that had been behind the figure, even though the men’s rifles were found to have been fired “by Air Force experts who were called in to investigate the case.” A few days later, Trejo’s vision failed again when he was in the mess hall, and he was taken to the sick bay. He lost consciousness for fifteen minutes and stayed there for a day. He started to recover, and was then sent to Badajoz Hospital where he stayed for ten days. After all sorts of tests, the doctors found nothing, and at that point, he felt normal. Trejo left the hospital and his vision failed again for 15 minutes five days later. He then went to a hospital in Madrid where he stayed for a month, and after numerous tests, he was told he had “a nervous maladjustment.” He had another “attack” in the Air Force hospital where he thrashed up and down in his bed as his sight, once more, began to fail. He said that he would feel a pain in the nape of his neck and then in his forehead each time before his sight failed. Benítez reports that Trejo, 21, “has experienced no further abnormal symptoms.” Next week: A follow-up report.

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  This past week, I found myself in the position of having two co-workers who are UFO witnesses and decided to take advantage of this and have them tell their stories for this blog. The first story is that of Ilya Vett, 54, who has been with the organization for over three years, and he first told it to me not long after I met him. He grew up in the area of New Paltz, New York, which is near Pine Bush and the Hudson Valley. Both of those areas are notorious for UFO flaps in the 1980s (Ilya and I went to the 2022 Pine Bush UFO Fair where I met up with Martin), which is when Ilya said he had his sighting. Ilya also told me that his wife, prior to their marriage, had a sighting of a UFO with her family while they were driving. According to him, when they got home, it was over their house. As for Ilya’s story, he recorded it for me on his own time not prompted by any questions from me. According to him, he and some friends were riding their bikes on Prospect Street in New Paltz sometime in the fall (school had started) “in the early 80s.” It was dark, and they were heading north towards Henry W. Dubois Drive. The area was undeveloped at the time, and there were “a lot of trees” on both sides of the road. They heard what Ilya indicated through vocalizations was a combination of a whoosh and a hum, though he settled on it not being “distinct.” He and his friends stopped and looked up. They saw some lights through the trees that were on a “ship” with a shape they couldn’t make out that proceeded to move slowly from east to west over their heads. They checked with each other: “Do you see this? I see this. Do you see this? We’re all seeing this, right?” He said, “We were all confirming with each other that we weren’t mad.” According to Ilya, they sat frozen and watched as the craft moved off towards Mohonk Mountain. It went out of their sightline and they rode to the end of the block to where they expected to see it, and it was gone. As Ilya is unavailable at the moment for follow-up questions regarding the size and shape of the craft seen by him and his wife, I’m not able to include these details in this blog. The second story is that of Michael Brooks, 33, who has only been with us for a few weeks. He came up to me and said he was told that I have an interest in UFOs. I said I not only have an interest but that I write about them. He then told me he’d had a sighting and proceeded to show me footage he took with his phone that was posted by a friend of his on Reddit. It was intriguing, and he agreed to be interviewed. I’ve written about how frustrating it is to see UFO footage on social media, posted by an anonymous source with no way to follow up, and this was an opportunity to do just that. As Brooks’s footage was taken at 230 5th Rooftop Bar, in midtown Manhattan, as a responsible investigator, I felt it was important that we do the interview there and arranged to meet him with my field recorder. When we got there and went to buy drinks, we were informed by the bartender that happy hour would be over in five minutes. While it took me a moment to process this, I came to my senses and ordered a second vodka and soda. Brooks stuck to just one rum and coke (I was buying), which is a detail I include to support Brooks’s claim that he wasn’t drunk at the time of his sighting. We sat down amidst some loud and terrible Christmas music and proceeded. According to Brooks, he and his girlfriend moved from California t0 New York in April, and he had been working with our organization since just before Halloween. His sighting was prior to this on October 4th. He was attending his best friend’s bachelor party (his friend and a group flew into New York for the occasion) and had only had “a couple beers.” He was sitting in the northeast section of the bar, and at around 11:30 p.m., while he was talking with his friend, his girlfriend said “It looks like there’s a UFO in the sky,” and in his words, “We all looked at once, and we all saw it, and I immediately pulled out my phone and started filming it.” I later asked him how many people constituted “all” and he told me there were seven, including him. I asked him to describe the UFO, and he said, “It was floating and kind of gyrating” and “was a doughnut of light.” He added that this was how it looked to the “naked eye.” As far as size, he said that the light of a plane he saw “in the distance,” which he estimated was at 30,000 feet, could have fit “in the circle of the doughnut.” According to him, it was either “not too big, or far away.” He shot “for a little over a minute,” and stopped because they “were getting ready to leave.” He said, “Right as I stopped filming, it actually sped up and left towards the northeast.”  According to him, the initial acceleration was caught “on film,” and “it accelerated even more after the film stopped.” I asked Brooks if he had any emotional reaction, and he said he was excited and felt “nothing negative” and that “the beer was hitting at that point.” He explained that he had never seen “anything so definitively, myself, that was a UFO.” He added that he’d seen lights before, but could possibly explain them as satellites or shooting stars. When asked if he’d had any other strange experiences recently, Brooks said he hadn’t, and when asked about his knowledge of the UFO subject, he said he knew very little. Brooks’s footage was posted on Reddit “about a week after” by his friend under the username mindmelder8. Responding to positive comments, he provided these details: Location: NYC – rooftop of 230 5th Rooftop Bar 11:46 PM Saturday Oct 4. Video is facing North-East, my guess based on a map is about 40 degrees from North. And for those saying balloon or plastic bag: -it was emitting light, constant. Reflecting light would fluctuate. the camera does not catch what our eyes saw, it looked like 2-3 orbs chasing each other in the loop, and the whole loop was gyrating.    

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  While June 24, 1947, marks the beginning of the modern-day UFO mystery, claims of earlier encounters and incidents, Maury Island for example, are found throughout the literature. One such case is that of Udo Wartena, a Dutch immigrant working as a miner for the Northwest Mining Syndicate in Broadwater County, Montana. Wartena claimed that in 1940, an alien invited him to go on board a huge flying saucer. The case came to light in the 1990s, and is based on the testimony of Wartena just before he died in 1989. Prior to this, he reportedly kept the story to himself, not even telling his wife. It was included in the 1993 book, Aliens and UFOs by James L. Thompson. Australian researcher Warren P. Aston looked into it after reading the book and presented his findings at the July 1997 Mutual UFO Network International Symposium in Grand Rapids, Michigan. According to Aston in an account from the March/April 1998 UFO Magazine posted on ufoevidence.org, the story as told by Thompson “contained numerous factual errors.” Aston put his version together from accounts by Wartena, two of which that were handwritten and one that was typewritten, and interviews with Wartena’s friends and family. The story starts off in May of 1940 with Wartena, then 37, working in his spare time looking for gold in a glacial deposit at the base of Boulder Mountain, not far from Canyon Ferry Lake, near the town of Townsend, Montana. At the time, he was clearing an old ditch running around the mountain so he could divert water from a nearby stream for his mining operation. As he was working, he heard a humming, drone-like sound and assumed it was from an airplane from Great Falls Army Air Base to the north. As it continued, he thought it might, instead, be from a vehicle driving towards him, and he moved to higher ground. According to Aston, Wartena then saw a 35-feet-high by 100-feet-diameter disk-shaped object that was the color of stainless steel, though not as shiny. As he watched, a circular stairway descended from the bottom, a “man” walked down it, and then came towards him. Wartena wrote (Aston never indicates which of the three written sources he’s quoting from), “As I was somewhat more than interested, I went to meet him. He stopped when we were ten or twelve feet apart. He was a nice-looking man, seemingly about my age. He wore a light gray pair of overalls, a tam of the same material on his head, and on his feet were slippers or moccasins.” The man came up to Wartena, shook his hand, and apologized for the intrusion. He asked if they could take some water, and Wartena said “Sure.” The man signaled to the ship and a hose came down. While the man spoke English, according to Wartena, “he spoke slowly as if he were a linguist and had to pick his way.” The man asked Wartena what he was doing and Wartena explained. The man then invited him to come on board the ship, and he went willingly and without fear. Wartena described the humming noise as “not loud, though it seemed to go through you,” and said it was hardly noticeable once inside the ship. According to Wartena, “We entered into a room about twelve by sixteen feet, with a close-fitting sliding door on the farther end, indirect lighting near the ceiling and nice upholstered benches around the sides. There was an older man already in the room, plainly dressed, but his hair was snow white. I then noticed that the younger man’s hair was also white.” According to Aston, Wartena asked the men how old they were and was told that the younger man was “about six hundred years old and that the older was “over 900 years old” in Earth years. They also told him that they knew over 500 languages. Wartena asked why they wanted water from the stream and not the lake and they told him that it was free from algae and more convenient. Wartena told family members many years later that they extracted hydrogen from the water to use as fuel for their craft. Warten asked about the noise and was shown the mechanism that powered the craft. They told him, “As you noticed, we are floating above the ground, and though the ground slopes, the ship is level. There are in the outside rim, two flywheels, one turning one way and the other in the opposite direction.” According to Wartena, “He explained [that] this gives the ship its own gravitation or rather overcomes the gravitational pull of the Earth and other planets, the sun and stars; and through the pull of the stars and planets…to ride on like you do when you sail on ice.” Wartena asked why they were visiting Earth, and they explained that since they looked like us, they were mingling among us, monitoring us, and giving us instruction and help as needed. When Wartena asked if they knew of Christ and religion, they refused to discuss such things, and contradicting their statement that they gave us help and instruction, they said “we cannot interfere in any way.” The men offered to examine Wartena for impurities and when he agreed, they passed a device over him. Wartena didn’t elaborate on this any further. A light came on, and Wartena took it to be a signal that they were done taking on water and that it was time for him to leave. When he mentioned this, they invited him to come with them, and he declined. He wrote, “I said that I thought it would be interesting, but felt it would inconvenience too many people. Later, I wondered why I said that.” As he left, they told him not to tell anyone as he would not be believed and then took off. He estimated he had spent around two hours with them. When Aston talked about this case at the MUFON Symposium in 1997, the abduction narrative was still dominant, and Aston suggested that researchers should be open to other possibilities and that contactee claims, dismissed by most in the community since the 1950s, should be re-examined. Aston’s presentation was written about by Townsend Star reporter Linda Kent in an article headlined “Alien Encounter.” We found it reprinted in the January 7, 1998, edition of The Independent Record out of Helena, Montana. Kent credits Aston’s presentation as “the first public exposure of the 50-year-old incident.” According to research by the Star, Wartena did live in Broadwater County, Montana; did work for the Northwest Mining Syndicate; and did die in Clackamas County, Oregon, in 1989. Two “anachronisms” are mentioned: the encounter was said to have occurred near Canyon Ferry Lake, which didn’t exist until 1954; and construction of the Great Falls Army Air Base, now known as Malmstrom AFB, didn’t begin until 1942. After the article, there is a section headlined “Alien Encounter Questions,” which describes the Star reaching out to Aston via express mail with some questions to which he responded from Australia by fax. He addressed the Canyon Ferry Lake issue saying it didn’t come from Wartena and was his mistake. The Great Falls Army Air Base issue isn’t addressed.        

In last week’s blog, we looked at the beginning of the modern crop circle phenomenon that first got the attention of the media and UFO researchers in 198o. This was described in the 1986 report compiled by Paul Fuller and Jenny Randles (written by Randles) for the British UFO Research Association titled Mystery of the Circles. According to Randles, the idea that UFOs had something to do with the mystery came from the fact that the first circles appeared in the West Country in the area of Warminster, which had become famous in the 60’s as a UFO hotspot. When we left off, that idea was falling out of favor with researchers, particularly Ian Mrzyglod of the newly formed organization, PROBE, who is quoted from the March 1982, Vol. 2, No. 4, PROBE Report: “…even to suggest that the flattened circles were UFO landing nests is wildly speculative wishful thinking, without any foundation.” After a lull in attention in 1982, things picked up after eight sets of five circles appeared that were made up of one large circle surrounded by four smaller circles at equidistant locations. Prior to this, there had been only single circles or two or three in a row. Playing a large part in the media attention was the fact that the circles appeared in the summer, often called the silly season due to the fact that stories of a less-than-serious nature are used as filler in the midst of what is traditionally a slow news period. And, it did get silly. One example presented by Randles is Daily Express columnist Jean Rook being sent to one of the sites “to come up with a lovely, poetic ode to ‘E.T.,’” the titular alien from the movie. According to Randles, Rook “found physical evidence of his presence in the midst of one of the rings – a poppy.” Randles emphasizes that “serious UFO investigators refused to get involved” and notes that she, herself, refused to appear on BBC and ITV television, even though she had a new book to promote, The Pennine UFO Mystery. According to Randles, members of PROBE took visitors out to see the five circles at Westbury and were shocked to see an identical set right next to them. Somehow, they had been missed by the media. At this point, the group was looking out for hoaxers who might be encouraged by all the attention from the press, and Randles notes that the five-ring patterns looked “remarkably symmetrical and artificial.” Throwing confusion into the mix, it was found that aerial photos taken by Now magazine for a story on the first circle reported in Westbury in 1980 showed there were three smaller circles around it with a hedgerow running through the position where a fourth circle would be. Randles sees this as supporting the possibility that the five-circle patterns could be naturally formed. What was odd about the second set at Westbury was that the circles were swirled counter-clockwise, whereas every circle previous had been swirled clockwise. They were finally reported on in the August 29, 1983, Wiltshire Times, and Francis Sheppard, son of the owner of the Westbury field, Alan Sheppard, said they were possibly hoaxed because he and his family were able to create a circle themselves using rope and a chain. PROBE followed up and discovered that the Sheppards had created the entire second set. The story that came out was that the Daily Mirror, not wanting to be outdone by The Express, had paid the Sheppards to have Francis, his father, and some Mirror reporters create the circles. They filmed the operation with a stop-motion camera, and the whole process from arrival to departure took under an hour, with only 24 minutes spent actually making the circles. The idea was that the circles would be discovered and reported on, hopefully by The Express, and then the Mirror would step in and expose the hoax. As it turned out, interest in the circles had already died down that season, and the only report covering the whole affair was in the Vol. 4, No.2, October 1983 PROBE Report, which was the final issue before the organization folded. Randles describes Mrzyglod, a council member of BUFORA during this period, quitting UFOlogy after becoming frustrated by “people who did not want to know the facts.” The Sheppards are said to have “insisted” that they were only responsible for the one set and not for the other on their land or any of the others elsewhere. According to Randles, while she and BUFORA stuck to playing down the UFO connection when dealing with the media, the media played it up. She cites the article “Healey’s Comet” (named after Shadow Foreign Secretary Dennis Healey who took photos of a five-ring pattern featured in the article) in the August 4, 1984, edition of The Daily Mail that mentions a “giant spaceship” and people being “totally baffled.” She points out repeatedly that not a single UFO was reported in connection with any of the circles. The report is broken up into five sections, and after “A Historical Review of the Mystery Circles,” the remaining four are: “Facts About the Mystery Circles,” “Theories,” “The Weather Theory,” and “Conclusions.” Randles starts off the “Theories” section saying that the most popular theory is that the circles are hoaxes, and other theories, all of which are presented along with their “problems,” include helicopter downwash, “hippies” marking areas for aerial drug drops, and UFOs.  “The Weather Theory” section is a detailed look at the work of meteorologist, Dr. Terrence Meaden, who argued that the circles were caused by whirlwinds. Finally, in “Conclusions,” Randles states that BUFORA doesn’t intend to offer a solution and that UFOs are low on the list of possible causes. As anyone who was following the UFO subject in the late 20th century is probably aware, the report failed to make the mystery go away, and its association with UFOs, mostly in the press, continued. In 1990, Bob Kingsley put out the first issue of The Circular, which is a compilation of articles, news clippings, and reports, and it is noteworthy that the only mentions of UFOs are in the news clippings and one instance where Kingsley includes ufology in a list of other “ologies” that might be of use in exploring the mystery. He provides the phone number of the information line of the Circles Phenomenon Research group run by Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews since 1984, but notes that he’s not sure it will be set up for the next year’s season. At this point, the circles are more plentiful and elaborate, and Kingsley mentions in the introduction that hoaxers are making research more difficult. The very next year, the media caught on to the hoaxing aspect when two landscape painters, David Chorley, 62, and Douglas Bower, 67, came forward claiming that they had been making circles since 1978 and would make 25 to 30 every season. Kingsley teamed up with The Center for Crop Circle Studies, and starting with the Vol. 2, No.1, March 1991 issue, The Circular became that organization’s quarterly journal with Kingsley staying on as editor. They kept publishing until 2005, and in the final issue it is announced that CCCS is shutting down. In his editorial, Kingsley sums up the state of the phenomenon at that time: As someone who has kept a watchful eye on the phenomenon, and those involved with it, since 1988, I have been saddened to see the evident loss of its ‘magic’ over the years. Both the hoaxers, or self-styled ‘land artists’ aided and abetted by the media, and an increasing band-waggonism by so-called croppies, have sapped much of what was once a mystery and replaced it with a dull repetitiveness -of pretty patterns, ‘new-age’ commercialism and of often tiresome adages repeated at summer gatherings. But this is not to say that the mystery, the ‘genuine crop formation’ has ceased, as numbers of most interesting and unusual events are continuing to be recorded both in Britain and across Europe and America.    

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  Jenny Randles Within UFOlogy, there are several areas of specialization, such as abductions, landing traces, humanoids, contactees, military encounters, etc. They often have their own specialized literature put out by individual researchers or organizations, and many have come and gone in terms of popular fascination and press coverage. One aspect that has fallen by the wayside is crop circle research, also known as “cereology.” Its early history, and the reasons for it falling out of favor with the press, and even among UFOlogists, is summed up neatly in the 1986 report, Mystery of the Circles, “compiled by” by Paul Fuller and Jenny Randles (Randles is the writer) for the British UFO Association. Of course, their report didn’t put an immediate end to the phenomenon or the activity of researcher/investigators who were focused on it, but it did presage the eventual waning of interest to where very few in the community continue to consider it seriously as having anything to do with UFOs. According to Randles, mystery circles in the British West Country first started getting media attention in August of 1980, but “persistent local rumors” of them appearing in oat, barley, and wheat fields throughout Wiltshire and Hampshire goes back to at least 40 years before that. As of the release of the report, mysterious circles had shown up in fields between May and August for six successive years. Randles points out that the reason BUFORA became involved was because of the appearance of circles in the area of Warminster, which was notorious for a UFO flap in the 1960’s involving an object known as “The Warminster Thing.” She explains that this “created a definite hype which sees these marks regarded as ground traces left by a landing, or hovering, spacecraft.” Tulley NestWhile this is very likely a valid argument for crop circles in England becoming associated with UFOs, mysterious circles that started appearing in the area of Tulley, Australia, in 1966 were called “Tulley nests,” and notably, “saucer nests,” in the press, so the association of mysterious circles with UFOs goes back far earlier than 1980. However, the Tulley nests consisted of swirled reeds and swamp grass, so they can’t be called crop circles. There is an article covering the Tulley nests headlined “1966 – Tully” posted under the “Related Cases: Australasia” section on the Old Crop Circles website run by Terry Wilson. According to Wilson (we assume he is the writer), they actually occurred closer to the town of Euramo, south of Tully, which is “known informally as Horseshoe Lagoon.” The first incident there involved a witness, George Pedley, who reported that while driving a tractor in the area at around 9 a.m. on January 19, 1966, he heard a hissing sound and then saw a flying saucer rise up out of a swamp and fly away. When he went over to investigate, he found a circle of flattened reeds swirled clockwise in a 3o-foot-diameter circle. He later brought the landowner, Albert Pennisi, to see it, and when Pennisi waded out into the circle, he found that the reeds had all been uprooted and were floating as a mat on the surface of the water. Five more nests appeared, all in swamp grass, including one with a scorched center.  That same year, also in Australia, circles in the grass were said to have been seen where around 200 school children and a teacher reported seeing at least one saucer land in a field on April 6th. This was near Westall High School in Melbourne. According Randles, what “seems” to have been the first West Country crop circle newspaper report appeared in the August 15, 1980, Wiltshire Times. It told the story of two circles being found by John Scull in his oat field just below “the famous Westbury White Horse Hill.” A UFO group from Bristol that had recently formed, NUFORA (soon to be renamed PROBE) investigated. Ian Mrzyglod and Mike Seager interviewed Scull, and with the help of Dr. Terence Meaden (a meteorologist), took measurements (the circles were 64.5 and 58.5 feet in diameter and had an 80% and a 93% eccentricity respectively) and samples, and learned there had originally been three circles, but the first one was destroyed when Scull harvested that section of his field before the other two appeared. Mryzglod published an account (page 8 of the pdf) in the Vol. 1, No. 2, August 1980 Probe Report and told his readers that “UFOs are not ruled out, (but) neither (are they) readily accepted as an easy answer.” He noted that natural explanations were possible. Crop CirclesAccording Randles, the story fizzled out “like all nine-day wonders” until three circles all in a line were discovered a year later “at Cheesefoot Head, near Winchester in Hampshire.” Quickly on the scene was Ken Rogers of BUFOS who had promoted the idea that the 1980 circles were created by a UFO and held up the latest circles as evidence to support this. As local farmers became concerned about their fields getting vandalized, the August 26, 1981, Southern Evening Echo reported that one landowner, Giles Rousell, claimed that the circles were caused by the downwash of a twin-rotor helicopter. An MoD spokesman said that an American Chinook helicopter may have been involved. Meaden advised PROBE (it is emphasized that he was not a member) that the new circles were similar to the ones from the year before in that they were eccentric and swirled clockwise. His theory was that they were caused by a weather-based phenomenon. Randle lauds PROBE for its stance that UFOs were an unlikely cause. They quote Mrzyglod from the March 1982, Vol. 2, No. 4, PROBE Report: “…even to suggest that the flattened circles were UFO landing nests is wildly speculative wishful thinking, without any foundation.” There was a lull in press reports in 1982, and it was announced in the October 1982, Vol. 3, No. 2, PROBE Report, “It is now time that the ‘mystery’ be dropped from (the circles) definition, as they are seasonal as Christmas and regular as clockwork.” However, PROBE’s efforts to demystify the phenomenon were in vain, as, in 1983, eight sets of mostly five-ring formations (a large central circle with four smaller circles “on a compass point grouping” around it) appeared, and the press presented not only UFO theories, but the idea that the mating habits of deer and hedgehogs were a causal factor. That year, the circles received nationwide coverage via the July 11, 1983, Daily Express, and Randles describes that morning as “one of the busiest in my life.” According to Randles, “every newspaper in Fleet Street” called her (as she was BUFORA’s director of investigations) asking if she had heard about “the UFO landing.” She says her “obvious lack of interest in speculating about giant spacecraft was met with varying degrees of incredulity” by those she spoke with. With the circles now receiving national attention, Randles says it was felt at BUFORA that this would result in more people looking for them and more reports coming in, and would also embolden those with intentions of hoaxing them. Next week: Hoaxes and confusion cause researchers to pack it in.

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  In the Volume 26, Number 6, March 1981 Flying Saucer Review, there is an article (page 7 of the pdf) by Russian UFO investigator Nikita A. Schnee headlined, “Contact Reported Near Pyrogovskoye Lake.” It tells the tale of an unnamed Red Army officer who said he was taken aboard a craft by “two men in dull-coloured cellophane like garments,” who told him they wanted to have a talk. In his introduction, Schnee explains that Soviet UFOlogists were of the belief that there were no Russian CE-3 cases. He cites Felix Y. Zigel, an assistant professor at the Moscow Institute of Aviation, who presented his opinion in the second issue of Observations of UFOs in the USSR that, in Schee’s words, “such reports are the fruits of sick minds, or obvious hoaxes with the aim of making money or obtaining publicity.” With that said, Schnee assures the reader that in his report, “all the events described actually (emphasis in the original) took place and are not products of the contactee’s imagination.” He says this “has been proved, quite convincingly” through examination of the witness and “the landing site of the UFO.” As the reader shall see, Russian UFOlogists had a unique style of landing site examination in those days. According to Schnee, a Soviet Army officer of high rank was walking away from Lake Pyrogovsoye “at the end of May or the beginning of June, 1978.” He suddenly felt like he was being taken by the arms and then saw the two men in the cellophane-like clothing. One of them communicated this to him: “We’d like to talk to you. It’ll take just a few seconds. Everything we’ll talk about will be erased, and you’ll forget it.” Schnee then continues the story from the witness’s written statement. According to the witness, he couldn’t remember the faces of the men, explaining, “they are as if in a haze.” He says that neither he nor the two men talked, but he could “feel” their words, and they were able to understand his thoughts. As they communicated, the fear he had initially experienced gave way to feeling “light-hearted” and “free.” His answer to their request was “I’ve nothing against talking with representatives of another civilization.” According to the witness, the next thing he knew he was in a dome-like room with bright white walls. He couldn’t tell where the light was coming from as he didn’t see “lamps of any kind.” He saw the two men sitting at a table, but his memory of them was hazy. The part of the room opposite him was dark, but he could see “some small tables with buttons and a big screen like a TV-set.” He was trying to figure out how to prevent the men from erasing his memory after their conversation and “had to try one of our old customs.” He told the men it was a rule here to celebrate important meetings with a drink and they responded by bringing him a glass of salty liquid that looked like lemonade.  He told them that we like to celebrate with something stronger, and they asked him to explain. He remembered the formula for alcohol and asked for paper and a pencil. They told him he could write on the wall, and to his surprise, he found he was able to do so with his finger “just like writing on misted glass, or on black velvet.” One of them said they’d “make it right away,” and “disappeared into the gloom.” He came back with a glass and gave it to the witness. The witness asked “How’s this, that such a highly-developed civilization does not use something like this?” One of them answered saying, “Maybe if we’d used it, we would never have been so highly developed!” The witness felt it was said jokingly. The witness then asked why they didn’t help us here on Earth in our struggles against the evils of “poverty, fascism, the rich, and so on.” They explained that it would be difficult to know whom to help and they would “either have to exterminate everybody, or let everybody be and let life on Earth go on the way it goes.” According to the witness, “they aren’t going to interfere; they are just watching us.” After what seemed to be three hours of conversation, one of them told him they would now erase his memory. He went to a keyboard and started pressing buttons but seemed to be having problems. There were “pulses jumping about on a small screen,” and when the witness asked what was the matter, the man told him that the pulses were usually strongest from the area of the brain affected by the conversation, but strong pulses were coming from everywhere. He said he didn’t know which pulses to erase and told him to just not tell anyone anything he might remember. The next thing the witness knew, he was back in the spot where he had been before, and it seemed as if only seconds had passed. He told Schnee that his clothes smelled fresher. He went home and told his wife what had happened, and she asked him not to tell anyone lest he be thought insane. He told his co-workers later during a break, and they laughed at him, and also told him he “shouldn’t go around with things like that.” According to Schnee, he believed the witness was telling the truth, and his friends and co-workers believed he was sincere, but that his experience might have been a dream or “a figment of his imagination.” Schnee then describes the Russian-style site investigation. To aid in this, he brought along “sensitives” who were able to feel “biological fields.” If these are detected, a landing is believed to have occurred and the investigation moves forward. Jacques Vallée describes encountering this during his time in Russia in his 1992 book, UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union. According to Vallée, the term for the practice is “biolocation,” and during a discussion (p.94) with UFOlogist Alexis Zolotov, Vallée and his co-author, Martine Castello, were told by Zolotov that students of geology “graduate with a diploma in biolocation,” which is basically the same as dowsing. Vallée describes Zolotov demonstrating using a coiled piece of metal wire and declaring, “The desk should not be here. This is a negative section of the room.” Patrick Gross looks at this case on his site, UFOs at Close Sight, and it’s catalogued as URECAT-000313. Besides the FSR article, which is the original source, he lists the 1983 book by Jenny Randles, UFO Reality – A Critical Look at the Physical Evidence (pp. 22-23), and the compilation of reports (page 82 of the pdf) by John Schuessler, UFO-Related Human Physiological Effects. He also lists two websites, and in the account he provides from the Alien Conspiracy website, the officer has developed the name, “Anatoly.” Gross doesn’t think much of the case. To begin with, he says he couldn’t find a Lake Pyrogovskoye, though he did find embankments with that name. He also notes that Schnee was “a partner of Vladimir Azhazha,” a Russian UFOlogist known for sensationalism and “his pure inventions of UFO sightings.”

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  Brazil has a history of official UFO investigation almost as long as that of the United States. However, it has an official policy on disclosure that predates the U.S.’s by more than a decade. In 1954, the Brazilian Air Force started The First Confidential Inquiry into Unidentified Aerial Objects in response to the first major flap in that country. In 1969, the Sistema de Investigação de Objetos Aéreos Não Identificados (SIOANI) was established, and nearly 100 detailed case files were accumulated up until its termination in 1972. After this, in 1977, in response to reports of injuries and deaths as a result of UFO encounters in the area of Pará (mainly in Colores) Operação Prato was authorized by Colonel Protásio Lopes de Oliveira. This resulted in more than 2000 photos, 16 hours of film, and a 179-page report. The First Confidential Inquiry, SIOANI and Operação Prato files were classified for decades, but thanks to a freedom of information campaign begun in April of 2004 by the Brazilian UFOlogist and publisher of UFO Revista, Ademar José Gavaerd, many of the files were shown to him and other UFOlogists in 2005 as a prelude to releasing them to the general public. Then, in 2010, Brazil issued Ordinance 551/GC3, requiring every branch of the military and aviation sectors to collect and transfer all UFO reports to the Aerospace Defence Command in Brasilia along with any material proof by way of photos or video on a yearly basis. There, it is to be catalogued and made available to the public. Along with this, since 2012, the Air Force has periodically released declassified files through the Brazilian National Archives, and recently released 893 reports in May of this year. In this blog, we’ll look at the history of the Air Force investigation, the efforts of Gevaerd and other UFOlogists to gain access to the case files, and some of the most interesting (at least to us) cases (translated files can be found here) found within them. One case of note that Oliveira was involved with concerned a series of five photos of a flying saucer taken in Barra Da Tijuca in 1952 by Ed Keffel and published in O Cruzeiro on May 24th of that year. In his front page story in the October 1961 APRO Bulletin, Fontes describes Keffel being present at AF headquarters, along with O Cruzeiro reporter João Martins, at a meeting called by Oliveira in 1954 where Fontes and the others were invited to be interviewed and present evidence. SIOANI was created within the 4th Air Zone Command. It was sponsored by the commander, Brigadier José Vaz da Silva, and coordinated by Major Gilberto Zani de Mello. There were two bulletins released: Bulletin 1 in March 1969 and Bulletin 2 in August 1969. According to Pratt, SIOANI was shut down after Mello retired. There is a case in Bulletin 1 involving humanoids and physical contact reported to have taken place in São Paulo on August 28, 1968. According to the report (page 14 of the pdf), the witness saw a person wearing “yellow pants and a T-shirt” standing 100 meters from a power plant and asked him to move away. The person told him, “I am waiting for companions who are hunting.” Two days later, he saw the same person in the same spot, and he was wearing “a yellow blouse and clear pants.” He saw another person in dark clothing looking at him through a window in the “Central” (power plant?). The witness happened to have been carrying a piece of conduit and swung twice at the first person and missed. The person in the Central came out by “passing through the window” and helped the other “dominate the witness.” The witness was lifted up and dropped several times, and then the first person slapped him on the back and said, “go away, you tramp, that [sic] we will return when this work is over.” As the witness ran away, he saw a light blue, metallic, hat-shaped object with a door. There was a yellow light coming through the door and he could see three “crew members,” which included the two he encountered, as they closed it. He then heard a “frying noise initiating the movement of the UFO.” An early example of the Brazilian Air Force’s willingness to be forthcoming with its information was in 1986, when Minister of Aeronautics, Brigadier Octávio Júlio Moreira Lima, held a press conference on May 23rd to tell reporters that five Brazilian Air Force FAB fighter jets had chased 21 UFOs (some reportedly as big as 100 meters in diameter) seen by both civilians and military personnel and detected on radar. The written report, however, wasn’t made available until 2009. As mentioned before, it was because of the efforts of A. J. Gevaerd and other Brazilian UFOlogists that Brazil’s official UFO files became available to the public. Their main interest was in the files generated during Operação Prato, although, according to Pratt, documents leaked in the 1990s were already in the hands of the “400 to 500 active Brazilian UFOlogists.” He says that he was given about 400 pages, including 18 photos of UFOs, and he presents some of the material in his report, which predates the official release of the documents. The man who headed the operation, Captain Uyrangê Hollanda, decided that he was no longer obligated to remain silent after his retirement as a Lieutenant Colonel and began speaking publicly in 1997. The operation was begun in response to complaints by several mayors in the Colares area that their villages were under attack by UFOs. Many people reported being burned, some reported having blood taken from them (which spawned the term “chupa-chupa” for some of the UFOs), and Wellaide Carvalho, a doctor who told Pratt she had treated 40 UFO burn victims, said that two of them had died. According to Pratt, during meetings with Gevaerd and other UFOlogists at military headquarters in Brasilia on May 20, 2005, “three top generals acknowledged that the Air Force had long been concerned about UFOs and had systematically tracked them – known as “H” traffic – since 1954.” He says that, according to Gevaerd, Air Force leaders “(1) recognized the importance of UFOlogy, (2) pledged to help get classified files opened to the public, and (3) guaranteed that steps would be taken to form a joint committee of military and civilian UFO researchers to study the phenomenon.” During the meetings, Gevaerd and six other UFOlogists were allowed to examine Air Force UFO files that included some from Operação Prato. Pratt explains that even though the meetings were promising, before the documents could be made public, approval had to be given by the chief of the Air Force, the defense minister, and Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The approval was given, and Ordinance 551/GC3 was signed on August 9, 2010, by Air Force Commander Lt. Brigadier Juniti Saito and published on August 10, 2010.   Thanks to Scott Bernewitz for bringing our attention to this subject.

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  In the course of researching UFO cases in Spanish speaking countries, one is bound to run into Scott Corrales and Inexplicata: The Journal of Hispanic UFOlogy. It exists today as a website, but in the fall of 1998, Corrales put out the first print version. In issue number 3, put out in the spring of 1999, Corrales celebrates the public reception of the first two issues and notes that there were 1800 visitors to the inexplicata.com website. In that issue is an article by Javier Garcia Blanco headlined “Roadside Encounters: UFOs, Aliens and Missing Time,” that Corrales promises, “does for driving what Spielberg’s Jaws did for swimming: you won’t want to get behind the wheel!” Blanco is credited with being the editor (along with Angel Briongos Martinez) of the Spain-based magazine Declasificado and the director of LACIP. The first case Blanco goes into is that of “veteran radio personality” Pedro Mateo and his wife, Gloria Jiménez. According to him, Mateo described what he said happened to him and his wife on June 26, 1977, after explaining, “I have it etched upon my mind because we were flying to Dusseldorf that day, and most of what happens to me I write in a notebook.” He said that after leaving Zaragoza at around 5:00 a.m., they were just past the town of Los Garrigues after sunrise when they saw a disk-shaped object off in the distance. He wasn’t “overly concerned” at that point, but got scared when it proceeded to move quickly and silently towards them. It stopped above the car and Mateo’s description of its size appears at the top of the article: “That thing had the side of eight cars or more. In other words, when it was on top of us, it looked like a skyscraper…” He saw a sign for a gas station 1000 meters away and sped up to 160 kph. He said, “Seconds later, we noticed the object disappearing the same way we saw it arrive.” According to Mateo, when they got to the station, it was “very odd.” It had “two posts and a broken-down shed, with the kind of pump one sees in American stations.” A 1.9- meter-tall man dressed in faded blue coveralls came over and when they asked him if he had seen anything unusual, he said he hadn’t. They weren’t able to see his face because he covered it with something that looked like a sandwich. When he realized they weren’t buying gas, he left. They continued on to the airport, and whereas they had expected to get there at 11:00 am., they didn’t arrive until 2:30 p.m. and barely had time to catch their flight. They were missing three hours. They didn’t talk about their experience during the flight there or even on the flight back. At the hotel in Dusseldorf, Jiménez noticed that her underwear was torn on one side. On their drive home after their trip, they put a cassette tape in the car’s player to listen to some music and heard nothing. They tried other tapes and found they had all been erased, and when they got home, they found they couldn’t record on them. Mateo’s bifocals were missing from the glove compartment and later, the car’s roof, and hood on the passenger side, which had been red, turned pink. The couple also found a “strange wart” on each of their genitals after reading a book which, from the description, was probably John Fuller’s 1966 book, An Interrupted Journey. Later, they found that the gas station where they stopped never existed. According to Blanco, another couple, Alberto Ballerin and Maria Josef Torres, were heading for their home in Monzón on April 2, 1976. They were on highway N-240 going through Angües when they saw an object heading towards them in the other lane moving at about 55 kph. It was shaped “like a flattened pear,” about 3.5 meters tall by 7-8 meters wide and moving “as if riding the waves.” The object passed them, giving off sparks, and then rose up into the air and moved out of sight. The couple then found themselves “in front of the San Román parador,” with no memory of passing by the bridge and the town of Lascellas before it. They were missing fifteen minutes. They reported they felt “a great sense of calm, tranquility and well-being” for a few days afterwards and that their car ran better, “and even brakes better.” Blanco then describes two cars being chased by UFOs: one driven by Jésus Garcia in 1995, who reported radio interference, and the other driven by Ana Casamayor in July of that year. Garcia reported a rectangular object with blinking multi-colored lights, and Casamayor reported a metallic disk. After this, there is a report from Zaragoza. According to Blanco, on November 1, 1968, five recruits (Francisco Marti Cuatrtero and four others not named) were heading back after being away on a pass. On the Los Monegros road, they saw what they thought was the Sun coming up but then realized that the Sun was on the opposite horizon. Described as a “luminous disc,” it came closer, and when it was half a kilometer away, the car engine and radio shut off, and the headlights dimmed. The men later noticed that their watches had all stopped at the same time. The object is described as being as big as a bullring and is said to have landed 500 meters to their left and remained there silently for three minutes. According to Blanco, it then rose up, suddenly accelerated, and was quickly out of sight. At this point, the car’s engine and radio started up, and the headlights returned to normal. Once they were back, they reported the incident to their superiors and were subjected to “detailed questioning.” Finally, there is a case (Blanco doesn’t give a dater) from Burgo de Ebro, “a small town located a certain distance from Zargoza.” According to Blanco, Balthasar Cavero Andreu “a humble shepherd,” was headed home on his motorcycle after sunset. Halfway there, he saw three men who were standing on the roadway. He got to within 40-50 meters of them and thought “It must be the Guardia Civil.” Andreu turned on his high beams and the three “men” started running downhill. He followed them for about 200 meters and after coming around a curve, didn’t see a trace of them. He described them as 1.8 meters tall, dressed in white, and having blue bands on their backs that ran from their shoulders to their waists. While this might not seem all that strange, he reported that two days later, he went to check on his sheep and sheep dogs and saw that they were all huddled against a wall. He then saw two men dressed the same as the ones from before “flattened against a wall as if to avoid detection.” He ran away and called the Guardia Civil, but when they arrived, the men were gone. In his conclusion Blanco comments that these cases and thousands of others like them “evince the phenomenon’s interest in the human being and a desire to let itself be seen.” As for the purpose of such encounters, he says, “Who knows?”

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  In the August 1975, APRO Bulletin, the front-page story, headlined “UFOs ‘Escort’ Mexican Aircraft” has details of a pilot’s reported UFO encounter. Backing him up is confirmation from the air traffic controller who was in contact at the time. What’s not included are details of the aftermath, which include reports by the witness of encounters with Men in Black. This part of the story can be found in the 1990 book, The UFO Silencers by Timothy Green Beckley, and in the 1997 British UFO Research publication (page 21 of the pdf) by Robert Bull, Men in Black: A Preliminary Report. According to the Bulletin, at 10:30 a.m. on May 3, 1974, 23-year-old Carlos Antonio de los Santos Montiel, took off from Zihuatenajo, state of Guerrero, in his Piper Aztec 24 with the registration, XB-XAU. He was headed for Mexico City on a cloudy day with poor visibility and had to climb to 14,500 feet to get above it. When he was over Tequesquitengo, he dropped down to try and get a look at Lake Tequesquitengo so he could verify his position. When he got below the clouds, fog and mist near the ground blocked his view of the lake, but his attention was quickly drawn to another matter altogether. To his right, he saw a 3-meter-diameter saucer with a cupula on top that had what looked like a small window and an antenna. He looked to his left and saw an identical object. Both were 20 centimeters above the wings and about 1 ½ meters from the cabin. According to the Bulletin, Montiel “told officials” the following: “I was petrified after I saw a third object which seemed about to collide head-on with the windshield. But it went beneath the aircraft and I heard a strange noise from below as though it had collided with the underside of the plane.” Montiel noted that his speed had decreased from 140 to 120 nautical mph. He tried to bank left in order to bump the left object away, but his controls were frozen. He tried lowering his landing gear to deal with the object underneath him but found it wasn’t functional. He then contacted the Mexico City Airport control tower and a transcript provided by APRO Field Investigator Fernando J. Tellez Pareja is presented. Montiel called in saying “Mayday!” and apparently was unable to hear a response. He then described his situation: “Extra alfa union to Center Mexico. My aircraft is out of control – I have no control over it. I have three unidentified objects flying around me. I have three unidentified objects flying around me, one came under my aircraft and hit it. The landing gear is locked in and the controls won’t release them. My position – I am on the Radial 004 from the VOR Tequesquitengo – I am not controlling the plane Center Mexico, can you hear me?” It doesn’t seem that Montiel was able to hear anything from the tower, but he was eventually put in radio contact with his uncle who was “an authority on aircraft.” The runways were closed at the airport, and preparations were made for an emergency landing. As Montiel got close to the airport, his elevation had gone from 15,000 feet to 15,800 feet. Then, the saucer on the left moved over the cabin until it was above the saucer on the right, and then, both flew off together. There is no mention of the third saucer. Montiel circled the airport eight times as he tried to lower the landing gear using a screw driver on the control column and finally managed to do so. He then landed on the grass between two runways at 1:34 p.m. where emergency vehicles were waiting. He was taken to the airport clinic and it was determined that he was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol.  Two days later he underwent tests to determine whether flying too high without oxygen had caused him to hallucinate. Dr. Luis Amezuca, chief of the Mexico City Airport’s Aviation Medicine Department, gave his opinion that Montiel was suffering from low blood sugar because he had skipped breakfast and inferred that this was the cause. Details of Montiel’s reported MiB encounters are on page 17 (page 22 of the pdf) of the BUFORA publication by Robert Bull. According to Bull, Montiel’s case got a lot of publicity, “much to his embarrassment.” He reluctantly agreed to appear on a TV show hosted by Pedro Ferriz, and on his way to the studio, a black Ford Galaxy limousine pulled in front of him, and he saw an identical car behind him. Both looked brand new. He was forced to pull over and stop, and as he went to get out of his car, he saw four tall men with broad shoulders get out of their cars and walk towards him. They looked Scandinavian, with very pale skin, and were wearing black suits. One of them went to Montiel’s door, put his hand on it, and prevented Montiel from getting out. With a “mechanical” tone, he said in Spanish, “Look boy, if you value your life and your family’s too, don’t talk any more about this sighting of yours.” Montiel was “stunned speechless,” and obediently turned his car around and drove home. Two days later, Montiel described his experience to Ferriz who told him he had heard similar stories from other witnesses. Montiel was convinced to proceed with the interview and it went forward without incident. According to Bull, J. Allen Hynek was in Mexico two months later and got in touch with Montiel after hearing about his case. He invited Montiel to his hotel, and he went, after first going for a job interview at Mexicana Airlines. Montiel was walking up the steps of the hotel when he was confronted by one of the men who had threatened him. The man said, “You were already warned once. You are not to talk about your experience.” Montiel tried to explain that he was only responding to an invitation, and the man “pushed him sharply back several feet” and said, “Look, I don’t want you to make problems for yourself. And why did you leave your house at six this morning? Do you work for Mexicana Airlines? Get out of here and don’t come back!” Once again, Montiel obeyed. When talking to Jerome Clark two years later, he said, “They were strange. They were huge, taller than Mexicans are, and they were so white. But the strangest thing of all is that all the while they were in my presence, I never saw them blink.” Beckley interviewed Hynek and includes his comments on the case (page 109 of the pdf) in his book. Hynek confirmed that Montiel had failed to show up, but said he came back the following Saturday. Hynek said he interviewed Montiel for two hours and invited him to have breakfast on Monday. Montiel didn’t show up for that and explained that he had again been threatened by the same man.

Waldheim Meeting. Credit: ICUFON Archives by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  On October 7, 1977, Prime Minister of Grenada Sir Eric Gairy gave a 90-minute speech during the 32nd session of the General Assembly of the United Nations urging the organization to create an agency that would monitor UFOs. This led to a presentation and panel discussion over one year later, organized and produced by Lee Speigel, that included Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Dr. Jacques Vallée, and Col. Gordon Cooper. While this was considered a high point at the time in terms of gaining respectability for the UFO Waldheim Meeting. Credit: ICUFON Archives subject (Grenada issued a set of stamps in 1978 commemorating Gairy’s efforts) and still is today, not everyone was happy about it, particularly the directors of the Scientific Bureau of Investigation, formed in January of 1979. SBI introduced itself to the UFO community in the first issue of The SBI Report, published in March 1979. Its founders were Pete Mazzola and Jim Fillow, who helmed the organization as its “International Directors.” It is claimed that SBI is “the first organization to have two international directors” and explained that it was felt that “two heads are better than one.” Mazzola is described as having been a New York City policeman for 12 years, holding a BS in psychology, and being “a certified expert in the fields of Polygraph and Psychological Stress Evaluation testing.” Fillow is described as a general contractor with two years of college studying computer science and 15 years of experience as a UFO investigator with over 500 cases to his credit. Regarding the UFO discussion at the United Nations, after pointing out that both directors have lectured, “appeared on numerous radio and T.V. programs,” and published the “Step-By-Step” UFO Investigating Manual” [sic] there is this statement: “Currently, each is heavily engaged in the United Nations/UFO discussions dealing with ‘the seriousness of UFO’s [sic] on a world-wide basis which is [sic] currently being presented by WNBC producer—- [sic] Lee Speigel.” This is a little confusing as the presentation organized by Speigel already occurred on November 27, 1978. On page five it is stated: “presentation of evidence was shown to the General Assembly in order to show cause that ‘UFO’s [sic] present a threat to the national security of the world’ and to have the U.N. investigate this threat on a world-wide scale. The discussions still continue, however, the future investigation into this phenomena [sic] by the U.N. does not look favorable.” It didn’t help that Gairy’s regime was overthrown the very month this was published by Marxist rival, Maurice Bishop, while Gairy was in New York on U.N. business. By issue Number 2 of the Report, the attitude of SBI towards the “United Nations/UFO discussions” and the people involved has become downright negative, and the issue contains a vehement attack on Hynek by Mazzola. The reason for this seems to be the relationship between SBI and Colman (spelled Coleman in the Report) VonKeviczky, a former major in the Hungarian Army who emigrated to the U.S. in 1952 and became interested in UFOs during the flap that year which included the “Washington Merry-Go-Round.” He is profiled and welcomed as a consultant in “Photographic Analyzation.” According to the list of his credentials and achievements, he started (in 1966) the Jackson Heights (Queens), New York-based Intercontinental Galactic Spacecraft (UFO) Research and Analytic Network (ICUFON), was the first UFOlogist to make an effort to have the U.N. get involved in the investigation of UFOs when U-Thant was the secretary general, was a member of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and was “employed by the United Nations as a liason [sic] officer.” On page 10 there is a report from VonKeviczky which shows his involvement in the recent U.N. discussions. According to VonKeviczky, his organization was originally chosen by Gairy on June 16, 1978, to prepare a presentation of evidence to support Gairy’s speech at the 33rd session of the General Assembly. Then, on July 12, Gairy told him that while it was known by his government that he had the “strongest analysed [sic] evidences [sic] about the UFOs existence and operation,” Gairy, his cabinet, and the “sponsored scientists *” would not be willing to present evidence that UFOs posed an international threat. The asterisk leads the reader to the following: “On July 14th, Drs. Hynek, Vallée, and astronaut G. Cooper constrained Prime Minister Gairy to cancel Maj. Ret: C. VonKeviczky invitation and announced visit three hours before to U.N. Secretary General Dr. Kurt Waldheim. (WHO ALERTED THE EX-GOVERNMENT SCIENTISTS AGAINST ICUFON!)” This is possibly what led to Mazzola’s attack on Hynek, which is on page 2. According to Mazzola, Hynek is a “one man army,” who is using his “supreme authoritarianism” to gather “3/4’s of all the UFO data around the world.” He then, Mazzola alleges, turns it over to the CIA while only the cases guaranteed to be ridiculed are ever presented to the public. Mazzola makes this suggestion to Hynek: “Retire and collect your C.I.A. pension.” Peter Robbins, who was a young aspiring UFOlogist at the time and a member of SBI, wrote a paper titled The United Nations 1978 UFO Committee Initiative: A Personal Reminiscence, which he presented at the 2009 Crash Retrieval Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Robbins provides a clear timeline of the events, beginning with Gairy’s speech on October 7, 1977. According to Robbins, he “came into the picture” after Gairy’s July 1977 meeting with Waldheim (accompanied by Hynek, Vallée, Leonard Stringfield, David Saunders and Claude Poher) “to discuss the creation of a steering committee whose aim was to involve the United Nations in UFO research.” He says his interest in UFOs started the year before when he was “befriended by the three men who would serve as my ufological mentors” whom he identifies as Budd Hopkins, Pete Mazzola, and Colman VonKeviczsky. Lee Spiegel in 1978 Waldheim had invited VonKeviczsky to submit a paper for the upcoming proceedings addressing his concern that a misidentified UFO might start a war between the U.S. and the Soviets, and Robbins says that he and Chilean UFOlogist, Antonio Huneeus, were “hired” (he points out that neither of them were paid) to be his editors. He describes the process as being quite challenging given that English “was very much a third (or fourth?)” language for VonKeviczsky. He says that due to VonKeviczsky’s pride and stubbornness “the majority of our suggested changes were politely declined, but always with his warm thanks.” In spite of this, the paper was accepted, and Robbins and Huneeus were invited to upcoming relevant meetings. Robbins has a detailed description of the meetings on November 27, but makes no mention of VonKeviczsky being sidelined. SBI, meanwhile, wasn’t done with its gripes. On page 3 of the Volume 1, Number 4, June 1979 Report, Mazzola lays into Lee Speigel, regarding his recent notoriety as a UFOlogist thanks not only to his involvement in the U.N. discussions, but also his show, The UFO Report, a ten-minute program that ran on NBC radio twice a night, Monday thru Friday. He points out that Speigel has been noted as “an authority” on UFOs and tells the reader “We at S.B.I. have this to say about it—-BALONEY!!!” He attributes Spiegel’s rise to prominence to his association with Hynek, “the Benedict Arnold of the U.S. Air Force,” and accuses both of working together to hijack the “UN/UFO debates.” After venting his ire, Mazzola asserts that it is VonKeviczsky, not Hynek and Speigel, who is moving the discussion forward “secretly meeting with several important delegates of powerful nations to attempt to introduce a proposal into the agenda for the UN/UFO talks late in October.” He adds that, instead of Spiegel, SBI will be producing the next presentation. Apparently VonKeviczsky and SBI weren’t successful. According to Robbins, after the talks on November 27, 1978, “Grenada’s efforts to establish a UFO study program were left to languish in committee and died a quiet death the following year.”        

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  In the January 12, 1982, New South Wales, Australia Pix-People, there is an article (page 11 of the pdf) by “Australia’s leading authority on UFOs and psychic phenomena,” John Pinkney, headlined “UFO terror grips a NSW township.” Pinkney’s weekly column for the publication is “The Pinkney Report–Investigating the Incredible.” It seems there was a flap in the town of Nowra, and one case in particular is reported to have been investigated by the Scientific Bureau of Investigation. SBI had its own publication at the time, and a report on the case was published in the Vol. 3, No. 6 SBI Report. SBI was based in Staten Island, NY, and one member readers might recognize was Peter Robbins, who is listed as art director for the magazine. According to Pinkney, “dozens of people” were “caught up in bizarre events” in Nowra, which is 150 km south of Sydney: railway men reported they saw lights hovering over abandoned mineshafts; a foal was found with its leg cut off “neatly from its shoulder; a “huge, brightly lit object” paced a bus with 40 passengers “for seven minutes, before vanishing up a shaft of light in the clouds;” a newspaper man saw a mass of what looked like meteorites fly up from the ground into the air in 1978; a 12-meter-diameter ring was found burned into a field after a farmer told police that “a weird thing had crashed on his property, starting a bushfire;” and two hunters shot at a two-meter-tall, human-like entity that vanished and left an overpowering odor that made one of the hunters sick for several hours.  Pinkney’s main focus, however, is on a case involving not only some unusual trace evidence, but physical effects on the witness as well. According to Pinkney, Frank Burke, a pastrycook, was driving through the Kangaroo Valley heading home from work at around 10:30 p.m. when a “blazing light” engulfed the car. Burke said it lit up the area in a radius of around 25 feet and “was so intense I could have read the fine print of a newspaper or counted the ants at the roadside.” He was listening to music coming from a cassette player/recorder sitting on the seat next to him, and it stopped playing as soon as the light came down. Burke said, “Frankly, I was terrified… mainly because a dead silence settled over everything.” Even though the car was still moving, he couldn’t hear the engine. He then he saw flames around the wheels but “wasn’t game to get out.” According to him, the light followed him up a mountain and then disappeared when another car came into view. According to Pinkney, Burke got up early the next day so he could report the incident to the police. As he took a shower, he noticed his leg was sore and then saw it was blistered. He had double vision and his fingernails were flaking and falling off. He told Pinkney, “But the biggest shock came when I got into the car. My recorder’s cassette carriage had been melted and buckled.” He gave the machine to Thomas van Andel of SBI, and that’s when they got involved. Van Andel’s report is on page 36 of the magazine. He describes Burke as 51, married, and known as a “reliable guy” by the local police. Unlike Pinkney, van Andel provides the date of the incident; April 17, 1981. There are more details in this account along with some discrepancies. According to van Andel, Burke was driving a Morris 1100 through the “Mystery Mountain” area when he saw what he thought were very bright headlights or high beams being reflected in his rear-view mirror. As he came to a curve in the road just before it started to ascend, the lights quickly came closer. They then rose above the car and stayed over him for the next two miles as the road became steep and winding and surrounded by trees and vegetation on both sides. The same light coming down and surrounding him is described, but in this account, Burke is said to have felt as if he was “floating in or on the light.” He went over the mountain, and as he was close to the bottom, he saw an oncoming car approaching from the south, and the light (and presumably the object producing it) disappeared. Burke had realized that the music had stopped playing during the encounter but didn’t pay it any mind until afterwards. It is here that this account differs from Pinkney’s. According to van Andel, Burke looked down and noticed that the tape recorder was melted. He felt “an intense heat” and had a ringing in his ears during the encounter, and after pulling over and stopping, he saw that his left leg was burned near the calf. He called the police and they came to the scene and “they attest to the fact that he was not intoxicated” but was “agitated and nervous.” This report is said to have been corroborated by Nowra Police Sgt. Wally Crock. Burke is described as a veteran of the Korean war having served on the HMS Sydney, not given to “exaggerations or complaining,” and in good shape. After the encounter, he reportedly suffered a long list of symptoms: constant ringing in his ears; an inner ear problem; a rash on his left leg; sensitivity to light and occasional double vision; frequent nose bleeds; sinus irritation; chills and flushes, respiratory problems, high blood pressure; discolored fingernails, some of which would fall off; flaking skin; and nervousness. His urine changed color, and he lost 14 pounds in 12 weeks. A report by “three independent medical physicians” is promised once it has been received. According to van Andel, Burke was “not a reader of UFO literature,” didn’t belong to any UFO group, and had never seen a UFO before this. He says they “can deduce a UFO encounter transpired” as: Burke reported no noise from the object and a sensation of floating (“typical of many UFO encounters”); the object was able to ascend, hover, pace the car, and then disappear; electromagnetic effects stopped the tape recorder (not the melting?); intense heat was felt; and Burke suffered physiological effects. Van Andel reports that Burke’s statements were subjected to “Voice Stress Analyzation” and that SBI believed he was telling the truth as he knew it. He says that the tape machine was still being analyzed but thus far, SBI had been unable to duplicate conditions where only the top part would be melted. Unfortunately, a search through subsequent issues of SBI Report yielded no follow-up.

Near the end of the 20th century, human abducting, cattle mutilating, Grey aliens flying sport-model saucers dominated the popular UFO narrative. However, there are reports that differ greatly from such accounts that offer insight into what might be an even stranger phenomenon. In the September 12, 1999, edition of the Trenque Lauquen paper, La Opinión, there is an article (page 16 of the pdf) headlined “Extraterrestrial Encounter?” It tells the tale, mostly in the words of the witness, Carlos Colón, a resident of Trenque Lauquen, who said he had a strange encounter on August 25th. During a follow-up investigation by a Spanish UFOlogist almost 20 years later, Colón shared details of the aftereffects of his encounter which he had formerly chosen not to share with the press and other investigators. According to the article, Colón was “a well-known mechanic of agricultural machinery” and often travelled on the roads around Trenque Lauquen in his pickup truck. He had originally wanted to keep his story to himself and was still concerned that he wouldn’t be taken seriously. According to Colón, he was on National Route 5 at 4:30 p.m. returning from the ranch of a friend. He was listening to music on the radio and it started making a humming noise that he thought might be due to the failure of his alternator. As he was checking his radio, some movement on the shoulder of the road caught his attention, and he looked up and saw “five figures that looked like people.” He realized there was something strange about them, and he described them this way: “When I take a better look I see they were all white but as if they were inside a screen, like a projection…” They came closer and closer until they were about 20 meters away. They then came together, moved “something like hands,” and “the screen becomes smaller in the shape of a cone that lifts up…” He said, “I saw no feet since they moved in a sliding motion.” He explained that he couldn’t give a better description “because I was so scared, it’s difficult for me to retain the image.” According to him, something “like a big light” came down and he found himself looking up at “the figures as if they were behind a frosty window.” He heard music and realized it was coming from his truck, which was on the road, while he was standing next to a fence with no idea how he got there. He went back to the truck and noted that the humming noise was gone. He continued home, but stopped to get his blood pressure checked, as he had had trouble with it “some years ago.” He said it was fine, “but a bad sensation remained in my body like uneasiness and anguish because I can’t know what happened, and you think you’re crazy.” Colón described the beings as looking like very tall humans (almost 2 meters) with heads that “looked like an elongated inverted water drop with a very big neck.” He couldn’t make out facial features but noted that there was a black spot in the middle of their heads. He said “they were no more than 20 cm wide, an intense matte white color.” According to the article, other area residents had reported seeing UFOs and lights and encounters with “presumably non-human beings.” “Several” reports are said to have come from close to where Colón stopped his truck. Colón went back to the site on his motorcycle the day after his encounter. He told the paper that he found a ticket from the Chevalier company and some coins he had in his pocket and was convinced he had actually been there and hadn’t hallucinated. He said he believed the encounter had lasted between two and seven minutes but that he had had a loss of consciousness from which he recovered when he heard the music from the truck. In 2018, Spanish UFOlogist Josep Guijarro discovered the case while researching lost time events on National Route 5 involving reports of drivers travelling long distances instantly without any loss of fuel. After contacting Colón, he went to see him in January, 2018, and wrote an article about their meeting headlined “The Humanoids of the National,” posted August 14, 2018, (updated August 23, 2018) on the espaciomisterioso website. According to Guijarro, he arrived in the city with “social psychologist Miguel Ángel Pumilla, theoretical physicist Marcela Jaroszewicz, and mythology specialist Mario Luis Martín.” In a taxi on the way from the bus station, they asked the driver about Colón and “he had only good things to say.” They met Colón, then 70, at his company and went to his spacious office where they set up filming equipment. Colón addressed them loudly saying. “The only thing I ask is that you stick to the letter of what I’m going to say; don’t change anything to make it more engaging. This is it.” Colón then told his story, which was the same as that in La Opinión but with some additional details. He said that as he was looking at the beings, he heard a sound described by Guijarro as “a piercing buzzing sound.” He described the “screen” as transforming into the shape of a bell as the beings “grabbed each other’s shoulders;” turning opaque, dark grey and surrounded by fog; and then dematerializing as he heard a sound like that of a cathode-ray television being turned off. He then realized he was somehow 350 meters away from his truck. Colón said he ran towards the truck, jumped a fence, and fell into a puddle. Once inside the truck, he began to “feel scared.” He said, “I saw the cars and trucks passing by me, but they were very small, as if they were toys.” It was this that prompted him to get his blood pressure checked as he feared he might have a heart attack at any moment. He added that he was missing some documents and everything he had had in his pockets, which is what he recovered the next day. After telling his story, Colón broke into tears. He said, “When I got home, I hugged my wife and told her, ‘Old lady, I’m not crazy.’” He then complained about the fact that the beings didn’t bother to help his disabled daughter saying, “If they’re capable of doing things like appearing out of nowhere and dematerializing, they could have also helped her have a normal life.” Then, Colón shared details of what seem to be aftereffects of the encounter, which he had never done with any previous investigators or the press. He said a friend’s watch stopped working when he touched it, and after experimenting, he found he could stop other timepieces at will. He also found that radios and televisions would shut down when he walked by them. As he was adjusting to this, he found out from his wife that he had been getting out of bed at 3:00 a.m., seemingly still asleep, walking to the patio, and then standing there. He said, “My wife was crying and wouldn’t tell me what was happening, but in the end she told me that, in addition to remaining motionless in the darkness, she could see a luminescence around my body.” According to Guijarro, Colón went to get some tests at the Alexander Fleming Institute in Buenos Aires, and it was found that he had developed “an infallible photographic memory.” A doctor there recommended that he not use his new-found abilities “unless it’s a matter of life and death,” and after three years, they disappeared.  The article ends with this bit of advice from Colón, “My recommendation is that when someone is traveling in their car and encounters a phenomenon like the one I experienced, it’s best not to get out of the vehicle.”          

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear In last week’s blog, we looked at a case from British Columbia that involved two witnesses who said they not only saw a UFO on the night of October 3, 1981, described as an upside-down flying saucer with its dome underneath surrounded by four lights that were in the 3,6,9, and 12 o’clock positions, but also had encounters with MiB types afterwards. The main witness, a 16-year-old who ran his own security company, Grant Breiland, reportedly took a photo that was not developed at the time of the article. The other witness, identified only as “N.B.” was a 19-year-old male who said he saw the same object. Breiland was interviewed extensively by former University of Victoria linguistics professor, Dr. P.M.H. Edwards. Edwards wrote a report that was published in the Vol. 27, No. 4, January 1982 Flying Saucer Review. When we left off, Breiland had just been confronted in the glass-doored vestibule of a shopping mall by two men dressed in extremely dark blue clothing. They were stiff and robotic, had tanned faces and lips the same color, no eyebrows, and “Eton crop” haircuts. He was scared by not only their non-human appearance, but also by the fact that there were suddenly no people to be seen anywhere, which was the case during the entire encounter. According to Edwards, they asked him what his name was, where he lived, what his phone number was, and he refused to answer. After staring at him for five seconds, they turned on their heels “as one man,” walked outside (it was raining), crossed the sidewalk to the road, went left, and walked in sync in a military fashion. Breiland followed them and watched as they walked onto a muddy, excavated field and then vanished before his eyes. He ran to the spot where they disappeared and saw they had left no footprints. According to Edwards, Breiland was “thoroughly frightened” at this point and ran to the bus stop so he could get home quickly. He told Edwards he was certain that he had caught the 4 p.m. bus, which should have gotten him home in about 15 minutes, but found himself walking in the door a few minutes before 5 p.m. Edwards speculates that he may have caught the 4:40 p.m. bus, but notes that Breiland told him that that bus would have been much more crowded. Edwards describes a dream Breiland had that night. In the dream, when he got across the field, the men were waiting for him. They grabbed his wrists and disappeared, whereupon he suddenly found himself in a circular white room. It was lit, but he could not see any source. The men strapped him to a chair, repeated their questions, and he, again, refused to answer causing one of the men to exclaim, “You’ll be sorry.” They asked Breiland if he’d told anyone about his experience, and he said he hadn’t. They told him they had been watching him and said he was lying. They said “Forget it. Destroy it.” On following nights, he dreamt of the interrogation in the vestibule. Breiland noticed an approximately half centimeter round welt on the inside of his right thigh and Edwards asked him to let him know if there was any change in it. He also asked him to report any kind of unusual event experienced by him and his family. According to Edwards, N.B. also reported an encounter with two strange men. He told Breiland that at around noon on October 5, 3-4 hours before Breiland’s encounter, two very pale, slender men with white hair who were dressed just like the others, came to the gas station where he worked and asked for petrol for their car, which was nowhere to be seen. N.B. asked what kind of car they had and whether they needed leaded or unleaded gas, and one of the men said, “I don’t know.” He got a can and filled it with unleaded and asked for their names so they could sign for the can. The same man said he couldn’t give him their names and the other remained silent. N.B. asked how long they would be with the can and the man said 15 minutes. He told them they owed him $2.65 and they gave him a $10 bill. When he gave them their change, which included bills and coins, he noticed that they had no fingernails and they looked at the coins as if they had never seen such things. They then turned “mechanically” and walked away to a side street where they turned. They came back 15 minutes later, put down the can, which was still full, and asked (we assume it was the one who was doing all the talking before) “Where do you live in this fine city?” N.B. answered “At Gordon Head,” and they stared at him and then turned around and walked off. N.B. noted that they didn’t bend their knees when they walked. As for the activity in the area during the encounter, N.B. didn’t say anything about it being unusual. Edwards says he called Breiland on October 20th to ask him if he’d had any strange phone calls or noticed any strange people looking at him on the streets. Breiland said he’d gotten a few “blank” calls as well as “crank” calls the last two days. Edwards tells the reader that he had gotten three “blank” calls and one where he heard “a faraway-sounding croaking voice.” In a postscript, Edwards quotes a sentence in the 1976 book by Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power. On page 180, Don Juan says they will be going to a place where something supernatural had previously occurred in their presence. Castaneda asks, “Aren’t we risking being seen by people?” and Don Juan replies, “No. The nagual will keep everything suspended.” Edwards asks “Could this be connected with the apparent absence of any sign of movement or life during a UFO sighting or an MIB visit?”

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear Men in Black stories are almost as old as the modern UFO mystery, starting with the 1947 Maury Island Incident. This aspect of the phenomenon became firmly cemented with Gray Barker’s 1956 book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, and it plays a big part in John Keel’s 1975 book, The Mothman Prophecies. Keel was of the mind that MiBs were not human beings from secret government organizations out to silence witnesses, but creatures of a much stranger origin. Supporting this is a 1981 report (page 8 of the pdf) out of Canada that is presented in the Vol. 27, No. 4, January 1982 Flying Saucer Review. At the beginning of the report headlined, “M.I.B. Activity Reported from Victoria B.C.,” Dr. P.M.H. Edwards, a former linguistics professor at the University of Victoria, points out that the area “has largely been neglected by UFOs in the past.”  Then, according to him, on October 2, 1981, “two major incidents occurred in Victoria, B.C., involving two men who were unknown to each other.” In a sidebar, the editor shares a note from Edwards headed “How this story was uncovered immediately after it occurred” that was included with the report. According to Edwards, he got a phone call from a “lady acquaintance” on October 4th telling him there was an article in the morning Victoria Times-Colonist reporting that a 16-year-old boy had taken a photo of a UFO between Mount Douglas and Mount Tolmie the previous night. On “a hunch,” Edwards got in touch with the boy, Grant Breiland, three days later and got the details of his story after meeting with him “several times.” According to Edwards, the other witness, who was 19, wanted to remain anonymous, “forget about the whole thing,” and “refused to be interviewed.” Edwards gives him the initials “N.B,” says he has his information on file, and that he works at a local gas station. As for Breiland, Edwards gives his address (1507 Winchester Road, Victoria, B.C. V8N 2B6, Canada) and describes him as unusual for his age with an “above-average intelligence,” keen observation skills, and his own security business called “J.R. Security,” consisting of a staff of friends who keep tabs on homes when their owners are away and assist “in keeping law and order.” In one instance, he is said to have helped to arrest a man who was breaking into a car and taken him to the police station. According to Edwards, Breiland handcuffed the man. Besides the above reasons for being inclined to believe Breiland’s story, Edwards points out that Breiland had only read a portion of the book UFOs and IFOs (Gardner Soule, 1967) at the age of twelve and “has read nothing else in our field.” According to Edwards, at 9:30 p.m., Breiland was out in his driveway with his mother, seeing his sister off after a visit, when he saw what seemed to be an especially big star with “a yellowish tinge around the edge.” His sister and mother couldn’t see it, nor could a boy who rode by on a bicycle. Breiland got on the CB radio he used for his business and called out to anyone listening who might be on Mount Tolmie, which had an unimpeded view of the area. The second witness, N.B., replied and said he was looking at a big white light he described as “like a star that is about to shoot!” Looking through binoculars he said he saw a big red light that was pointing right at him. Breiland got his 35 mm Pentax camera, put a zoom lens on it, and mounted it on a tripod. Using this setup, he could see what looked like an upside-down saucer with its dome underneath. It had a red light that moved across its width and then circled down and around from front to back. There were four white lights around the object that were smaller than it in the 12, 3, 6, and 9 o’clock positions with black dots on them that Breiland thought could have been windows. There were yellow beams of light going between the “craft” and the surrounding lights. Breiland took a picture that had yet to be developed as of the writing. The craft then moved in a manner described as that like a priest making the sign of the cross, with the lights maintaining their positions around it. The red light stopped moving for two seconds at one point, shone directly into Breiland’s eyes, and then resumed its former motions. Breiland took a moment to look at his watch and saw it was 9:59 p.m., and then, “at precisely 10 p.m. everything was switched off, like an electric light bulb being extinguished.” Breiland and N.B. met for the first time the next day at Breiland’s house and talked about what they had seen. They both had bad headaches that weren’t responding to aspirin. They met again the next day and N.B. took Brieland for wild ride in his truck that was such that Brieland was relieved to get home safely. N.B. was also swearing and talking violently about people and things that annoyed him, and Edwards notes that he couldn’t say whether this was his normal behavior or an after-effect of the sighting. On Monday, October 5, at 3:15 p.m., Breiland left school and went to the local shopping mall to see if a part he had ordered for his radio had arrived at the Radio Shack there. It hadn’t, and he then went to the main entrance of the mall where he hoped to meet a friend. The friend wasn’t there and he went to call him using the pay phone in the vestibule between the glass doors to the parking lot and the glass doors inside to the store. His friend’s sister answered and told him that her brother wasn’t able to come, as he had just broken his arm. As Breiland hung up, he saw two men who were standing “extremely close together” and seemed as if they wanted to talk to him. He became scared because they had a non-human appearance and also because he noticed that there were suddenly no people coming into and going out of the entrance whereas there had just been lots of activity. He saw no one outside either. The men were stiff and motionless, didn’t move or blink, and were expressionless. They were dressed in dark blue, almost black, suits, shirts, and shoes. They had no ties and their shirts were closed up to the neck, but Breiland saw no buttons on either the jackets or the shirts. Their faces were tanned, and their lips were the same color. Their eyes were mat as opposed to glossy and didn’t reflect any light. They had eyelashes but no brows, weren’t wearing hats, and had “Eton crop” haircuts with their hair only covering the top half of their foreheads. They had “squarish” earlobes, and one of them “kept his mouth perpetually half open like a rectangle,” whereas the other one’s mouth was more “normal.” They both had perfect teeth. One of them spoke to him in a monotone robotic voice and asked, “What is your name?” Breiland said, “I’m not going to tell you.” and that man remained silent while the other continued and asked “Where do you live?” and “What is your number?” Breiland refused to answer the first question verbally as before and remained silent after the second. After staring at him in silence for about five seconds, they turned on their heels “as one man,” went outside and crossed the sidewalk. They then turned left and walked on the road in sync “as in a military drill.” Breiland followed them at a close distance of about two feet and noticed that there were no people or moving cars anywhere to be seen. It was raining, and he stopped by the wall of the store and watched as the men approached a muddy, excavated field. He thought he heard someone call his name from behind, and he turned around. This happened twice, and after the second time, the men vanished as he watched. As he ran toward the spot where he had last seen them, he noticed that they had left no footprints. Next week: More details, N.B.’s encounter, and the aftermath.

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear Brazilian UFO cases have aspects to them that, while not unheard of in other countries, come up over and over again giving them a commonality that is unique to Brazil. Lost time, traveling long distances in trucks and cars in far less time and using far less fuel than it should take, humanoid encounters, and injuries are a few of these. A case from 1980 has all of these aspects except injury, and it is described in the cover story of the March 1982 APRO Bulletin. According to the article headlined “1980 Brazilian Abduction,” the case came to light “during the question and answer period following a UFO lecture by APRO’s Brazilian Representative, Mrs. Irene Granchi.” Granchi later interviewed the people involved, Elias Seixas de Matos, 38; Guaraci Fernandes de Sousa, 47; and Alberto Seixas Vierra, 26. Granchi later wrote about the case in an article (link to original article broken at this time) published in the April 1995 issue of UFO Magazine. There, she says she was lecturing about the work of Rio de Janeiro-based “hypnologist,” Dr. Silvio Lago. According to her, the three men were introduced to her, and it was explained that they wanted to meet Lago as they all seemed to have experienced partial amnesia and couldn’t recall long stretches of time during a delivery run in a truck. According to the Bulletin article, in the course of the interviews, the story came out that at around 10:30 p.m. on September 25, 1980, the three were on their way back to Rio after a long trip to Belem where they delivered some oil cans. De Matos was driving and when they were near Conceicao de Araguaia, the truck’s headlights started blinking on and off. He turned them off and they continued blinking. He then felt something he described as being like “cold liquid” touch the back of his neck and heard a voice say, “Elias, I want to speak to you.” He said to de Sousa, “Look, I’ve been feeling something strange; let’s stop here.” At this point, de Sousa and Vierra saw a quick flash of blue light come down from the sky which hit the hood of the truck. De Matos stopped the truck, and the three got out. As they did, they saw what looked like a bonfire ahead of them about a mile away. It’s described as having been “fiery red,” to have emitted a white flash every second, and to have been smokeless. The men estimated that it was about one meter high, six meters long, and cigar shaped. During “later questioning,” Granchi learned that de Matos and de Sousa “had always wanted to see a UFO,” and that de Sousa was “well informed on the subject.” Vierra was worried about taking any sort of risks and begged the other two not to go any farther. In spite of this, they went another 20 yards and de Matos shot some film footage of the object with the new Super-8 camera he’d brought along. Granchi reportedly viewed the eight seconds worth of footage which showed “a fiery circle and four white flashes against the dark night background.” De Sousa attempted “mental contact” and nothing happened, and Vierra became panicked at the possibility that they might be abducted and not see their families again. They went back to the truck and continued on. As they were travelling, de Sousa’s hat flew out of the truck from where it had been “wedged between his back and the seat.” They stopped so he could get it, whereupon de Matos suddenly felt drowsy and asked de Sousa to drive. From this point until their next stop at Guarai, de Matos remembered nothing. When they got to Guarai, they assumed it was around 11:30, as this leg of the journey normally would have taken four hours. De Matos went to get some coffee at a gas station, and when he asked for the time there, he was shocked to find that it was 4:30 a.m. They rested, and then, when de Matos went to fill the fuel tank, he was amazed to find that they had used up only one liter on a 143 km trip. They set off for the 1200 km trip to Brazilia, which was uneventful, and then headed home to Rio, which should have taken 20 hours, but they made it in 12, and de Matos noted that they had used only 270 cruzeiros worth of diesel, whereas they normally would have used 3,000 cruzeiros. They pulled up to de Sousa’s house, and the lights of the car in his driveway started blinking on and off. De Sousa’s wife thought it was their son playing with the car, but saw that he was standing on the truck and that the car was empty. Then, when de Matos got home, got out of the truck and walked in front of it, the hood, which formerly had been difficult to open as it often stuck, lifted up about 20 cm and banged down twice. He also noted that a cyst that had been on the back of his hand for a long time was gone. It was arranged that both de Sousa and de Matos would be hypnotized on October 9th. De Sousa’s session revealed no more information, but during de Matos’s session, an abduction story came out. He described finding himself floating upside down in an egg-shaped object, becoming stuck to one of its walls, and then sliding down it to the floor. He said walked down some steps to a large, white, circular room and saw a “man” crouching in front of a table that had levers of various colors which he was manipulating. The man was wearing a tight-fitting, rubber-like, yellow one-piece suit with a head covering and a belt that had a circular buckle-like shape in the front that had lights that were the same colors as the levers. De Matos said his arms were limp and that he felt like there was some sort of wall between him and the man and that he was unable to get closer. He described the man’s face as pale, his eyes as lilac and having no pupils, his mouth as large with no lips, and said his arms and hands were exceptionally long. He said the man was tall as well and stood about 2 meters. The man pointed out a window and de Matos could see “something very large and balls or spheres of several colors crossing the space beyond the window” and “stars moving across a blue background.” Granchi’s article has a transcript of a second session, and the story there includes a trip to what seems to be the creature’s planet, and de Matos describes being on what seems to be a city street. He says, “I’m standing under the awning of a tall building” and mentions a “closed store.” He then describes being taken back to Earth in another ship with a pilot who was “a nice guy,” who talked to him in Portuguese without moving his lips, “joking around to lighten the trip.” He said that when they got back, the pilot told him to “open the door and jump out.” He said he was told that they would meet again when he least expected it. During further questioning by Granchi and another researcher, he added that the creature placed a small chrome-colored object about the thickness of a finger on his chest that stuck there. When asked what the purpose of this was, he answered that it was “so he could locate me, so he could contact me.” Granchi explains that “we later learned it was an implant” and proceeds to put this early abduction story into the context of the narrative that developed after Budd Hopkins’s 1981 book, Missing Time. According to Granchi, de Matos was abducted again and had “sperm extracted in a painful operation that left him impotent for weeks.” She adds that he then developed “healing powers and all the paranormal abilities that are the corollary of abductions.” After the article, Granchi is described by whom we assume is an editor as “practically a living legend” at 83 years of age and “a true matriarch” of the Brazilian UFO community who had been active for almost five decades.

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear In last week’s blog, we looked at a case involving a 1979 report by a forestry worker in Scotland who said he not only saw a mysterious domed object sitting on the ground, but that he was assaulted by two spherical objects with spike-like protrusions that rolled towards him rapidly, rolled over onto his sides, and seemed to be pulling on his pants. At this point he went unconscious. According to him, when he came to, he heard a “whooshing” noise and then saw that the object was gone. He was extremely thirsty, had a headache, pain in his chin and legs, and couldn’t walk or speak. He crawled back to his pickup truck, which was 300 meters away, found himself incapable of driving it, but was then able to make his way home on foot. Upon returning “with others” the next day, there were physical traces seen that gave support to his claims. This week, we’ll look at the aftermath and the physical evidence. The case got the attention of Flying Saucer Review Editor Charles Bowen, who made arrangements to have it investigated by members of the UFO Investigators Network, an organization funded by FSR and formed in 1977 with the help of Jenny Randles who had proposed the idea. The resulting three-part report by UFOIN investigators Martin Keatman and Andrew Collins appears in the November-December 1979, Spring 1980, and September 1980 issues. According to Keatman and Collins, when Taylor got home, as soon as he walked through the door, he asked his wife “for a drink to quench his intense thirst.” She described him as “ghastly” and in a state of shock. His speech had returned to the point where he was able to mumble words to the effect that he’d been attacked. Mrs. Drummond suggested he get out of his dirty clothes and take a bath, which he did, and then called his boss, Malcolm Drummond, who drove over immediately. After Taylor’s wife described the situation, Drummond went upstairs to the bathroom to try and get some details. While he acknowledged something real had happened to Taylor, according to him, he thought he might have “fallen on his head, or something,” when Taylor mentioned “space ships” and “things coming towards him.” According to Keatman and Collins, Drummond called a doctor, who came over and examined Taylor. It was seen that he had a red mark that was 4 cm long and 1.5 cm wide under his chin and a similar mark on his left hip in the area where he said he was being pulled. Taylor’s pants “a general-purpose police issue,” were torn on both hips and his long underwear was torn only on the left. Drummond and the doctor went to the site and found the pickup truck with its ignition on and door open. They considered the idea that Taylor had fallen out of the truck and knocked himself out. Finding nothing else, they went back to Taylor’s house. By this time, Taylor was dressed and suggested he take them to where the encounter took place to try and find any marks left by the “vehicle.” The doctor, instead, went home, and Taylor went with Drummond back to the site.  Taylor is described as being almost back to normal at this point “with only a headache, slight pains, and some thirst lingering on.” According to Keatman and Collins, they found marks at the site that consisted of a series of indentations that looked like those left by horse hooves, and two parallel lines of eight  rectangular impressions that looked like marks left by tracks. The hoof-like indentations circled each set of “track” marks and the spot where Taylor was left unconscious as if they had left the “vehicle” and returned. There were also marks that looked like they were made by Taylor’s boots dragging along the ground. Drummond took Taylor back home and radioed for a group of LDC workers to put up a fence to protect the marks from the curious. He then went to his house and called the Livingston Police. He went back to the site and was met by seven officers from Livingston and Bathgate, “including a superintendent.” Drummond took them to the area of the encounter “and they seemed totally baffled.” A police photographer took pictures as other officers made measurements and sketches. The superintendent went over to Drummond and said, “When I came on duty at two o’clock, I didn’t have a care in the world; now look at this!” Taylor went to a hospital for a head x-ray on the advice of the doctor and left after becoming annoyed at being kept waiting for more than two-and-a-half hours and then being told that they wanted to give him a full physical. He was then interviewed by the police in the late afternoon. According to Keatman and Collins, Taylor and his family recounted the events “many times, but not once did it change in any way.” They give Taylor’s estimate of the spheres as two-and-a-half feet in diameter, and of the “six equidistant ‘spikes’” as one-and-a-half feet long. An LDC photographer took photos, but they ended up in the hands of the police who “thwarted” attempts by the researchers to obtain copies. The police also went to Taylor’s house when his daughter was there alone and took the clothes he was wearing during his reported encounter “for forensic analysis.” As part of the investigation, Keatman and Collins made “numerous enquiries” in an effort “to establish if any folklore, mystical, or UFO type events had been associated with Deer Hill or Livingston in the past.” They reference FSR Volume 24, No. 5 (March 1979) which has a report of a low-altitude object that seemed to be “scanning the ground” with “an intensely bright, white” searchlight less than 2km from the Detchmont Woods site.  They also discovered a case where a young girl disappeared  “a couple of years ago” on a “harsh wintry evening” and was found by a search party (which included Taylor) warm and dry under some trees “a few hundred metres from where Bob claimed to have had his experience.” She said she had “followed the sheep.” Part II details the investigators clearing the snow from the impressions with Taylor, his son, a friend, and two people from the LDC, and they comment that it had served as a protective covering. They note that measurements for radiation and magnetic anomalies showed nothing unusual. They then go into details about Taylor’s pants and long underwear (they were able to examine them under supervision at Edinburgh H.Q. forensic laboratories), the investigation by police, and the physical effects on Taylor. It is noted that he and Lara (his Irish Setter who was with him) both lost their appetites for five days after the reported encounter. Part III has details of other sightings in the area that fall and of a follow-up visit with Taylor. It is reported that he underwent regressive hypnosis at the request of “an American newspaper,” and that the story that came out of that matched the one he told in conscious recall. Keatman and Collins conclude that Taylor related real events just as he had experienced them.

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear When a single witness reports an episode of high strangeness involving a UFO encounter, having physical evidence in the form of traces left on the ground, or on the witness, really helps when arguing for the witness’s credibility. This was the case in the 1979 report by a forestry worker in Scotland who said he not only saw a mysterious domed object sitting on the ground, but that he was assaulted by two spherical objects with spike-like protrusions that rolled towards him. The case got the attention Flying Saucer Review Editor Charles Bowen, who made arrangements to have it investigated by members of the UFO Investigators Network, an organization funded by FSR and formed in 1977 with the help of Jenny Randles who had proposed the idea. The resulting three-part report by UFOIN investigators Martin Keatman and Andrew Collins appears in the November-December 1979, Spring 1980, and September 1980 issues. The case was also investigated by employees of the Livingston Development Corporation and local police from two stations. Detchmont WitnessThe case is the cover story in the 1979 issue. According to the report titled, “Physical Assault by Unidentified Objects at Livingston – Part I,” LDC forestry foreman Robert Taylor of Livingston, West Lothian, Scotland, reported that on Friday, November 9, 1979, he encountered a mysterious domed object sitting on the ground in a forest clearing. According to him, as he watched, two spherical objects with spike-like protrusions came towards him rapidly and rolled over onto his sides, at which point he went unconscious. When he came to, he heard a “whooshing” noise and then saw that the object was gone. He was extremely thirsty, had a headache, pain in his chin and legs, and couldn’t walk or speak. He crawled back to his pickup truck, which was 300 meters away, found himself incapable of driving it, but was then able to make his way home on foot. Upon returning “with others” the next day, there were physical traces seen that gave support to his claims. According to Keatman and Collins, they made arrangements on Monday with Taylor’s superior, Malcolm Drummond, to meet with Taylor the next day, who would take them to the site. They also established contact “with all the other authorities in the area, including the local police and newspapers, in order to pave the way ahead.” When they got to the area on Wednesday, they went to the LDC, met with Drummond and Taylor, and were taken to the site, an area known as Detchmont Woods. The site was covered with snow, but LDC workers had put up a fence to protect the trace evidence. There were footprints all around as a result of people coming to look at the site out of curiosity, and the reader is told, “You can imagine our feelings when we were greeted with the sight of a large snowman built in the center!” Because it was getting dark, they were unable to thoroughly investigate the site and instead, went with Taylor to Livingston where they interviewed him, his wife, one of his sons, and his daughter. They interviewed Taylor under “rapid questioning for more than three hours,” and then over the next three days, and he “never veered from his original story, nor did the others involved in this bizarre saga.” The report then goes into the finer details of Taylor’s story. According to Keatman and Collins, Taylor, 61, was making his rounds in his Bedford pickup truck with his six-year-old Irish Setter, Lara, and arrived at Detchmont Woods at approximately 9:55 hours, an area he went to “virtually every week.” He went through two gates and drove up the unpaved forestry road to Deer Hill. He parked 300 meters from where he said his encounter took place, let Lara loose “to roam freely and chase small animals in the forest,” and checked on the gates, fencing, and fire paths “searching for anything untoward.” He made his way to an intersection of three fire paths. There, in a clearing to his right, he saw a large object “quite out of context with the area as he knew it.” He described it as a “top” or domed-shaped, and said it had a flange around it with evenly-spaced, vertical, cylindrical bars sticking up from it that had “horizontal bars not unlike propellors on top of them.” He said that between the vertical bars there were what could have been portholes, but he couldn’t see through them, so he thought they might have just been “markings.” Keatman and Collins describe the structure beneath the upper part as “confusing” and say that Taylor recalled it as being like the upper part giving “the impression of a ‘Saturn-shape’ overall, or as he put it ‘a child’s top.’” This sounds more like a spherical object than a dome, and the illustration reflects this. Based on “measurements taken at the site” they estimate that it was about 7 meters wide at the flange and about 8 meters away from Taylor. Taylor is said to have described the surface as rough, with no apparent joints or seams, dark grey like “carborundum,” and to have said it didn’t seem to be metallic. He added, however, that after looking at the object for about 30 seconds, parts of the upper section “disappeared,” allowing him to see what was behind it, and would then become opaque, first on the left, then on the right, and then in the center. It’s at this point that the spikey, spherical objects are said to have “hurtled towards the startled witness.” According to the report, they seemed to come from in front of the lower section and to have moved in unison on a parallel course before falling onto his sides. Taylor recalled an overpowering smell, a bad taste in his mouth, and feeling something “tugging” on his pants as he was dragged forwards. It is assumed that he then went unconscious and fell “head first on the ground.” The additional details of the aftermath are Taylor having “an intense headache” centered over his forehead, pain in his chin “as if it were burned,” an itch in his left thigh, and feeling sick. He tried to talk to Lara, who was nearby and “barking furiously,” but his jaw seemed to have “ceased to function,” and he was unable to speak. He was able to get to his knees and saw that the objects had gone. Taylor crawled about 100 meters towards the truck, “staggered to his feet” and was able to walk but fell repeatedly. When he got to the truck, he called the LDC, but was still unable to talk. He then started up the truck, tried to turn it around, lost control, and reversed it into a shallow ditch. At this point he got out and decided to walk 1.5km through woods, fields, and on roads to get to his home. He said he was “slightly dazed and confused” and still feeling the physical effects of the encounter. Next week: The investigation and the evidence.    

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  In the late 1960s, Dr. J. Allen Hynek was a key figure in getting members of the scientific community to take flying saucers/UFOs seriously. He was a prominent astronomer who was involved in the mystery at the very beginning as a consultant for the Air Force’s investigation, which operated for most of its existence as Project Blue Book until its termination in 1969. He was born in Chicago in 1910 and worked and lived in Ohio from 1935 until he became chair of the astronomy department at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in 1960. In 1973, he founded the Center for UFO Studies, which was based in Chicago. Then, in 1984, after spending his entire life in the Midwest, he rather suddenly moved with his family from Chicago to Scottsdale, Arizona. In this blog, we’ll explore what was going on behind the scenes. In 1972, Hynek’s first book, The UFO Experience, was published. In it, he presents his vision of a UFO research center: If funds were no object (!) and I were directing a UFO institute, I would personally train an adequate number of full-time investigators and then, when a particularly interesting UFO report came along, assign two investigators to bird-dog the case until every bit of potentially available data was obtained. In his 2017 biography of Hynek, The Close Encounters Man, Mark O’Connell quotes Hynek telling a Chicago Tribune reporter that the reason he and his wife, Mimi, had moved to Arizona was because “Chicago… is a hotbed of inertia.” While this may have been part of the reason, it seems his main motivation was the opportunity to realize his dream of a well-funded UFO research center. O’Connell goes into this, but Jacques Vallée, a longtime friend and associate of Hynek’s, describes the circumstances in much more detail. Vallée wrote about Hynek’s move in a journal kept during the period that was published in 2016 as Forbidden Science: Volume Three. The first entry addressing this is headed, “Spring Hill. 10 November 1984.” There he wrote, “Allen told us his new center was now duly established in Scottsdale with the backing of wealthy Englishman Jeffery Kaye, a pro-Israeli businessman who maintains homes in three countries…” He explains that Kaye had only provided startup funds and intended to fund the center through publishing and film projects starting with a biopic on Hynek written by John Fuller. According to him, Hynek talked about spending two million dollars a year, “but Mr. Kaye will not provide that kind of cash.” How Hynek came to meet Kaye comes out in entries up to December 15, 1986. It seems the driving forces for the center were a pair of gold-mining entrepreneurs Vallée identifies as Tina and Brian. O’ Connell gives their last names as Choate and Myers respectively. They had known Kaye for several years as a potential investor. Tina Choate, a former Chicago deputy sheriff who had been interested in psychic research, became interested in UFOs after meeting Ed Slade in Las Vegas, who told her he was a “former agent.”  According to Vallée, Slade told her that the U.S. had captured flying saucers, one of which was being held at Nellis AFB, and their occupants. He would later tell her he was a contactee and show her a scar as proof. Slade and Jules Glazer, Kaye’s financial adviser, shared an interest in collecting old share certificates, and it was arranged that Kaye and Slade would meet. Vallée notes that “Kaye long refused to meet with Slade.” Once they did meet, Kaye was “fascinated by the man’s brilliant conversation.” After this, Kaye, Choate, and Glazer started making plans to establish a UFO research center. Choate suggested inviting Hynek to join their effort, which would be based in Scottsdale. Kaye agreed, and she then went to Hynek with the proposal that he move there saying, presumably these are Vallée’s words, “A multimillionaire from Monaco begs you to join him in solving the UFO problem: he pledges his support…” Hynek jumped at the chance and bought a house from Glazer who was taking care of the business aspects of getting the center started. Kaye offered the use of a duplex he owned in Phoenix for the base of operations. It seems Hynek was a bit hasty, and Vallée wrote in his journal, “Allen himself now feels he may have rushed a bit too fast to set up his new Center in Arizona under pressure from the fair Tina.” Besides the iffyness of the finances, the people involved were far from being the scientific-minded researcher/investigators Hynek had surrounded himself with throughout his time with CUFOS, which was now attached to the center in Scottsdale. Vallée provides some insight into Glazer, whom he met at a meeting after being invited to Scottsdale to discuss lending his name to the project. He describes wincing, and Hynek saying nothing, as Choate said, “Glazer jumped on the idea of ufology as a money-making operation when he saw the Meier photographs from Switzerland.” As for insight into Choate and Myers, they show up in The Zanfretta Case, the 2014 book we just looked at by Rino Di Stefano. The book was about an Italian security guard, Piero Fortunato Zanfretta, who reported, with corroborating evidence, multiple abductions and contact with creatures “about 10 feet tall, with hairy green skin, yellow triangular eyes and red veins across the forehead.” Under hypnosis he said they gave him a glass sphere with a gold pyramid inside and told him to give it to Hynek. It was described variously as a communication device, homing beacon, and doomsday machine. According to Di Stefano, he and Zanfretta were invited by Wendell Stevens to the first World Congress of UFOlogy in Tucson, Arizona, in 1991, which was after Hynek’s death. There, they met Choate and Myers who said they were CEO and president respectively of the International Center for UFO Research and were the spiritual heirs of Hynek. They made a point of wanting to speak Di Stefano and Zanfretta in private. When they got together, Choate and Myers told them that there were other cases where people were abducted and given spheres. They said they were able to obtain two of them and needed a third, in Di Stefano’s words, “to carry out a project on a global scale.” After Zanfretta told them he needed to think about it and went back to his home in Genoa, Italy, Choate and Myers went so far as to fly to Genoa to press the matter. They made a formal proposal that involved Zanfretta being flown to Arizona in a private plane. He was to stay there while the three spheres were united. They said that this would reveal a hidden alien message. Di Stefano says that Zanfretta replied, once again, that he’d have to think about it but seemed to really mean, “I’d like to, but I can’t.” It seems that Hynek lost patience with his new partners and their approach to the UFO subject, and Vallée wrote this: “Allen told me that CUFOS, from Chicago, had sent a sternly worded letter to Tina and Brian, forbidding them from using Hynek’s name in connection with their work. This saddened Allen, who gave Tina credit for bringing him to the freedom of Arizona, although he no longer wants to be associated with Jeffery Kaye.” Unfortunately, in the midst of all this, Hynek was diagnosed with prostate cancer and a brain tumor was discovered as well. He died on April 27, 1986.   Excerpts from Forbidden Science were sourced from the blog by Keith Basterfield titled “Why did J Allen Hynek move to Scottsdale?” posted October 8, 2017, on the blogspot.com site, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena – scientific research.

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  In August 1979, a case out of Minnesota that was chock full of trace evidence, including physical effects displayed by the witness in the aftermath, was investigated by Allen Hendry for the Center for UFO Studies. The incident and the related activity are described two days afterwards in the August 29, 1979, edition of the local Warren, Minnesota, Sheaf. According to the article (page 8 of the pdf) headlined “Deputy Johnson Stunned by UFO Monday Morning,” Marshall County Deputy Sheriff Val Johnson was in his patrol car about 11 miles west of Stephen, Minnesota, headed south on TH 220 just before 1:30 am when he saw a bright light about a mile away, hovering over the road. Thinking it might be an aircraft in distress, he sped up. As he did so, the light came towards him, and as it filled the interior of the car, he heard the sound of glass breaking. He lost consciousness and remembered nothing of about 40 minutes after that. The Warren Sheriff’s office received a 1088 (officer in distress) from Johnson at 2:19 am, and he is described as having sounded rational but disoriented. When he was asked about his situation he said, “Something just hit my car – strange. Something attacked my car – brakes locked up. I don’t know what is going on.” He was asked if he needed an ambulance and replied, “I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m leaking blood. My eyes hurt.” Stephen Deputy Greg Winslow was dispatched and got to the scene at around 2:30 am. Johnson was brought by a Stephen ambulance to Warren and was also checked out at Grand Forks. His eyes were burned, and doctors described the condition as being similar to burns suffered by welders, which is known medically as actinic conjunctivitis. Evidence that something had collided with the car consisted of a broken headlight (which one is not identified) with no damage to the frame around it, a dent and cracks in the windshield, damage to the red light on the roof, and two antennas bent at almost right angles. One of the more intriguing aspects of the case is that both the clock in the car and Johnson’s watch had stopped for 14 minutes. An investigation of the scene showed that from the location where glass from the headlight was found, Johnson had travelled 854 feet before applying the brakes. Tire marks after that went for 99 feet to where the car came to a stop perpendicular to the road with the front wheels on the east shoulder. Hendry is described as “a UFO expert from Chicago,” and the chief investigator for CUFOS, and CUFOS is described as “a private organization which took over from the Air Force after they abandoned investigating UFO incidents in 1969.” Hendry said that this was as credible a case as he had seen and estimated that he investigated three such incidents a year throughout the U.S. CUFOS was obviously impressed with the case as the September/October 1979 issue of its publication, the International UFO Reporter, is almost entirely devoted to it. Banner-style, diagonally across the bottom of a picture of Johnson’s patrol car is this notice: STOP THE PRESSES! IUR presents a special double issue deliberately delayed in order to provide you with the details of the dramatic Deputy Johnson case in Minnesota! The coverage of case starts off the section headed “U.S. Sightings” on page 4 and continues to the end of page 9, after which there are eight cases, most having less than a full column devoted to them. What is noteworthy is that the coverage is straight-forward, just-the-facts style reporting, with very little speculation and no sensationalism. Johnson and his credibility are examined in the section “Val Johnson: A Personal Profile,” which takes up the left side of page 4. It is explained that “everything we have learned about Val Johnson bespeaks a man of professional integrity and fastidious professionalism.” He is described as a 35-year-old married father of three who had been a member of the department for two-and-a-half years and a deputy sheriff for over a year after working as a tool and die maker. The sheriff, Dennis Brekke, is quoted regarding Johnson’s credibility: “What he’s seen, he’s seen. None of us are trained to explain things we’re not used to seeing.” He is said to have described Johnson to Hendry as “highly intelligent,” not a drug user, and “nobody’s alcoholic.” Chief Deputy Everett Doolittle is said to have “echoed these sentiments” and to have added that Johnson was “almost ‘annoyingly’ fussy about his time and log keeping.” Brekke added, “I know Val, and if he said it happened, it happened.” The rest of the article goes into great detail regarding the investigation by Hendry and the Sheriiff’s department that led to the conclusions presented in the Sheaf article. Six points of damage are listed as follows: One headlight was “smashed to pieces.” These was a small circular dent in the upper part of the hood. The windshield in front of the steering wheel was smashed. The red plastic filter of the police light on the roof was punctured and dislodged from its housing. The whip antenna on the roof was bent back at the base. The whip antenna on the trunk was bent back at 90º near the top. Under the heading “Plane Near-Collision,” a newspaper editor is said to have come up with “the most popular theory,” which was that the damage to the car was caused by debris being kicked up by the prop wash of a plane and that the antennas were bent by the propellor hitting them. While it is acknowledged there are over a dozen crop-dusting companies listed in the yellow pages for the area, and that drug smugglers have flown planes in the area at night, it is argued that the crop dusters don’t operate at night, and that a propellor hitting the front antenna would have likely sheared it and taken out the police light just in front of it as well. Presented as further arguments against the plane theory are: the lack of noise and the acceleration of the UFO described by Johnson; his eye burns; and the time discrepancy of his watch and the car clock.  

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  This is the last of a three-part series of blogs covering the case of an Italian security guard (with the company Val Bisagno), Piero Fortunato Zanfretta, who reported a number of encounters with UFOs and their occupants.  After the first incident, he described in conscious recall being confronted by “an enormous green, ugly and frightful creature, with undulating skin, no less than ten feet tall.” Under hypnosis the story came out that he was taken up into a craft where he was interrogated and examined by as many as ten creatures “about 10 feet tall, with hairy green skin, yellow triangular eyes and red veins across the forehead” with metal strips over their mouths. He said they told him they were from the “third galaxy,” wanted to talk to the people of Earth, and would return soon in greater numbers. Italian journalist Rino Di Stefano became interested in the case, stuck with it, and wrote a book about it titled The Zanfretta Case, first published in Italian in 1984 and then in English in 2014. The reader can refer to his website promoting the book for most of the information. What makes this case unique is that there is corroborating evidence in the form of possible landing traces, giant footprints, witness testimony from his co-workers, and observations made during the investigation by the Italian military police known there as the Carabinieri. When we left off, Zanfretta had gone missing for the fourth time on December 2, 1979, while on patrol in an Austin Mini. His four-man Val Bisagno rescue team of two men each in two cars drove to the scene after spotting a UFO in the hills over Genoa. When they approached, two beams of light came down out of a large cloud, and both cars shut down. The men got out, and Lt. Cassiba shot at the beams, which seemed to have caused them to go out. One of the guards, Germano Zanardi, was reportedly so unnerved by the experience that he never recovered and shot himself in the head a few months later. Zanfretta was hypnotically regressed after each encounter, twice on television, and the story that came out was that the creatures, known as the Dargos, intended to build a domed city on Earth in order to escape their doomed planet. At one point he described meeting their prince, Almoc. After his fourth encounter, he said they had tried to give him a glass sphere with a golden triangle in it intended for Dr. J. Allen Hynek, and he smashed it. He then managed to open a hatch and escape by jumping out of the craft, which was only around ten feet off the ground. He said that before his abduction, he had picked up a man with an egg-shaped head at a gas station. He said he was wearing a checkered suit, a metallic-looking shirt, and acted as an intermediary between him and the Dargos. Zanfretta went missing again just after midnight on February 14, 1980, only this time, as described in the book, the car he was driving, a Fiat 127, had been prepared unbeknownst to him in order to track him and gather substantial evidence that there was something to his extraordinary claims. An engineer at the company, Nino Tagliavia, and a technician, Guiliano Buonamici, hid various items in the car, including a radio that would act as a homing beacon, cassette tapes and color photo plates to pick up any magnetic anomalies, and a thermometer that would record the highest temperature. Because Zanfretta was reporting that he and his various vehicles were being lifted up into the craft, they rigged cables that went from the wheel hubs to the body, that would only break if the car was lifted up.  According to Di Stefano, this was all supervised by the director of Val Bisagno, Gianfranco Tutti, who had a look on his face that indicated that “this was the last time he would try to understand the Zanfretta mystery.” A rescue team that included Tutti and Di Stefano was hot on Zanfretta’s trail and found the car quickly in the mountains in the area of Torriglia. The driver’s side door was open, but Zanfretta was nowhere to be seen. After a few minutes of searching in the freezing cold, Zanfretta was found unconscious on the edge of a ravine clinging to a bush and on the verge of falling in. On this occasion, Zanfretta was cold as he should have been, as opposed to hot as he had been on previous occasions, and as he was taken back to Val Bisagno headquarters, he warmed up and returned to full consciousness. According to Di Stefano, the next day, he watched as Tagliavia and Buonamici checked the various items they had placed in the car and found that the thermometer had recorded a high temperature of 109.4º F. They also found that all four of the cables had been broken. As usual, Zanfretta underwent hypnosis that night with Dr. Mauro Moretti with Di Stefano present. Contradicting the evidence of the snapped cables, when asked if the car had been lifted up into the air that night as before, he said, “No, it was on the ground.” He did, however, describe it as becoming hot when it was lit up by “a huge light overhead.” According to him, he picked up the egg-headed man (he described not being able to move as the car stopped and the door opened by itself) and continued to the square in Torriglia with the car driving itself without headlights. There, he saw a bright, metallic, 30-meter-diameter object hovering 4-5 meters above the ground. He said the egg-headed man ran into it and he, Zanfretta, ran away. He said that as he was running, the object went into the valley “towards… where there is a house made of metal… inside that deep hole.” Zanfretta brings up the possibility that the rescue team got there too quickly saying, “The cars could have waited to come up. They might have given me that object and the problem would be solved.” He added, “I’m sure they have a base there because they definitely always leave from there.” It is during this session that Zanfretta suddenly appeared to be channeling Almoc, first speaking in a strange language and then switching to Italian to address Moretti directly starting with “Earthling! Speak!” Moretti asks if they will show themselves, and Zanfretta/Almoc replies, “Everything in due course.” After explaining that they can’t get Zanfretta to stop fearing them and that they know Moretti and the others want to help, Z/A says “in due course we will show ourselves. Ending transmission.” Zanfretta was reportedly abducted five more times with the last occasion being on August 8, 1981. In more hypnosis sessions it came out that he had received the sphere and hidden it the mountains where he regularly checked up on it. He said he was to activate it to enable a landing, but it never happened. He said in his last session on April 24, 1992, that the Dargos were going to take it back. In the first year of his reported experiences, Zanfretta’s hair went from black to grey and within a few years was completely white. He gained 14 kg and reported that his urine turned black immediately after and that he vomited for days after his abductions.  Val Bisagno gave up trying to understand what was happening to him, and he eventually lost his job and family and ended up living on a pension in Genoa. He remained a minor celebrity in Italy, and his story continues to intrigue.          

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  In last week’s blog, we looked at the first two UFO and occupant encounters reported by Italian security guard Piero Fortunato Zanfretta. The case was investigated by the Carabinieri (Italian Military Police) and evidence was found in the form of possible landing traces in the first and second instances with the addition of huge footprints in the second. In conscious recall, Zanfretta described encountering “an enormous green, ugly and frightful creature, with undulating skin, no less than ten feet tall.” Under hypnosis after the first instance, he said he was taken to a bright, hot place and examined by “monsters about 10 feet tall, with hairy green skin, yellow triangular eyes and red veins across the forehead” (he also described them having metal strips over their mouths) that told him they were from the “third galaxy,” wanted to talk to the people of Earth, and would return soon in greater numbers. Italian journalist Rino Di Stefano became interested in the case, stuck with it, and wrote a book about it titled The Zanfretta Case, first published in Italian in 1984 and then in English in 2014. The reader can refer to his website promoting the book for most of the information. According to Di Stefano, Zanfretta’s second “encounter,” where his car was found by the Carabinieri to have been extremely hot inside and out in spite of the winter cold, got a lot of publicity. A hypnosis session was again arranged with the original psychotherapist, Dr. Mauro Moretti, except that this time it was to be televised on local station TVS. The story that came out of this is described in the book, but Zanfretta was hypnotized multiple times and Di Stefano isn’t strict about chronology. It seems that in this session he described being taken up into a triangular craft in a beam of green light. According to him, the inside of the craft appeared to be too big to be accommodated by it and resembled a city. One of the creatures (in the hypnosis sessions described in the book, Zanfretta said they identified themselves bas the Dargos from the planet Titania) took his gun and fired five times (it was silent), which seemed to have explained the fact that his gun was found to have been fired that many times without him being able to recall who or what he’d fired at. He was confronted by ten creatures that took him to be examined. They put a helmet on his head that served to translate, but it caused him great pain. When he asked why they were doing this to him, it was explained that they needed human guinea pigs. As the audience watched, he protested that he had a family and wanted to be left alone. Zanfretta became a celebrity and experienced the problems that came with it, including having his mental health questioned. This caused him to regret having told his story. As for his mental health, his company, Val Bisagno, had him examined by a neurologist and he was declared “perfectly sane.” This helped his credibility, he was invited to appear on the national TV show Portobello (he was interviewed and regressed), and his story started to make international news. Zanfretta’s superiors, out of concern for his safety and the safety of his fellow guards, put him on duty in a populated and well-lit area of Genoa, where he would patrol on a Vespa. Reluctantly, they gave him night duty, which he requested because the pay was better. There were no episodes for over seven months until the night of July 30, 1979, when Zanfretta was on patrol. He went missing and was found by his fellow guards running in the dark on top of Mount Fasce. There was only one road up and other Val Bisagno guards who were patrolling it said he hadn’t been seen going up it, and this included a guard at the bottom of the road who stood in the middle of it when he was alerted Zanfretta was headed towards him after Zanfretta had failed to call in. Another hypnosis session was arranged, and this time, at his request, Zanfretta was injected with sodium pentothal.  Once again, he had said he had been lifted up into the craft by a green light. According to him, he met Almoc, prince of the Dargos, who was slightly taller than the others. Almoc told him their planet was doomed and that they needed a place to start over and intended to build a domed city on Earth. Like many contactees before him, Zanfretta said he was warned about the danger posed to Earth by our atomic weapons. He also said he was shown a clear sphere with a gold pyramid inside and that Almoc told him this was a means, much like a television, to become familiar with the Dargos. He went on to say that Almoc told him they would return “when the great cold comes,” and give the sphere to an American professor whose name sounded like “hanky.” The doctor who had administered the pentothal reportedly suggested Hynek, and Zanfretta is said to have agreed, although he did not know who Hynek (presumably J. Allen Hynek) was. Zanfretta then described hitting buttons on a nearby console until a hatch opened, whereupon he jumped out of the craft, which was fortunately only around ten feet above the ground. He said the creatures lowered his Vespa after him. According to the account on the website, Zanfretta went missing again on December 2, 1979, while driving an Austin Mini. His four-man rescue team of two men each in two cars drove to the scene after spotting a UFO in the hills over Genoa. When they approached, two beams of light down came out of a large cloud, and both cars shut down. The men got out, and Lt. Cassiba shot at the beams, which seemed to have caused them to go out. One of the guards, Germano Zanardi, was reportedly so unnerved by the experience that he never recovered and shot himself in the head a few months later. Zanfretta was found and was again hypnotically regressed. The story came out that when he was at a gas station in downtown Genoa, he heard a voice calling him and couldn’t resist walking towards it. It came from a man he described as slightly taller than him, with an egg-shaped head. He said he was wearing a checkered suit and had something made of steel instead of a shirt. According to him, the man ordered him to drive into a cloud and he was taken up into a craft. There, the creatures gave him a tour where he saw tubes filled with blue liquid containing creatures that included a caveman and a frog-like being said to be an enemy of the Dargos. He was given the sphere and told to give it to Hynek, and he smashed it on the floor. He had the helmet forced on his head and was shown pictures he was told were of everyone on Earth that included their information. They said everyone would become subjects in their experiments and that they would return again with another sphere. During the session Zanfretta reportedly said, “Where have you been? And what do you want to do in Spain? Why? But all together? That will scare people!” It is noted that a report came out of Spain the next day of a dentist driving off the road terrified and blinded by a UFO that had followed him for an hour. He also said that he was told that someone was firing at the ship. Next week:  Intriguing evidence, more episodes, and the aftermath.

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  In the last couple of blogs, we looked at the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena 1978 UFO Chronology, which was unusual for the large number of humanoid reports with space suits, helmets and antennas in the descriptions. We also noted that there seemed to have been a flap in Italy in December and that one case listed that month is worthy of individual attention. The principal witness/experiencer was Piero Fortunato Zanfretta, and his story was investigated by Italian journalist Rino Di Stefano, who wrote a book about it that he published in 2014 titled The Zanfretta Case. According to Di Stefano on his website promoting the book (we have read the book and recommend it), he isn’t a UFOlogist. He says that at the time of the incident, he was working at the Genoa Corriere Mercantile and looked into the case as a reporter. He then gives his account. On December 6, 1978, just after midnight, Zanfretta, a private security guard, was on patrol in his Fiat 126 on “a dark and moonless night” near Genoa in the village of Torriglia. It was very cold, and the roads were icy after a snowfall that day. As he came up to a client’s empty country house in Marzano, his engine, lights, and radio stopped. He saw four lights moving around in the garden and got out to investigate, bringing along his gun and flashlight. He went through a gate and moved along a wall in an attempt to surprise whoever might be there. He then felt something touching him from behind. He turned around and was “filled with terror” as he found himself inches away from what he described as “an enormous green, ugly and frightful creature, with undulating skin, no less than ten feet tall.” Zanfretta dropped his flashlight out of fright when the beam from it hit the creature’s face, but he managed to pick it up as he turned and ran. As he was doing so, he noted that there was a large bright light behind him. Turning around, he saw that it was coming from a triangular craft that made a hissing sound and was bigger than the house it rose up behind. He said later that he felt an intense heat. Zanfretta went to his car and called the security center. According to Di Stefano, Carlo Toccalino, the radio operator, “testified” that Zanfretta kept repeating excitedly, “My God, are they ugly!” and when asked if they were human said “No, they aren’t men, they aren’t men,” just before communication was lost. Toccalino called the head of the security service, and an hour later, at 1:15 am, two guards found Zanfretta lying on the ground in front of the house. “Eyes bulging,” with gun and flashlight in hand, he jumped to his feet when he saw them and didn’t seem to recognize or understand them when they told him to lower his gun. The guards moved in to disarm him and were surprised to find that his clothes were warm in spite of the cold night. The Carabinieri (Italian military police) investigated and found 9-feet-diameter horseshoe-shaped imprints in back of the house.  The commandant of the Torriglia station, Antonio Nucchi, found that 52 residents there had witnessed a bright glare from the area of the house at the time of Zanfretta’s reported encounter. The story made the local papers, and DiStefano says that while “most journalists” didn’t want to look into it too closely, he decided to because he didn’t believe that a responsible family man with a good reputation would put his job at risk with such a ridiculous story. He was also moved by the 52 witnesses discovered by Nucchi. According to Di Stefano, the head of Zanfretta’s company believed he was “an honest man,” but was worried about bad publicity. Zanfretta is said to seemed “shy” and “uneasy” and to have said, “People call me on the phone at all hours just to play jokes on me. I don’t know what it was that I saw, but I saw it. I am not a liar” Zanfretta agreed to be hypnotized and what came out reads like an extremely bizarre combination of a contactee and abduction experience. He said he was taken by “monsters about 10 feet tall, with hairy green skin, yellow triangular eyes and red veins across the forehead” that took him to a bright, hot place where they examined him. They told him they were from the “third galaxy,” wanted to talk to the people of Earth, and would return soon in greater numbers. They didn’t speak Italian and used a “luminous device” to translate. According to Di Stefano, Zanfretta went missing three nights later on December 26, at 11:45 pm after calling in to say that his car was no longer in his control and was driving itself coming out of the Bargagli Tunnel. He said over the radio that he couldn’t see well because of the fog, as the car continued moving up a steep road. After a mile, the car stopped abruptly, and Zanfretta hit his head on the steering wheel. Speaking to the radio operator “in a very controlled voice,” he said, “The car has stopped. I saw a bright light. Now I am getting out.” Zanfretta was found by his co-workers at in a field at 1:10 am. Even though it was raining, his clothes and head were “warm and dry.” He was scared, shaking, and crying, and said, “They say I must leave with them. What about my children? I don’t want to, I don’t want to…” The Carabinieri were called, and when they examined the car, they found that its roof felt like it had been out in the sun all day, and its interior was “as hot as an oven.” They also discovered huge footprints all around it that were 20 inches long and 8 inches wide, “with a distinct empty spot between sole and heel.” Zanfretta’s gun was found to have been fired five times, but he didn’t remember who (or what) he’d fired at. Nucchi sent an official report to the Genoa Magistrates Court to find out what sort of action should be taken, and it ended up being “filed away with this declaration: ‘no crime committed.’” Meanwhile this latest episode created a lot of media interest, and Zanfretta ended up getting hypnotized on local television, which led to him appearing on national television. His story went beyond Italy and gained worldwide attention, but there were still more episodes to come. Next Week: More strangeness and more evidence. For a detailed account of Zanfretta’s first encounter see page 5 of the Vol. 25, No. 1,   Flying Saucer Review.

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  It has been determined by many researchers in the scientific community that during hypnosis, false memories are very likely to be generated, and distinguishing them from real memories is difficult, if not impossible without some means of confirmation. This is, for instance, the conclusion of a report for the U.S. Department of Justice by Martin T. Orne et al. titled “Hypnotically Refreshed Testimony: Enhanced Memory or Tampering with Evidence?” published January 1985 in Issues and Practices in Criminal Justice. With the above in mind, it is helpful for researchers attempting to evaluate a case when a distinction can be made between elements of the report derived from conscious recall and elements derived through the use of hypnosis. A case where this can be easily done is that of Judy Kendell of Zamora, California, thanks to a newspaper article announcing her intention to undergo hypnosis to recover around four hours of missing time, and another article in a different paper after the procedure, which was, apparently, well attended. According to the article (page 3 of the pdf) by Spencer Sias, headlined “Hypnotist Will Help Woman Find Four Hours Lost During Trip,” published in the January 26, 1977, Davis, California, Yolo County Shopping News, Kendell was scheduled to be hypnotised that Saturday to find “four hours that experts think may have been stolen from her by space creatures who abducted her in an unidentified flying object.” The term “frontloading” comes to mind, but the circumstances that led Kendell to contact Center for UFO Studies Director J. Allen Hynek looking for answers are described in detail. According to Sias, Kendell drove her two sisters home to Zamora one “pitch black” night in 1970 after leaving their grandmother’s house in Bodega Bay at 5:30 p.m. Although the trip should have taken about three hours, they arrived in Zamora seven hours later at 12:30 a.m. The youngest sister, 22, was reportedly asleep as Judy, 23, and her older sister, 25 (all ages are at the time of the article), found themselves driving much longer than expected as they looked for the turnoff for Zamora after crossing the Cache Creek bridge on Interstate 505. Sias says they agreed they should be getting there and then quotes Judy as saying, “Shortly after that we were back in front of the flashing yellow light in front of the bridge again.” According to Sias, when they got home, their parents were angry and thought their story was “baloney.” Kendell said her father called her grandmother and confirmed they left at 5:30 and then checked a map to see if they had driven in a circle and concluded that wasn’t a plausible explanation. Kendell added that if they had driven for seven hours straight, they would have run out of gas. With no explanation and everyone safe at home, the mystery is said to have been forgotten until 1975, when Judy and her older sister went to see Escape to Witch Mountain “featuring a Winnebago taking off into the sky” and “remembered the ride at the same time.” Sias says, “Curiously, whenever Judy talks about the experience, she refers to ‘setting down in front of the flashing light again’ as if they were floating in the air.” According to Sias, Kendell saw a UFO that summer that she didn’t report, but it reminded her of her experience. She talked with some friends and one of them suggested that she write to Hynek. Although Hynek didn’t reply himself, his “fellow researcher,” Alvin H. Lawson, an English professor at California State University, contacted her and expressed an interest in her case. Lawson is reported to have contacted researchers in Los Angeles who checked out Kendell’s credibility and she is said to have agreed to be hypnotized that coming Saturday “to see whether she remembers being aboard a space craft.” Her hypnosis session is described in the article (page 1 of the pdf) headlined “Woman in Trance Tells of Space Ordeal” in the January 31, 1977, Davis, California, Enterprise. According to the reporter, Kendell underwent hypnosis “shivering on her warm living room couch” in front of a “roomful of calm UFO researchers and incredulous friends…” The article is written as if the reporter was present, so this seems to have been quite the public spectacle. In this account, the events are said to have taken place “on a Sunday in November 1971 or 1972.” The rest of the brief account matches the one in the Shopping News. According to the reporter, Kendell realized for the first time during the hypnosis “that she was kidnapped by a space ship.” She is described as shielding her face to avoid seeing “a space creature she described as having a bulbous head with saucer-sized red-pupiled gelatinous eyes.” She is reported to have said it had holes for ears, an almost translucent white face with a mask covering the lower part, red veins on its neck that were “not like the purple ones we have,” a human-like body, and hands “like ours” with five fingers. Kendell reportedly said she was told by the creature in English, “it’s okay, it’s okay,” in a voice that “sounded like it was muffled and coming through a distant megaphone.” She is described saying “But it’s not okay” in “a small tight voice” and then grabbing her right side and leaning over “as if in pain.” According to the reporter, the hypnotist, Dr. D. W. McCall, asked her what was happening, and she replied that she felt like she got poked. McCall is said to have taken her through her experience repeatedly, and the story is told that “she relaxed after being poked and was lying on a cold table with a sheet over her,” and in disgust, announced that she was being catheterized and having urine taken from her. She reportedly saw three creatures at the foot of the table and couldn’t describe their faces, and also saw a human woman with blue eyes and straight black hair “who handed the creature a tube of colorless fluid, ‘that you can’t see through.’” Kendell is said to have been mystified as to how the woman knew her name as she tried to reassure her. Kendell is reported to have described the creatures looking at her feet throughout the experience, and to have said that they probed her ear with something cold and hard, and that one creature put a “heavy machine over her eyes” with what sounded like a “quiet motor whirring inside.” McCall is said to have asked, “Is it a brain reading machine?” to which Kendell replied, “I don’t know.” According to the reporter, she described being in a round room circled with windows and seeing two bucket seats on one side with a “console with a lever like a car gear shift in the middle.” She is said to have pointed to her left and described seeing “a table with what looked like doctors’ ‘probes’ on it along with a black box that had “speaker holes in it.” Kendell is quoted talking about her sister who, according to the reporter, wished to remain anonymous and wanted nothing to do with the hypnosis: “I can hear her calling my name. She is crying. She is really upset. She sounds far away. I hope she is alright.” The next thing Kendell reportedly recalled was finding herself behind the wheel of her car without knowing how she got there. McCall is said to have “ran her through the experience again” whereupon she remembered being carried by three creatures dressed in grey who threw her into the car. She is quoted as saying, “They must have carried me because I couldn’t walk.” According to the reporter, Kendall said her sisters seemed to suddenly materialize “and when they were in the car, it was pitch black.” Kendell, “in a disbelieving voice,” is quoted as saying, “We just landed on the road – in my car?!” and with “certain amazement,” adding, “In my car.” Lawson is reported to have said that, in the reporter’s words, “Judy’s story could be as much an idiosyncrasy in human makeup as an abduction by space creatures.” The other researchers are described as being “in many ways as mysterious as the story itself,” and not saying “for certain how they felt about Judy’s story.” McCall is reported to have said that he had hypnotized “about” six others who had similar stories.  

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  In the January 28, 1974, Jacksonville Journal out of Florida, there is an article (pages 5 and 9 of the pdf) by Lloyd Brown headlined “Did a Creature From UFO Land Here?” that tells the story of a Jacksonville man’s report of a UFO and creature encounter in 1972. He is said to have delayed in reporting it because he was afraid of being called, in his words, “some kind of nut.” According to the account, he decided to come forward after attending a lecture at Florida Junior College by the director of the UFO Research Institute, Stanton Friedman. According to Brown, two years ago, 62-year-old Norman R. Chastain “of 2507 Kershaw Drive” found a plant growing in his yard that looked like “a devil’s head,” brought it to the paper, and a picture of him holding it was published in the Journal.  That picture is presented in the 1974 article as well. Chastain is said to have not mentioned an incident prior to finding the plant and that he decided to talk about it now. According to the account, late at night on January 26, 1972, Chastain, an electrician for the Seaboard Coast Railroad Company, was fishing near the eastern tip of Blount Island in the St. Johns River. At around 3:00 a.m., he noticed, in his words, “several orange and blue lights from over the St. Johns Bluff Monument.” He thought they were from a police or mosquito control helicopter, but he heard no sound. He said, “After a few minutes, the lights came directly towards my boat, and I could make out the outline of something like a half of a ball with lights flashing and changing colors about every minute.” Chastain said he turned off the lights of his boat and put out the Coleman lantern he had burning, and the object moved off slowly back to the bluff. He said his boat had run aground at this point and that he went ashore to find something he could use as a lever to get his boat loose. After finding a two-by-six, he stopped to rest 75 feet away from his boat. Chastain said that at this point, “I raised my spotlight to see if my boat was still in the muck, and in the edges of the bushes, I saw the darndest human-like creature one could ever imagine.” At this point, it is said that he was hit by a bright white light that made him dizzy, causing him to lay down in the grass. According to Brown, Chastain said his arms and legs were tingling and that he stayed where he was and prayed until daybreak. He then crawled inland where he stayed until he regained his strength at around noon. His boat had drifted about 50 feet offshore, and after swimming out there he noticed, in his words, “an overpowering stench” in his hair and clothes that wasn’t there before he met the “devil-looking creature.” He said he washed and threw his clothes away before going home, where his wife commented that he didn’t look right, and he told her he’d gotten seasick. According to Brown, three nights later, Chastain was dreaming that he was on another planet when he was awaked by a thunder clap and saw that it was raining. He noticed the same smell and stayed awake for the rest of the night holding a gun. He is quoted describing what he found in his yard after going outside the next morning: “There in the grass directly behind my boat at the same distance the creature was positioned on Blount Island was a cluster of several flesh-colored heads looking at me and they looked
so much like that devil-looking creature I saw on the island that my first thought
was the UFO was over my house that night looking for
me.” He went looking for witnesses among his neighbors, but they were all away, and then he, in Brown’s words, “dug up the plants and brought one to the journal.” Chastain is said to have described the plant as having teeth, big eyes, a wide mouth, pointed ears, and blood coming from it. He said that each plant shriveled up into a ball within six hours of being dug up and that no more have grown since. According Brown, the Journal contacted the botany department of the University of Florida and was informed that the plant in question was a type of mushroom known as a stinkhorn. While this case seems like a silly one-off that didn’t get beyond the local news, blogger Alleen Garoutta shared a report about the case on her blogspot.com site, UFOexperiences, saying, “The following article is my favorite UFO story. It ran in UFO Report about 15 years ago. I don’t have the exact date of the magazine because the pages have been torn out. I know you will find it as intriguing as I do…” The article by B. Ann Slate is headlined “The Alien of Blount Island.” It starts off with Slate describing 600 people being turned away from a packed auditorium at Florida Junior College full of people waiting to hear “nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman” give his lecture, “Flying Saucers ARE Real.” Chastain is said to have been there and afterwards, to have written a letter to Friedman at the UFO Research Center in California. According to Slate, “The contents of that letter and the subsequent scientific research now being conducted as a result may make Norman Chastain’s encounter the most unique and conclusive in UFO history.” After this, Chastain’s encounter is described, and there are more details about his boat, said to be a Sea Camper with lighting features he built himself, and there are more details about the creature. According to Slate, the creature was wearing “a tight-fitting suit that the witness compared to old-fashioned men’s underwear,” except that it shone slightly and was dark silver-grey. The creature is described as around five to five-and-a-half feet tall, with small arms, a large head, eyes that protruded and “resembled glass reflecting light,” pointed ears, “and a slightly angular chin.” A glowing disc is said to have been on top of its head. According to Slate, Chastain and the “alien” looked at each other, and then, the creature suddenly “raised his left hand which held a flat device about three inches across.” She says there was a blinding flash, and “then the numbness started, a slow paralysis that began in his neck and moved throughout his body.” The rest of the account is similar to that in the Journal, but there are these additional details regarding Chastain’s dreams: “Chastain began to experience vivid dreams of another planet with strange-looking beings, remarkably huge flowers, and assembly lines which put out saucer-shaped craft.” The creatures reported in the 1955 Kelly-Hopkinsville Incident are brought up as being similar to Chastain’s creature. Although the description of the creature is scant in the Journal, a picture of one of the K-H creatures said to have been drawn by the Air Force is presented in that article and at the end of the caption it says, “Chastain wonders if this could be the same type creature he saw.” The rest of the UFO Report article describes Chastain’s state of fear and excitement upon discovering the “heads” and explains that they were stinkhorns, but Slate questions whether the prosaic explanation for the “heads” eliminates “any connection between the alien on the island and the peculiar growths in Chastain’s backyard.”

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  The first two years of the 1970s seems to have been a slow period for UFO reports in the U.S. if the 1970 and 1971 UFO Chronology hosted on the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena website is any indication, with the 1970 chronology consisting of 5 pages, and the 1971 consisting of 8 pages. As a comparison, the 1966 chronology page count is 35 and the 1967 count is a massive 85. This might have been expected after the release of the Condon Report and the termination of Blue Book. There is a comment to this effect in the 1971 chronology: “An apparent lull in sighting reports may be the result of the closing of Project Blue Book and the media coverage of this for several years, and may not reflect the actual situation.” By 1973, things would pick up in the U.S. in a big way (35 pages in that chronology) with high-strangeness cases dominating the headlines. However, there seems to have been a head start on this in other parts of the world and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization had people in place to investigate and report. In the July-August 1970 APRO Bulletin there is an article (page 6 of the pdf) headlined “Finns Observe UFO Occupant” with an account that is said to have been forwarded by “APRO’s Swedish Representative” K. Gösta Rehn. According to the article, Rehn got the story from a Finnish magazine (it would be nice to know which one) and “contacted the author and satisfied himself as to the credibility of the two men.” According to the account, on January 7, 1970, at around 3:45 p.m., two men, Aarno Heinonen, 36, and Esko Viljo, 38, were cross-country skiing. They stopped to rest and saw a bright light coming in from the north that was enveloped in a fog. Described as a “cloud” it changed direction, came towards the men, and they started to hear a humming sound.  It came down lower and lower as it got closer, and the noise got louder. At this point, the “cloud” is described as red-grey and pulsating with smoke coming from the top like smoke from a chimney. When it was around 15 meters off the ground, the men are said to have been able to see a shiny, grey metal craft that was three meters in diameter with three round balls on the bottom along with a “pipe-like affair” that was 2 cm long and 5 cm in diameter. The men are said to have been able to see a dome on top of the craft as it stopped about 3-4 meters off the ground and the cloud thinned. Heinonen reportedly said that he felt like something grabbed him around his waist and pulled him back. At that point, he is said to have noticed a creature standing in a circle of light that emitted from the tube. The creature is described as being about 90 cm tall, thin and slender, with a “waxy, pale face.” No eyes were seen, and it seemed to have a hook-like nose. Its clothing is described as a light green overall, with darker green boots and white gloves that had gauntlets that went up to the elbows. “Clutched” in its “claw-like fingers” is said to have been a black box with a pulsating yellow light shining out of a round hole. Viljo’s take on the creature is different. According to Rehn, Viljo said he “didn’t get an impression of clothing on the little figure but noted that he glowed ‘like he was made of phosphor.’” Viljo is also said to have described the creature’s head as being crowned with a metallic-looking helmet. According to Rehn, the men said that after 15-20 seconds, the creature turned towards Heinonen, and the light coming from the box that was directed towards him was “brilliant and almost blinding.” The red-grey mist is described as “pouring down from the craft,” and big sparks are said to have been “jumping from the luminous circle on the ground.” The sparks are described as one-centimeter-long red, green, and violet “luminous staffs.” According to Rehn, “They seemed to flow outward from the circle, quite slowly, and some of them struck Heinonen, and he was surprised that he did not feel them.” The creature is said to have been covered by the fog and the “light cone on the ground appeared to be ‘sucked up’ into the opening at the bottom of the object.” Rehn says the fog then dissipated, and the men saw that the craft was gone. According to Rehn, for two to three minutes, the men stood there, and then Heinonen, who had been closest to the circle and the object, started to experience a numbness on his right side. He went to move forward, and his right leg gave out, and “Viljo had to half-carry and drag his friend to his home which was located about 2 kilometers from the area where the object was seen.” Both men reportedly suffered physical ailments upon arriving at Heinonen’s home. Viljo’s face is described as being “swollen and red,” and Heinonen is said to have complained of aching joints, a backache, to have vomited, and to have said during an interview for a Finnish magazine that his urine was black for two months. Rehn says that the men were examined by a doctor who “attested to the complaints of Heinonen, but said that both men were so excited in telling their story that they were nearly incoherent and felt that they had encountered some kind of electrical phenomenon.” The assessment of who we assume is then editor, Coral Lorenzen, is that the case is “quite possibly” one of those that will need to be looked at more deeply to be understood. It is noted that there are elements that have turned up in other cases, and the reader is told that any “further important information” will be published in a future issue. Scandanavia has a long history of UFO reports that predates the flying saucer mystery that started in 1947 in the United States. Starting in 1946, there were mysterious rockets reported over Sweden and Finland that have become known as “ghost rockets” and before that, from 1933-1934, there were mystery airplanes reported over Sweden that have become known as “ghost fliers.” Rehn’s archives are housed at the Archives for the Unexplained in Sweden, and co-founder and board vice chairman, Håkan Blomqvist wrote a biography of Rehn titled “K. Gösta Rehn – a pioneer” that he posted on his blogspot.com site Håkan Blomqvist’s blog. According to Blomqvist, Rehn was born in 1891, and while he had dreams of becoming a concert pianist, due to family finances, he “was persuaded to study law instead.” He is said to have become interested in “the UFO enigma” in 1954 after reading Donald Keyhoe’s 1953 book Flying Saucers From Outer Space, which he translated into Swedish and had published in 1955. Blomqvist describes him as “a hardline atheist, materialist and socialist” and says that in spite of this, he became active in UFOlogy in 1958 as a field investigator and Swedish Representative for APRO. He wrote four books on the subject, and according to Blomqvist, felt that the ETI (extraterrestrial intelligence) theory was the only one that was scientifically acceptable.  

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear  Dennis Pilichis on left In last week’s blog, we looked at a highly strange report out of Ohio that involved UFOs, Bigfoot-type creatures, and “black forms,” all of which reportedly besieged the family of “Robert S.” in Ohio during the months of June and July in 1981. The principal investigator was Dennis Pilichis, who self-published a booklet in 1982 titled, Night Siege: The Northern Ohio UFO-Creature Invasion. The witnesses, Robert S. and his sons, reportedly shot at “black forms” and hairy creatures with glowing red eyes, and Pilichis wrote that he saw a ladder leaning up against the house and shotgun shells littering the yard when he arrived, and upon investigation, found strange, three-toed footprints. This week, we’ll look at Pilichis’s claim that he witnessed a siege from the roof first-hand, along with investigators who were assisting him, and we’ll share some thoughts on the validity of the case from the researchers involved in the making of the Small Town Monsters Mysteries and Monsters episode, “Sasquatch Night Siege.” Under the heading “The Encounters of July 6th and 7th 1981,” Pilichis says that “Willard McIntyre of the MARCEN Group of Maryland” made plans to visit him on his way to Mt. St. Helens to investigate Bigfoot reports. According to Pilichis, McIntyre arrived, and Pilichis briefed him on the events in his area of Rome, Ohio. He adds that James Carnes of Mecca, Ohio, stopped by as well, and they “all jumped in the car” and went to Robert S.’s home. Pilichis describes finding that Robert had put up a barbwire fence around the front of his house and yard to protect his family from “some sort of large creature, a black form” that had walked up to “the window on the porch.” Pilichis notes there were 18- inch, five-toed impressions found in the yard, the driveway, and in front of the window. In addition to all this, Robert is said to have told Pilichis that “the forms had come back,” and Pilichis says that three-toed prints were found in the area as well as “big hoofmarks of some sort” that couldn’t be identified as coming from anything “earthly.” An unusual discovery Pilichis describes is a set of five-toed footprints in four-feet- high grass where the grass was swirled around them “in a clockwise direction.” According to him, all of the above was documented and photographed on 35 mm film, though he doesn’t include any photos of the footprints with the swirled grass around them. He says that after “more taped interviews were taken” Carnes went home, and he, Pilichis, and McIntyre “decided to come back and spend the night.” Pilichis says that when they arrived late in the day, the family was loading their guns getting ready for another night on the roof. According to him, one of the family members said they saw glowing red eyes in the wood line behind the house and he says that he, McIntyre, and two family members went out there. He explains that he “could not, first off, see many of the forms moving on the woodline [sic]”and attributes this to his “night vision abilities.” He points out that the family members could probably see better at night than he could as they “were expert hunters.” Pilichis describes “an intense experience while out on the woodline [sic],” where “a glowing form” stepped out of the woods on the other side of a field, and three family members shot at it, hit it, and it seemed to fall into the high grass. He says they went to look and saw the grass was “smashed down” with a path leading away “as if something had dragged it’s [sic] self away into the woods.” Pilichis says he and McIntyre threw rocks into the woods to see if they might hear something run away or see something come out after them and that “a rock came flying out of the woods” and landed by the family members 15 feet behind them. He then describes multiple instances of seeing glowing eyes and a form with a white glow. According to Pilichis, the best sighting they had that night started with “three sets of glowing red eyes” around a dead tree. Pilichis describes a 12-feet-tall, black-haired creature stepping out and standing to the left of the tree and says he caught it in his flashlight beam, and it cast a shadow on the tree trunk. He says “everyone fired at it” and that the creature turned sideways “with a strange sort of motion,” walked out of the beam of light, and seemed unaffected by the shooting. More encounters and shootings are described, including one on August 21st that reportedly involved Pilichis, McIntyre, and Larry Peters, a new addition to the investigation. There is also an account of a trap being set using live rabbits with a capsule of cyanide inside each of them (Pilichis doesn’t explain what getting the capsules “inside” entailed) and a tape loop of rabbits screaming. Pilichis reports that one rabbit was gone, and five-toed, 18-inch, “bigfoot-type” prints were found. While Pilichis’s account is highly strange and dramatic, the fact that he presents what he claims are transcribed police reports, and has so many named witnesses, begs for some follow-up research, as 1981 was recent enough that it would be highly likely the witnesses would still be alive. Supporting the story are transcripts of newspaper articles from the period from the Orwell, Ohio, Valley News presented on the website, Sasquatch Chronicles under the heading, “Strange Beast Roams in Rome, Ohio.” The first article is from the July 1, 1981, edition with the same headline as the heading of the posting, and describes “a Rome family” reporting that it shot a 7 to 9-feet-tall “black animal” that had been showing up repeatedly since the previous Wednesday. According to the article, sheriff deputies weren’t able to find the animal but did find footprints. The family is reported to have said that since the creature first showed up, “four ducks and some chickens have disappeared.” The article in the July 8, 1981, Valley News headlined, “Rome’s Strange Beast: Is it Fact or Fantasy?” reports that “at least three area residents spotted what they believe is a nine-foot tall animal, which walks on its hind legs Tuesday night in the same area where sheriff’s deputies found large footprints a week ago.” The last article is from the July 15, 1981, Valley News headlined “Rome’s Bigfoot: Fact or Fantasy?” and the source of the information is Pilichis. The account here contains many of the same elements as the account in Night Siege presented in chronological order with dates. In the Small Town Monsters Mysteries and Monsters episode, “Sasquatch Night Siege,” the host, Eli Watson, provides background on how he came to know about this story through Andy Matzke (whom he met when both were the youngest Small Town Monsters film crew members), and how Matzke went about trying to verify the story. Matzke talks about how he went to Rome, Ohio, and how he sought to find people and organizations mentioned in Pilichis’s booklet. Matzke’s father, Mark Matzke, a regular narrator for Small Town Monsters productions who passed his interest in the case down to his son, provides commentary and speculation throughout. The question of why Pilichis never followed up on the case in the over forty years before his death is raised by Watson, and Mark Matzke speculates that it was because Pilichis discovered it was a hoax and stayed quiet so he didn’t look like a fool. Supporting this is some background on Willard McIntyre. McIntyre is identified by Andy Matzke (at around one hour in) as the person who presented a photo of what he claimed was a burned alien body (it was dubbed “The Tomato Man”) that was identified as an Air Force pilot by Ron Schaffner (who wrote about it in the article “The Tomato Man Revisited”) and investigators from the Ohio UFO Investigators League who noted not only elements of the uniform, but electrical wires and the frame of a pair of aviator glasses in the picture. Matzke describes coming upon an article by Schaffner in which he wrote that during personal contact with McIntyre, McIntyre said that Pilichis believed everything he was told and would be easy to hoax, and that he, McIntyre, was related to one of the witnesses. Matzke presents the argument that the whole episode was a hoax perpetrated on Pilichis by McIntyre with the cooperation of the witnesses who possibly shot blanks.