Before we can examine the evidence for and against U.F.O.s, we must first rid ourselves of the popular misconceptions associated with them. A U.F.O. is just that, an Unidentified Flying Object, any object in the skies whose identity is unknown. It may after investigation turn out to be nothing more interesting than a weather balloon, a hot air balloon, a jumbo jet or even an unusual cloud formation, but at the first sighting though, people are reluctant to label them as a U.F.O. despite this being exactly what it is, the misconception being that to do so would to be admitting to the existence of “little green men” and “flying saucers.”
Is their reluctance to do this a sign of healthy skepticism or is it just plain ignorance? What we must bear in mind when looking at the following cases of U.F.O.s is that we are talking about something which may have a perfectly reasonable explanation such as a balloon or terrestrial aircraft, but there are those where no such rational explanation is forthcoming at the present time, maybe in the future these cases will also become identified flying objects, but until we know for sure what we are talking about, we must refer to them as U.F.O.s.
U.F.O.s have been around for a long time and we can trace their history right back to the early days of man's existence on the planet, indeed when the first men saw for example the sun, moon and stars, they too would have been U.F.O.s, and as man learned more and more about the world he lived in, they would become identified and no longer considered a thing of mystery. This may well happen in the future to some of the current cases we have on file as we are still learning about our surroundings and will continue to do so in the future. If we take a look at some of the early reports of U.F.O.s we can see one common denominator, that the people of the time describe them as things which are in the grasp of their technology and within the scope of their experience.
For example the earliest recorded sighting of a U.F.O. dates right back to 1450 BC, it was described as a circle of fire in the sky with no head, and the breath from its mouth had a foul odour. Over the following days there were more of them in the sky, one of the witnesses was the reigning Pharaoh Thutmose III. These sightings would most probably have been taken as a sign from the gods, and let us not forget that there are many who say that the star of Bethlehem was in fact a U.F.O. and not just a mere star brighter than all the others moving across the night sky.
There are many records of sightings of U.F.O.s by the Romans, but unfortunately the records weren't written until many years after the sightings occurred. The descriptions are of a spark which falls from a star to the earth growing to the size of the moon before shrinking again as it returns to the sky. Other sightings are described as daylight in the night sky, or “night suns.” Roman sightings from around the fourth century are of “ships in the sky” over Italy, and an Indian record from before 500 BC talks of machines. Obviously they were a common enough occurrence to be given a name, and that name is “Vimanas” which were said to be able not only to fly but to be controlled by pilots.
In the twelfth century in England a group of French churchmen saw, in Christchurch, Hampshire, a dragon coming up out of the sea breathing fire, additionally some modern U.F.O. reports describe U.F.O.s as coming up out of the sea. Also in the same century, again in England at St. Osyth, Essex a dragon was seen to rise up and leave fire behind it in the air and burn a house and its outbuildings to ashes. Just as dragons in medieval times were a mythical creature said to be able to fly, so as time moves on the description of U.F.O.s also moves on and the technology now becomes more advanced. A feature of U.F.O.s is that as we advance in our own knowledge, so too do they but on a parallel course, yet always marginally ahead of us, always remaining on the verges of our understanding, never leaping too far ahead to leave us behind but likewise never too slowly to allow us to catch up, and where they were once described as dragons able to fly, they then become known as balls or rings of fire, often seen to be spinning such as the ones witnessed by many people over the former capital of Japan, Kyoto which were seen in 1606 and were said to be hovering over Nijo Castle. As time moves on again they become known as aircraft able to fly faster and faster and with more agility than our own aircraft.
Though the sightings of balls of fire continued, they now became various colours including black, blue and blue-red, later they diversified to cover discs, crosses and one case of two huge cylinders which were engaged in a battle over Nuremberg, Germany on April 4th, 1561. Another battle occurred just five years later over Basel, Switzerland on August 7th, 1566 this time between two black sphere shaped objects.
A marked change began to occur around the end of the seventeenth century, at the time known as “The Age Of Reason,” where people were looking at the skies in a different light, and with a more “logical” and “scientific observation.” On December 9th, 1731 Thomas Short described a dark red cloud which had intense beams of light underneath it that moved around slowly before stopping. He then describes how hot the air became and, though it was winter, he was able to comfortably remove his shirt.
A sighting over Kilkenny, Ireland and one over Romania were described as a meteor even though the Romanian meteor split into two halves and then reformed back into one. The Romanians took this to be a sign, whereas elsewhere it was referred to as a meteor. As technological developments were made by man, his inventions were often mistaken for other things until people came to know them and know what they were. In the nineteenth century, as airships became a more and more common form of transport they were frequently mistaken, and people described seeing cigar shaped objects which seemed to be carrying something beneath them. Reports even described how sometimes the craft would land and human type figures would emerge from them. As rockets and missiles entered into service these too were often mistakenly identified, and reports came flooding in from many countries including Sweden, Greece, Portugal and Belgium.
Slowly over time we have found that a lot of cases can be identified and explained away by what now seems like obvious explanations. There are however many which we have not explained and are still classed as U.F.O.s. What we must now try and do is not only try to answer the question what are U.F.O.s, but also the question where do they come from? We can only do one at a time though, and we will look at many sightings and close encounters, all will share at least one characteristic even if it is only that whatever occurred is certainly very strange.
There were frequent sightings of U.F.O.s during World War 2, for example on December 13th, 1944 the Associated Press reported strange silvery balls flying over the western front and said that they could be German allies from space. American bomber pilots often saw these “strange craft” over the Pacific so regularly that they made up a nickname for them. They called them “Foo Fighters.”
The “modern” era of flying saucer reports began with a vengeance in 1947 in America. On June 24th of that year Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot, had an experience which was to change his life and begin for him what became a fascination with U.F.O.s and would inspire him to co-write a study of U.F.O.s with Ray Palmer called “The Coming Of The Saucers” which was published in 1952. It is Arnold who was inadvertently responsible for the term “Flying Saucer” which was taken out of context by a reporter from his interview after seeing several U.F.O.s over Washington States Cascade Mountains on the East coast of America.
Arnold was an experienced pilot and part time Deputy Sheriff, he was also a member of the Idaho Search and Rescue Mercy Flyers and Flying Deputy for the Ada County Aerial Posse. He was flying over the mountain range in search of a lost military C46 transport plane which had crashed in the area with thirty two men on board, and for which the military had offered a five thousand dollar reward for the person or persons who could locate it. In particular Arnold was in the area of Mount Rainier at about 9,200 feet when, during a 180 degree turn, “a tremendously bright flash lit up all the surfaces of my aircraft.” His first thought was that he was about to collide with another aircraft, but the only other aircraft he could see though was a Douglas DC4 Airliner which he assumed was on its way to San Francisco, and he wasn't even close to it. His next thought was that it had been the sun until he saw another flash and saw where it had come from. Flying to his left, very close to the mountains were nine bright objects over Mount Baker. Arnold first took them for aircraft flying in formation, but he could see no tails on them and he estimated that they were about a hundred miles away from him and flying across his own flight path. Using his own instruments and Mount Rainier and Mount Adams as markers he calculated that they were travelling in excess of 1,700 mph. No aircraft around at this time could fly at anything approaching this speed, in fact in that same year the sound barrier (750 mph) was broken for the first time by a jet aircraft. Arnold knew that these were like no other aircraft he had ever seen before because of the way he flew. He said that: “They flew in a definite formation but erratically.... their flight path was like speed boats on rough water, or similar to the tail of a Chinese kite that I once saw blowing in the wind.” He also said that they were “tipping their wings alternately and emitting those very bright blue-white flashes from their surfaces” though he thought that the flashes weren't actually from the aircraft, but rather “the sun's reflection from the highly polished surfaces of their wings.”
After his encounter with the craft, Arnold landed at Yakima where he discussed it with other pilots, and then left to fly back to his starting point at Pendleton, Oregon. It was there that Arnold described the craft as “Flying like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” A journalist, Bill Becquette, got this mixed up and coined the phrase “Flying Saucer.” It was also at Pendleton where Arnold again calculated, this time with other pilots, just how fast the craft had been travelling. However conservative they were in their calculations they couldn't get the speed below 1,350 mph.
These were by no means the only such sightings of similar craft at the time, let's not forget that the events at Roswell, New Mexico occurred less than two weeks later. In April a meteorologist who was tracking a weather balloon saw an object shaped like a saucer fly past it. On May 5th over Washington, a silvery object was seen falling from the sky and disintegrated before it hit the floor. On June 12th another formation was seen over Weiser, Idaho by another pilot by the name of Rankin, only this earlier sighting was made up of ten craft, as opposed to Arnold's nine, and a later sighting by yet another pilot flying over Nevada was of nine or ten craft. Could these have been the same ones that Arnold saw?
There may have been another witness to Arnold's sighting, as around the same time a prospector in the Cascades saw his compass needle going haywire as he was looking at a group of U.F.O.s in the sky. No fewer than 850 reports of U.F.O. sightings were received between June and mid-July of 1947 by the U.S. authorities from all over the United States and this sparked action from the U.S.A.F. who, in September 1947, wrote to J. Edgar Hoover stating that they had checked all the current Army, Navy and Air Force secret projects to see if any of them could be responsible for the spate of U.F.O. sightings but they had found nothing. One incident which happened on January 7th, 1948 near Godman Base, close to Fort Knox, Kentucky would again wake the military up to the seriousness of the situation.
Captain Thomas Mantell was flying the leading plane of a group of P51 fighters who were on a training mission when they were scrambled to investigate a U.F.O. that had been reported by a number of nearby residents. As they approached the official altitude limit for their aircraft, which had no oxygen cylinders for the pilots, all but Mantell gave up the chase, and he radioed in to the tower to say that he could “see something above and ahead of me, and I'm still climbing.” He described the craft by saying “It looks metallic and is tremendous in size and appears to be moving about half my speed.” Still pursuing it he said to the tower “It's above me and I'm gaining on it. I'm going to 20,000 feet.” He was at 22,000 feet when he last called the tower. Mantell was last seen at 3:15pm continuing to climb. His body and disintegrated plane were found later that day ninety miles from Godman Base, his watch had stopped at 3:18pm, due to his altitude and the lack of oxygen he would have blacked out. The official line on the matter was that Mantell, a skilled veteran pilot, had gone to his death chasing the planet Venus.
Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, Chief of Project Blue Book from 1951 to 1953, wrote a book called “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects” which was published in 1956, in it he said that at the time of Mantell's encounter the planet Venus would not have been visible, and this, in addition to rumours that he had been shot down by a U.F.O., sparked the military to change their minds and say that after reconsidering the evidence the altitude, size and speed of the craft, what Mantell had actually been pursuing was a weather balloon. This incident in 1948 was to herald the birth of “Project Sign” whose objectives were to examine and evaluate the many U.F.O. reports and to try and determine whether or not the sightings were of extra-terrestrial craft.
Another key figure in those early days of U.F.O. mania was George Adamski. Adamski was born in 1891, and was moved to America aged 2 when his family emigrated from Poland. He became interested in astronomy and wrote fictional stories about space travel, many of which he had rejected when he tried to get them published. In the 1950s he lived near the Mount Palomar observatory in California, and he would spend many hours watching the night sky through his own 15 inch binoculars and 6 inch reflector telescope which he had set up at his home. Adamski believed that the other planets in our solar system were inhabited, and he became convinced of this one night when watching a meteor shower on October 9th, 1946. He and several friends saw a “large black” “space craft” hovering above the ridge to the south of Mount Palomar. Every night after this sighting, Adamski sat up waiting to see another U.F.O. and between 1950 and 1952 he took a number of photographs of some of the craft he saw. Some of them he took through his telescope.
His new found fame enabled him to begin giving lectures on U.F.O.s and extra-terrestrials and it was through this that he heard rumours of U.F.O.s landing in the deserts of California. So on November 20th, 1952 Adamski and his secretary, Mrs. Lucy Mckinnis, and Mrs. Alice K. Wells met up with Mr. and Mrs. Al C. Bailey and Dr. and Mrs. George H. Williamson on the road near Blythe, California, and they all went into the desert in the hope of seeing a U.F.O. land. Adamski chose the day at random but said he had a hunch as to the best spot in which to lie in wait.
As the group ate lunch, or shortly after they had finished, they saw what they had come to see, a huge, silver, cigar shaped object with no apparent means of levitation or propulsion. The craft then travelled towards them and stopped. Adamski was adamant that the ship had come to see him but felt that they were too close to the road for the ship to land, so the group moved on to a dirt track and drove into the desert while all the while the ship followed them. They stopped when Adamski found a suitable spot and set up his equipment having brought his telescope and camera. He felt however that he would stand a better chance of making contact if he were alone and sent the others back out of the way, telling them to keep watching.
As they retreated the events were to be interrupted by the arrival of several military planes which tried to circle the aircraft. At this point the craft shot upwards out of sight, the planes left and Adamski waited.
After some time there was a bright flash and “a beautiful craft appeared to be drifting through a saddle between two of the mountain peaks.” The craft settled on a ridge and was photographed by Adamski, some minutes later a figure appeared and beckoned to him so Adamski apprehensively made his way toward it.
He described the figure as having long blond hair which blew in the wind, the figure was 5 feet 6 inches tall, about 135 pounds and apparently male. Its skin colour was like a sun tanned Caucasian’s, the face was round with a high slightly slanted forehead and cheeks and it had calm green eyes and a finely chiseled nose. “He” was wearing a brown one piece jump suit with no visible signs of zips or fasteners, no pockets, a broad waist band and a high tight collar. His shoes were red with blunt toes and the overall apparel gave a feeling of being a uniform.
It was as Adamski got nearer to the figure that he realised he was looking at a man from another world. Adamski claims the figure told him via signs and telepathy that he was from the planet Venus. He said that Venusians were worried because radiation from atomic bombs on earth would not only destroy life on earth but could also harm other planets as it made its way through space. He explained that the cigar shaped craft was the mother ship, and the craft he had come in was one of its scout ships which was powered by magnetism. He told Adamski that not only Venusians but other people from our solar system and beyond were visiting earth, some were in fact already living here among us undetected. Some craft had been shot down by earth craft and so they now only landed away from busy cities and towns, not only for this reason but also so that they wouldn't panic people. He declined to being photographed but allowed Adamski to take a closer look at the outside of his craft before climbing aboard and floating away.
Shortly after this encounter Adamski claims to have had a strong telepathic urge to visit Los Angeles and, on following this urge, he met two of the earth dwelling humanoids he had been told about. He says they took him into the desert and aboard a craft where he met more of their people and took part in debates with them.
The other witnesses to the first desert encounter who had been watching Adamski through binoculars all signed sworn affidavits to support Adamski's story, though later some of them changed their minds about what they had seen. Adamski however continued to go from strength to strength, now claiming to have been on the dark side of the moon and to Saturn where he also saw a population of humanoid figures. We must bear in mind that at this time we didn't know that all the planets in our Solar System could not support life but we did know as early as 1932 that Venus may not be able to support even low forms of life such as vegetation. Surely a keen astronomer like George Adamski would have known this, and if making the story up would have chosen either another planet in our solar system or even a planet from beyond it.
We can see as time goes by and we get more tales of contact with aliens that they claim to come from further afield. Is it that because they have travelled further than other visitors they have taken longer to reach us? Is it because they can see that as we acquire more knowledge of the universe, they tell us that they come from places quite near us that we don't know, but can associate with, or is it that as our knowledge increases, hoaxers have to name planets further afield as the origin of life forms they have made contact with? Adamski's claims were by far the most outrageous at the time but history will show they are certainly not the only reports of contact. Over the ensuing years Adamski continued to take photographs of U.F.O.s and also wrote many books about his encounters with aliens and his trips in their craft. Many of his books became best-sellers and he made several television appearances making his name famous the world over, even touring Europe giving lectures on ways of the Venusians. There are tales that he even met Pope John XXIII on May 31st, 1963 though of course the Vatican deny this meeting.
Adamski produced some more pictures of alien craft, this time though they were different from his usual material. They showed craft with apparently three ball shaped protuberances in a triangular formation on their underside, and very similar craft to these were reportedly seen in England at around the same time. One in the Lake District at Coniston in 1954, one by a family in Warrington, Cheshire and also one as recently as 1987 in Rochdale, Lancashire, but despite these and other corroborating sightings, by 1965 Adamski wasn't without his critics. Many claimed that his photographs were nothing more than “crude fakes” using small models, and as his stories became more and more outlandish people began to doubt his credibility, and his trips around the moon over wooded valleys and snow-capped mountains began to stretch the realms of the imagination a little bit too far. His tales of inhabited planets in our own solar system were proved impossible even before his death in April 1965 and, but for his photographic evidence, Adamski would have been made a laughing stock far sooner, though the many cigar and saucer shaped objects have been compared to many household objects such as lampshades, chicken feeders and vacuum cleaner accessories. If this wasn't bad enough, Adamski's accounts were found to have been adapted from his early rejected fictional material and he blamed President Roosevelt's economic policies in the 1930s for his predicament, he said that: “If it hadn't been for Roosevelt, I'd never have had to get into saucers.”
Another key figure in the history of U.F.O.s, so far dominated by Arnold and the outcast Adamski, was a man with very real experience in the matter of space and astronomy, rather than being self-taught like Adamski, he was a university astronomer and in the late 1940s was offered a post which he gladly accepted as a government consultant on Project Sign. He was Dr J. Allen Hynek (1910 - 1986). His position with the government required him to examine literally thousands of U.F.O. cases and he was then, and still is today, considered to be the world's leading authority on U.F.O.s. His book “The Hynek U.F.O. Report” was published in 1977, four years after he founded the “Centre For U.F.O. Studies” whose “Journal of U.F.O. Studies” and “International U.F.O. Reporter” are widely respected the world over. He also accepted an invitation to appear in the Steven Spielberg film “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind” a film based on many accounts of encounters with aliens and alien craft, in it Hynek played a cameo role as a scientist whose beard is stroked by one of the aliens.
Hynek looked at U.F.O.s in a scientific way and eventually became convinced that U.F.O.s were not a figment of the imagination or a whimsical phenomenon but that they had a very real cause. Project Sign was soon to collapse, in 1949, and was ridiculed by the United States Air Force (U.S.A.F.) as its conclusions were supported by the extra-terrestrial cause of U.F.O.s. Sign was replaced by “Project Grudge” which was itself succeeded by “Project Blue Book” which was, like its predecessors, based at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio, and which ran until 1969 with Hynek still very much in the fore. The head of “Project Blue Book,” Major Hector Quintilla Jr., said in a television appearance that the aims of the project were:
Though Hynek was convinced that U.F.O.s had a very real cause, he himself doubted that that cause was extra-terrestrial and turned down an offer to advertise an American beer, of which he was a fan, as the script implied that this was the case. His own opinion circa 1984 reads:
“It is far from certain that U.F.O.s represent a single phenomenon, despite the similarity in patterns of reports from all over the world... Perhaps I may intrude my own opinion on these matters, based on more than thirty years of study. I believe that the U.F.O. phenomenon is in some way directing us to consider an aspect of reality of which we have been hitherto largely unaware - an aspect, indeed, that may eventually be incorporated into our science and may prove to be of great value to the progress of mankind.“
In 1981 in Chicago, Hynek said to the author Reuben Stone that he believed U.F.O.s were directed by some kind of intelligence, but “That intelligence may be our own.”
One of Hynek's sayings was that in investigating U.F.O.s, whenever you looked for an answer, you got a hundred questions instead. In 1973, well into his career as a U.F.O. “expert,” to aid himself and others in the categorisation of U.F.O. sightings and encounters, Hynek constructed the following “Richter scale” of the varying types of encounter, starting with the less intense encounters, and ending with multi-racial communication:
One such case where Hynek would dearly have loved to have answered these questions is one where he was convinced that there was no hoax involved and he wanted to find a natural explanation for it. It occurred on April 24th, 1964 at 17:45 and Hynek says that he is convinced that “a real physical event occurred.”
The encounter was experienced by thirty year old police officer Lonnie Zamora from Socorro, New Mexico who was on duty at the time and in pursuit of a speeding car. During the chase Zamora heard a loud roar and spotted blue flames in the sky. The flames were low and appeared to be coming from an area which Zamora knew contained a hut used for storing dynamite, so he gave up the chase and headed towards the flames.
As he neared the site he arrived at a deep gully from where he could see the flames rising up and hear the roaring sound which became lower and lower until it stopped completely, along with the flames. He could see an elliptical object which was apparently supported on legs. His first thought was that it was an overturned car and he called in on his radio for assistance with a 10-40 (an accident). He could now see two humanoid figures beside the craft, one of which turned to look at him in surprise. They were wearing one piece suits and he thought at first that they were children due to their small stature, and on spotting him they got back inside the craft. Still at this point inside the car and wearing sunshades over his glasses Zamora got out for a better look, as he did so he dropped his microphone and bent to pick it up. While he was bent down the roar started up again and he looked back toward the object and saw that the blue flames were coming from underneath it. As the craft rose he noticed that it had a red symbol on it but he could see no doors or windows. He prudently decided to keep the patrol car between himself and the craft which had now become silent and was moving away from both him and the hut at great speed. Zamora quickly sketched the insignia from the craft while it was still fresh in his mind.
He wasn't the only witness to the craft as many others had seen blue flames in the sky, though only two people, a couple, saw a craft of a similar description to Zamora's. It might also have been seen by Sergeant Chavez who had responded to the 10-40 put out by Zamora had he not taken a wrong turn. When he did arrive at the scene he found Zamora staring down into the gully at the smoldering brush and scrub. The two officers then walked down into the gully where they found that the bushes, though smoldering, did not feel hot. They also found four marks on the ground that had apparently been made by the legs of the craft. These marks have been found to have been made by a heavy object, but to this day no such object has been identified, and the ground in the area and the four marks were devoid of traces of radiation, chemicals and exhaust gases. Chavez circled the indentation marks with stones to prevent them from being damaged until they could be examined properly, and by a stroke of luck an F.B.I. officer was in town that day on other business and both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. became involved, and thus Hynek was called in.
It was Hynek who tracked down two witnesses who on that day had been travelling through the state and had remarked to the garage owner about the “low flying aircraft.” One of the men described seeing an egg shaped object emitting smoke, while the other just saw the smoke from the scrubland. It is interesting to note that it was fourteen years before Hynek managed to track down the two men, yet they could still recall the day with such clarity. This encounter wasn't only a favourite of Hynek's but also one which Major Hector Quintilla found to be more convincing than any other which he had looked at. A further comment from Hynek was that “Of all the C.E.IIs this is the one that most clearly suggests a nuts and bolts physical craft.” What is also interesting to note is that, following Zamora's encounter, White Sands acquired a further 883,910 acres of land, spreading North and East encompassing the Landing Site, possibly showing that the military wished to conceal something by not allowing further access to the site.
This isn't the only case where a number of witnesses saw a craft which landed and left evidence behind it. Passengers on a train near Padriesko, Moscow in 1984 saw a U.F.O. land near to the side of the track in a clearing. Tests done on the site later by a Biologist, Professor Yuri Simiakov, showed that this, like other similar sites, was completely devoid of life, even microscopic life, and that living creatures will not enter the area. Simiakov also found strange electromagnetic effects in spiral patterns, and curiously that time apparently speeds up in the area. When he tested the soil samples he had taken he found that they contained tiny spheres, and when these were analysed he found that they ranged from the unknown to common parts of filter systems.
Another multiple witness sighting, again in America though much later, is most interesting as it satisfies more than one of Hynek's categories. It occurred on October 10th 1990. At around 9pm of that day the residents of Skibo, Minnesota reported seeing lights in the sky (categories 1+2) over the Hoyt Lakes area. Two police officers went to investigate and saw, as did others, numerous objects of “indeterminate shape.” The objects would hover before darting about and then stopping to hover again (category 2). Just over an hour after the objects were first reported the Federal Aviation Authority's air traffic controllers at Duluth, the nearest major airport to Skibo, confirmed that they were picking up radar echoes form the Hoyt Lakes area (category 3) and continued to monitor them for a further hour. They were also caught on radar (again category 3) by the local National Air Guard who saw between 3 and 5 objects intermittently in a roughly circular formation.
Another “professional” witness (category 2) was the pilot of a commercial aircraft at eleven thousand feet and he could see the objects forty five miles to the east of Hoyt Lakes. He reported seeing two unidentified lights at what he estimated to be 10,000 feet and he described them as a deep glowing red and they were a few miles apart. Checks carried out confirmed that there were no other aircraft in the area at the time. The radar echoes received by both Duluth and the National Air Guard cannot be explained away by any known weather conditions or atmospheric effects, and besides which no unusual such circumstances were witnessed at the time by those around Hoyt Lakes.
It was by now painfully clear that U.F.O.s were here to stay and the reports continued to flood in. The most common among sightings were, and still are, saucers, ovals, discs, eggs and cigar shapes. One particular cigar shaped object was witnessed by Adamski over his house, though no other witnesses were present. Another was either a triangular shape or as was later thought, a circular shape with a triangular formation of lights on the underside. Many photographs of such sightings are in existence, some more convincing than others, but lots of those which were at one time thought to be authentic photographic evidence have later been shown to be faked, and some of the methods used to produce fakes are more “crude” than others. The less convincing photographs, and most common among fakes, show just a blank patch of sky with the object somewhere in the frame. These are the most difficult of pictures to test for authenticity as there is nothing else in the frame to give us an idea of the scale of the object, it could either be a large object a long way away, or a small object very close. It is also difficult in these instances to get any real idea of effects of the light on any other objects to aid us determine for example the time of day, the colour of the object in comparison to other objects such as trees or houses, the speed of the objects movement and whether it is dull or shiny. The most tricky to determine though is the size, as mentioned earlier, and there have been many cases of hoaxers photographing car hub caps and camera lens covers on pieces of string, one enterprising photographer who fooled the experts for many years, before finally admitting he had fooled them, had stuck small cardboard saucer shapes to the outside of his window and photographed them from the inside of the house.
The easier pictures to examine are those with objects in the foreground such as buildings, though even these can be difficult to determine, especially if the object is moving and therefore blurred in the frame. Even better now though is the advent of the video recorder and then the camcorder which, rather than giving a still frame picture, gives us a continuous moving picture with zoom lenses able to show wide angle shots with foreground and then zoom in for close up shots without stopping the film. The more modern cameras also show, usually in one corner of the picture, the date and the time of day to the second, enabling us to see whether or not it is one continuous shot or if the film has been tampered with. We can also use this to check whether or not there were any other terrestrial aircraft in the area at the time, if not then we couldn't be looking at an airship, a helicopter, a plane, a balloon or possibly even a cloud formation. If there were other aircraft in the area at the time then we could be looking at some such mundane object or better still we could be looking at a U.F.O. with more than one witness, one witness being an experienced pilot who was able to lend a “professional” opinion.
What is interesting about the more recent sightings is that we seem to get them in spates followed by a relative lull before we get yet another wave of sightings. Some of the waves of U.F.O. sightings we have seen have occurred in America both in the late 40s and early 50s and then again in the early 70s when the people of the southern states witnessed over a hundred in a week between October 11th and 18th. Over north and central Europe in October 1954, and again over Europe, in particular Belgium between November 1989 and March 1990, and shortly after this in Mexico from July 1991 for the remainder of that year. These particular sightings brought Mexico City to a standstill while everybody, including police, stood and watched, as did all of Mexico when the scenes were televised. Why we should get these waves nobody has any idea but they do seem to be no accident, maybe aliens saturate an area until they attract too much attention and then move on to somewhere else.
The wave known as the “Gulf Breeze” sightings received massive publicity and were both praised and scorned by people who saw the many photographs taken of the craft seen between November 1987 and May 1988 at Lake Okobogee, Gulf Breeze, close to Pensacola Naval Air Station, Florida. The basis of the Gulf Breeze sightings was one man, Ed Walters, who claimed to have been abducted many times for the purpose of being constantly monitored by aliens who implanted a small probe in his skull, though when doctors looked for it with x-ray machines they couldn't find it. Under hypnosis he said that they had abducted him a final time to remove the probe and all traces of their ever being here as he had attracted far too much attention to them. Ed Walters was the main character in the spate of sightings but he wasn't the only witness to see U.F.O.s in the area over nearby Shoreline Park and Gulf Breeze, there were reports from hundreds of witnesses, one witness seeing up to 170 U.F.O.s. Though the majority of the sightings have been attributed to the local air base, others haven't. Walters came under close scrutiny because of the many photographs he took, and they would eventually appear to prove to be his downfall. Walters refused to do a television interview, or show his pictures for U.K. television, but they have been examined by many experts on the other side of the Atlantic.
The camera that Walters used for his first thirty or so pictures was a Polaroid 108 which is notoriously easy to double expose. It is possible to photograph an object against a plain background, and then take a photograph outdoors and the object will appear on the resulting exposure complete with background. Investigators have created shots very similar to Walter's in this way, however Dr. Bruce Maccabee is a government research physicist who has been researching extra-terrestrial intelligence for 25 years and he has computer analysed Ed Walter's photographs and he is satisfied that they are not fakes, but then again Maccabee is a believer in U.F.O.s and is the author of many scientific papers on them.
Investigative reporter Mark Curtis likens the Ed Walters case to the three strike rule in baseball, i.e. three strikes and you are out. Strike 1 was when a styrofoam model of a U.F.O. was found in the former home of Ed Walters. Strike 2 was when a man called Tommy Smith came forward and said that he had witnessed Walters taking double exposure photographs, and strike 3 was when Curtis was able to recreate Walter's photographs using fraudulent methods.
There are many cases of people taking what may be a genuine spate of sightings and using them to gain notoriety for themselves, this happens not only in U.F.O. cases but in various other phenomenon as well, and it is a shame that the hoaxers seem to gain more attention than the apparently genuine ones who are seeing a truly puzzling phenomenon. Whether or not the other sightings at Gulf Breeze were of “flying saucers” or something else is not clear, but in the area at that time there were tests under way on what are known as U.A.V.s, (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles), an airborne craft that was to be used for reconnaissance and secret observation, what we might call a drone today.
As plain old boring sightings were increasing, there were more interesting and more interactive encounters occurring, one such encounter took place on December 29th, 1980 when Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum and her seven year old grandson, Colby Landrum, were driving along Highway FM 1485 on their way home to Dayton near Houston, Texas after dining at nearby New Caney. After a while at around 9pm the car entered a pine and oak forest and Colby saw a bright light over the trees ahead of them which was looming larger and larger until it became what Vickie later described as “a diamond of fire.”
Betty stopped the car and the object hovered over the road about sixty yards in front of them, occasionally emitting a burst of flames and rising a little before returning to about twenty five feet off the ground. The three witnesses got out of the car to get a better look at it as the object was lighting up the trees and the road all around it. It appeared to be made of a dull rather than a shiny metal and had a row of blue lights around its centre. It would occasionally give off a beep and it was emitting a tremendous amount of heat. Vickie and Colby got back in the car at his request but Betty remained outside until the object rose and moved away. When she went to get back into the car she found the bodywork was hot to the touch, so hot in fact that she couldn't touch it with her bare hands. They heard a further noise from above and saw that it was a group of helicopters which seemed to appear from all directions and Betty thought that they were attempting to surround the object.
The three of them continued their journey for a further five miles and could once again see the craft though only in the distance, surrounded by the helicopters of which they counted twenty three. Within the ensuing hours all three of the witnesses fell ill and developed “painful swellings and blisters.” They also suffered stomach pains and blinding headaches. Colby was covered in a sunburn like rash and Vickie's hair began to fall out and Betty's eyes swelled to the point that she couldn't see and was taken to hospital. Over a period of weeks all three had suffered some hair loss and sore eyes, and though their hair regrew it was different to the hair they had lost, and none of them ever returned to their former health. The doctors who treated them said that their symptoms were synonymous with high levels of electromagnetic radiation in the bands of ultra violet, microwave and x-ray.
The craft in this case appears to be similar to that witnessed by Zamora, and similarly both caused lasting effects on either the environment or the witnesses with the flames that emitted from its underside. What is also apparent is that the military wished to conceal both sets of events as local airfields, both civil and military, denied knowledge that any fleet of helicopters had used their facilities or showed on their radar.
Vickie believed that they had witnessed a craft either owned by, or pursued by, the military and attempted to sue the U.S. Government for 20 million dollars, but the case was dismissed as no craft matching the descriptions given by the witnesses is “owned by, operated by or in the inventory of either the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force or N.A.S.A.” What didn't come out in court was whether or not the military knew what the craft was, so despite the court case, the origin of it still remains a mystery.
Could it be a military craft? Could it be an alien craft pursued by the military? Or even more outrageously, but a belief more popular than ever among Ufologists, is that the military are aware the craft was alien and were trying to hide their knowledge of U.F.O.s, or better still their collusion with them.
It is not only the military in the U.S.A. who encounter U.F.O.s, but militaries elsewhere, a Russian pilot saw a light in the sky that was closing in on him, and it eventually made contact with his plane which then went into a steep dive. He managed to land safely and found that there was damage to the wing on his plane. There aren't as many reports from Russia about U.F.O.s as there are from other countries in the “free world” but there must have been many encounters such as this in the past above the former Soviet Union because the authorities felt so strongly about them that they have implemented a “No Fire Policy.”
There was a momentous case that occurred around military installations in Britain, though the bases that the events occurred near are U.S. bases. The following case is considered to be a landmark case of U.F.O.s being experienced by the military, not only once but over a period of time. The events unfolded at Rendlesham Forest near Ipswich, Suffolk, and the case is now considered by many to be the equal of Roswell and the events that unfolded there.
Rendlesham Forest is near the U.S. bases R.A.F. Woodbridge and R.A.F. Bentwaters which are three miles apart, and the events occurred over several nights. Due to punch and counter punch the exact dates have become blurred, but the witnesses and their consistency, reliability and clarity seem very genuine and for this reason the case is considered as certainly the best to occur in Britain. In Edward Ashpole's “The U.F.O. Phenomenon” the case is given priority and is the sole topic of chapter one, a chapter called “The Best U.F.O. Report.”
At approximately 3am on December 27th, 1980 a bright light was seen by several villagers as it flew across the sky. It was also seen on radar by a British Base near Norwich and was lost to radar in the area around R.A.F. Woodbridge. Two U.S.A.F. security guards saw something come out of the sky and “drop” into the forest, so three patrolmen, including two sergeants, went out of the east gate at Woodbridge and entered the forest where they saw on the ground a bright luminous triangular shape, possibly a cone shape about 9 feet (3 metres) wide at the base and about 6 feet (2 metres) tall. The object lit up the surrounding forest with its bright light, and had a pulsating red light on top with blue lights at the base. It appeared to be either hovering or standing on legs, and as the three men approached it, it rose and moved through the trees toward a farm where it frightened the animals before quickly flying away. It was seen again about an hour later around the base's perimeter, though only briefly, and was also seen on radar by Bentwaters whose impression was that the object had crashed. The site in the forest was investigated the next morning at dawn and the men saw a hole through the tree tops where branches had been broken as if a heavy object had fallen from the sky. At the spot where the cone had been stationary were three indentations in the ground in a triangular formation. The area was also tested for radiation and the levels were found to be highest around the marks in the ground.
Now is where the dates become confused as some say the next sighting was on the next night and others say it was two nights later, but whichever it was, the sighting was considered serious enough to disturb Colonel Charles Halt at a dinner party. Halt was then a Deputy Commander at the twin bases and was later promoted to Base Commander, a post he served for a further 4 years. He was told that the U.F.O. had returned.
Halt assembled an investigating team and they returned to the forest, taking with them equipment to record the events. Halt is heard on tape to mention a large sun-like object which seemed to drip smaller white lights from it which showed red, green and blue lights and that moved erratically through the sky. These objects caused distress to nearby animals and as the large one moved through the trees it was followed by the men. Every so often as they followed it a bright light would beam downwards from its underside and it appeared to pass straight through solid objects such as the trees and at one time a truck.
Several of the witnesses say they saw alien beings with large heads and big eyes which seemed to be suspended in mid-air beneath the craft inside the shafts of light. It also appears that at least one of the airmen suffered a loss of time and found himself elsewhere in the woods when he “came to.” The classic symptoms of an abduction case.
Another of the airmen, Sergeant Jim Penniston was one of those who went to investigate the first night's sighting and said later “The air was filled with electricity. You could feel it on your skin as we approached the object. It was about the size of a tank.... triangular in shape.” Colonel Halt said of the second nights encounter: “If we hadn't made the tape, even I would have trouble believing what happened that night.” As well as the tape Halt had erected huge floodlights called “lightalls” but they failed to operate, as did the replacements they brought in, and also the walkie-talkies they were using.
Another of the witnesses present at Woodbridge was Larry Warren, whose military record was classified after his honourable discharge in 1981, and whose re-entry into the Air Force was barred as his record stated that he couldn't fully extend his right arm - a fact he says is simply not true. Warren says that the object just materialized out of an explosion of light rather than being seen to fly, and this is not the only case of such materializations of craft, one sighting in August 1980 by a woman in Medway, Kent was of two humanoid figures inside a bubble which appeared out of a misty fog that emitted a sickly smell. What is interesting about this case is that, rather surprisingly, the details haven't been shrouded in mystery, rather the opposite, reports and statements issued by Halt have been made public, and even the tape recording of the nights events has been made available.
Conspiracy theorists speculate that, rather than admitting the existence of U.F.O.s, the authorities are making available a gamut of evidence which will confound and amaze the public into disbelief, thus ending the U.F.O. problem. Another less cynical explanation is that the authorities are fully aware of the existence and technology and are slowly but surely bringing this to the attention of the public rather than via a short sharp shock, so are we being fed information or misinformation?
What is interesting about the Rendlesham Forest case is the loss of time suffered by at least one of the airmen and the fact that they “came to” in another part of the forest with no recollection of how they had got there. As I said earlier, this is the typical scenario of an abduction case where the victims often later realise that a journey has taken them longer than it would normally do, or they have no memory of a particular part of the journey. More amazingly some people find strange marks on their bodies.
The first alien abduction case to become famous, though not the first to occur, is that which occurred on September 19th, 1961 to Betty and Barney Hill. The couple were driving through their home state of New England on their way home from a holiday near Niagara Falls, it was late at night and they had stopped for dinner before continuing their drive along Highway U.S. 3. They passed through a village called Lancaster and shortly afterward Betty noticed a bright light near the moon in the sky ahead of them. She told Barney about it and he told her it was probably just a satellite, but they continued to watch the light which continued to get brighter and brighter, and appeared to be keeping pace with the car and flying up and to the right of them. When Barney stopped the car he looked at the light through his binoculars and realised that it was no ordinary celestial body. They continued their journey once again and Betty became worried and considered spending the night in a Motel and returning home the next day. She carried on watching the object through Barney's binoculars while he drove and saw the object was “Like a big pancake” and was far too big to be a helicopter as Barney had earlier thought and that it had two rows of windows around it. Barney again stopped the car and walked over a field to within a distance of 50 feet (15 metres) of the object and could now clearly see that it was occupied by at least a dozen beings which he thought were looking at him. He became frightened, as did Betty who could no longer see him, so he ran back to the car and leapt in driving away as fast as he could. They could hear beeping sounds like a microwave oven but could no longer see the craft and the car began to vibrate. They had a feeling of drowsiness come over them and as they continued their drive the drowsiness passed and they noticed a road sign which pointed to Concord 17 miles away, but Concord was 35 miles from where they had seen the U.F.O.
They drove all the way home that night and they arrived there without further incident, but the next morning Barney became angry with Betty when she kept on talking about the previous night, and Betty also found that their car had very shiny spots on it, as though somebody had polished parts of it. She even telephoned the Air Force and reported the incident to them, reluctantly Barney also spoke to them and they were told that a number of other witnesses had reported a U.F.O. in the area. Over the ensuing period Betty began to suffer from vivid nightmares and Barney's health also began to deteriorate, a fact they both connected with their close encounter.
Betty now became fascinated with U.F.O.s and began reading about them, she read a book by Major Donald Keyhoe called “The Flying Saucer Conspiracy” and even wrote to the author, relaying her experience to him. As a result of her letter she was visited by a lecturer who was on the staff of the Hayden Planetarium in Boston, Walter Webb, who was skeptical when he arrived, but left convinced that they were telling the truth, and that's what he told NICAP (National Investigations Committee) who then spoke to the Hills themselves, and it was during this interview that they realised that there was an unaccounted for period of time. They found that the journey had taken the Hills two hours longer than it normally would have done, even allowing for the time that they had briefly stopped. They also had no recollection of seventeen miles of the journey, so they returned to the site a number of times in order to try and remember what had happened to them there, but they found they had no recollection of it and try as they might they could not prompt their memories to recall it.
The Hills also told their story to a church discussion group in September 1963 and then decided to consult a well-known Boston psychiatrist, Dr. Benjamin Simon. In 1963 Barney began psychiatric treatment and was put under hypnosis, at which time he began to recant tales of alien abduction. Betty was also now hypnotically regressed, independently of her husband, and corroborated her husband's account of events. They both said that they had been forcibly taken aboard a space craft by grey humanoids with pear shaped heads and large eyes where they were given an intimate, and at times very embarrassing, medical examination. Betty was told that it was a pregnancy test which was performed by inserting a needle through her navel, a test not available to “Earthlings” in 1961. Such a device, a lamaroscope, a long, flexible tube containing fibre-optics, was developed about 10 or so years later as a way to test for Downs Syndrome in unborn babies via the amniotic fluid and for removing ova for fertilization as test tube babies. Betty was also given a guided tour of the craft and was shown a map of where the Alien's world was, and she was able to draw this map while under hypnosis.
The psychiatrist who performed the regressions, despite the very detailed accounts given by the Hills and the fact that at times during his regression Barney had to be restrained, isn't convinced that what they said under hypnosis is necessarily the true account of events, but merely what the Hills believe to be the truth. He says that it is highly possible that they did indeed encounter a U.F.O. and their abduction was a figment of their imagination possibly triggered by some unsettling incident during the journey. The fact that they both made up the same story is not surprising as they weren't regressed for a long time after the sighting and they both had read a great deal of material on U.F.O.s in that time and would have certainly talked to each other about both what had happened and what they had read. Interestingly, Barney had also watched an episode of the television series “The Outer Limits” which had featured an alien being who spoke using telepathy just days before he described one during a hypnosis session. The fact that they may have seen a real U.F.O. is backed up by Pease Air Force Base who tracked one on radar at the same time and place as the Hills encounter, and also there was the physical evidence left behind on their car, but more importantly the map that Betty Hill drew in 1963.
Using the map astronomers began to look for the star system in space and they reasoned that the majority of stars they felt could support life giving planets were located in the obscure southern constellation of “Reticulum,” but three of the stars in that system were not discovered until 1969, and yet Betty Hill's map showed them clearly. Astronomers at Ohio State University used a computer to place the stars in the constellation in their correct positions, somewhere beyond the double star system of Zeta Reticuli one and Zeta Reticuli two. These are to be found 220 trillion miles, 37 light years from Earth, and the computer drew a map of them which was an almost exact replica of the map Betty Hill had drawn.
The Hills ordeal was transcribed in a book by John G. Fuller, and this started the abduction craze with many people now coming forward with similar claims that they too had been abducted. One famous case happened in 1975 to a logger called Travis Walton who was with six of his colleagues on their way home to Sholo, Arizona when they all saw a bright light through the trees. Walton got out of the truck and walked towards the light which now they could all see was a metallic saucer with spotlights beneath it. The craft was humming, almost below the threshold of hearing and was lighting up the forest around it. It started to move and Walton got down to hide behind a log as his colleagues began shouting at him to get back into the pickup truck. He turned to run back to it and as he did so he was hit in the chest area by a bluish beam of energy like a bolt of lightning and thrown through the air before falling back to the ground. Fearing Walton was dead, his colleagues drove quickly away and stopped a short distance down the track where they talked about what had happened and decided to drive back to find him, but when they got back to the spot where he had disappeared they could find no sign of him, and an organised widespread search of the area also failed to find him.
Travis says that he was taken aboard the craft and examined by alien beings with large heads and eyes, no hair and pale grey skin and he was so terrified that he screamed the whole time, which he felt was a couple of hours. He started swinging at them and they held their hands out to him and left the room, but standing in the doorway was a figure he took to be a man and he was led down a corridor into a room where there were other people like the man. He was laid down on a table and they covered his face, at which point he lost consciousness until he woke in the cold and dark, lay down with a light above him which then shot up into the sky. He found he was lying in the spot where he had been captured. Travis Walton had been missing for five days. Both he and his six colleagues have all stuck to their story for twenty years, and have all taken, and passed, lie detector tests.
The aliens that people regularly began to describe as their abductors were all very similar, whereas those described by abductees before the release of John G. Fuller's book had all been markedly different. So if people are creating, be it intentional or not, stories of abduction it seems that they may be “borrowing” details from this and other sources. The many reports of abductions share common details, mostly those of lost or unaccounted for hours, medical tests and the taking of body samples, some even include accounts of inter species intercourse, and some abductees say that it has not only happened to them once but many times over a period of time, as though they are being continually monitored and examined.
The real problem with abduction cases is that they are only recalled under hypnosis, which is itself an unreliable and marginally understood phenomenon. The craze was again kick started in 1977/8, the year which saw the release of one of the most popular films of the time, Steven Spielberg's “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind” which was based on several real accounts of encounters with U.F.O.s and featured, as mentioned earlier, Dr. Hynek in a cameo role, and it seemed that plain old sightings were no longer big news and abduction was now the norm. The film began a spate of books and spin off films and got worldwide media attention and abduction now became such a problem, especially in the United States, that help groups were set up for the victims. It seems that every day another victim comes forward, and a recent survey found that 10% of Americans believe they have at least seen a U.F.O., but then again another survey found that 17% of American students would hit themselves in the face for fifty dollars.
It is believed among abduction circles that the phenomenon has been around for centuries and there are as many as twelve different types of aliens described on a regular basis by victims. The most common are known as Greys. Greys are around nine feet tall with large, black oval eyes and are said to be “quite sweet looking.” Many believe that the greys have agreed treaties with earth governments who trade with them and turn a blind eye to abductions in return for grey military technology. Another group are the Blues who also have large oval eyes. The blues are said to be trying to talk governments out of dealing with the “evil” greys. The greys though seem angelic when compared to the Reptoids who emanate from near the constellation Draco. The Reptoids control some greys via implants and have a tendency to eat human flesh. However fantastic this may all sound, there are many people who believe it to be true and swear by it.
Like the phenomenon of U.F.O.s themselves, abduction has been with us for a long time. In medieval times people would claim to wake in the night to find a “devil” in their room, and it was not uncommon for nuns in their nunneries to claim that they were raped by such “devils” to explain their pregnancies. These “creatures” became known as “incubus” or “incubi” and it is true to say that in the majority of abduction cases, the actual event occurs in the bedroom during a state of waking or falling asleep, and these “dreams” are called “hypnogogic hallucinations” and they can also occur when the percipient is just tired.
One of the big players in the field of alien abduction is a New York painter and sculptor, Bud Hopkins, author of “Missing Time” and “Intruders” who believes that aliens may maintain a relationship with generation after generation of contactees. Hopkins became more and more interested in the concept of missing time in the late 1970s and he began his work believing that Betty and Barney Hill were unconscious self-deceivers, and though he had himself seen a daylight disc in 1964 he was unable to accept the idea of alien abduction, but the more he investigated the phenomenon the more he came to believe it, and in “Missing Time” in 1981 he speculated that perhaps thousands of people may have had U.F.O. abduction experiences, and that those who are abducted have the same experience many times in their life, and their purpose he claims is to create human hybrids.
One of his “subjects,” a woman named Andrea, told him how she was “floated out of her bed” into a U.F.O. and, as she sat on a table, a long needle was pressed up her nose which caused her pain as it broke through the top of her nasal cavity, and when she woke in the morning back in her bed there was blood on her nightgown and bedclothes from a bad nose bleed. Stranger still was Andrea's experience when she was thirteen years old and still a virgin. She became pregnant and didn't even have a boyfriend. She had dreamt that she was having sex with a man with no hair and “real funny eyes” and in the morning when she woke, her underwear was wet as was the bed. She went on to say:
“… and after a while my stomach started to grow. My mother took me to a gynaecologist, and I was pregnant. I couldn't believe it. My father was furious and asked who did it to me, he wanted to get even. I told him it was a weird man in a dream, with funny eyes and a big head, and you know, Bud, the gynaecologist said I was still a virgin. I still had my hymen.”
One of Hopkins' most detailed studies, and equally one of his most baffling cases, is that of a woman who wrote to him via his publisher after reading “Missing Time” and who Hopkins calls Kathie Davis.
One evening in 1983 Kathie Davis was about to go out to a neighbour's house when she noticed that the door to the pool house was open and the light was on, despite her having closed the door earlier on. She mentioned it to her mother but neither of them were worried about it, and before she left she checked them again and saw that the light was now off and the door closed, but the garage door was now open, and this was always kept closed.
When she got to her neighbour, Dee Anne's house she telephoned her mother who told her that she had seen a “big light” by the pool house which had moved across the garden to the bird feeder where it had grown to two feet in diameter. This phone call prompted Kathie to go back to her house and take a look around the garden where she found her dog hiding underneath a car. Later her neighbour also came over with her eleven year old daughter Tammy and they all went swimming. They found a burned patch on the ground about eight feet in diameter where nothing will now grow, and the bird feeder, which was once full of birds, often rare ones, is now avoided by wildlife and nothing will grow near there. Hopkins felt that the burning of the grass indicated that some sort of landing had taken place, and in a later telephone conversation he asked Davis to have a closer look around the burn mark, and she found four small holes about three inches deep some two feet beyond the edge of the circle.
Her letter went on to cover a couple of incidents that had occurred to her sister Laura whom she described as a “realist, very level headed and not much imagination” and who was driving past a church one day when she got a compulsion to pull into the car park behind it where she saw something silver hovering over her at about the height of a telephone pole with red, green and white lights that flickered on and off. She turned down her radio to see if it was making any noise and the next thing she remembers is driving home in the dark. The next incident was 10 years later when she went to a hypnotist to try and lose weight, but the hypnosis had the opposite effect and she woke one night to find that she was deaf and dumb. She went to hospital where she was given tranquillisers and eventually she improved, though she still took comfort in eating and it made her feel better when she was eating. She telephoned her hypnotist to ask him why she should be feeling this way but the sound of his voice enraged her so much that she felt compelled to kill him.
Kathie's letter ended by saying that both she and her mother had found scars on their legs that looked very similar, she went on, “I don't remember when I got mine, but it seems like I had it all my life... At first I only had one scar but now I have two, on the same leg.” Hopkins was fascinated by the letter and felt that Laura had been abducted in the church car park and her hypnosis session had reawakened hidden memories of it, and in a telephone conversation with Hopkins, Kathie told him of a disturbing dream she had had shortly after her marriage at age nineteen. There were two strange, grey faced creatures with large heads and pitch black eyes that seemed to shimmer liquid-like, stood by her bed, and one of them was holding a small black box with a red light on it. Together they stepped forward and one of them gave her the box and told her that at some time in the future she would see it again and she would know how to use it. Hopkins asked her if she had ever actually seen her a U.F.O. and she cited an incident when she was a teenager and had been driving in a car with two friends when they saw a flashing light in the sky and one of them said it was a U.F.O. As it came closer they “all got a creepy feeling” and they stopped to have a closer look but Kathie couldn't remember what happened next. Hopkins asked her if she could call her friend to see if she could remember any of what had happened, and she was surprised to hear that she did remember a little more than Kathie did. Dorothy remembered stopping the car and getting out to look at a light on the ground, which Kathie had no recollection of, but when she got home that night she found that several hours of the night appeared to be missing.
Hopkins would later visit Kathie at her home in Copley Woods, near Indianapolis, and he would not only interview her, but also Dee Anne and Tammy about the night they had gone swimming. Dee Anne had felt that something was wrong as soon as she had entered Kathie's yard “like somebody's just watching us” and Tammy had felt nauseated when she went into the pump house to change into her costume. As they were swimming they all began to feel sick and when they later drove to a fast food restaurant to eat, they all felt too ill to eat so they drove back home again.
Kathie became increasingly worried about her experiences but Hopkins told her that these type of cases generally tended to stop once somebody starts to investigate them, but Kathie's didn't. In fact on October 13th, 1983, ten days before she was due to visit Hopkins in New York, she had been lying in bed when she felt she heard somebody calling her name, but it seemed to be inside her head rather than outside. She rushed to call a friend of Hopkins called Sue whom he had put “on duty” should anything further happen, and after this she woke her mother who told her to take some aspirin and try to sleep. She carried her son Tommy into her room with her and sat watching television until she became drowsy and went to sleep, and a little while later she was woken by her mother who told her that she felt that somebody had called her name, and at that moment they heard a humming sound “like a truck with its engine running” coming from outside the house, but they could see nothing and they soon went back to sleep.
In the morning Kathie woke feeling strangely exhausted with a stiffness in her arms, shoulders and neck as though she had been lifting weights, a complaint her mother also made. When Kathie looked at her bed clothes she found that there was blood on them where her neck and where her lower back would have been.
Her trip to New York went ahead and she spent the time there telling Hopkins more about herself, explaining that she had suffered many health problems since being a young child. She had begun to menstruate at seven, had high blood pressure at ten, her gall bladder was removed at fourteen, she had suffered from hepatitis, almost died from pneumonia, had her appendix removed, had an asthma attack, needed medical attention for an irregular heartbeat and spent two weeks in traction when two of the vertebrae in her back somehow fused together, what was unusual about this was that they were extra vertebrae which “normal” people don't have. When she was seventeen she met the man who was to become her husband and she fell pregnant, a fact she had confirmed by a doctor, so she decided to move her wedding forward by a few months, but soon afterward she began to menstruate normally again, and further medical tests showed that she was no longer pregnant. She had not had an abortion and she had no signs of miscarriage, she had simply ceased to be pregnant.
Hopkins now wanted her to undergo hypnosis and this was performed by his associate, Dr. Clamar. At the first session she described how she had awakened one night to find two small grey faced figures standing beside her bed, and at the next session she described more fully the incident where she had been handed the small black box, saying that first of all she had had a probe pushed up her nose until it seemed to break through the skin near her sinuses and she could taste blood, but when she had looked up into the large black eyes she had felt reassured. A similar case with the nasal probe was described to Hopkins by a girl from Kentucky who told him that when she was five she had had a long probe with a ball on the end inserted into her nose, and Hopkins feels that the ball may be left inside as some sort of implant, and this was brought to mind by another one of Kathie's encounters.
She was woken one night by a scream from her son Robbie's bedroom and she ran to see what was the matter. She found Robbie lying awake and looking shocked and told him that he must have had a bad dream but he told her “Mommy, this ain't no dream.” He had seen a man with a big head come in through the wall and into the closet, he had not let the boy move and he had told him that he wanted his brother Tommy. One week later Kathie went into boys' room and found Tommy covered in blood from a nose bleed in the night. She took him to a doctor who found a small hole high up in his sinuses and the doctor told Kathie that he had probably pushed a pencil, or something similar, up his nose. Hopkins' opinion was that on the first night when Robbie had awoken, the men had then inserted the probe into Tommy's nose, and the night that Tommy had had the nose bleed it may have fallen out again.
More than two years later, in 1986, Kathie dreamt that she was lying on a table with her nightgown pulled up under her breasts while a man examined her. He asked her telepathically how she was feeling and she replied “Kind of crampy.” He then patted her on her stomach and told her “That's good” and she went back to sleep. The next morning when she woke she found her underwear on top of the bedclothes. That day she felt pain in her lower abdomen and this was significant because this was supposed to be the day that she menstruated. Hopkins felt that the “man” knew this and had come to take away her ovum, and he compared this to the testimony of Betty Hill who had had a long needle inserted through her navel, and Barney Hill who said he had had a sperm sample take from him. Hopkins would write:
“Above all, in none of these cases involving either men or women do we have what can be called a basically erotic experience. The descriptions are invariably of a detached, clinical procedure instead, even if some of them result in more or less involuntary ejaculation.”
“Now all of this leads to the unwelcome speculative inference that somewhere, somehow, human beings - or possible hybrids of some sort - are being produced by a technology obviously - yet not inconceivably - superior to ours.”
One thing that helped convince Hopkins that his ideas are true happened during a visit with Kathie in Copley Woods when she said something that took him completely by surprise. He made a remark to her about how lucky she was to have two boys like Tommy and Robbie and she stopped the car and said “Budd, you know I have a daughter too. I know I have a daughter. I think I've seen her. I know what she looks like.” and on her second visit to New York, something else that she had said to him earlier took on a greater meaning than he had first realised. It was to do with the night she had been driving with her two friends and they had seen a U.F.O.
It took place at about the time that she met her future husband and she can only recall being “frozen” in the car, but her friend Dorothy can recall getting out of the car, and they both remember the other girl, Roberta, crouching in the back seat refusing to look, and Kathie's memory then goes to her arrival home, later than usual. When Kathie was hypnotically regressed she could recall the events in further detail, and she said that the girls were looking up into the sky at the U.F.O. which looked like “an airplane with the strobe things on it” and there was a sudden flash in the car which made them all feel cold. Everything went black and she wanted to get out of the car but was unable to move because her arms and legs felt cold and heavy and her back felt stiff, it was as though she was being held down by some invisible force. She remembers getting out of the car and standing next to Dorothy as they watched something float away in to the sky.
Taking her back to the point of the flash in the car, Hopkins suspected that she may have been abducted first and then returned to the car while Dorothy was taken. Kathie recalled a pain that “makes my stomach hurt. It feels like my legs are being pulled off my body from the waist down.” Asking her where the pain was she continued “Where my uterus is, down low, like I'm going to have my period. It's hard, it hurts. It's like a toothache... Oh it feels like someone's pushing on me real hard... Wiggling and pushing right in there.” Hopkins believes that this is the point at which she is impregnated, and that the baby was taken away the following March when she found herself menstruating after finding she was pregnant.
Possibly, and probably, connected to this particular episode is another incident that was recalled by Kathie under hypnosis. She was lying on a table and she says that “I just want to scream.” Hopkins asks her if she wants to scream because of the pain and she says, in a high pitched wailing voice, “No! It's not right, it's not fair. IT'S NOT FAIR! IT'S MINE! IT'S MINE! I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU! IT'S NOT FAIR!” and obviously Hopkins feels that this is the point where her baby is taken away, which was backed up by another account that Kathie gave in which she explained what she had meant when she told him that she had a daughter.
She recalls waking in a place that was “all white” with several “little grey guys” around her. She stood up and one of them put its arm round her waist as if to comfort her, and at this point a little girl came into the room with two more grey men:
“She looked to be about four. She looked about Tommy's size... She was real pretty. She looked like an elf, or an... angel. She had really big blue eyes and a little teeny-weeny nose, just so perfect. And her mouth was just so perfect and tiny, and she was pale, except her lips were pink and her eyes were blue. And her hair was white and wispy and thin... fine... real thin and fine. Her head was a little larger than normal, 'specially in the forehead and back here... The forehead was a little bigger... but she was just a doll. And they brought her to me. And they stood there, and they looked at me. Everyone was looking at me. And I looked at her, and I wanted to hold her. She was just so pretty, and I felt like I just wanted to hold her. And I started crying...”
Before the girl was taken away, Kathie was told that she would see her again. She also recalled that the grey man she thought of as the child's “father” held her hand “and I feel all kinds of things... sad and warm, and care and distance... and goodbye... and lonely... I feel lonely too.” Consciously she says that as the man held her hand she felt a lot of emotions, one of which was guilt, and Hopkins feels that this could be the man's guilt rather than her own.
Bud Hopkins has come in for a lot of criticism in his line of work, mainly because of the kind of sessions he holds to get the information from his subjects, and it is felt that they are giving him what he wants and not necessarily what is true. It has been said that they are being rewarded for providing details and so they will strive to do so all the more. Psychologist at the University of Washington, Elizabeth Loftuss, says that there is no better way to do this than when a person is at their most susceptible, when they are relaxed, i.e. when they are under hypnosis.
Whatever the truth is about alien abduction, it must surely be that there is far too much evidence in favour of it to merely discount it, but is it a genuine phenomenon or is it just the strange workings of the human mind?
It seems that nowadays any phenomenon which can't be explained away at one time or another will be linked to aliens. A good example of this is Crop Circles, another is Cattle Mutilations, which came to the fore in late 1973, though isolated cases were noted in the late 1960s, coming after the dawn of “abduction fever” and now there are several thousand cases reported every year. The epicentre of cases was Minnesota and Kansas where farmers were reporting that their livestock, mainly larger cattle, were being killed in weird and wonderful ways. The animals showed no signs of struggle, no knife or bullet wounds, yet often they were completely devoid of any blood. It also seemed that the animals had been bled elsewhere as the surrounding area was clear of both the missing blood and any sign of footprints, even in a case of one carcass found in a mud hole.
The most puzzling aspect of the phenomenon is the fact that the bodies were missing various organs such as eyes, ears, lips, assorted glands, rectum and genitalia. If this isn't weird enough, the operations had been done with apparent surgical precision. Attempts at explanation were many and varied and included death from unknown phenomena, natural causes and the careful mutilations being caused by scavenging animals. Some of the cows examined were found to have died from a common cattle ailment known as black leg, though this doesn't explain the mutilations. A more popular theory was the involvement of Satanic Cults, though this couldn't explain the lack of footprints especially in the mud hole, it was as though the animal had been dropped from above. In 1975 police thought they had got the breakthrough when they found a blue satchel which contained a pair of surgical gloves, a scalpel and a cow’s ear. However no finger prints were found and the ear matched no reported mutilation.
By the late 1970s the number of mutilations had risen into four figures and they had now occurred in all the main U.S. farming states. An official report followed a year-long enquiry led by Ex Federal Agent Kenneth Rommel, and the two hundred and ninety seven page report concluded that the mutilations were due to predators and scavenging animals, needless to say this didn't satisfy many people, but officially the case was closed. In 1989 the author, Linda Howe, and a pathologist analysed tissue samples taken from wounds and concluded that the animals had all suffered from heat induced changes along the incisions and suggested that this may be caused by a laser being used to cut the flesh.
A momentous event which was eventually blamed on U.F.O.s occurred on November 9th, 1965. A blackout on the east coast of America plunged 80,000 square miles and 36 million people in and around New York into darkness from 5-30 pm to 4 am the following day, trapping nearly 800,000 people in elevators and on underground trains, while many air passengers were forced to circle darkened airports. It is a fact that human kind will strive to make the best out of every situation, and this was backed up by the statisticians who noticed that nine months later they were experiencing a baby boom.
Two days later it was announced that the problem had been caused by a break in the power line from Niagara, but checks found this not to be the case. Next it was announced that the problem was a remote control substation at Clay, New York, but repair men at Clay could find nothing wrong. The press briefly reported a story but later dropped it. The report was based on the evidence of a pilot, Weldon Ross, who had been approaching Hancock Field at Syracuse just before the blackout occurred when he had seen, below him, just over the power lines near Clay substation, a huge red ball of light about 100 feet across. This statement was backed up by a student pilot who had been in the plane with Ross at the time. It was also supported by another witness, Robert C. Walsh who was the Deputy Commissioner for the Federal Aviation Agency in the Syracuse area, and he had seen the same ball a few miles south of Hancock Field. Other witnesses, pilots included, reported seeing two U.F.O.s over Pennsylvania shortly before the blackout with Air Force fighters in pursuit.
Investigators found that the blackout had been caused by the grid being drained of power in some sectors while being overloaded in others, and the safety controls which had worked under similar strains before had failed to work this time.
In 1968 the Atmospheric physicist James Macdonald claimed, during a House Committee on Science and Astronautics, that U.F.O.s were responsible, and he charged the Federal Power Commission with evading the evidence connecting U.F.O.s to the blackout. As the accusation was made in Congress it was entered into the Congressional record. Unfortunately however, his outburst created a storm of criticism from his colleagues who denounced him as a crank, and on June 13th, 1971 James Macdonald was found shot through the head with a gun at his side. The official verdict was suicide.
Other experts claimed that other, similar blackouts were also caused by U.F.O.s, including one in London in the very same month, and they supported their claims by saying that U.F.O. activity was often seen shortly before or during the blackout.
Another mystery sometimes associated with U.F.O.s and aliens, though far less often than most, is “The Missing Link.” That is the link between man as we know him today and the primates that we are believed to have evolved from. Fossilised remains of primates have been found, as have those of primitive man, but never the remains of the evolutionary stage in between, i.e. the “Missing Link.”
Some people believe that abductions are the result of us being monitored by aliens, others go one step further by saying that, not only do they monitor us but they also help us in our daily lives by showing us their technology and how to use it, but of course that is once we are here on earth, surviving and able to accept their help. Many people also believe that the fact we are here at all is thanks to them and that life on earth exists due to their influence, and continues to survive with their help. The missing link has not been found because it does not exist, and that is due to genetic engineering on the part of our “overseers” who “engineered” us so that we appeared in the form we take today, human beings.
If these phenomenon can't be easily attributed to U.F.O.s, then there is one which almost certainly can, and that is “Men In Black” or M.I.B.s. The encounters with M.I.B.s occur at some time after a person has had an encounter with a U.F.O. and usually quite soon afterwards. The term is used quite loosely as there is sometimes a woman as well as men, and they generally visit witnesses of U.F.O.s and try to discourage them from telling people about what they have seen. The M.I.B.s are described as being tall, foreign looking, possibly slightly oriental as they tend to have slanting eyes, dark hued or tanned skin, and at least one was said to be wearing lipstick. They wear black suits and hats, black shoes and socks with white shirts. Their clothes leave a lasting impression on witnesses due to their immaculate condition as they are always well pressed and spotless.
Their mannerisms also leave a lasting impression as they are unusual to say the least. M.I.B.s rarely if ever smile and their movements are described as “awkward” as is their speech which seems as though it is not natural to them and they usually talk in short and formal sentences. They are very business-like and formal, even to the point of being menacing. People who encounter M.I.B.s are left with an overall feeling that they are not entirely human.
When the M.I.B.s are seen to arrive in a car it is always a prestige car such as a Cadillac, a Jaguar or a Rolls Royce and, like their clothing, the car is black and always immaculate even though it is often an old model, sometimes one that has been out of production for a number of years. If the registration number is checked later it is always found to be non-existent, as are the numbers on the identification cards they carry. Often they claim to be working for the military or the C.I.A. and openly proffer their I.D. Cards.
The usual chain of events is that soon after a witness sees a U.F.O. they are contacted by M.I.B.s, sometimes over the telephone, but more commonly in person. What is interesting in some cases is that the M.I.B.s make their appearance too soon after the sighting for the authorities to have investigated the matter properly, and often even before it has been reported to them. They have a disturbing amount of knowledge, some of it personal about the witnesses, who they usually contact when they are alone, in one case minutes after the witness had bid farewell to company. They ask about what the witness saw and heard and what they thought it was. If they say that they think they saw a U.F.O. the M.I.B.s will try to dissuade them, saying that it could not have been and must have been something else. If the hint isn't taken by the witness about what it was or was not and about not telling anybody else about it, then the M.I.B.s will resort to threats against them and their family. It is often these threats which make the witness suspicious of the motives of the M.I.B.s and report them to the authorities, who deny all knowledge of any of their operatives paying such a visit, though even if they were government operatives they would still presumably deny all knowledge of them. There are however no known records of these threats ever being carried out.
A famous case of M.I.B.s was experienced by fifty eight year old Dr. Herbert Hopkins, a doctor and hypnotist, who was investigating the abduction case of David Stephens and his son John Hopkins in Maine in 1975. One evening in September 1976, Hopkins' wife and children had gone out to see a movie, leaving the doctor alone in the house, when the phone rang. The caller identified himself as Vice President of the New Jersey U.F.O. Research Organisation and asked Hopkins if he could discuss the abduction case with him in person to which Hopkins agreed. When he had replaced the receiver he walked to his back door to switch on the porch light to make it easier for his visitor to find his house from the car park, but by the time he had walked from the phone to the back door, his guest was already walking up the porch steps. Hopkins is quoted as saying that he could see “no car, and even if he did have a car, he could not have possibly gotten to my house so quickly from any phone.”
The visitor was dressed in a black suit with black hat, tie and shoes and a white shirt, all of which were immaculate, his first thought was that “he looks like an undertaker.” When he removed his hat he revealed a bald head and it was now that Hopkins noticed the man had no facial hair at all including a lack of eyebrows and eyelashes. The one item of clothing the man wore which wasn't black were his gloves that were grey suede, and when during their conversation he brushed his gloved hand across his lips Hopkins noticed that the glove was smeared with lipstick. It was at this point that the conversation took an unusual turn. The man said to Hopkins that he knew he had two coins in his pocket and asked the doctor to give one of them to him. He did so and the man held it in the palm of his hand, Hopkins saw the coin go in and out of focus then slowly vanish and the man said that “Neither you nor anyone else on this plane will ever see that coin again.”
As the conversation on U.F.O.s continued, the visitor’s speech seemed to slow down and he shakily got to his feet. He told Hopkins that his energy was running low and he must leave. He walked unsteadily down the porch steps and Hopkins saw a light much brighter than a cars headlights and he could hear no engine sound. When Hopkins' family returned home they saw marks on the driveway but they were in the centre of the drive rather than at the edges like car tyre tracks would be, but by next morning they had disappeared. Hopkins decided to comply with his visitors wishes, that he erase all of his tapes of the hypnosis sessions he had carried out during his investigation, thus erasing all his hard work, and all at the request of this strange visitor. Hopkins later found that the New Jersey U.F.O. Research Organisation did not then, or had ever existed.
A few days later, Hopkins' daughter in law, Maureen, received a phone call from a man who claimed to know her husband John and asked if he and a friend could visit them. John however claimed not to know them and agreed to meet them at a restaurant before bringing them into his home. The couple, a male and a female, though not dressed in black were wearing old fashioned clothes and the Hopkins' noticed other certain oddities about the couple, such as the woman's breasts which seemed to be set very low, her legs which seemed to join her hips in a peculiar way, and both seemed to walk in very short steps and tended to lean forward as they walked as though they might fall at any moment. They offered the couple drinks, which were accepted though went untasted, while they asked the Hopkins' a number of questions, some of them intimate, but some as dull as their preferred tastes in television viewing. Throughout the conversation the man had been constantly “pawing and fondling” the woman and asked John if he was doing it correctly, at one stage when John was out of the room the woman asked Maureen how she was made and whether or not she had any nude photographs of herself. When they stood to leave the man seemed unable to walk and his companion seemed unable to move around him and she asked John to “Please move him, I can't move him myself.” The couple then left without further comment.
Though some believe M.I.B.s to be a hallucination there is one case which would seem to put pay to that theory, and it is that of Fireman Jim Templeton. On May 24th, 1964 Jim had been photographing his daughter on a marsh in Cumbria, England and at the time saw nothing unusual, but when he got his pictures back from developing he saw the figure of a man in a spacesuit behind his daughter. The pictures were analysed and the verdict was that the man was either very tall or was floating above the ground. Double exposure was ruled out as the girls head obscured part of the man, and the prize of free film for anyone who could explain the picture was never claimed. Years later, in 1990, the picture was blown up for use in an advertising gimmick by a local copying firm, and clearly visible were a clear visor over breathing tubes and ears. It was in that same year that the first connection with the figure to U.F.O.s was made after Templeton was visited by Men In Black, interestingly not as soon as the picture was taken or developed but only when it was connected with U.F.O.s after being blown up twenty six years later.
Templeton was driven in a black Jaguar car by two men carrying I.D. cards who claimed to be government agents. They took him back to the marsh and asked him many questions including a lot about the behaviour of any animals that had been in the area on the day that he had taken the photograph. He refused to believe their story that he had merely photographed an ordinary man on the marsh at which point they became annoyed and drove away, leaving him to walk the five miles back to his home.
Whatever the cause or origin of M.I.B.s they are certainly very peculiar. They have access to personal information long before anyone else, some of it not available by “normal” means. Their behaviour suggests a non-human origin as though they are merely imitating humans and some suggest teleportation and extra sensory perception. They prove never to be who they say they are and they drive immaculate though old cars with false number plates and make no apparent attempts at covering their lies and false documents, and their threats to witnesses and their families are never carried out. One such threat was: “If you want your wife to stay as pretty as she is....” Some people claim to have been almost run over by cars after a visit from M.I.B.s but then anybody regularly walking down a busy high street could make the same claim.
It is interesting to note that no M.I.B.s have ever been experienced by somebody who hasn't seen a U.F.O. beforehand or had some kind of close encounter, and for possibly this reason alone, like cattle mutilations they will be forever linked with U.F.O.s whether it is justified or not.
So now we have clearly seen that U.F.O.s exist, but what are they and where do they come from? There have been an estimated 14 million U.F.O. sightings in the last forty years, surely some of these have been, or will be explained away, but that would still leave an enormous number of so called visits from outer space. One conservative estimate is that one in twenty sightings cannot be put down to natural causes such as planes, balloons and the like, so out of 14 million sightings, that leaves 700,000 to be explained.
An interesting possible explanation for abductions, and one which comes from an unusual angle, is offered by Peter Brookesmith in his book “U.F.O.s Where Do They Come From?” Brookesmith suggests that aliens seen in abduction cases are an image created by the mind which have their origin in the womb. In the book he compares both a U.F.O. shape with the disc shape of the six day old human ovum attached to the uterus wall, and a typical humanoid figure with a child in the fetal stage, showing that the figure is diminutive in size with a frail appearance, the head is large in proportion to the body, and in turn the eyes are large in proportion to the head. Some sightings mention under-developed or webbed hands, the ears, nose and mouth are small and there are no obvious genitalia, nor is there any body hair and the skin is pallid. If we bear these facts in mind and then add the fact that child birth is one of, if not, the most traumatic times in our lives for both mother and child, and could easily cause a mental scar which stays with us all our lives, then we add what Dr. Benjamin Simon said when regressing Betty and Barney Hill.
He said that abductees may well encounter a U.F.O., but the abduction stage may be caused by some unsettling moment during the encounter, and maybe the encounter itself. Could this be the cause of the vision of a humanoid figure, along of course with medical equipment and embarrassing tests? This would assume though that we can remember, possibly subconsciously our time in the womb, we do know however that we have a certain awareness whilst inside our mothers, and that this is a part of our conditioning, enabling us to recognise and respond to our mothers voice, and when we see her face for the first time to put the two together and treat them as our mother.
The other, and more common, theory is that we are being visited by those who share the vast universe with us, and if we are to consider whether or not U.F.O.s are the craft of alien beings from other planets, we must put things into perspective and try to appreciate what a mammoth task travelling across space would be.
In our solar system alone there are around 10 billion stars and, like our sun, itself a star, some have planets in orbit around them, our sun having nine or possibly more orbiting planets, though we know that none of these nine contain or could support life. It is certainly possible that ours is the only planet in the whole universe which does support life, though the odds for this must surely be as high as those against. Even if we do accept that it is possible for there to be other inhabited planets, we must look at the distances one would have to cover to travel from one to another in a space craft. We can get some idea of the scale of the universe just by looking at the immense size of our own solar system alone.
If we imagine that the sun is the size of an average grapefruit, about 110 mm (4 inches), then in comparison our earth would be the size of a pin head at a distance of about 12 metres (39 ft) away (larger than the width of a tennis court). The largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter, would be the size of a small marble at just 11 mm (0.4 inches) across and about 61 metres (200 ft) away. The furthest known planet from the sun is Pluto, which in our scale would be the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence and could be found 460 metres (1,510 ft) away (the length of four football fields). So we can gain some impression of the vast distances that are involved in space travel and we automatically assume that if aliens did possess the ability to travel such distances, they would want to come and visit us, possibly time and time again.
People on earth have been searching for, and trying to contact, alien beings for years, the first man to propose such an idea was Charles Cross (1842 - 88) who suggested sending a message to Mars using flashing lights, though nowadays we use the S.E.T.I. Programme (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) and its successor Project Pheonix. These projects used, and we continue to use, radio telescopes to send out and receive aliens' signals on up to 240 million channels simultaneously. It is possible that aliens don't communicate as we do but by some other means, and if the victims of Close Encounters are to be believed then telepathy is a distinct possibility, or it may just be that we are impatient and we haven't been waiting long enough. The truth is actually quite depressing.
The most advanced way that we have at present of sending messages through space is by radio waves which travel at the same speed as light, that being 186,000 miles per second, or 670,647,600 mph, but rather than measure it in these terms with such large numbers we use light years, that is the distance that a ray of light travels in a year, which is roughly 6 million million miles. Long before we thought of sending radio messages to alien beings, indeed long before Kenneth Arnold started the modern U.F.O. era, we had been unwittingly sending radio waves out into space in the form of the very first radio programs to be broadcast to those fortunate enough to have a radio set to receive them on about seventy years ago. This means that the first ever radio signals from earth are still only seventy light years away from us. If we then consider that the centre of our own galaxy is three hundred light years away then it is not at all surprising that we have yet to receive a reply to our attempts at communicating, that is assuming that our signals are understood and then replied to in the first place.
Once we had started deliberately attempting communication by radio we began to listen to the universe in 1960, and Dr. Frank Drake of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia began by listening to the two nearest stars most like our own sun, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, with the observatory's 87 ft radio telescope. On the wavelength he was listening to, he heard nothing, but now larger telescopes are used to monitor wavelengths throughout the spectrum from radio to ultra violet and from distant galaxies. When we first started sending our own communications from earth we didn't aim at one spot in space but transmitters sent out signals as the earth rotated and so the signals swept the universe like lighthouse beam. There are estimates that in order to make contact with anybody in space we will have to search as far as 1,000 light years away or search 100,000 stars, but so far we have only covered less than 1,000 stars. To help to make the search for life a little quicker, on March 2nd, 1972 we launched a communication in the form of Pioneer 10 which was a probe sent through the orbit of Mars to rendezvous with Jupiter before heading out of our solar system. It will continue its journey for 2,000,000 years before it reaches the star Aldebaran and for another 10,000,000 years before it reaches the planetary system of another star, unless of course it is found first. On board Pioneer 10 is a gold-anodised aluminium disc that shows a map of our solar system and also pictures of a naked man and woman so that anyone who should find it in space will know where it has come from and who sent it. It also contains instructions on how to play it, and when it is played, whoever finds it will hear sounds from earth including hello in several languages.
We are always led to believe that the powers that be are skeptical about finding life elsewhere or being visited by other life forms, but why is it that people are so reluctant to believe that it is possible? Why do we come up against a wall of ignorance about visits from aliens when we ourselves are trying to visit other places in space. We have already visited the moon, and Mars is set to be the next target, but what if somebody else out there is trying to do the same? What if we were to find a similar probe sent by somebody else into the deep recesses of space in the vain hope that somebody may find it and know that they are not alone? It is pure hypocrisy to reject the notion of extra-terrestrial life and visits from such, when we are striving to do that exact same thing ourselves. Are we fearful of discovering once and for all that we are not as intelligent as we like to think we are? What would it do to us to discover that we are not the most advanced civilisation in the universe? This is a genuine phenomenon when modern man on his journeys of discovery around the world came across primitive tribes and civilisations which immediately spelt the end for them. This is known as the “Conquistador Syndrome” and it has been seen to exist many times.
For example what would happen if we were to be shown a new source of energy by an alien race that meant that we were no longer dependent on oil resources? The economic structure throughout the whole world would collapse overnight, but despite our fears, the search for life goes on, and we have been sending out radio messages to various star clusters, in particular to the M13 cluster in the constellation of Hercules which contains many hundreds of thousands of stars, so it is a fair bet that if there is indeed life out there then it may well exist here. There is however one setback, M13 is 25,000 light years away, so the signal will take until the year 26, 974 to get there, and if there is a reply forthcoming, of which there is no guarantee, then it will reach us another 25,000 years later. It is for this reason that S.E.T.I. and Pheonix were set up as we would stand a greater chance of communication if we try to receive signals which are already on their way to us from elsewhere. Disappointingly though in its 10 years so far, S.E.T.I. has only ever received one possible transmission that has passed all the “acid tests.” It was received between September 9th and 11th, 1988 and it was far more powerful than anything else we have received but it has not been repeated, which is unfortunately one of the criteria necessary before we can officially class it as an intentional signal from another race.
There is a school of thought that believes we have been visited by alien beings, not just recently, but also way back into the far reaches of time, and one such proposer of this theory is the author of a book published in 1968 entitled “Remembrance of the Future” which was translated into English and called “Chariots of the Gods.” The book sold more copies than any other book apart from the bible with over seven million sales worldwide making its author a millionaire. The author was Erich Von Daniken, and he proposed that Earth was visited thousands of years ago and many times and that ancient civilisations were influenced by these visitations. Von Daniken looked at the different types of pyramids being built around the world by different races, some of which were strikingly similar, yet these races were previously thought to have been primitive, and he looked at many examples of ancient art engraved in stone and suggested that these engravings contained pictures of space men and their craft. These interpretations by Von Daniken were a little far-fetched to say the least and many people condemned him and his work as flights of fantasy, hardly surprising really when you consider one suggestion he put forward for contacting extra-terrestrials. He said:
“One audacious but perfectly reasonable idea: A gigantic equilateral triangle would have its 600 mile long sides sown with potatoes; in this enormous triangle a circle would be sown with wheat. In this way a vast yellow circle, surrounded by a green equilateral triangle, would appear every summer. Incidentally, a most useful and productive experiment.”
When Von Daniken was imprisoned after being found guilty of fraud and embezzlement while running a hotel in Switzerland his reputation was done untold damage, and even more so when some of the stone tablets that he had claimed had come from biblical times were found to have been faked, and the American science program “Nova” tracked down the man who had made them. Von Daniken also claimed that the Mayan civilisation had known that the Venusian year lasted for 584 days due to information they received from extra-terrestrials, but in fact it lasts only 225 days and only appears longer when the planet is observed from the earth, so obviously the Maya had merely observed the planet themselves and counted the days until they saw it again.
Von Daniken also wrote about the Egyptian pyramids and how they may have been built by an alien race as the constructions were so complicated as to be beyond the capabilities of a human race at that time. He is certainly not alone in this argument, even today, but in his argument he somehow managed to come to the conclusion that rope didn't exist in Egyptian times, yet many tomb paintings depict men using ropes and he also managed to multiply the weight of the blocks in the pyramids by five. He theorised that the famous lines on the floor of the desert in Peru, the Nazca Lines, were used as landing strips and parking spaces for spacecraft, but he fails to mention that the lines are barely scratched onto the loose surface of the desert floor and would be blown away by any wind caused by aircraft turbulence, and they have only remained undamaged since 500 AD because the desert is windless. When facts like this were put to Von Daniken he said that in fact it was alright to tell lies about things if you were merely trying to convince people of the truth.
Though for the large part his theories were discredited along with him, there are many who believe the basic theory that Von Daniken based his work on was a sound one, and there are other good examples of ancient close encounters. One such example is reported by Robert Temple, an American with a degree in Oriental Studies and Sanskrit.
Temple made a detailed study of the African Dogon tribe from the Republic of Mali, 300 miles south of Timbuktu in the former French Sudan. The Dogon people have many traditions and most of them are centred around a star which they call “Po Tolo” (the seed that forms the staple part of their diet and whose botanical name is “Digitaria”). Po Tolo lies in the constellation “Canis” - which is why it is also referred to as the Dog Star - and its name of Digitaria is significant in that this is the smallest seed known to the Dogon.
Temple found an account of the Dogon people published in 1950 in the “Journal De La Sociate Des Africainistes” called “A Sudanese Sirius.” It was written by two French anthropologists, Marcelle Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who had lived with the Dogon from 1931 for a number of years and had learned the truth behind many of their traditions. In 1941 Griaule was initiated into their religious secrets and told that fish like creatures called “Nomo” had come to Earth from Sirius to civilise earth's people. In the detailed account Temple found the following passage:
“The starting point of creation is the star which revolves around Sirius and is actually named the Digitaria Star, (Sirius is visible in the winter as the brightest star in the southern sky and is often called the Dog Star while its smaller companion is often referred to as The Pup) it is regarded by the Dogon as the smallest and heaviest of all the stars; it contains the germs of all things. Its movement on its own axis and around Sirius upholds all creation in space, we shall see that its orbit determines the calendar.”
If the fact that the Dogon knew that the stars revolved on both an axis and an orbit and that the orbit took fifty years to complete is not startling enough, then consider the fact that Sirius B - Sirius' orbiting star - is not visible to the naked eye and was only discovered in the last century. It is 8.7 light years away and was thought to exist from the middle of the 19th Century but it was not actually discovered until 1862, and was not described in detail until the 1920s. In fact it was only in 1928 that Sir Arthur Eddington proposed the theory of the existence of white dwarves, but it wasn't until 1970 that Sirius B was photographed and astronomers found that it was almost concealed by the brighter Sirius and that it was actually a white dwarf, which is the smallest visible star in the universe, and it was also historic in that it was the first white dwarf to be discovered.
Just as the Dogon said, Sirius B is the smallest seed in the universe which is why the name Digitaria is so fitting as a white dwarf is extremely dense, it is the size of the earth but the weight of the sun, and one cubic foot of matter from it would weigh 2,000 tons. The Dogon said that it was made of a metal and is so heavy “that all earthly beings combined cannot lift it.” They were also correct about the elliptical orbit of Sirius' dark companion that takes fifty years to complete. It is possible that the Pup was much brighter 5,000 years ago and there are ancient records of it being described as red, and though it is true that red giants will eventually become white dwarfs, this process is an extremely long one and could not take place over the time scale of 5,000 years.
Sirius is the brightest star in the sky and was the basis of the Egyptian calendar so it is understandable that the Dogon, among other civilisations, would have traditions and myths based around it, but it is interesting that they consider Sirius to be less important than its almost invisible companion Sirius B, but how could they come to know so much about it long before it was discovered, and yet be so accurate in their information?
As can be expected there are arguments about just how this “primitive” tribe could have come by this information, and it is suggested that the Dogon merely gained their knowledge from their ancestors which were the Egyptians from before 3200 BC. It is also argued that the evidence of Sirius B being red seems to be over 5,000 years old and that it infers contact in the past between earth and beings from another planet, and there are estimates that this contact could have been made between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago.
Dogon tradition also names “Nommo” as the founder of civilisation who came from Sirius B to set up society on earth, and the Nommos, they say, are similar to “Oannes” who in Sumerian and Babylonian tradition is the demigod leader of the amphibious “Annedoti” creatures that brought civilisation to earth.
The opposing argument is that the Dogon themselves were visited, and it is true to say that they also knew of details about our own solar system, such as the sun being dry and dead, that Saturn had rings, that the planets revolved around the sun, that the earth spun on an axis and that Jupiter had its own moons. They refer to the home of the Nommo as a star but they must mean a planet, they referred to them as Gods and they drew diagrams of the craft they arrived in and say that they landed in a place north west of where they now live, incidentally this is where the Dogon originate from.
If either of these arguments are to be believed, then just 8.7 light years away is a planet in the region of Sirius that is host to amphibious creatures far in advance of ourselves that have visited earth and possibly still observe us. What is interesting about this account is that where Von Daniken was proposing his own ideas, Temple was merely quoting the accounts of the two anthropologists that had lived with the Dogon, been initiated into their religious rites and learned their traditions from them personally.
Astronomers have so far failed to locate a planet in orbit around Sirius, but if there is one there it would need to be a long way from the star as the Dog Star is many, many times brighter than our own sun, so any planet too close to it would be too hot to support life, but our own telescopes may not be able to see it as we only spotted Sirius B because it causes perturbations in the orbit of Sirius. If life did exist on a planet near a sun as hot as Sirius then it would probably be a hot and steamy planet, so any life which evolved there would be most likely to do so in its seas, should they have any that have not evaporated, and which would be much cooler than the air. Though these potential life forms may be able to spend time on land, they would have to remain close to water to keep their skin moist and help to maintain their body temperature.
The fact that we are only so far able to send and receive radio signals over vast distances and not manned space craft is perhaps quite depressing, and we are obviously many years from manned missions heading for the far reaches of space as the technology that we possess at the moment will not even carry us to the furthest planet in our own solar system, and even if one of our craft would make it as far as Pluto, then a new born baby placed inside at launch would die of old age long before the planet Pluto was in sight, but should we eventually make it to a distant planet, how would we feel if we were to find it devoid of life?
When a friend of Arthur C. Clark became the Deputy Director of the C.I.A. he gathered his scientists together on his very first day in office and said to them: “What's the truth about U.F.O.s?” They told him: They were positive that there is lots of intelligent life out there in space, but they don't have a shred of evidence that proves it. There is a way however that we can calculate the probability of there being life elsewhere in the universe, and that is by using what is known as the Drake Equation, and the equation is as follows:
i.e. N = 100,000,000,000,000.
Let's take a few steps forward; we've got to a planet and we've found other forms of life, what form would they take? Nobody talks of Close Encounters with beings other than vaguely humanoid ones, be they green, grey, blue or Reptoid. It is a fact though that life will always try to adapt and evolve in its continual struggle to survive. For instance if a creature has the ability to communicate by telepathy and so has little or no use for ears, then their ears will be small and under developed or maybe even non-existent. Many aliens are described as having large oval eyes, could this be the result of living in a world with little or no light? If a planet has a gravity much greater than our own, then the creatures who live there would possibly be quite flat in appearance with strong internal bone structures, external shells or exoskeletons, whereas a world with a very low gravity would spawn creatures which are often airborne and must have ways of controlling their movements during their long periods of flight and would also have little use for strong bones and shells but more need for highly developed muscular tissue. Many people believe that we on earth have a largely dormant capability for telepathic communication which we sometimes hear of people using, but we rather use our mouths and ears and eyes to communicate with each other, and it is curious how aliens are able to cope with conditions on earth, i.e. temperature, air content and gravity with apparently no great difficulty.
There are problems with accepting that U.F.O.s are of an extra-terrestrial nature, for instance even if they could make it to earth and back, why would they continue to visit us and then leave without making apparently proper contact? There are many reports of beings seen taking samples of plant life, rocks, soil and even sea water, and however credible it may sound, animal organs and human bodily fluids, but why go to all that trouble if they don't want to make contact with us? Could they be afraid of the Conquistador Syndrome?
Another interesting feature of U.F.O.s is that in abduction cases, and also when Adamski spoke to the Venusians and they explained where they came from, it is always just beyond the bounds of our own technology and knowledge, never too far ahead so as to leave us behind and bemused, but never too close for us to fully grasp, and if we were to compare the learning curve of our own technology and knowledge with that of our visitors then we would find them very similar, though ours would always be one step behind and never quite catching up, though we do try. Could they be trying to guide us by seeing that we are nearly on the verge of a discovery and they then give us just enough information to help us along?
Despite our feeble attempts at space travel, it is widely believed that astronauts on space missions have encountered alien craft, and should extra-terrestrials be aware of our efforts to travel across space then it would surely be in their interest to monitor our progress. There is a school of thought which believes that lunar landings didn't continue, not because of lack of funding or the rechannelling of funds into other ventures, but because the astronauts encountered other life forms during these missions. There have also been numerous reports of manned space craft merely orbiting the earth encountering alien vessels.
The details of the former Soviet Union's attempts at space flight are clouded in secrecy as it is thought that in their haste to beat the U.S. into space, a feat which they achieved, they cut corners and many cosmonauts died in their quest on missions doomed to fail before they even left the ground. One craft which did make it into space and back again was Voskhod 1, whose crew of three had requested that they be allowed to stay in orbit because they wanted to investigate further some things which they had seen from their craft. Indeed their journey around earth was intended to last longer than it did, and many believe that it was forced down by U.F.O.s but the official story is that the cosmonauts had wanted to look further at the Aurora around the Antarctic, however they are unlikely to admit to a technical failure so perhaps we will never know.
There are also in existence many photographs taken from outer space aboard our own craft of what usually appears as “strange lights.” The rational explanation is that they are reflections of the sun caused by the craft themselves, either by their structure or the windows. One such photograph though is shrouded in mystery, it was taken by James Mcdivitt aboard Gemini 4 on June 4th, 1965 while he was passing over Hawaii. The picture, which was released by N.A.S.A., shows two fuzzy sources of light, and he was told that he had seen his own booster rocket in orbit but he doubted this and was adamant that the pictures he was shown and the one released, were not the same ones which he had taken. He added that his pictures showed a large object shaped like a beer can, and it also seems that N.A.S.A. were aware of this swap. Mcdivitt then looked through all the pictures which had been taken during the flight and he could see none which showed the object he had photographed.
Another photograph which was taken from space, but this time not by an astronaut, was of the Martian surface and it appeared to show a mountain in the shape of a human face, and this argument is used by some who say that a civilised race must have made it. The image though is not a “natural” one as it has been beamed back to earth and enhanced many times, so if the computer sees an image it will make it clear. There is a counter argument which says that the face isn't there at all as the human mind will always try to see symmetry where there isn't any, so we look at it and see something that isn't necessarily there. Even if there is a feature which looks like a face on Mars there are many to be found on Earth as well and these are perfectly natural occurrences. The best one is a Canadian Island called Point Bernard Shaw which, when viewed from the air, looks uncannily like the famous writer, including the hair line, beard, nose, mouth and eye sockets, and this don't forget is a completely natural feature formed by the winds and the rains over many years.
Evidence which cannot be easily substituted as photographs are the radio communications between the astronauts and the men on the ground, many of which are picked up and recorded by radio hams and enthusiasts as they occur and make very interesting listening. One example is from the crew of the Apollo 11 mission who were asked by N.A.S.A. “You sure you don't have anyone else in there with you?” after they received mysterious sounds over the radio. An Apollo 12 crew saw what they thought to be lunar module panels moving away from them but were puzzled by this as one seemed to be moving much faster than the others. They were told by mission control “Well let's assume it's friendly anyway OK.” Though N.A.S.A. insists that comments like this are made in jest and are aimed to relieve the great amount of stress and tension involved in space flight, it is also certain that any compelling evidence that what is being said isn't a joke would be edited out of the transcript that is released to the public.
A recent alleged close encounter by astronauts occurred after the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. The shuttle involved was Discovery on flight No. STS 29 on March 14th, 1989, and it wasn't until a fortnight later that the story was broken by the press. Reporter Donald Ratsch was listening via the Goddard Amateur Radio Club to the transmissions between Houston and the shuttle, and at 06-35 he could clearly hear the words “We have a problem.... we have a fire” and indeed it was later found that there had been a fire on this flight and some electrical problems. Seven minutes later, at 06:42, Ratsch heard the sentence “Houston, Discovery... we still have the alien space craft under observance.” Ratsch was recording these transmissions and the tape clearly contains the above communication, but what is not clear though is whether or not the tape itself is genuine, N.A.S.A. are not saying that they said these things in jest, they are simply denying that they ever said them at all.
There are many people and U.F.O. researchers who think that the U.S. “Star Wars” Program was designed to warn us of not a military invasion on earth but an invasion from beyond the Earth, and the shuttle Discovery again had a close encounter two years later, in September 1991, when N.A.S.A. cameras aboard the shuttle filmed what is said to be a Star Wars weapon being fired at a U.F.O.. The film shows a U.F.O. emerging out of the Earth's atmosphere and flying towards the top left hand side of the picture when there is a bright flash from the bottom left and, as the U.F.O. takes evasive action and flies out into space, a bright streak shoots across the screen from the bottom left and passes by the spot where the U.F.O. had been. Dr. John C. Kasher is a Professor of Physics who worked on the Star Wars Program and he says that the footage does indeed show a Star Wars weapon being fired, while N.A.S.A. say that it shows ice particles affected by the rockets on the shuttle, or perhaps waste being jettisoned from it. Kasher responds by asking: “Could either of these move slowly in one direction and then suddenly stop for half a second before moving away quickly in another?”
Earlier we have looked at the scale of the universe and some of the problems we have with travelling the vast distances involved at the speeds we are capable of at the moment, so we would obviously need to be able to travel much faster in order to reach the parts of space where we may find other forms of life, but we have no proof that it is possible to travel at such massive speeds as they would need to be at least equal to light speed.
The great expert on such matters has long thought to be Albert Einstein whose “Theory of Relativity” is considered to be correct according to all the evidence we have amassed thus far. Einstein said that “near” light speed is the highest attainable because when an object approaches light speed, its energy is no longer converted to kinetic energy but to mass, so an object travelling at light speed would have infinite mass. Once again however there is an exception to the rule. What if a particle were to have no mass, then it must surely be able to surpass light speed? Massless particles are known as “Tachyons” but whether they exist or not is not known for certain, but it is highly possible when you consider the very complex laws of quantum physics. The other big factor is “time dilation” i.e. the faster you go the slower that time will run, so a clock on a craft travelling at light speed will run slower than a clock elsewhere.
We have equipment called particle accelerators; low energy accelerators can hurl objects around at 0.44 of light speed, and high energy accelerators which have a circumference of seventeen miles or more - the largest being in Geneva, Switzerland - can hurl electrons and anti-electrons much more quickly than this, in fact at 0.99999999995 of light speed. Objects travelling at this speed have been found to have a mass 100,000 times greater than when they are at rest, and one particular particle, a “meson,” with a life span of 2 millionths of a second was accelerated to half-light speed in 1961, and its life span was increased by 50%. This is obviously only a small amount but it goes to show that so far Einstein is indeed correct, but even if we were able to send a manned space craft through space at these speeds, it is still far too slow for our purposes.
We often hear talk of parallel dimensions to our own, that there is more than one universe and that all exist together but on different “planes” and that U.F.O.s could come from these parallel universes, a possibility which would seem to be supported by the coin which was made to disappear in front of Herbert Hopkins' eyes to another plane. If this were the case would the U.F.O.s as they appear do so in a cloud of gas, as described by some witnesses rather than being seen to fly to a particular spot? And could it also explain how M.I.B.s can appear so suddenly, again as witnessed by Hopkins.
Stranger still is the theory that U.F.O.s and their occupants are in fact an evolved state of man as we know him today, and that they, or in fact we, have mastered the art of time travel and are visiting ourselves in the past.
A more rational possibility is the “Tectonic Stress” theory, and it is the brain child of Professor Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist, who theorises that tension and stress below the surface of the earth can create, due to electromagnetism, distant lights in the sky, and can also interfere with the electromagnetic activity in the human mind. He theorises that apparitions of U.F.O.s could be caused in this way, and similarly so too could apparitions that appear as ghosts. The brain tries to make sense of these apparitions and so they appear as space craft, aliens, angels and of course ghosts.
It seems that electromagnetism, radiation and microwaves play a large part in U.F.O. theory, and a physicist / engineer James McCampbell who used to work at N.A.S.A. has examined thousands of U.F.O. reports and notes that these energies are present in almost all. Interference with car engines, electrical interference, heat and burning and radiation sickness are all consistent with high levels of microwave radiation. Also consistent with this is the humming and high pitched sounds, strange odours and a metallic taste. Disturbingly some witnesses who have got a little too close to U.F.O.s have been found during autopsy to have been cooked on the inside, consistent with microwaves, and less extreme cases of this are cars becoming hot to the touch and minor sun burns.
Working with Dr. John Derr, Persinger looked at a spate of U.F.O. sightings in Colorado to try to prove his theory, and he went a long way towards doing just that. In 1963 a munitions factory pumped hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic waste in to a two mile deep well, and in doing so they unwittingly lubricated a fault system, and over the five years that the pumping went on, there were over 1500 earthquakes reported as the plates rubbed together. This created a slow ripple effect of minor tremors which emanated out from the factory at speeds of 30 to 80 miles per month. These tremors were monitored as they spread out, and it was found that just before they entered an area there were reports of U.F.O.s in that area, and a clear cycle was spotted which ran; injection - lights in the sky - earthquake.
The process of creating lights by friction is called “Triboluminescence” and has been studied by Dr. Alan Mills of the University of Leicester. Light can be created by simply rubbing two pieces of quartz together in a darkened room and many other minerals also achieve the same results. Another way is to crush the crystals, and this can be done with something as simple as a sugar lump. There is one problem however, the light is only created at source, that is, in the exact spot where the friction occurs, so when two pieces of quartz are rubbed together, the light appears in between them, and when the sugar lump is crushed it gives off a light as it disintegrates. Nobody knows how this light could manifest itself above ground but that is not to say however that it does not do so, and there is obviously a clear connection between lights in the sky and earthquakes, but again nobody knows why one should precede the other. We now move to Washington State, U.S.A. where this whole U.F.O. episode started with Kenneth Arnold in 1947, but this time however we go particularly to the Yakima region where there have been many reports of various phenomenon such as Bigfoot, strange sounds but most commonly balls of light.
The reports come from the lookouts who work in the area watching for forest fires, and as such they have to report every light they see, even those in the sky. One such lookout is Dorothea Sturm who, in her thirty five years there, has seen over a hundred lights and strange objects in the sky, and it is here that Persinger and Derr again used their theory to explain them. The pair found the area to have many faults in the ground, and studying the sightings they found that lights were most often seen over these local faults. More interestingly they found that the sightings were more frequent in the time before a local tremor took place, but this explanation does not explain all U.F.O. sightings, and probably not even all the reports of lights in the sky, but it could well explain many of them.
Persinger also looked at abduction cases to see if these experiences could be created by some kind of strange electromagnetic field, possibly also caused by the same Tectonic Stress. To do this he built a dark, sound proof chamber in which the patient would sit while wearing a special helmet. This helmet would generate a weak magnetic field which can be controlled by a computer so that Persinger is able to control the shape of the electromagnetic wave that it transmits through the brain. During his experiments the kind of thing that the patients would report feeling were. The feeling that they were floating through a tube, floating in a cave, feeling detached or feeling that another mind was talking through their own. They would feel as if they were spinning, their body was vibrating or something were moving through their body. Some would experience a sudden recall of childhood memories while one particular wave pattern caused them to feel as if they were dying and some of them would see the “white light.” Throughout the experiment they would know that they were alone in the room but would still feel as if somebody was in with them, and they would feel as if they were being pulled, pushed and prodded. Could people in a state of semi sleep confuse these feeling and images with an alien abduction?
Whereas Persinger used his tectonic stress to account for the electromagnetic field that could cause these feelings outdoors, paranormal researcher, Albert Budden, looked for a link with high tension power lines and radio waves. He feels that certain people may be more sensitive to these than others, and of the fifty cases he has researched he has found that most of the people involved have had, at one time or another, some sort of electrical experience such as being hit by lightning, being near a lightning strike or they have been electrocuted, and he says this may cause some kind of permanent damage to the body and the mind (the permanent damage could explain why abductees feel that they are taken many times and monitored constantly). Budden has found that this is not only true for alien abductions but for other psychic or electrical phenomenon as well, such as a television switching itself on when a person is near it or tingling sensations in the body. Again this could explain some of the cases that have so far gone unanswered, but surely not all of them.
Theorists on the propulsion methods of U.F.O.s have a very difficult task as U.F.O.s are seldom seen to be propelled by “engines” and are often noiseless. A common theory is that they may harness the power of gravity, and Dr. Frederick Alzofon proposed that such a theory is the more likely.
Scientist Kenneth Behrendt from New Jersey has been investigating the propulsion systems of U.F.O.s since the early 1980s and has been trying to quantify the forces needed to propel a craft at the speeds that have been related to him by witnesses. His calculations are as follows:
If a craft thirty two feet in diameter hovering near ground level rises and disappears out of sight in ten seconds in a clear sky it would need to reach an altitude of 20.83 miles. If it accelerated uniformly, any crew on board would experience an inertial force of 68.38 Gs and would reach a speed of 15,000 mph. If the 32 feet wide craft weighed a mere ten tons its engines would need to produce a force of 1,368 million pounds at 27.36 million horsepower or 20,000 megawatts, this is equivalent to twenty 1,000 megawatt power plants at peak output. Behrendt says that a craft of this size would be unable to produce such power, therefore he surmises that any craft moving at these speeds must be a massless craft, or free of the forces normally imposed by gravity.
In 1951 at Draakensteen Mountain, South Africa a close encounter took place and the witness, an engineer, was told how the craft he saw was powered. The beings he spoke with told him that their craft didn't have an engine but used a system which nullified gravity. To do this they used a tube which contained a heavy fluid that circulated around it creating a magnetic field. At the speed of light this fluid is subjected to radiation so that when the fluid is leaving the tube, it is already entering again at the other end.... its relative speed is infinite.
Another propulsion system was explained during an abduction case in October 1974 in Aveley, Essex where the man of the family was told that the ship had two propulsion systems, one for use in space which fired vortices of ionized particles via an ion drive, but this was too dangerous to use inside an atmosphere, so they would use an older and safer method that converted the magnetic poles of particles outside the craft to the same as those inside the craft's core. This process creates a thrust, and a rapid cycling of the process creates a drive force. One side effect of this, he was told, is that it can create unusual visual distortions to an outside observer, these include a pulsating craft, a shape changing craft and even invisibility by filtering light from the surrounding objects through a field and creating a hologram of the scenery.
If we take a giant leap and suppose that such propulsion systems can be achieved with the right technology, and that aliens have already found us and continue to visit us, then the big question which begs an answer then becomes: Why?
One theory is that they are taking samples from earth, and indeed many have been seen digging earth, taking rocks and even pumping sea water, in fact a U.F.O. was seen in 1980 off the coast of Brazil descending toward a second craft on the surface of the sea, these two craft then joined after apparently signalling to each other by changing colours and then moved upwards into the sky as one. There are many tales of sample taking aliens who rush away when discovered, in 1919 in Iowa an entity rushed back to its craft and flew away in such a haste that it collided with the tree tops. In Canada in 1914, a craft apparently syphoning sea water through a hose flew away almost leaving behind one of its crew which clung to the side of the craft.
It is not just rocks and water that they seem to be interested in but also animals seem to hold a certain fascination for them. In Cheshire, England in 1978, beings were seen taking a cow's measurements, and in Sussex, England a dog was the object of their interest but the owner palmed them off with a china model rather than part with his pet. However they were apparently more successful in Yorkshire, England in 1980 when policeman Alan Godfrey said that during his abduction he saw a black dog on board the craft. Stranger still is the testimony of a man in Spain in 1978 who was told by alien beings that they wished to examine his dog, but while he was there they may as well take a look at him also.
Another theory for the attentions of alien craft is that their craft are in need of repair as was telepathically communicated to ambulance driver Reg from Yorkshire, England when he woke to find tall beings in his bedroom. He was told to lie on his bed and when he did he had a feeling of floating upwards until he felt he was inside an object. He was then examined by a probe and told not to ask any questions as he was an “insignificant being.... like a worm.” He was also told that, to them, time was different, and a thousand years were to them “but a day.” There was no further mention of repairing the craft and it is thought that this was just a ruse to get him to cooperate with them as shortly afterward he was returned to his bed.
Witnesses have watched beings repairing their craft at, among other places, Brazil and New York, and it is believed by some that the craft at Rendlesham Forest was damaged as it hit the trees and the entities in the shafts of light in the woods were carrying out repairs, and of course let us not forget the crash at Roswell, though it was obviously a little too late to repair “that” craft after it had landed.
There is a school of thought however that these repairs are set up to make the beings seem fallible and therefore less “frightening” to us, as a race which could build a craft to travel to earth from wherever they come from would surely not need to seek human help to mend it, beside which, the ratio of U.F.O. landings to breakdowns is much higher than one would expect.
Another theory is that they are curious about us and wish to observe us and find out just what makes us tick. This was apparently the case when Herb Schirmer, a Police Officer (later Police Chief), was in his patrol car in December 1967 in Ashland, Nebraska.
At around 2-30am on December 3rd Schirmer went to investigate when he heard a commotion coming from some cattle and saw an object in the road in front of him. Thinking that it was a broken down truck he switched on his spotlight, and caught in the beam was a disc shaped object. Schirmer drove toward it and it took off. Thirty minutes later at 3 am, Schirmer's report stated that he “saw a flying saucer at junction of Highways 6 and 63, believe it or not!” After making his report he felt thirsty and tired and could feel a buzzing in the back of his neck where there was a strange red mark. At the time Schirmer was unaware that fifteen or twenty minutes had passed which were unaccounted for, and investigations into the missing time led to hypnosis sessions which seemed to explain, as far as Schirmer was concerned, the missing minutes.
Apparently when Schirmer had shone his spotlight on the object in the road it lifted off the ground and landed again near some electricity pylons. He now suffered some sort of interference as his spotlight, engine and radio failed to work. When he looked up he saw a group of beings walking towards him, they were “typical” in appearance being under five feet tall with grey white faces, large eyes and thin lips. One of them operated a device in its hand which gave off a beam of light and the patrol car was surrounded by a green mist. Schirmer passed out and awoke again outside his car and spoke to the beings.
They asked him if he was a watchman and if there was a power station or a reservoir nearby, he declined their offer to shoot at their craft which they now lead him over to, and both asked and answered questions about each other. Some of the things they told him were that their craft was an observation ship and they had been watching humans for a long time, they said it was made of magnesium and was powered by harnessing the forces of “Reversible Electromagnetism” which in turn harnessed the power of gravity. They told him that they were sucking power from the overhead electricity cables which they used to create a defensive force field when close to the ground, and it was this that caused interference with car radios and engines. They then showed him an object, about the same size and shape as a car wheel hub cap, which was a remote flying sensor that relayed pictures back to the craft and was used to look at an area before they landed. The reason for this particular visit was to collect animal samples for a breeding analysis program. A possible precursor to the many human samples later taken in the many abduction cases and, as mentioned earlier, alien technology not making leaps ahead of ours, as animal genetics was less of a mystery to us than human genetics in 1967.
They then told Schirmer that they were worried about how hostile we humans were as they had been shot at by military aircraft. They would try to act randomly when visiting earth as they knew that world powers and governments would try to look for patterns in their operations and try to predict their next move, obviously they didn't want this and did not appreciate being shot at. They would also erase human memories of encounters with them to ensure that they, and their actions, remain shrouded in mystery so we knew that they existed but did not know enough to interfere with their observations and experiments. It is well within their capabilities to destroy us as a race but this is not their intent and they wish to continue observing us long term. Indeed they said that they would contact Schirmer a further two times. The interesting thing about his encounter is that it was apparently duplicated in detail thirteen years plater in Todmorden, West Yorkshire in 1980, and this time it occurred again to a police officer, the earlier mentioned Alan Godfrey, who, like Schirmer, was checking on livestock, suffered engine and radio failure, saw a beam of light and was told that he would be visited again and “lost” fifteen or twenty minutes in time.
As well as observation and research it seems that our guests are even going so far as to apparently cure witnesses of disease, in one case even treating a diagnosed terminal stomach cancer. The case occurred in Rio De Janeiro to the daughter of a rich man who, in August 1957, had failed to respond to treatment. She was moved to Petropolis, a place in the country air, and on October 25th was lying in bed in great pain under the influence of the painkiller morphine. However she was not alone in the room and all those present saw the room lit with a bright light as a disc hovered outside. Two beings emerged from the craft and entered the room where one touched the head of the girl's father and apparently received information from him on his daughter's illness. They moved over the girl's stomach which began to glow with a blue light and illuminate her insides like an x-ray. They pointed an implement at the infected area and some minutes later turned the machine off and left the girl in a deep sleep. The implement they used looked a little like a laser, which of course did not exist in 1957. The same being then again communicated with the girl's father using telepathy and told him that they would leave a small hollow object with thirty small white balls inside. They were to give her one of these balls every day until they were all gone, and all they asked for in return was that all those present in the room kept quiet about what they had seen, to which they all agreed, and in due course the girl made a full recovery. The story was later told by one of the family's servants who was present at the time but who would not give the name of the family.
It would seem in some cases that the alien beings wish to help us in some way, though not always as directly as in the above case, one predominant message seems to be our destruction of the planet by industry, car exhaust fumes and other abuses of the atmosphere by nuclear energy, both in bombs and in the production of electricity. One farmer, Gary Wilcox from Newark Valley, New York, encountered two alien beings who warned him of the dangers of global warming and told him about the hole in the ozone layer. This may not seem so extraordinary, but the encounter occurred in April 1964 when no scientist had even given a thought to the ozone layer. Earlier warnings of danger received from alien beings throughout the 1950s had been predominantly concerning the nuclear holocaust, and it is almost as if the beings wish to help us preserve the earth as much as we do so that they can continue to monitor us, and a recurring feature of close encounters is the further visits that the witness or witnesses will receive.
Witnesses have been told many tales by alien beings and they can be as unusual as an offer to inject a special glue into cracks in the earth’s crust, or as mundane as introducing viruses and diseases to us which would cause confusion among the us and slow down our advancements in certain technological fields in which we were making progress too quickly. They are concerned that we must be fully aware, and have full knowledge, of what we are doing. Whatever their reason for wanting to help us preserve the earth it seems apparent that this is certainly one of their intentions. One witness in Edinburgh in 1980 was told that: “This was our planet before you and we will not allow you to destroy it. If you try we will send a warning that will shudder the earth. Only the innocent will survive.” Maybe it is for no reason as complicated as these, but only a wish to preserve a part of the universe they share with us, and they want to help their neighbours to survive and nurture it. One witness was told that he “didn't know how lucky he was to live here” as the earth was one of the universe's treasures as it supported myriad life forms which few other planets could sustain.
Apart from some of these reasons for us to warrant alien attention, by far the most predominant is the testing and sample taking of human subjects, some as unlucky as Carl Higdon from Wyoming who was told by his abductors that he was unsuitable for their purposes. He felt that it was because of his forty one years of age and his vasectomy making him unable to breed, in fact any abduction case which doesn't feature the taking of samples or breeding may be viewed as unusual and certainly in the minority.
So who takes U.F.O.s seriously? It would appear that not only do some members of the public and witnesses to sightings but various world leaders as well. For example, imagine the possibilities available to the first nation to gain access to, and be able to use, alien technology. The scope is almost unimaginable, and certainly it looks as though the U.S. Government has no intention of letting anybody but themselves gain this knowledge first, that is if they don't already possess it. Call it what you will. The Pig Farm, Paradise Ranch, The Box, Groom Lake or, more common on aviation radio frequencies, Dreamland, but its most common name however is Area 51.
Area 51 does not appear on any map, military or otherwise, and even if you did manage to find it, you would not be able to get anywhere near it and certainly not close enough to see it. Even military pilots are forbidden from entering its airspace, and though its existence is denied there are signs around the boundary which read “RESTRICTED AREA,” “U.S. AIR FORCE INSTALLATION,” “PHOTOGRAPHY OF THIS AREA IS PROHIBITED” and “USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORISED.”
In truth it lies where it has been for over forty years, along a discreet trail beside Highway 375, ninety five miles north of Las Vegas on the desert shores of the dried up Groom Lake and it consists of barracks, hangars and of course an airstrip. It is at this airstrip that six unmarked jets known as “Janets” land every day carrying around 600 employees from Las Vegas. It is believed that the installation was developed so that the Government could secretly work on technology it had obtained from crashed flying saucers without anybody troubling them and it forms a part of Nellis Air Force Base, the other three parts being the Tonopa and Nevada test sites (where top secret nuclear tests are carried out), Nellis bombing range (where planes and weapon systems are tested), and Nellis Military Airport. If top secret “saucers” are being tested here, then Nellis air traffic controllers would certainly know about it.
One radar operator says that she witnessed a classified flying disc test at night in the desert a few miles from the base along with a group of other people, who didn't know each other, and who weren't wearing any name tags or insignia, so nobody was talking to anybody else. There were ten to fifteen discs which glowed orange on their underside and performed many manoeuvres which she describes as sophisticated, so much so in fact that she felt that the pilots must have been extra-terrestrials. After the tests she was taken to a medical facility she felt must have been at Area 51, and there she was laid down on a stainless steel table and told in a dead pan voice to “Keep calm” by a man who was walking around the room holding a hypodermic needle, and very quickly he had injected something into her neck.
It has taken her over ten years to come forward with her story as she could never talk about it before, but the more she does the easier it becomes, and she feels that this is because she was given a very strong “suggestion” not to talk about it and this worked for a long time.
Area 51 was the birth place of top secret U.S. military projects such as the U2 spy plane, the Blackbird spy plane, the SR71 and of course the F-117A or Stealth Bomber. It is now believed that tests are under way on Project Aurora, an aircraft whose existence is officially denied yet was accidentally mentioned in a Pentagon report. Aurora is an aircraft alleged to be capable of reaching speeds of up to 5,000 mph or Mach 8.
Another example of the secret testing, and possibly the best one, is the Avro Car which was launched in total secrecy in 1965. The Avro Car was, to all intents and purposes, a flying saucer. It was a manned, disc shaped craft which was first tested in Canada in 1960 and the film footage of it being flown is now declassified after the project was scrapped in the late 1960s after swallowing up millions of dollars with no reason given. What is interesting about the Avro Car is that these tests and developments were happening at the same time that Project Blue Book said that they were not, and Nick Pope, formerly of the Ministry of Defence, says that the technology we are in possession of is always five to ten years ahead of that which is on public display, but he also says that any new aircraft is not flown over public areas but over classified ranges, so any U.F.O. seen by the public is not our own. Chris Carter of “The X Files” fame has heard many of these new aircraft being tested from his home, he says “I've tracked their sonic booms.... the Government won't tell you where they come from....”
The testing and other research is paid for by the “Black Budget,” which doesn't appear in any federal allocations so that it can't be traced, but the United States is by no means alone in the practise of running a black budget. The budget for Area 51 is rumoured to be somewhere between 1 and 1.5 billion dollars every year, and in the year 1996-97 the U.S. will spend over 11 billion dollars on research, development and testing of secret weapon systems of all kinds, far more than any other country. The budget for Area 51 is boosted, allegedly, by the expensive tastes and eating habits of the staff who indulge in such delicacies as frogs legs, king crab and filet mignon washed down with mineral water at $50,000 per month. One Colonel is believed to have his own Isreali grapefruit flown in at a cost of $25 each. These facts fade almost into insignificance when compared to the mother of all rumours, that Area 51 is home to no fewer than nine recovered U.F.O.s which are studied, and more importantly, tested at a facility on the base called S-4.
Eye witnesses to these tests in the skies over the desert tell of seeing strange lights in the sky, disc and triangle shaped craft performing unearthly manoeuvres such as travelling at great speeds, mid-air halts and exceptional acceleration. In 1988 aviation writer James Goodall quoted a retired Air Force Colonel in “Gung Ho” (an American military magazine) by saying that the Colonel had told him “We have things that are so far beyond the comprehension of the average aviation authority as to be really alien to our way of thinking.” Clearly a most unfortunate use of the word “alien.”
George Knapp, a local newsman and Ufologist, says that rumours of recovered alien craft have persisted around the base since the 1950s and most of them were only rumours, though two of the many which persist are one in 1953 of a recovered disc shaped craft whose cockpit was too small to accommodate a man, and one of a disc shaped object in the sky being escorted by helicopters in 1978.
Both rumours were refuelled in 1989 by a technical engineer called Robert Lazar who claimed that he had worked at the S-4 part of Area 51 for a few months in 1988, he said that he had held a position thirty eight levels above the Top Secret “Q” Clearance that he had held at Los Alamos Laboratory while working on Defence. Lazar appeared on K.L.A.S. TV. News and shocked the world when he claimed that he had been working on Reverse Engineering one of nine recovered alien craft to see how its propulsion system operated. He did not know how or when the craft had arrived at the base but thought that it was not the victim of a crash, and he said that it had actually been test flown. Its nickname on the base was “The Sport Model.” Lazar cannot prove his academic record as he says that it has been destroyed by the Government, but he can produce Government pay slips for the time that he claimed he was at Area 51.
The recovered craft's existence wasn't common knowledge around the base and was only on a need to know basis, and may not even have been brought to the attention of Congress and the President himself, although Dwight D. Eisenhower was believed to have been shown extra-terrestrial technology, and Ronald Reagan had also been heard to make references to it. Jimmy Carter however was denied access to U.F.O. data after his election campaign in which he had vowed to pursue the U.F.O. mystery after having seen several himself. One source said on the matter: “Guests in the White House come and go every four to eight years, but the C.I.A. goes on forever.”
Lazar's claims were not technically impossible but later became somewhat discredited when he was found to be involved in a brothel, and some of his academic credentials failed to check out. British Ufologist Timothy Good feels that Lazar's story is basically true, and said “that he needed to make the story more credible, but of course, once people realise that he's exaggerated about something, they tend to throw the baby out with the bath water.” Lazar claims that his employers knew of his background and his contacts within the U.F.O. community, and possibly of his creative C.V., but were interested in his capabilities as an employee, and then of course should he go A.W.O.L. he would be easy to discredit, yet at the same time he would be credible enough to be believed, thus carrying on the confusion and mystery. This would of course be unnecessary if the base didn't exist, but then again if it didn't exist, how could a former employee take legal action against their former employers there.
The process has proven difficult and has been ongoing since 1994 when a total of five former employees, and the widow of a sixth, all represented legally by Jonathan Turley, initiated legal action against the Pentagon and the Environmental Protection Agency. They are suing over exposure to burning toxic waste which took place throughout the 1980s. The waste, they allege, was burned in open pits and was classified material. The symptoms that they all suffered from were a skin rash which could only be removed with sand paper, and the man who died, Robert Frost, had suffered from this same rash. A hazardous chemical expert Professor Peter Kahn was given a tissue sample from the body of Frost and commented “My only reaction is, what on earth has this man been exposed to?”
One of the victims appeared on an ABC World News bulletin with his face in silhouette and his voice disguised, and concluded his interview by saying “The running joke was, the place didn't exist so consequently anything could occur there.” The danger of course was that all are facing imprisonment if found guilty of breaching national security, so they aren't allowed to tell doctors of their place of work or the nature of the work they do or did.
The government admitted that they did indeed have “an operating location near Groom Lake“ but that it was nameless, and they took steps to ban the use of the terms “Area 51” and “Dreamland” from all court proceedings, though Turley noted that the name Area 51 appeared both in the Pentagon's in-house newspaper and in the congressional record.
The case is ongoing but it was severely hampered by Sheila Widnal, U.S. Secretary of the Air Force, whose affidavit stated that any details revealed in court would be of grave consequence to national security, thus destroying the case for the prosecution, and then Turley was prohibited from owning a copy of the operating location's security manual, despite the press, the justice department and anybody surfing the Internet being able to gain access to it. Turley is quoted as saying “The Soviets have pictures of it, kids in Nevada play with the planes that fly from it.... but it doesn't exist.”
At around the time that this case came to light, the pentagon reclaimed a 4,000 acre patch of land which had offered the best and most accessible vantage point of the site, and this added to the land they had already previously bought up around the area. They then released a statement saying that they needed this extra land to ensure the safety and security of operations, but that they “don't have U.F.O.s out there, what goes on out there is classified.” Whatever classified means, it is obviously very sensitive, and anybody foolish enough to climb for ninety minutes to the top of a hill side with a telescope will be met by armed private security patrolmen in white jeeps bearing government plates, wearing camouflaged uniforms with no insignia and carrying walkie-talkies. The lucky ones just face a fine of up to $5,000 or a prison term. Some people however will not be put off by these minor details and many make the trip, stopping just short of the boundaries. The nearest town to the site, Rachel, nothing more than a few trailers, has a population of only one hundred people, and one hostelry called The Little A' le' Inn which houses thousands upon thousands of such visitors every year.
Rumours continue to abound regarding Area 51 and the work carried out there, the latest of which concerns the B52 Stealth Bomber which is rumoured to possess anti-gravity capabilities, these particular rumours being started by scientists whom the powers that be had tried to silence. Even scientists who hadn't worked on the Stealth project claim that the aircraft possesses a strange design and some equally strange capabilities. So are the U.S. Military in possession of recovered U.F.O.s and their technology, or are all the rumours exactly that, just rumours? The saying that there's no smoke without fire springs to mind. If not then why the need for such drastic measures to ensure security, and why the apparent obstruction of justice in the high courts?
So we've looked in detail at many tales of U.F.O. sightings, close encounters and the ensuing chaos, secrecy or denial, but are we any nearer to solving the problem than we were before, have we learnt anything, or have the facts simply become too muddled to fathom?
In similarity to the ghosts questions there is likewise no doubt that U.F.O.s do exist, and this is plainly clear in the context of them being objects in the sky which are, at least at one time or another, unidentified, but like the misconception with ghosts being the spirits of the dead, are U.F.O.s actually space ships of alien life forms from other worlds, and is the admittance to the existence of U.F.O.s to admit that we are being visited by little green men? As Mac Brazel's character said in the film “Roswell:” “They ain’t green.” The evidence for and against is before us, so we must now sum up, draw our conclusions and make up our minds about one of, if not the most fascinating questions the world has yet to properly answer.
The question is not really whether or not U.F.O.s exist because they clearly do as we have seen testified by many witnesses, men, women and children alike, and of all ages from all walks of life, surely all of these people can't be wrong, nor can they all have an ulterior motive for lying about it. Obviously what a lot of the cases are, are merely M.F.O.s, Misidentified Flying Objects, but as we saw earlier we have some 700,000 cases to explain away from just the last forty years. The fact that U.F.O.s are with us and have been for many years is clear to see, so what we must look at is what they are, we are not concerned here though with those which may be balloons, planes, tricks of the light or cloud formations, the ones we are concerned with are those 700,000 that can't be explained away as such.
The possibilities are several, though we can narrow them down, especially if we consider that U.F.O.s are not a random phenomenon, they do not move with a random pattern though they are sometimes erratic, they are seen to hover, to land, to take off and to avoid military aircraft sent to intercept them. These are clearly not the reactions of a random force of some kind but of a controlled object, so who or what is controlling them? Presumably, and it is by no means a huge presumption, they are being controlled by the beings which are seen inside or in the vicinity of the craft themselves, an alien race of some kind.
So what we now have is a manned craft flying around in our skies, the origin of which we do not know. Not all are apparently manned, for example the U.F.O. seen at Rendlesham Forest seemed to drip smaller ones from it which later rejoined it, and a Russian pilot had his aircraft “buzzed” by a small object which had separated from the larger one he had been sent to identify, and when he avoided it he saw it “re-enter” the mother ship. Could these be monitoring probes of some sort like the ones that Herb Schirmer was shown, or a smaller version of the craft Adamski claimed to have seen but on a smaller scale? This would explain some of the other sightings of U.F.O.s where just a small unidentified light source is seen rather than a larger craft of some sort, and might suggest that the area is being checked out before the craft themselves come, or the beings risk being seen taking their samples.
The problem now is where do they come from? Are they humans from the future, our descendents come back to see us in the ultimate history lesson? Unlikely as we would surely see many more similarities between us and them rather than the humanoid figures we now see. Are they beings from another planet in our own solar system? This is certainly the most popular theory and the one which receives most attention.
The chances of there being other life forms in the universe, bearing in mind the number of solar systems, stars and possible planets, have to be at least a safe bet if not a mathematical certainty, and there cannot be a problem with the thought that we are not the only form of life in the universe. The problem we have with these other life forms being the answer to U.F.O.s is just how do they manage to travel all the way to earth across space. The problem is not only with the actual journey itself, but at least one expert is of the opinion that if a craft were to approach earth, there are so many people and so much technology watching the skies, both amateur star gazers and professional organisations, that the approach and arrival of such a craft would be immediately seen once it got in the near vicinity, and could not remain secret from the public for more than twelve minutes, and certainly no longer than fifteen.
Of course this would be if they were to be visible during their approach and using conventional propulsion systems which some have been seen to do, for instance by Officer Zamora, but only during landing and taking off, not in mid-flight, during which they seem to possess no apparent engines as such. Could they possibly “leap” through space by harnessing the powers of natural sources such as gravity, or perhaps a more controversial theory is that they may use what is known as wormholes, which are not yet proven to exist, but are believed by scientists to be a possibility. Wormholes are a phenomenon proposed by New Zealand mathematician, Roy Kerr, who, using Einstein's theory of relativity showed that a spinning black hole could contain a wormhole which is a space-time bridge that joins different places in space and time in the universe. The problem with using these as a regular means of travel is that by their very nature they are unstable, emitting vast amounts of radiation which would fry any object unfortunate enough to get too close, and they then have a nasty habit of closing, trapping anything caught inside. Therefore any craft that was brave, or foolish, enough to try and utilise a wormhole would need two things:
So should we manage to overcome these minor problems, would we be allowed to use wormholes by the laws of nature, time travel being full of potential paradoxes? For example going back in time and killing your mother on the night before you were conceived. As with everything though this has also been accounted for by theorists and experts such as David Deutsch and Michael Lockwood who suggest that Quantum Theory would allow time travel but only to a parallel universe in which any actions taken would have no bearing on our own universe.
This is the other main possibility for the origin of U.F.O.s, a parallel universe, though it is one which receives less press than the “universal brothers” theory. The suggestion is that U.F.O.s and their inhabitants are from such an alternative universe and are able to commute between theirs and our own at will. It has been theorised many times that there may be an infinite number of universes in which every eventuality is played out, for example in our own universe we may have got out of bed on time, but in another we may have overslept. In another we may have just been in time to catch the bus to work, but in yet another we may have missed it and had to walk.
Many people have attempted to come up with theories about how parallel universes exist and the conditions to be satisfied to travel between them but none have really come up with anything solid, though by the very nature of the material any theory is bound to sound incredible to the point of being beyond belief. If scientists, theorists and philosophers are giving it so much time is there a modicum of truth in it? It is likely that one of these two possibilities holds the key to U.F.O.s, the fact that craft can visit us and then apparently disappear afterwards shows us that the technology they use is far superior to our own, and whether they come from outer space or from a parallel universe, we the public are still a long, long way from knowing the truth. There are almost certainly people on earth who do know the truth and have no apparent intention of divulging their knowledge. Possibly some of these people are the staff at Area 51 or, perhaps more accurately, some of these people are some of the staff at Area 51. The fact that there is a military installation there is advertised by the signs telling us to keep out and has been admitted by the military themselves, but this is not what we are interested in and what we want to know is just what goes on there.
The facts are that many new military aircraft have been developed at Area 51, so obviously research into genuine new projects is conducted there, and those new aircraft would need to be tested in the skies above the base, so no doubt this work is genuine and bona fide, but is that as far as it goes? Having legitimate research and development would certainly be an excellent cover for more covert work and would help to divert attention from U.F.O.s should they be housed there as well as the U2 spy plane, the B52 and the stealth bomber.
It is an obvious fact that rumours will always start, escalate and be passed on and added to until their source is undetectable, and it eventually becomes indistinguishable from the truth, but it is also a fact that there is no smoke without fire, and there are certainly no court proceedings, even in the adoptive home of litigation, without somebody feeling that they have a strong case, especially when that case is against the whole back bone of a nation as large as America.
Why would a military base be built in such an inaccessible part of the country and then the land for miles all around it be bought up and patrolled so heavily if not to conceal something extremely sensitive? Other operating installations can make do without all these precautions so what makes Area 51 so special? It has been rumoured many times that the Majestic 12 wished to build such an installation to use for their objectives in researching U.F.O. technology, and of course there are myriad rumours that this is indeed what takes place there, and given half a chance the six former employees would testify in court to that effect were they not facing a possible jail term for breaching the official secrets act.
The latest rumours about Area 51 are those which concern “Project Aurora”, said to be Americas latest super plane, which, as mentioned earlier, does not officially exist, but we have heard mention of it in official documents, we have heard of some of its alleged capabilities and we have even seen sketches of what it is supposed to look like. This latest development is said to use U.F.O. technology in order to be able to achieve some of these unique qualities, and to a greater extent than the F-117 Stealth Bomber. Of course most of what we hear is just rumours but that has been the name of the Governments game over the years, releasing information every so often, but the tactics they employ are to release false information from reputable sources and genuine information from easily discredited sources with “questionable” backgrounds and vice versa so that they can't be accused of not releasing information. We are unable to decipher what is the truth and what is lies, but if the U.S. Government are in possession of recovered U.F.O.s then it is almost certain that Area 51 would be where they are kept and tested.
There is a popular theory that in time the authorities will reveal what they know to the public and that they have already begun to do so by giving us information from disreputable sources and false information from reputable sources, both of which are as good as one another in their view, and that this is part of their plan to allow us to get used to the idea of not being alone. Once they feel they have achieved this they will start to release more information from more and more reputable sources when they feel that the public is able to handle such knowledge, and if this is the case then it is certainly taking them a long time to gently prepare us for the confirmation of what we already suspect. This would seem to be borne out by the experience of twenty seven year old Robert Suffern, and later his wife, of Bracebridge, Ontario which began on Tuesday October 7th, 1975 when Robert received a phone call from his sister who lived nearby. She wanted him to investigate a strange glow that she could see inside a barn, which he duly went to do in his car, though when he got there he could see nothing out of the ordinary. Deciding to put his sisters mind at ease he began to drive toward her house, and on his way there he saw a dark disc shaped object about twelve or fourteen feet wide on the road in front of him, but before he had stopped his car the object “went straight up in the air and out of sight.”
Suffern decided to turn around and head home, in his own words “I was scared” but as he headed home he saw a humanoid figure about four feet tall with “very wide shoulders.... out of proportion to his body,” it was wearing a silver grey suit and a helmet. The figure walked out into the road in front of Suffern's car and he hit the brakes, causing the car to skid on the gravel road, narrowly avoiding a collision with the figure which then ran to the side of the road and jumped over the fence in such a manner as to give Suffern the impression that it was weightless before running into the field and out of sight.
He continued to drive home feeling very shaken by the incident, and he felt no better when he looked out of a window and saw that the U.F.O. had come back. It was now flying slowly along the road where it circled an electricity pylon before flying upwards again in to the night sky.
Suffern said of the affair “I know what I saw, but I don't care if I ever see that creature again” and he would have been happy to let the incident die down, but an investigator, Harry Tokarz, tracked him down in July 1976 while he was working on a documentary about U.F.O.s in Canada and paid the Sufferns a visit. They both agreed to talk to him as long as he used no recording equipment but merely spoke to them “man to man,” however, an account of the visit did later appear in CUFORN's Journal “The Pulse Analyser.” It was the journalist's opinion that Robert Suffern was “an individual who carefully measures his thoughts” and his wife was “a home bred country girl, quick to air her views.”
After the original October encounter with the craft the Sufferns received a telephone call in November during which they agreed to a meeting, and a police car arrived on December 12th carrying three men in uniform whose credentials showed that they were from the Canadian Forces, the U.S. Air Force, the Pentagon and Naval Intelligence, and once comfortable inside the house they proceeded to answer any questions that the Sufferns asked them about the U.F.O. sightings. Their answers were immediate and without faltering giving the impression that they were, as they said, answering in truth. They told the Sufferns what the U.F.O. was, where it had come from and why. The impression they gave was that the authorities had been working with the aliens since 1943 when, during an experiment commonly, though not officially, known as “The Philadelphia Experiment,” the Navy had accidentally bridged the gap between two dimensions using electromagnetic fields concentrated on the destroyer U.S.S. Eldridge (DE 173). Believed to be present was Albert Einstein whose “Unified Field” theory was the basis behind the principle of making objects invisible.
The men apologised to the Sufferns for the incident and said that it had been a mistake, Robert thought it must have been a secret military craft but no, they said that it was a saucer with a malfunction. Mrs. Suffern was still skeptical about the whole thing but her mind was put at rest when the men quoted the exact time to the minute at which all of their sightings had occurred, a detail that the Sufferns had told nobody about. Possibly the visitors could have been M.I.B.s, but rather than try to dissuade them from the U.F.O. theory they supported it and told them that this is indeed what they had seen, nor had they arrived in an old black classic car but a police car, nor did they wear black or act unusually and they gave the Sufferns no impression that they were anything but human. They also confirmed a third sighting of the craft on the Suffern's property again giving the precise time of the sighting, and again saying that this one had also been an accident.
One must wonder why the military would go to the trouble and risk of visiting the Sufferns and explaining it to them, could it be through a fear due to Robert almost running over the figure in the road and the serious repercussions that would have ensued if he had not managed to avoid it, or on the other hand could this be an example of them supplying genuine evidence through unreliable sources, after all the Sufferns were just “simple country folk?” Understandably though, in return for their frankness they asked the Sufferns to keep quiet about what they had been told, and Robert did so out of “moral reasons” and not because he is bound by the official secrets act, and they had only opened up to the investigator after a slip of the tongue by Mrs. Suffern, and then only casually got slowly around to discussing the incident as though it was no big deal.
As a footnote, the investigator claims to have evidence that shows the Canadian and U.S. Authorities had conducted medical and psychological checks on the Sufferns earlier than the December meeting to assess just how they would react when they were told just what they had seen. Whatever the purpose was behind the military's co-operation it was almost successful in putting the matter to rest, but not quite, and again we have a parallel universe as the “source” of U.F.O.s rather than another part of our own universe, and we are slowly seeing more evidence that the parallel universe holds the key to U.F.O.s, and they are able at will to “leap” between universes appearing, as seen by some witnesses, in a cloud of gas relatively undetected, but if they have the ability to do so why would they continue to do so without making much more contact with us. In the short term of course, the desire to explore and gather knowledge would be too great to ignore and this quest for knowledge would continue, possibly making a few trips and then trying to analyse what they have found. Could this also explain the waves of sightings we get over the years?
The main reason for their visits must be research such as taking samples of rocks, water and possibly even animals and human tissue rather than to get repairs done on their craft, or to preach to us about how we are destroying our planet. The question then is how much do the authorities know about, and assist, our visitors? We have seen evidence that the military, in America at least, have been escorting these craft, and we have also seen evidence that they deny all knowledge of them, but what exactly is their “working relationship?”
Some people believe that they have an “agreement” in which they give us some knowledge of their technology and in return we turn a blind eye to their abductions of humans and possibly even supply them with animals as well, but if the cooperation was that great, then they would surely be able to get all the samples they would need without them taking the risk of being seen by the public, so surely the relationship cannot be all that close. This is also borne out by the fact that we don't yet have a craft of our own which can perform aerial feats to match theirs, or is this just part of a joint plan to slowly bring us round to accepting the knowledge of their existence by letting us see their craft and the occupants, and planes like the Stealth Bomber and the unofficial Aurora using a little more of their technology than their predecessors?
This eventuality though doesn't seem very likely, especially if we have been known to shoot down their craft, and if bases like Woodbridge and Bentwaters at Rendlesham Forest are visited by crafts which mystify them, besides which could we really develop such a close relationship with an alien race if we can't even work with each race on our own planet, as the wars that rage all over the planet demonstrate? It is therefore hard to believe that we are as close to our visitors as we would like to think, and that whenever one of their craft crashes, we swarm all over it in an attempt to learn all we can from it and its occupants. This may have been the case for many years, and that over this time we have gleaned bits of information from such crashes and that research is under way to try to understand and operate the technology we discover, though it seems that we are still a long way from fully understanding it, and we are not fully aware of the implications of what we are doing. This would be why our guests are still seen by the public as they collect their samples and monitor and observe us, but do they actually abduct us or are abductions a scenario created by some “unsettling incident.”
What is certain is that they seem very real to the people who experience them and they truly believe that they have been experimented upon and examined medically. The reasons for these tests, if they do take place, are clear and the reasons that people are told they will be revisited are clear. It is so that they can be monitored over a period of time. Also clear are the reasons why the events are wiped from the memories of the victims, but what is not so clear is just why, if the events are to be wiped from their memories, do they get a guided tour of the craft, are showed how the craft are powered and told that they are worried for our environment and the way in which we treat it?
If the abduction is the creation of the distressed mind, then could the fears for the environment be the subconscious fears of the abductee? And if this is the case then also the tour of the craft and how they are powered must also be the creation of the mind, but these technical explanations are a little too close to the truth to be the creation of the distressed mind of a person with no apparent technical knowledge. Having said that, it is puzzling as to why a person would be told that they must try to help save the planet and then have the warning wiped from their memory.
The real difficulty when dealing with abductions is that they generally only become apparent when the victim is hypnotised, and as we said earlier this is a complicated and relatively misunderstood phenomenon in which the person will say what they perceive to be the truth, rather than what is the actual truth, though of course they will have no awareness that these are not one and the same.
As for cattle mutilations, they are certainly intriguing but on the evidence so far, it is less and less likely that they are the work of predators and scavengers that leave perfect surgical incisions and no signs of their ever having been at the scene.
One thing is for certain, we can't ignore the 40 million sightings that we have had of U.F.O.s and nor can we ignore the fact that there is one sighting every three minutes somewhere on earth. U.F.O.s are here now and they will be here for the foreseeable future, at least until “they” have got what they are looking for, just what that is, is unclear, but surely if they had some ulterior motive, they could have achieved their aims long before now. Perhaps they do only wish to observe us and our “strange” ways while examining our planet, and who’s to say, if some of the rumours are true, then maybe some people from earth have visited their world and perhaps are still there now, though for the foreseeable future we will simply never know and it will remain, as many stories are when connected with U.F.O.s, as speculation based on rumour.
Is their reluctance to do this a sign of healthy skepticism or is it just plain ignorance? What we must bear in mind when looking at the following cases of U.F.O.s is that we are talking about something which may have a perfectly reasonable explanation such as a balloon or terrestrial aircraft, but there are those where no such rational explanation is forthcoming at the present time, maybe in the future these cases will also become identified flying objects, but until we know for sure what we are talking about, we must refer to them as U.F.O.s.
U.F.O.s have been around for a long time and we can trace their history right back to the early days of man's existence on the planet, indeed when the first men saw for example the sun, moon and stars, they too would have been U.F.O.s, and as man learned more and more about the world he lived in, they would become identified and no longer considered a thing of mystery. This may well happen in the future to some of the current cases we have on file as we are still learning about our surroundings and will continue to do so in the future. If we take a look at some of the early reports of U.F.O.s we can see one common denominator, that the people of the time describe them as things which are in the grasp of their technology and within the scope of their experience.
For example the earliest recorded sighting of a U.F.O. dates right back to 1450 BC, it was described as a circle of fire in the sky with no head, and the breath from its mouth had a foul odour. Over the following days there were more of them in the sky, one of the witnesses was the reigning Pharaoh Thutmose III. These sightings would most probably have been taken as a sign from the gods, and let us not forget that there are many who say that the star of Bethlehem was in fact a U.F.O. and not just a mere star brighter than all the others moving across the night sky.
There are many records of sightings of U.F.O.s by the Romans, but unfortunately the records weren't written until many years after the sightings occurred. The descriptions are of a spark which falls from a star to the earth growing to the size of the moon before shrinking again as it returns to the sky. Other sightings are described as daylight in the night sky, or “night suns.” Roman sightings from around the fourth century are of “ships in the sky” over Italy, and an Indian record from before 500 BC talks of machines. Obviously they were a common enough occurrence to be given a name, and that name is “Vimanas” which were said to be able not only to fly but to be controlled by pilots.
In the twelfth century in England a group of French churchmen saw, in Christchurch, Hampshire, a dragon coming up out of the sea breathing fire, additionally some modern U.F.O. reports describe U.F.O.s as coming up out of the sea. Also in the same century, again in England at St. Osyth, Essex a dragon was seen to rise up and leave fire behind it in the air and burn a house and its outbuildings to ashes. Just as dragons in medieval times were a mythical creature said to be able to fly, so as time moves on the description of U.F.O.s also moves on and the technology now becomes more advanced. A feature of U.F.O.s is that as we advance in our own knowledge, so too do they but on a parallel course, yet always marginally ahead of us, always remaining on the verges of our understanding, never leaping too far ahead to leave us behind but likewise never too slowly to allow us to catch up, and where they were once described as dragons able to fly, they then become known as balls or rings of fire, often seen to be spinning such as the ones witnessed by many people over the former capital of Japan, Kyoto which were seen in 1606 and were said to be hovering over Nijo Castle. As time moves on again they become known as aircraft able to fly faster and faster and with more agility than our own aircraft.
Though the sightings of balls of fire continued, they now became various colours including black, blue and blue-red, later they diversified to cover discs, crosses and one case of two huge cylinders which were engaged in a battle over Nuremberg, Germany on April 4th, 1561. Another battle occurred just five years later over Basel, Switzerland on August 7th, 1566 this time between two black sphere shaped objects.
A marked change began to occur around the end of the seventeenth century, at the time known as “The Age Of Reason,” where people were looking at the skies in a different light, and with a more “logical” and “scientific observation.” On December 9th, 1731 Thomas Short described a dark red cloud which had intense beams of light underneath it that moved around slowly before stopping. He then describes how hot the air became and, though it was winter, he was able to comfortably remove his shirt.
A sighting over Kilkenny, Ireland and one over Romania were described as a meteor even though the Romanian meteor split into two halves and then reformed back into one. The Romanians took this to be a sign, whereas elsewhere it was referred to as a meteor. As technological developments were made by man, his inventions were often mistaken for other things until people came to know them and know what they were. In the nineteenth century, as airships became a more and more common form of transport they were frequently mistaken, and people described seeing cigar shaped objects which seemed to be carrying something beneath them. Reports even described how sometimes the craft would land and human type figures would emerge from them. As rockets and missiles entered into service these too were often mistakenly identified, and reports came flooding in from many countries including Sweden, Greece, Portugal and Belgium.
Slowly over time we have found that a lot of cases can be identified and explained away by what now seems like obvious explanations. There are however many which we have not explained and are still classed as U.F.O.s. What we must now try and do is not only try to answer the question what are U.F.O.s, but also the question where do they come from? We can only do one at a time though, and we will look at many sightings and close encounters, all will share at least one characteristic even if it is only that whatever occurred is certainly very strange.
There were frequent sightings of U.F.O.s during World War 2, for example on December 13th, 1944 the Associated Press reported strange silvery balls flying over the western front and said that they could be German allies from space. American bomber pilots often saw these “strange craft” over the Pacific so regularly that they made up a nickname for them. They called them “Foo Fighters.”
The “modern” era of flying saucer reports began with a vengeance in 1947 in America. On June 24th of that year Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot, had an experience which was to change his life and begin for him what became a fascination with U.F.O.s and would inspire him to co-write a study of U.F.O.s with Ray Palmer called “The Coming Of The Saucers” which was published in 1952. It is Arnold who was inadvertently responsible for the term “Flying Saucer” which was taken out of context by a reporter from his interview after seeing several U.F.O.s over Washington States Cascade Mountains on the East coast of America.
Arnold was an experienced pilot and part time Deputy Sheriff, he was also a member of the Idaho Search and Rescue Mercy Flyers and Flying Deputy for the Ada County Aerial Posse. He was flying over the mountain range in search of a lost military C46 transport plane which had crashed in the area with thirty two men on board, and for which the military had offered a five thousand dollar reward for the person or persons who could locate it. In particular Arnold was in the area of Mount Rainier at about 9,200 feet when, during a 180 degree turn, “a tremendously bright flash lit up all the surfaces of my aircraft.” His first thought was that he was about to collide with another aircraft, but the only other aircraft he could see though was a Douglas DC4 Airliner which he assumed was on its way to San Francisco, and he wasn't even close to it. His next thought was that it had been the sun until he saw another flash and saw where it had come from. Flying to his left, very close to the mountains were nine bright objects over Mount Baker. Arnold first took them for aircraft flying in formation, but he could see no tails on them and he estimated that they were about a hundred miles away from him and flying across his own flight path. Using his own instruments and Mount Rainier and Mount Adams as markers he calculated that they were travelling in excess of 1,700 mph. No aircraft around at this time could fly at anything approaching this speed, in fact in that same year the sound barrier (750 mph) was broken for the first time by a jet aircraft. Arnold knew that these were like no other aircraft he had ever seen before because of the way he flew. He said that: “They flew in a definite formation but erratically.... their flight path was like speed boats on rough water, or similar to the tail of a Chinese kite that I once saw blowing in the wind.” He also said that they were “tipping their wings alternately and emitting those very bright blue-white flashes from their surfaces” though he thought that the flashes weren't actually from the aircraft, but rather “the sun's reflection from the highly polished surfaces of their wings.”
After his encounter with the craft, Arnold landed at Yakima where he discussed it with other pilots, and then left to fly back to his starting point at Pendleton, Oregon. It was there that Arnold described the craft as “Flying like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” A journalist, Bill Becquette, got this mixed up and coined the phrase “Flying Saucer.” It was also at Pendleton where Arnold again calculated, this time with other pilots, just how fast the craft had been travelling. However conservative they were in their calculations they couldn't get the speed below 1,350 mph.
These were by no means the only such sightings of similar craft at the time, let's not forget that the events at Roswell, New Mexico occurred less than two weeks later. In April a meteorologist who was tracking a weather balloon saw an object shaped like a saucer fly past it. On May 5th over Washington, a silvery object was seen falling from the sky and disintegrated before it hit the floor. On June 12th another formation was seen over Weiser, Idaho by another pilot by the name of Rankin, only this earlier sighting was made up of ten craft, as opposed to Arnold's nine, and a later sighting by yet another pilot flying over Nevada was of nine or ten craft. Could these have been the same ones that Arnold saw?
There may have been another witness to Arnold's sighting, as around the same time a prospector in the Cascades saw his compass needle going haywire as he was looking at a group of U.F.O.s in the sky. No fewer than 850 reports of U.F.O. sightings were received between June and mid-July of 1947 by the U.S. authorities from all over the United States and this sparked action from the U.S.A.F. who, in September 1947, wrote to J. Edgar Hoover stating that they had checked all the current Army, Navy and Air Force secret projects to see if any of them could be responsible for the spate of U.F.O. sightings but they had found nothing. One incident which happened on January 7th, 1948 near Godman Base, close to Fort Knox, Kentucky would again wake the military up to the seriousness of the situation.
Captain Thomas Mantell was flying the leading plane of a group of P51 fighters who were on a training mission when they were scrambled to investigate a U.F.O. that had been reported by a number of nearby residents. As they approached the official altitude limit for their aircraft, which had no oxygen cylinders for the pilots, all but Mantell gave up the chase, and he radioed in to the tower to say that he could “see something above and ahead of me, and I'm still climbing.” He described the craft by saying “It looks metallic and is tremendous in size and appears to be moving about half my speed.” Still pursuing it he said to the tower “It's above me and I'm gaining on it. I'm going to 20,000 feet.” He was at 22,000 feet when he last called the tower. Mantell was last seen at 3:15pm continuing to climb. His body and disintegrated plane were found later that day ninety miles from Godman Base, his watch had stopped at 3:18pm, due to his altitude and the lack of oxygen he would have blacked out. The official line on the matter was that Mantell, a skilled veteran pilot, had gone to his death chasing the planet Venus.
Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, Chief of Project Blue Book from 1951 to 1953, wrote a book called “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects” which was published in 1956, in it he said that at the time of Mantell's encounter the planet Venus would not have been visible, and this, in addition to rumours that he had been shot down by a U.F.O., sparked the military to change their minds and say that after reconsidering the evidence the altitude, size and speed of the craft, what Mantell had actually been pursuing was a weather balloon. This incident in 1948 was to herald the birth of “Project Sign” whose objectives were to examine and evaluate the many U.F.O. reports and to try and determine whether or not the sightings were of extra-terrestrial craft.
Another key figure in those early days of U.F.O. mania was George Adamski. Adamski was born in 1891, and was moved to America aged 2 when his family emigrated from Poland. He became interested in astronomy and wrote fictional stories about space travel, many of which he had rejected when he tried to get them published. In the 1950s he lived near the Mount Palomar observatory in California, and he would spend many hours watching the night sky through his own 15 inch binoculars and 6 inch reflector telescope which he had set up at his home. Adamski believed that the other planets in our solar system were inhabited, and he became convinced of this one night when watching a meteor shower on October 9th, 1946. He and several friends saw a “large black” “space craft” hovering above the ridge to the south of Mount Palomar. Every night after this sighting, Adamski sat up waiting to see another U.F.O. and between 1950 and 1952 he took a number of photographs of some of the craft he saw. Some of them he took through his telescope.
His new found fame enabled him to begin giving lectures on U.F.O.s and extra-terrestrials and it was through this that he heard rumours of U.F.O.s landing in the deserts of California. So on November 20th, 1952 Adamski and his secretary, Mrs. Lucy Mckinnis, and Mrs. Alice K. Wells met up with Mr. and Mrs. Al C. Bailey and Dr. and Mrs. George H. Williamson on the road near Blythe, California, and they all went into the desert in the hope of seeing a U.F.O. land. Adamski chose the day at random but said he had a hunch as to the best spot in which to lie in wait.
As the group ate lunch, or shortly after they had finished, they saw what they had come to see, a huge, silver, cigar shaped object with no apparent means of levitation or propulsion. The craft then travelled towards them and stopped. Adamski was adamant that the ship had come to see him but felt that they were too close to the road for the ship to land, so the group moved on to a dirt track and drove into the desert while all the while the ship followed them. They stopped when Adamski found a suitable spot and set up his equipment having brought his telescope and camera. He felt however that he would stand a better chance of making contact if he were alone and sent the others back out of the way, telling them to keep watching.
As they retreated the events were to be interrupted by the arrival of several military planes which tried to circle the aircraft. At this point the craft shot upwards out of sight, the planes left and Adamski waited.
After some time there was a bright flash and “a beautiful craft appeared to be drifting through a saddle between two of the mountain peaks.” The craft settled on a ridge and was photographed by Adamski, some minutes later a figure appeared and beckoned to him so Adamski apprehensively made his way toward it.
He described the figure as having long blond hair which blew in the wind, the figure was 5 feet 6 inches tall, about 135 pounds and apparently male. Its skin colour was like a sun tanned Caucasian’s, the face was round with a high slightly slanted forehead and cheeks and it had calm green eyes and a finely chiseled nose. “He” was wearing a brown one piece jump suit with no visible signs of zips or fasteners, no pockets, a broad waist band and a high tight collar. His shoes were red with blunt toes and the overall apparel gave a feeling of being a uniform.
It was as Adamski got nearer to the figure that he realised he was looking at a man from another world. Adamski claims the figure told him via signs and telepathy that he was from the planet Venus. He said that Venusians were worried because radiation from atomic bombs on earth would not only destroy life on earth but could also harm other planets as it made its way through space. He explained that the cigar shaped craft was the mother ship, and the craft he had come in was one of its scout ships which was powered by magnetism. He told Adamski that not only Venusians but other people from our solar system and beyond were visiting earth, some were in fact already living here among us undetected. Some craft had been shot down by earth craft and so they now only landed away from busy cities and towns, not only for this reason but also so that they wouldn't panic people. He declined to being photographed but allowed Adamski to take a closer look at the outside of his craft before climbing aboard and floating away.
Shortly after this encounter Adamski claims to have had a strong telepathic urge to visit Los Angeles and, on following this urge, he met two of the earth dwelling humanoids he had been told about. He says they took him into the desert and aboard a craft where he met more of their people and took part in debates with them.
The other witnesses to the first desert encounter who had been watching Adamski through binoculars all signed sworn affidavits to support Adamski's story, though later some of them changed their minds about what they had seen. Adamski however continued to go from strength to strength, now claiming to have been on the dark side of the moon and to Saturn where he also saw a population of humanoid figures. We must bear in mind that at this time we didn't know that all the planets in our Solar System could not support life but we did know as early as 1932 that Venus may not be able to support even low forms of life such as vegetation. Surely a keen astronomer like George Adamski would have known this, and if making the story up would have chosen either another planet in our solar system or even a planet from beyond it.
We can see as time goes by and we get more tales of contact with aliens that they claim to come from further afield. Is it that because they have travelled further than other visitors they have taken longer to reach us? Is it because they can see that as we acquire more knowledge of the universe, they tell us that they come from places quite near us that we don't know, but can associate with, or is it that as our knowledge increases, hoaxers have to name planets further afield as the origin of life forms they have made contact with? Adamski's claims were by far the most outrageous at the time but history will show they are certainly not the only reports of contact. Over the ensuing years Adamski continued to take photographs of U.F.O.s and also wrote many books about his encounters with aliens and his trips in their craft. Many of his books became best-sellers and he made several television appearances making his name famous the world over, even touring Europe giving lectures on ways of the Venusians. There are tales that he even met Pope John XXIII on May 31st, 1963 though of course the Vatican deny this meeting.
Adamski produced some more pictures of alien craft, this time though they were different from his usual material. They showed craft with apparently three ball shaped protuberances in a triangular formation on their underside, and very similar craft to these were reportedly seen in England at around the same time. One in the Lake District at Coniston in 1954, one by a family in Warrington, Cheshire and also one as recently as 1987 in Rochdale, Lancashire, but despite these and other corroborating sightings, by 1965 Adamski wasn't without his critics. Many claimed that his photographs were nothing more than “crude fakes” using small models, and as his stories became more and more outlandish people began to doubt his credibility, and his trips around the moon over wooded valleys and snow-capped mountains began to stretch the realms of the imagination a little bit too far. His tales of inhabited planets in our own solar system were proved impossible even before his death in April 1965 and, but for his photographic evidence, Adamski would have been made a laughing stock far sooner, though the many cigar and saucer shaped objects have been compared to many household objects such as lampshades, chicken feeders and vacuum cleaner accessories. If this wasn't bad enough, Adamski's accounts were found to have been adapted from his early rejected fictional material and he blamed President Roosevelt's economic policies in the 1930s for his predicament, he said that: “If it hadn't been for Roosevelt, I'd never have had to get into saucers.”
Another key figure in the history of U.F.O.s, so far dominated by Arnold and the outcast Adamski, was a man with very real experience in the matter of space and astronomy, rather than being self-taught like Adamski, he was a university astronomer and in the late 1940s was offered a post which he gladly accepted as a government consultant on Project Sign. He was Dr J. Allen Hynek (1910 - 1986). His position with the government required him to examine literally thousands of U.F.O. cases and he was then, and still is today, considered to be the world's leading authority on U.F.O.s. His book “The Hynek U.F.O. Report” was published in 1977, four years after he founded the “Centre For U.F.O. Studies” whose “Journal of U.F.O. Studies” and “International U.F.O. Reporter” are widely respected the world over. He also accepted an invitation to appear in the Steven Spielberg film “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind” a film based on many accounts of encounters with aliens and alien craft, in it Hynek played a cameo role as a scientist whose beard is stroked by one of the aliens.
Hynek looked at U.F.O.s in a scientific way and eventually became convinced that U.F.O.s were not a figment of the imagination or a whimsical phenomenon but that they had a very real cause. Project Sign was soon to collapse, in 1949, and was ridiculed by the United States Air Force (U.S.A.F.) as its conclusions were supported by the extra-terrestrial cause of U.F.O.s. Sign was replaced by “Project Grudge” which was itself succeeded by “Project Blue Book” which was, like its predecessors, based at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio, and which ran until 1969 with Hynek still very much in the fore. The head of “Project Blue Book,” Major Hector Quintilla Jr., said in a television appearance that the aims of the project were:
- To ascertain whether the U.F.O. phenomenon represents a threat to our security.
- To ascertain whether the U.F.O. phenomenon exhibits any technological advancements that could be used for research and development.
Though Hynek was convinced that U.F.O.s had a very real cause, he himself doubted that that cause was extra-terrestrial and turned down an offer to advertise an American beer, of which he was a fan, as the script implied that this was the case. His own opinion circa 1984 reads:
“It is far from certain that U.F.O.s represent a single phenomenon, despite the similarity in patterns of reports from all over the world... Perhaps I may intrude my own opinion on these matters, based on more than thirty years of study. I believe that the U.F.O. phenomenon is in some way directing us to consider an aspect of reality of which we have been hitherto largely unaware - an aspect, indeed, that may eventually be incorporated into our science and may prove to be of great value to the progress of mankind.“
In 1981 in Chicago, Hynek said to the author Reuben Stone that he believed U.F.O.s were directed by some kind of intelligence, but “That intelligence may be our own.”
One of Hynek's sayings was that in investigating U.F.O.s, whenever you looked for an answer, you got a hundred questions instead. In 1973, well into his career as a U.F.O. “expert,” to aid himself and others in the categorisation of U.F.O. sightings and encounters, Hynek constructed the following “Richter scale” of the varying types of encounter, starting with the less intense encounters, and ending with multi-racial communication:
- NOCTURNAL LIGHT - Any light seen in the night sky, unaccounted for by aircraft, astronomical bodies, meteors or any other rational explanations.
- DAYLIGHT DISC - Any object seen in the daytime sky, such as discs, cigar shapes, egg shapes or ovals.
- RADAR VISUAL - A U.F.O. seen on radar, and witnessed simultaneously by the human eye.
- CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF THE FIRST KIND (C.E.I) - A U.F.O. seen within 500 feet of the witness.
- CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF THE SECOND KIND (C.E.II) - A U.F.O. which leaves marks on the ground, frightens animals, causes burns or paralysis, interferes with engines, television or radio.
- CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF THE THIRD KIND (C.E.III) - A sighting of the craft's occupants, as well as the craft itself.
- CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF THE FOURTH KIND (C.E.IV) - The abduction of a human being for the purpose of intrusive and often embarrassing tests.
- CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF THE FIFTH KIND (C.E.V) - The communication of information between races.
One such case where Hynek would dearly have loved to have answered these questions is one where he was convinced that there was no hoax involved and he wanted to find a natural explanation for it. It occurred on April 24th, 1964 at 17:45 and Hynek says that he is convinced that “a real physical event occurred.”
The encounter was experienced by thirty year old police officer Lonnie Zamora from Socorro, New Mexico who was on duty at the time and in pursuit of a speeding car. During the chase Zamora heard a loud roar and spotted blue flames in the sky. The flames were low and appeared to be coming from an area which Zamora knew contained a hut used for storing dynamite, so he gave up the chase and headed towards the flames.
As he neared the site he arrived at a deep gully from where he could see the flames rising up and hear the roaring sound which became lower and lower until it stopped completely, along with the flames. He could see an elliptical object which was apparently supported on legs. His first thought was that it was an overturned car and he called in on his radio for assistance with a 10-40 (an accident). He could now see two humanoid figures beside the craft, one of which turned to look at him in surprise. They were wearing one piece suits and he thought at first that they were children due to their small stature, and on spotting him they got back inside the craft. Still at this point inside the car and wearing sunshades over his glasses Zamora got out for a better look, as he did so he dropped his microphone and bent to pick it up. While he was bent down the roar started up again and he looked back toward the object and saw that the blue flames were coming from underneath it. As the craft rose he noticed that it had a red symbol on it but he could see no doors or windows. He prudently decided to keep the patrol car between himself and the craft which had now become silent and was moving away from both him and the hut at great speed. Zamora quickly sketched the insignia from the craft while it was still fresh in his mind.
He wasn't the only witness to the craft as many others had seen blue flames in the sky, though only two people, a couple, saw a craft of a similar description to Zamora's. It might also have been seen by Sergeant Chavez who had responded to the 10-40 put out by Zamora had he not taken a wrong turn. When he did arrive at the scene he found Zamora staring down into the gully at the smoldering brush and scrub. The two officers then walked down into the gully where they found that the bushes, though smoldering, did not feel hot. They also found four marks on the ground that had apparently been made by the legs of the craft. These marks have been found to have been made by a heavy object, but to this day no such object has been identified, and the ground in the area and the four marks were devoid of traces of radiation, chemicals and exhaust gases. Chavez circled the indentation marks with stones to prevent them from being damaged until they could be examined properly, and by a stroke of luck an F.B.I. officer was in town that day on other business and both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. became involved, and thus Hynek was called in.
It was Hynek who tracked down two witnesses who on that day had been travelling through the state and had remarked to the garage owner about the “low flying aircraft.” One of the men described seeing an egg shaped object emitting smoke, while the other just saw the smoke from the scrubland. It is interesting to note that it was fourteen years before Hynek managed to track down the two men, yet they could still recall the day with such clarity. This encounter wasn't only a favourite of Hynek's but also one which Major Hector Quintilla found to be more convincing than any other which he had looked at. A further comment from Hynek was that “Of all the C.E.IIs this is the one that most clearly suggests a nuts and bolts physical craft.” What is also interesting to note is that, following Zamora's encounter, White Sands acquired a further 883,910 acres of land, spreading North and East encompassing the Landing Site, possibly showing that the military wished to conceal something by not allowing further access to the site.
This isn't the only case where a number of witnesses saw a craft which landed and left evidence behind it. Passengers on a train near Padriesko, Moscow in 1984 saw a U.F.O. land near to the side of the track in a clearing. Tests done on the site later by a Biologist, Professor Yuri Simiakov, showed that this, like other similar sites, was completely devoid of life, even microscopic life, and that living creatures will not enter the area. Simiakov also found strange electromagnetic effects in spiral patterns, and curiously that time apparently speeds up in the area. When he tested the soil samples he had taken he found that they contained tiny spheres, and when these were analysed he found that they ranged from the unknown to common parts of filter systems.
Another multiple witness sighting, again in America though much later, is most interesting as it satisfies more than one of Hynek's categories. It occurred on October 10th 1990. At around 9pm of that day the residents of Skibo, Minnesota reported seeing lights in the sky (categories 1+2) over the Hoyt Lakes area. Two police officers went to investigate and saw, as did others, numerous objects of “indeterminate shape.” The objects would hover before darting about and then stopping to hover again (category 2). Just over an hour after the objects were first reported the Federal Aviation Authority's air traffic controllers at Duluth, the nearest major airport to Skibo, confirmed that they were picking up radar echoes form the Hoyt Lakes area (category 3) and continued to monitor them for a further hour. They were also caught on radar (again category 3) by the local National Air Guard who saw between 3 and 5 objects intermittently in a roughly circular formation.
Another “professional” witness (category 2) was the pilot of a commercial aircraft at eleven thousand feet and he could see the objects forty five miles to the east of Hoyt Lakes. He reported seeing two unidentified lights at what he estimated to be 10,000 feet and he described them as a deep glowing red and they were a few miles apart. Checks carried out confirmed that there were no other aircraft in the area at the time. The radar echoes received by both Duluth and the National Air Guard cannot be explained away by any known weather conditions or atmospheric effects, and besides which no unusual such circumstances were witnessed at the time by those around Hoyt Lakes.
It was by now painfully clear that U.F.O.s were here to stay and the reports continued to flood in. The most common among sightings were, and still are, saucers, ovals, discs, eggs and cigar shapes. One particular cigar shaped object was witnessed by Adamski over his house, though no other witnesses were present. Another was either a triangular shape or as was later thought, a circular shape with a triangular formation of lights on the underside. Many photographs of such sightings are in existence, some more convincing than others, but lots of those which were at one time thought to be authentic photographic evidence have later been shown to be faked, and some of the methods used to produce fakes are more “crude” than others. The less convincing photographs, and most common among fakes, show just a blank patch of sky with the object somewhere in the frame. These are the most difficult of pictures to test for authenticity as there is nothing else in the frame to give us an idea of the scale of the object, it could either be a large object a long way away, or a small object very close. It is also difficult in these instances to get any real idea of effects of the light on any other objects to aid us determine for example the time of day, the colour of the object in comparison to other objects such as trees or houses, the speed of the objects movement and whether it is dull or shiny. The most tricky to determine though is the size, as mentioned earlier, and there have been many cases of hoaxers photographing car hub caps and camera lens covers on pieces of string, one enterprising photographer who fooled the experts for many years, before finally admitting he had fooled them, had stuck small cardboard saucer shapes to the outside of his window and photographed them from the inside of the house.
The easier pictures to examine are those with objects in the foreground such as buildings, though even these can be difficult to determine, especially if the object is moving and therefore blurred in the frame. Even better now though is the advent of the video recorder and then the camcorder which, rather than giving a still frame picture, gives us a continuous moving picture with zoom lenses able to show wide angle shots with foreground and then zoom in for close up shots without stopping the film. The more modern cameras also show, usually in one corner of the picture, the date and the time of day to the second, enabling us to see whether or not it is one continuous shot or if the film has been tampered with. We can also use this to check whether or not there were any other terrestrial aircraft in the area at the time, if not then we couldn't be looking at an airship, a helicopter, a plane, a balloon or possibly even a cloud formation. If there were other aircraft in the area at the time then we could be looking at some such mundane object or better still we could be looking at a U.F.O. with more than one witness, one witness being an experienced pilot who was able to lend a “professional” opinion.
What is interesting about the more recent sightings is that we seem to get them in spates followed by a relative lull before we get yet another wave of sightings. Some of the waves of U.F.O. sightings we have seen have occurred in America both in the late 40s and early 50s and then again in the early 70s when the people of the southern states witnessed over a hundred in a week between October 11th and 18th. Over north and central Europe in October 1954, and again over Europe, in particular Belgium between November 1989 and March 1990, and shortly after this in Mexico from July 1991 for the remainder of that year. These particular sightings brought Mexico City to a standstill while everybody, including police, stood and watched, as did all of Mexico when the scenes were televised. Why we should get these waves nobody has any idea but they do seem to be no accident, maybe aliens saturate an area until they attract too much attention and then move on to somewhere else.
The wave known as the “Gulf Breeze” sightings received massive publicity and were both praised and scorned by people who saw the many photographs taken of the craft seen between November 1987 and May 1988 at Lake Okobogee, Gulf Breeze, close to Pensacola Naval Air Station, Florida. The basis of the Gulf Breeze sightings was one man, Ed Walters, who claimed to have been abducted many times for the purpose of being constantly monitored by aliens who implanted a small probe in his skull, though when doctors looked for it with x-ray machines they couldn't find it. Under hypnosis he said that they had abducted him a final time to remove the probe and all traces of their ever being here as he had attracted far too much attention to them. Ed Walters was the main character in the spate of sightings but he wasn't the only witness to see U.F.O.s in the area over nearby Shoreline Park and Gulf Breeze, there were reports from hundreds of witnesses, one witness seeing up to 170 U.F.O.s. Though the majority of the sightings have been attributed to the local air base, others haven't. Walters came under close scrutiny because of the many photographs he took, and they would eventually appear to prove to be his downfall. Walters refused to do a television interview, or show his pictures for U.K. television, but they have been examined by many experts on the other side of the Atlantic.
The camera that Walters used for his first thirty or so pictures was a Polaroid 108 which is notoriously easy to double expose. It is possible to photograph an object against a plain background, and then take a photograph outdoors and the object will appear on the resulting exposure complete with background. Investigators have created shots very similar to Walter's in this way, however Dr. Bruce Maccabee is a government research physicist who has been researching extra-terrestrial intelligence for 25 years and he has computer analysed Ed Walter's photographs and he is satisfied that they are not fakes, but then again Maccabee is a believer in U.F.O.s and is the author of many scientific papers on them.
Investigative reporter Mark Curtis likens the Ed Walters case to the three strike rule in baseball, i.e. three strikes and you are out. Strike 1 was when a styrofoam model of a U.F.O. was found in the former home of Ed Walters. Strike 2 was when a man called Tommy Smith came forward and said that he had witnessed Walters taking double exposure photographs, and strike 3 was when Curtis was able to recreate Walter's photographs using fraudulent methods.
There are many cases of people taking what may be a genuine spate of sightings and using them to gain notoriety for themselves, this happens not only in U.F.O. cases but in various other phenomenon as well, and it is a shame that the hoaxers seem to gain more attention than the apparently genuine ones who are seeing a truly puzzling phenomenon. Whether or not the other sightings at Gulf Breeze were of “flying saucers” or something else is not clear, but in the area at that time there were tests under way on what are known as U.A.V.s, (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles), an airborne craft that was to be used for reconnaissance and secret observation, what we might call a drone today.
As plain old boring sightings were increasing, there were more interesting and more interactive encounters occurring, one such encounter took place on December 29th, 1980 when Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum and her seven year old grandson, Colby Landrum, were driving along Highway FM 1485 on their way home to Dayton near Houston, Texas after dining at nearby New Caney. After a while at around 9pm the car entered a pine and oak forest and Colby saw a bright light over the trees ahead of them which was looming larger and larger until it became what Vickie later described as “a diamond of fire.”
Betty stopped the car and the object hovered over the road about sixty yards in front of them, occasionally emitting a burst of flames and rising a little before returning to about twenty five feet off the ground. The three witnesses got out of the car to get a better look at it as the object was lighting up the trees and the road all around it. It appeared to be made of a dull rather than a shiny metal and had a row of blue lights around its centre. It would occasionally give off a beep and it was emitting a tremendous amount of heat. Vickie and Colby got back in the car at his request but Betty remained outside until the object rose and moved away. When she went to get back into the car she found the bodywork was hot to the touch, so hot in fact that she couldn't touch it with her bare hands. They heard a further noise from above and saw that it was a group of helicopters which seemed to appear from all directions and Betty thought that they were attempting to surround the object.
The three of them continued their journey for a further five miles and could once again see the craft though only in the distance, surrounded by the helicopters of which they counted twenty three. Within the ensuing hours all three of the witnesses fell ill and developed “painful swellings and blisters.” They also suffered stomach pains and blinding headaches. Colby was covered in a sunburn like rash and Vickie's hair began to fall out and Betty's eyes swelled to the point that she couldn't see and was taken to hospital. Over a period of weeks all three had suffered some hair loss and sore eyes, and though their hair regrew it was different to the hair they had lost, and none of them ever returned to their former health. The doctors who treated them said that their symptoms were synonymous with high levels of electromagnetic radiation in the bands of ultra violet, microwave and x-ray.
The craft in this case appears to be similar to that witnessed by Zamora, and similarly both caused lasting effects on either the environment or the witnesses with the flames that emitted from its underside. What is also apparent is that the military wished to conceal both sets of events as local airfields, both civil and military, denied knowledge that any fleet of helicopters had used their facilities or showed on their radar.
Vickie believed that they had witnessed a craft either owned by, or pursued by, the military and attempted to sue the U.S. Government for 20 million dollars, but the case was dismissed as no craft matching the descriptions given by the witnesses is “owned by, operated by or in the inventory of either the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force or N.A.S.A.” What didn't come out in court was whether or not the military knew what the craft was, so despite the court case, the origin of it still remains a mystery.
Could it be a military craft? Could it be an alien craft pursued by the military? Or even more outrageously, but a belief more popular than ever among Ufologists, is that the military are aware the craft was alien and were trying to hide their knowledge of U.F.O.s, or better still their collusion with them.
It is not only the military in the U.S.A. who encounter U.F.O.s, but militaries elsewhere, a Russian pilot saw a light in the sky that was closing in on him, and it eventually made contact with his plane which then went into a steep dive. He managed to land safely and found that there was damage to the wing on his plane. There aren't as many reports from Russia about U.F.O.s as there are from other countries in the “free world” but there must have been many encounters such as this in the past above the former Soviet Union because the authorities felt so strongly about them that they have implemented a “No Fire Policy.”
There was a momentous case that occurred around military installations in Britain, though the bases that the events occurred near are U.S. bases. The following case is considered to be a landmark case of U.F.O.s being experienced by the military, not only once but over a period of time. The events unfolded at Rendlesham Forest near Ipswich, Suffolk, and the case is now considered by many to be the equal of Roswell and the events that unfolded there.
Rendlesham Forest is near the U.S. bases R.A.F. Woodbridge and R.A.F. Bentwaters which are three miles apart, and the events occurred over several nights. Due to punch and counter punch the exact dates have become blurred, but the witnesses and their consistency, reliability and clarity seem very genuine and for this reason the case is considered as certainly the best to occur in Britain. In Edward Ashpole's “The U.F.O. Phenomenon” the case is given priority and is the sole topic of chapter one, a chapter called “The Best U.F.O. Report.”
At approximately 3am on December 27th, 1980 a bright light was seen by several villagers as it flew across the sky. It was also seen on radar by a British Base near Norwich and was lost to radar in the area around R.A.F. Woodbridge. Two U.S.A.F. security guards saw something come out of the sky and “drop” into the forest, so three patrolmen, including two sergeants, went out of the east gate at Woodbridge and entered the forest where they saw on the ground a bright luminous triangular shape, possibly a cone shape about 9 feet (3 metres) wide at the base and about 6 feet (2 metres) tall. The object lit up the surrounding forest with its bright light, and had a pulsating red light on top with blue lights at the base. It appeared to be either hovering or standing on legs, and as the three men approached it, it rose and moved through the trees toward a farm where it frightened the animals before quickly flying away. It was seen again about an hour later around the base's perimeter, though only briefly, and was also seen on radar by Bentwaters whose impression was that the object had crashed. The site in the forest was investigated the next morning at dawn and the men saw a hole through the tree tops where branches had been broken as if a heavy object had fallen from the sky. At the spot where the cone had been stationary were three indentations in the ground in a triangular formation. The area was also tested for radiation and the levels were found to be highest around the marks in the ground.
Now is where the dates become confused as some say the next sighting was on the next night and others say it was two nights later, but whichever it was, the sighting was considered serious enough to disturb Colonel Charles Halt at a dinner party. Halt was then a Deputy Commander at the twin bases and was later promoted to Base Commander, a post he served for a further 4 years. He was told that the U.F.O. had returned.
Halt assembled an investigating team and they returned to the forest, taking with them equipment to record the events. Halt is heard on tape to mention a large sun-like object which seemed to drip smaller white lights from it which showed red, green and blue lights and that moved erratically through the sky. These objects caused distress to nearby animals and as the large one moved through the trees it was followed by the men. Every so often as they followed it a bright light would beam downwards from its underside and it appeared to pass straight through solid objects such as the trees and at one time a truck.
Several of the witnesses say they saw alien beings with large heads and big eyes which seemed to be suspended in mid-air beneath the craft inside the shafts of light. It also appears that at least one of the airmen suffered a loss of time and found himself elsewhere in the woods when he “came to.” The classic symptoms of an abduction case.
Another of the airmen, Sergeant Jim Penniston was one of those who went to investigate the first night's sighting and said later “The air was filled with electricity. You could feel it on your skin as we approached the object. It was about the size of a tank.... triangular in shape.” Colonel Halt said of the second nights encounter: “If we hadn't made the tape, even I would have trouble believing what happened that night.” As well as the tape Halt had erected huge floodlights called “lightalls” but they failed to operate, as did the replacements they brought in, and also the walkie-talkies they were using.
Another of the witnesses present at Woodbridge was Larry Warren, whose military record was classified after his honourable discharge in 1981, and whose re-entry into the Air Force was barred as his record stated that he couldn't fully extend his right arm - a fact he says is simply not true. Warren says that the object just materialized out of an explosion of light rather than being seen to fly, and this is not the only case of such materializations of craft, one sighting in August 1980 by a woman in Medway, Kent was of two humanoid figures inside a bubble which appeared out of a misty fog that emitted a sickly smell. What is interesting about this case is that, rather surprisingly, the details haven't been shrouded in mystery, rather the opposite, reports and statements issued by Halt have been made public, and even the tape recording of the nights events has been made available.
Conspiracy theorists speculate that, rather than admitting the existence of U.F.O.s, the authorities are making available a gamut of evidence which will confound and amaze the public into disbelief, thus ending the U.F.O. problem. Another less cynical explanation is that the authorities are fully aware of the existence and technology and are slowly but surely bringing this to the attention of the public rather than via a short sharp shock, so are we being fed information or misinformation?
What is interesting about the Rendlesham Forest case is the loss of time suffered by at least one of the airmen and the fact that they “came to” in another part of the forest with no recollection of how they had got there. As I said earlier, this is the typical scenario of an abduction case where the victims often later realise that a journey has taken them longer than it would normally do, or they have no memory of a particular part of the journey. More amazingly some people find strange marks on their bodies.
The first alien abduction case to become famous, though not the first to occur, is that which occurred on September 19th, 1961 to Betty and Barney Hill. The couple were driving through their home state of New England on their way home from a holiday near Niagara Falls, it was late at night and they had stopped for dinner before continuing their drive along Highway U.S. 3. They passed through a village called Lancaster and shortly afterward Betty noticed a bright light near the moon in the sky ahead of them. She told Barney about it and he told her it was probably just a satellite, but they continued to watch the light which continued to get brighter and brighter, and appeared to be keeping pace with the car and flying up and to the right of them. When Barney stopped the car he looked at the light through his binoculars and realised that it was no ordinary celestial body. They continued their journey once again and Betty became worried and considered spending the night in a Motel and returning home the next day. She carried on watching the object through Barney's binoculars while he drove and saw the object was “Like a big pancake” and was far too big to be a helicopter as Barney had earlier thought and that it had two rows of windows around it. Barney again stopped the car and walked over a field to within a distance of 50 feet (15 metres) of the object and could now clearly see that it was occupied by at least a dozen beings which he thought were looking at him. He became frightened, as did Betty who could no longer see him, so he ran back to the car and leapt in driving away as fast as he could. They could hear beeping sounds like a microwave oven but could no longer see the craft and the car began to vibrate. They had a feeling of drowsiness come over them and as they continued their drive the drowsiness passed and they noticed a road sign which pointed to Concord 17 miles away, but Concord was 35 miles from where they had seen the U.F.O.
They drove all the way home that night and they arrived there without further incident, but the next morning Barney became angry with Betty when she kept on talking about the previous night, and Betty also found that their car had very shiny spots on it, as though somebody had polished parts of it. She even telephoned the Air Force and reported the incident to them, reluctantly Barney also spoke to them and they were told that a number of other witnesses had reported a U.F.O. in the area. Over the ensuing period Betty began to suffer from vivid nightmares and Barney's health also began to deteriorate, a fact they both connected with their close encounter.
Betty now became fascinated with U.F.O.s and began reading about them, she read a book by Major Donald Keyhoe called “The Flying Saucer Conspiracy” and even wrote to the author, relaying her experience to him. As a result of her letter she was visited by a lecturer who was on the staff of the Hayden Planetarium in Boston, Walter Webb, who was skeptical when he arrived, but left convinced that they were telling the truth, and that's what he told NICAP (National Investigations Committee) who then spoke to the Hills themselves, and it was during this interview that they realised that there was an unaccounted for period of time. They found that the journey had taken the Hills two hours longer than it normally would have done, even allowing for the time that they had briefly stopped. They also had no recollection of seventeen miles of the journey, so they returned to the site a number of times in order to try and remember what had happened to them there, but they found they had no recollection of it and try as they might they could not prompt their memories to recall it.
The Hills also told their story to a church discussion group in September 1963 and then decided to consult a well-known Boston psychiatrist, Dr. Benjamin Simon. In 1963 Barney began psychiatric treatment and was put under hypnosis, at which time he began to recant tales of alien abduction. Betty was also now hypnotically regressed, independently of her husband, and corroborated her husband's account of events. They both said that they had been forcibly taken aboard a space craft by grey humanoids with pear shaped heads and large eyes where they were given an intimate, and at times very embarrassing, medical examination. Betty was told that it was a pregnancy test which was performed by inserting a needle through her navel, a test not available to “Earthlings” in 1961. Such a device, a lamaroscope, a long, flexible tube containing fibre-optics, was developed about 10 or so years later as a way to test for Downs Syndrome in unborn babies via the amniotic fluid and for removing ova for fertilization as test tube babies. Betty was also given a guided tour of the craft and was shown a map of where the Alien's world was, and she was able to draw this map while under hypnosis.
The psychiatrist who performed the regressions, despite the very detailed accounts given by the Hills and the fact that at times during his regression Barney had to be restrained, isn't convinced that what they said under hypnosis is necessarily the true account of events, but merely what the Hills believe to be the truth. He says that it is highly possible that they did indeed encounter a U.F.O. and their abduction was a figment of their imagination possibly triggered by some unsettling incident during the journey. The fact that they both made up the same story is not surprising as they weren't regressed for a long time after the sighting and they both had read a great deal of material on U.F.O.s in that time and would have certainly talked to each other about both what had happened and what they had read. Interestingly, Barney had also watched an episode of the television series “The Outer Limits” which had featured an alien being who spoke using telepathy just days before he described one during a hypnosis session. The fact that they may have seen a real U.F.O. is backed up by Pease Air Force Base who tracked one on radar at the same time and place as the Hills encounter, and also there was the physical evidence left behind on their car, but more importantly the map that Betty Hill drew in 1963.
Using the map astronomers began to look for the star system in space and they reasoned that the majority of stars they felt could support life giving planets were located in the obscure southern constellation of “Reticulum,” but three of the stars in that system were not discovered until 1969, and yet Betty Hill's map showed them clearly. Astronomers at Ohio State University used a computer to place the stars in the constellation in their correct positions, somewhere beyond the double star system of Zeta Reticuli one and Zeta Reticuli two. These are to be found 220 trillion miles, 37 light years from Earth, and the computer drew a map of them which was an almost exact replica of the map Betty Hill had drawn.
The Hills ordeal was transcribed in a book by John G. Fuller, and this started the abduction craze with many people now coming forward with similar claims that they too had been abducted. One famous case happened in 1975 to a logger called Travis Walton who was with six of his colleagues on their way home to Sholo, Arizona when they all saw a bright light through the trees. Walton got out of the truck and walked towards the light which now they could all see was a metallic saucer with spotlights beneath it. The craft was humming, almost below the threshold of hearing and was lighting up the forest around it. It started to move and Walton got down to hide behind a log as his colleagues began shouting at him to get back into the pickup truck. He turned to run back to it and as he did so he was hit in the chest area by a bluish beam of energy like a bolt of lightning and thrown through the air before falling back to the ground. Fearing Walton was dead, his colleagues drove quickly away and stopped a short distance down the track where they talked about what had happened and decided to drive back to find him, but when they got back to the spot where he had disappeared they could find no sign of him, and an organised widespread search of the area also failed to find him.
Travis says that he was taken aboard the craft and examined by alien beings with large heads and eyes, no hair and pale grey skin and he was so terrified that he screamed the whole time, which he felt was a couple of hours. He started swinging at them and they held their hands out to him and left the room, but standing in the doorway was a figure he took to be a man and he was led down a corridor into a room where there were other people like the man. He was laid down on a table and they covered his face, at which point he lost consciousness until he woke in the cold and dark, lay down with a light above him which then shot up into the sky. He found he was lying in the spot where he had been captured. Travis Walton had been missing for five days. Both he and his six colleagues have all stuck to their story for twenty years, and have all taken, and passed, lie detector tests.
The aliens that people regularly began to describe as their abductors were all very similar, whereas those described by abductees before the release of John G. Fuller's book had all been markedly different. So if people are creating, be it intentional or not, stories of abduction it seems that they may be “borrowing” details from this and other sources. The many reports of abductions share common details, mostly those of lost or unaccounted for hours, medical tests and the taking of body samples, some even include accounts of inter species intercourse, and some abductees say that it has not only happened to them once but many times over a period of time, as though they are being continually monitored and examined.
The real problem with abduction cases is that they are only recalled under hypnosis, which is itself an unreliable and marginally understood phenomenon. The craze was again kick started in 1977/8, the year which saw the release of one of the most popular films of the time, Steven Spielberg's “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind” which was based on several real accounts of encounters with U.F.O.s and featured, as mentioned earlier, Dr. Hynek in a cameo role, and it seemed that plain old sightings were no longer big news and abduction was now the norm. The film began a spate of books and spin off films and got worldwide media attention and abduction now became such a problem, especially in the United States, that help groups were set up for the victims. It seems that every day another victim comes forward, and a recent survey found that 10% of Americans believe they have at least seen a U.F.O., but then again another survey found that 17% of American students would hit themselves in the face for fifty dollars.
It is believed among abduction circles that the phenomenon has been around for centuries and there are as many as twelve different types of aliens described on a regular basis by victims. The most common are known as Greys. Greys are around nine feet tall with large, black oval eyes and are said to be “quite sweet looking.” Many believe that the greys have agreed treaties with earth governments who trade with them and turn a blind eye to abductions in return for grey military technology. Another group are the Blues who also have large oval eyes. The blues are said to be trying to talk governments out of dealing with the “evil” greys. The greys though seem angelic when compared to the Reptoids who emanate from near the constellation Draco. The Reptoids control some greys via implants and have a tendency to eat human flesh. However fantastic this may all sound, there are many people who believe it to be true and swear by it.
Like the phenomenon of U.F.O.s themselves, abduction has been with us for a long time. In medieval times people would claim to wake in the night to find a “devil” in their room, and it was not uncommon for nuns in their nunneries to claim that they were raped by such “devils” to explain their pregnancies. These “creatures” became known as “incubus” or “incubi” and it is true to say that in the majority of abduction cases, the actual event occurs in the bedroom during a state of waking or falling asleep, and these “dreams” are called “hypnogogic hallucinations” and they can also occur when the percipient is just tired.
One of the big players in the field of alien abduction is a New York painter and sculptor, Bud Hopkins, author of “Missing Time” and “Intruders” who believes that aliens may maintain a relationship with generation after generation of contactees. Hopkins became more and more interested in the concept of missing time in the late 1970s and he began his work believing that Betty and Barney Hill were unconscious self-deceivers, and though he had himself seen a daylight disc in 1964 he was unable to accept the idea of alien abduction, but the more he investigated the phenomenon the more he came to believe it, and in “Missing Time” in 1981 he speculated that perhaps thousands of people may have had U.F.O. abduction experiences, and that those who are abducted have the same experience many times in their life, and their purpose he claims is to create human hybrids.
One of his “subjects,” a woman named Andrea, told him how she was “floated out of her bed” into a U.F.O. and, as she sat on a table, a long needle was pressed up her nose which caused her pain as it broke through the top of her nasal cavity, and when she woke in the morning back in her bed there was blood on her nightgown and bedclothes from a bad nose bleed. Stranger still was Andrea's experience when she was thirteen years old and still a virgin. She became pregnant and didn't even have a boyfriend. She had dreamt that she was having sex with a man with no hair and “real funny eyes” and in the morning when she woke, her underwear was wet as was the bed. She went on to say:
“… and after a while my stomach started to grow. My mother took me to a gynaecologist, and I was pregnant. I couldn't believe it. My father was furious and asked who did it to me, he wanted to get even. I told him it was a weird man in a dream, with funny eyes and a big head, and you know, Bud, the gynaecologist said I was still a virgin. I still had my hymen.”
One of Hopkins' most detailed studies, and equally one of his most baffling cases, is that of a woman who wrote to him via his publisher after reading “Missing Time” and who Hopkins calls Kathie Davis.
One evening in 1983 Kathie Davis was about to go out to a neighbour's house when she noticed that the door to the pool house was open and the light was on, despite her having closed the door earlier on. She mentioned it to her mother but neither of them were worried about it, and before she left she checked them again and saw that the light was now off and the door closed, but the garage door was now open, and this was always kept closed.
When she got to her neighbour, Dee Anne's house she telephoned her mother who told her that she had seen a “big light” by the pool house which had moved across the garden to the bird feeder where it had grown to two feet in diameter. This phone call prompted Kathie to go back to her house and take a look around the garden where she found her dog hiding underneath a car. Later her neighbour also came over with her eleven year old daughter Tammy and they all went swimming. They found a burned patch on the ground about eight feet in diameter where nothing will now grow, and the bird feeder, which was once full of birds, often rare ones, is now avoided by wildlife and nothing will grow near there. Hopkins felt that the burning of the grass indicated that some sort of landing had taken place, and in a later telephone conversation he asked Davis to have a closer look around the burn mark, and she found four small holes about three inches deep some two feet beyond the edge of the circle.
Her letter went on to cover a couple of incidents that had occurred to her sister Laura whom she described as a “realist, very level headed and not much imagination” and who was driving past a church one day when she got a compulsion to pull into the car park behind it where she saw something silver hovering over her at about the height of a telephone pole with red, green and white lights that flickered on and off. She turned down her radio to see if it was making any noise and the next thing she remembers is driving home in the dark. The next incident was 10 years later when she went to a hypnotist to try and lose weight, but the hypnosis had the opposite effect and she woke one night to find that she was deaf and dumb. She went to hospital where she was given tranquillisers and eventually she improved, though she still took comfort in eating and it made her feel better when she was eating. She telephoned her hypnotist to ask him why she should be feeling this way but the sound of his voice enraged her so much that she felt compelled to kill him.
Kathie's letter ended by saying that both she and her mother had found scars on their legs that looked very similar, she went on, “I don't remember when I got mine, but it seems like I had it all my life... At first I only had one scar but now I have two, on the same leg.” Hopkins was fascinated by the letter and felt that Laura had been abducted in the church car park and her hypnosis session had reawakened hidden memories of it, and in a telephone conversation with Hopkins, Kathie told him of a disturbing dream she had had shortly after her marriage at age nineteen. There were two strange, grey faced creatures with large heads and pitch black eyes that seemed to shimmer liquid-like, stood by her bed, and one of them was holding a small black box with a red light on it. Together they stepped forward and one of them gave her the box and told her that at some time in the future she would see it again and she would know how to use it. Hopkins asked her if she had ever actually seen her a U.F.O. and she cited an incident when she was a teenager and had been driving in a car with two friends when they saw a flashing light in the sky and one of them said it was a U.F.O. As it came closer they “all got a creepy feeling” and they stopped to have a closer look but Kathie couldn't remember what happened next. Hopkins asked her if she could call her friend to see if she could remember any of what had happened, and she was surprised to hear that she did remember a little more than Kathie did. Dorothy remembered stopping the car and getting out to look at a light on the ground, which Kathie had no recollection of, but when she got home that night she found that several hours of the night appeared to be missing.
Hopkins would later visit Kathie at her home in Copley Woods, near Indianapolis, and he would not only interview her, but also Dee Anne and Tammy about the night they had gone swimming. Dee Anne had felt that something was wrong as soon as she had entered Kathie's yard “like somebody's just watching us” and Tammy had felt nauseated when she went into the pump house to change into her costume. As they were swimming they all began to feel sick and when they later drove to a fast food restaurant to eat, they all felt too ill to eat so they drove back home again.
Kathie became increasingly worried about her experiences but Hopkins told her that these type of cases generally tended to stop once somebody starts to investigate them, but Kathie's didn't. In fact on October 13th, 1983, ten days before she was due to visit Hopkins in New York, she had been lying in bed when she felt she heard somebody calling her name, but it seemed to be inside her head rather than outside. She rushed to call a friend of Hopkins called Sue whom he had put “on duty” should anything further happen, and after this she woke her mother who told her to take some aspirin and try to sleep. She carried her son Tommy into her room with her and sat watching television until she became drowsy and went to sleep, and a little while later she was woken by her mother who told her that she felt that somebody had called her name, and at that moment they heard a humming sound “like a truck with its engine running” coming from outside the house, but they could see nothing and they soon went back to sleep.
In the morning Kathie woke feeling strangely exhausted with a stiffness in her arms, shoulders and neck as though she had been lifting weights, a complaint her mother also made. When Kathie looked at her bed clothes she found that there was blood on them where her neck and where her lower back would have been.
Her trip to New York went ahead and she spent the time there telling Hopkins more about herself, explaining that she had suffered many health problems since being a young child. She had begun to menstruate at seven, had high blood pressure at ten, her gall bladder was removed at fourteen, she had suffered from hepatitis, almost died from pneumonia, had her appendix removed, had an asthma attack, needed medical attention for an irregular heartbeat and spent two weeks in traction when two of the vertebrae in her back somehow fused together, what was unusual about this was that they were extra vertebrae which “normal” people don't have. When she was seventeen she met the man who was to become her husband and she fell pregnant, a fact she had confirmed by a doctor, so she decided to move her wedding forward by a few months, but soon afterward she began to menstruate normally again, and further medical tests showed that she was no longer pregnant. She had not had an abortion and she had no signs of miscarriage, she had simply ceased to be pregnant.
Hopkins now wanted her to undergo hypnosis and this was performed by his associate, Dr. Clamar. At the first session she described how she had awakened one night to find two small grey faced figures standing beside her bed, and at the next session she described more fully the incident where she had been handed the small black box, saying that first of all she had had a probe pushed up her nose until it seemed to break through the skin near her sinuses and she could taste blood, but when she had looked up into the large black eyes she had felt reassured. A similar case with the nasal probe was described to Hopkins by a girl from Kentucky who told him that when she was five she had had a long probe with a ball on the end inserted into her nose, and Hopkins feels that the ball may be left inside as some sort of implant, and this was brought to mind by another one of Kathie's encounters.
She was woken one night by a scream from her son Robbie's bedroom and she ran to see what was the matter. She found Robbie lying awake and looking shocked and told him that he must have had a bad dream but he told her “Mommy, this ain't no dream.” He had seen a man with a big head come in through the wall and into the closet, he had not let the boy move and he had told him that he wanted his brother Tommy. One week later Kathie went into boys' room and found Tommy covered in blood from a nose bleed in the night. She took him to a doctor who found a small hole high up in his sinuses and the doctor told Kathie that he had probably pushed a pencil, or something similar, up his nose. Hopkins' opinion was that on the first night when Robbie had awoken, the men had then inserted the probe into Tommy's nose, and the night that Tommy had had the nose bleed it may have fallen out again.
More than two years later, in 1986, Kathie dreamt that she was lying on a table with her nightgown pulled up under her breasts while a man examined her. He asked her telepathically how she was feeling and she replied “Kind of crampy.” He then patted her on her stomach and told her “That's good” and she went back to sleep. The next morning when she woke she found her underwear on top of the bedclothes. That day she felt pain in her lower abdomen and this was significant because this was supposed to be the day that she menstruated. Hopkins felt that the “man” knew this and had come to take away her ovum, and he compared this to the testimony of Betty Hill who had had a long needle inserted through her navel, and Barney Hill who said he had had a sperm sample take from him. Hopkins would write:
“Above all, in none of these cases involving either men or women do we have what can be called a basically erotic experience. The descriptions are invariably of a detached, clinical procedure instead, even if some of them result in more or less involuntary ejaculation.”
“Now all of this leads to the unwelcome speculative inference that somewhere, somehow, human beings - or possible hybrids of some sort - are being produced by a technology obviously - yet not inconceivably - superior to ours.”
One thing that helped convince Hopkins that his ideas are true happened during a visit with Kathie in Copley Woods when she said something that took him completely by surprise. He made a remark to her about how lucky she was to have two boys like Tommy and Robbie and she stopped the car and said “Budd, you know I have a daughter too. I know I have a daughter. I think I've seen her. I know what she looks like.” and on her second visit to New York, something else that she had said to him earlier took on a greater meaning than he had first realised. It was to do with the night she had been driving with her two friends and they had seen a U.F.O.
It took place at about the time that she met her future husband and she can only recall being “frozen” in the car, but her friend Dorothy can recall getting out of the car, and they both remember the other girl, Roberta, crouching in the back seat refusing to look, and Kathie's memory then goes to her arrival home, later than usual. When Kathie was hypnotically regressed she could recall the events in further detail, and she said that the girls were looking up into the sky at the U.F.O. which looked like “an airplane with the strobe things on it” and there was a sudden flash in the car which made them all feel cold. Everything went black and she wanted to get out of the car but was unable to move because her arms and legs felt cold and heavy and her back felt stiff, it was as though she was being held down by some invisible force. She remembers getting out of the car and standing next to Dorothy as they watched something float away in to the sky.
Taking her back to the point of the flash in the car, Hopkins suspected that she may have been abducted first and then returned to the car while Dorothy was taken. Kathie recalled a pain that “makes my stomach hurt. It feels like my legs are being pulled off my body from the waist down.” Asking her where the pain was she continued “Where my uterus is, down low, like I'm going to have my period. It's hard, it hurts. It's like a toothache... Oh it feels like someone's pushing on me real hard... Wiggling and pushing right in there.” Hopkins believes that this is the point at which she is impregnated, and that the baby was taken away the following March when she found herself menstruating after finding she was pregnant.
Possibly, and probably, connected to this particular episode is another incident that was recalled by Kathie under hypnosis. She was lying on a table and she says that “I just want to scream.” Hopkins asks her if she wants to scream because of the pain and she says, in a high pitched wailing voice, “No! It's not right, it's not fair. IT'S NOT FAIR! IT'S MINE! IT'S MINE! I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU! IT'S NOT FAIR!” and obviously Hopkins feels that this is the point where her baby is taken away, which was backed up by another account that Kathie gave in which she explained what she had meant when she told him that she had a daughter.
She recalls waking in a place that was “all white” with several “little grey guys” around her. She stood up and one of them put its arm round her waist as if to comfort her, and at this point a little girl came into the room with two more grey men:
“She looked to be about four. She looked about Tommy's size... She was real pretty. She looked like an elf, or an... angel. She had really big blue eyes and a little teeny-weeny nose, just so perfect. And her mouth was just so perfect and tiny, and she was pale, except her lips were pink and her eyes were blue. And her hair was white and wispy and thin... fine... real thin and fine. Her head was a little larger than normal, 'specially in the forehead and back here... The forehead was a little bigger... but she was just a doll. And they brought her to me. And they stood there, and they looked at me. Everyone was looking at me. And I looked at her, and I wanted to hold her. She was just so pretty, and I felt like I just wanted to hold her. And I started crying...”
Before the girl was taken away, Kathie was told that she would see her again. She also recalled that the grey man she thought of as the child's “father” held her hand “and I feel all kinds of things... sad and warm, and care and distance... and goodbye... and lonely... I feel lonely too.” Consciously she says that as the man held her hand she felt a lot of emotions, one of which was guilt, and Hopkins feels that this could be the man's guilt rather than her own.
Bud Hopkins has come in for a lot of criticism in his line of work, mainly because of the kind of sessions he holds to get the information from his subjects, and it is felt that they are giving him what he wants and not necessarily what is true. It has been said that they are being rewarded for providing details and so they will strive to do so all the more. Psychologist at the University of Washington, Elizabeth Loftuss, says that there is no better way to do this than when a person is at their most susceptible, when they are relaxed, i.e. when they are under hypnosis.
Whatever the truth is about alien abduction, it must surely be that there is far too much evidence in favour of it to merely discount it, but is it a genuine phenomenon or is it just the strange workings of the human mind?
It seems that nowadays any phenomenon which can't be explained away at one time or another will be linked to aliens. A good example of this is Crop Circles, another is Cattle Mutilations, which came to the fore in late 1973, though isolated cases were noted in the late 1960s, coming after the dawn of “abduction fever” and now there are several thousand cases reported every year. The epicentre of cases was Minnesota and Kansas where farmers were reporting that their livestock, mainly larger cattle, were being killed in weird and wonderful ways. The animals showed no signs of struggle, no knife or bullet wounds, yet often they were completely devoid of any blood. It also seemed that the animals had been bled elsewhere as the surrounding area was clear of both the missing blood and any sign of footprints, even in a case of one carcass found in a mud hole.
The most puzzling aspect of the phenomenon is the fact that the bodies were missing various organs such as eyes, ears, lips, assorted glands, rectum and genitalia. If this isn't weird enough, the operations had been done with apparent surgical precision. Attempts at explanation were many and varied and included death from unknown phenomena, natural causes and the careful mutilations being caused by scavenging animals. Some of the cows examined were found to have died from a common cattle ailment known as black leg, though this doesn't explain the mutilations. A more popular theory was the involvement of Satanic Cults, though this couldn't explain the lack of footprints especially in the mud hole, it was as though the animal had been dropped from above. In 1975 police thought they had got the breakthrough when they found a blue satchel which contained a pair of surgical gloves, a scalpel and a cow’s ear. However no finger prints were found and the ear matched no reported mutilation.
By the late 1970s the number of mutilations had risen into four figures and they had now occurred in all the main U.S. farming states. An official report followed a year-long enquiry led by Ex Federal Agent Kenneth Rommel, and the two hundred and ninety seven page report concluded that the mutilations were due to predators and scavenging animals, needless to say this didn't satisfy many people, but officially the case was closed. In 1989 the author, Linda Howe, and a pathologist analysed tissue samples taken from wounds and concluded that the animals had all suffered from heat induced changes along the incisions and suggested that this may be caused by a laser being used to cut the flesh.
A momentous event which was eventually blamed on U.F.O.s occurred on November 9th, 1965. A blackout on the east coast of America plunged 80,000 square miles and 36 million people in and around New York into darkness from 5-30 pm to 4 am the following day, trapping nearly 800,000 people in elevators and on underground trains, while many air passengers were forced to circle darkened airports. It is a fact that human kind will strive to make the best out of every situation, and this was backed up by the statisticians who noticed that nine months later they were experiencing a baby boom.
Two days later it was announced that the problem had been caused by a break in the power line from Niagara, but checks found this not to be the case. Next it was announced that the problem was a remote control substation at Clay, New York, but repair men at Clay could find nothing wrong. The press briefly reported a story but later dropped it. The report was based on the evidence of a pilot, Weldon Ross, who had been approaching Hancock Field at Syracuse just before the blackout occurred when he had seen, below him, just over the power lines near Clay substation, a huge red ball of light about 100 feet across. This statement was backed up by a student pilot who had been in the plane with Ross at the time. It was also supported by another witness, Robert C. Walsh who was the Deputy Commissioner for the Federal Aviation Agency in the Syracuse area, and he had seen the same ball a few miles south of Hancock Field. Other witnesses, pilots included, reported seeing two U.F.O.s over Pennsylvania shortly before the blackout with Air Force fighters in pursuit.
Investigators found that the blackout had been caused by the grid being drained of power in some sectors while being overloaded in others, and the safety controls which had worked under similar strains before had failed to work this time.
In 1968 the Atmospheric physicist James Macdonald claimed, during a House Committee on Science and Astronautics, that U.F.O.s were responsible, and he charged the Federal Power Commission with evading the evidence connecting U.F.O.s to the blackout. As the accusation was made in Congress it was entered into the Congressional record. Unfortunately however, his outburst created a storm of criticism from his colleagues who denounced him as a crank, and on June 13th, 1971 James Macdonald was found shot through the head with a gun at his side. The official verdict was suicide.
Other experts claimed that other, similar blackouts were also caused by U.F.O.s, including one in London in the very same month, and they supported their claims by saying that U.F.O. activity was often seen shortly before or during the blackout.
Another mystery sometimes associated with U.F.O.s and aliens, though far less often than most, is “The Missing Link.” That is the link between man as we know him today and the primates that we are believed to have evolved from. Fossilised remains of primates have been found, as have those of primitive man, but never the remains of the evolutionary stage in between, i.e. the “Missing Link.”
Some people believe that abductions are the result of us being monitored by aliens, others go one step further by saying that, not only do they monitor us but they also help us in our daily lives by showing us their technology and how to use it, but of course that is once we are here on earth, surviving and able to accept their help. Many people also believe that the fact we are here at all is thanks to them and that life on earth exists due to their influence, and continues to survive with their help. The missing link has not been found because it does not exist, and that is due to genetic engineering on the part of our “overseers” who “engineered” us so that we appeared in the form we take today, human beings.
If these phenomenon can't be easily attributed to U.F.O.s, then there is one which almost certainly can, and that is “Men In Black” or M.I.B.s. The encounters with M.I.B.s occur at some time after a person has had an encounter with a U.F.O. and usually quite soon afterwards. The term is used quite loosely as there is sometimes a woman as well as men, and they generally visit witnesses of U.F.O.s and try to discourage them from telling people about what they have seen. The M.I.B.s are described as being tall, foreign looking, possibly slightly oriental as they tend to have slanting eyes, dark hued or tanned skin, and at least one was said to be wearing lipstick. They wear black suits and hats, black shoes and socks with white shirts. Their clothes leave a lasting impression on witnesses due to their immaculate condition as they are always well pressed and spotless.
Their mannerisms also leave a lasting impression as they are unusual to say the least. M.I.B.s rarely if ever smile and their movements are described as “awkward” as is their speech which seems as though it is not natural to them and they usually talk in short and formal sentences. They are very business-like and formal, even to the point of being menacing. People who encounter M.I.B.s are left with an overall feeling that they are not entirely human.
When the M.I.B.s are seen to arrive in a car it is always a prestige car such as a Cadillac, a Jaguar or a Rolls Royce and, like their clothing, the car is black and always immaculate even though it is often an old model, sometimes one that has been out of production for a number of years. If the registration number is checked later it is always found to be non-existent, as are the numbers on the identification cards they carry. Often they claim to be working for the military or the C.I.A. and openly proffer their I.D. Cards.
The usual chain of events is that soon after a witness sees a U.F.O. they are contacted by M.I.B.s, sometimes over the telephone, but more commonly in person. What is interesting in some cases is that the M.I.B.s make their appearance too soon after the sighting for the authorities to have investigated the matter properly, and often even before it has been reported to them. They have a disturbing amount of knowledge, some of it personal about the witnesses, who they usually contact when they are alone, in one case minutes after the witness had bid farewell to company. They ask about what the witness saw and heard and what they thought it was. If they say that they think they saw a U.F.O. the M.I.B.s will try to dissuade them, saying that it could not have been and must have been something else. If the hint isn't taken by the witness about what it was or was not and about not telling anybody else about it, then the M.I.B.s will resort to threats against them and their family. It is often these threats which make the witness suspicious of the motives of the M.I.B.s and report them to the authorities, who deny all knowledge of any of their operatives paying such a visit, though even if they were government operatives they would still presumably deny all knowledge of them. There are however no known records of these threats ever being carried out.
A famous case of M.I.B.s was experienced by fifty eight year old Dr. Herbert Hopkins, a doctor and hypnotist, who was investigating the abduction case of David Stephens and his son John Hopkins in Maine in 1975. One evening in September 1976, Hopkins' wife and children had gone out to see a movie, leaving the doctor alone in the house, when the phone rang. The caller identified himself as Vice President of the New Jersey U.F.O. Research Organisation and asked Hopkins if he could discuss the abduction case with him in person to which Hopkins agreed. When he had replaced the receiver he walked to his back door to switch on the porch light to make it easier for his visitor to find his house from the car park, but by the time he had walked from the phone to the back door, his guest was already walking up the porch steps. Hopkins is quoted as saying that he could see “no car, and even if he did have a car, he could not have possibly gotten to my house so quickly from any phone.”
The visitor was dressed in a black suit with black hat, tie and shoes and a white shirt, all of which were immaculate, his first thought was that “he looks like an undertaker.” When he removed his hat he revealed a bald head and it was now that Hopkins noticed the man had no facial hair at all including a lack of eyebrows and eyelashes. The one item of clothing the man wore which wasn't black were his gloves that were grey suede, and when during their conversation he brushed his gloved hand across his lips Hopkins noticed that the glove was smeared with lipstick. It was at this point that the conversation took an unusual turn. The man said to Hopkins that he knew he had two coins in his pocket and asked the doctor to give one of them to him. He did so and the man held it in the palm of his hand, Hopkins saw the coin go in and out of focus then slowly vanish and the man said that “Neither you nor anyone else on this plane will ever see that coin again.”
As the conversation on U.F.O.s continued, the visitor’s speech seemed to slow down and he shakily got to his feet. He told Hopkins that his energy was running low and he must leave. He walked unsteadily down the porch steps and Hopkins saw a light much brighter than a cars headlights and he could hear no engine sound. When Hopkins' family returned home they saw marks on the driveway but they were in the centre of the drive rather than at the edges like car tyre tracks would be, but by next morning they had disappeared. Hopkins decided to comply with his visitors wishes, that he erase all of his tapes of the hypnosis sessions he had carried out during his investigation, thus erasing all his hard work, and all at the request of this strange visitor. Hopkins later found that the New Jersey U.F.O. Research Organisation did not then, or had ever existed.
A few days later, Hopkins' daughter in law, Maureen, received a phone call from a man who claimed to know her husband John and asked if he and a friend could visit them. John however claimed not to know them and agreed to meet them at a restaurant before bringing them into his home. The couple, a male and a female, though not dressed in black were wearing old fashioned clothes and the Hopkins' noticed other certain oddities about the couple, such as the woman's breasts which seemed to be set very low, her legs which seemed to join her hips in a peculiar way, and both seemed to walk in very short steps and tended to lean forward as they walked as though they might fall at any moment. They offered the couple drinks, which were accepted though went untasted, while they asked the Hopkins' a number of questions, some of them intimate, but some as dull as their preferred tastes in television viewing. Throughout the conversation the man had been constantly “pawing and fondling” the woman and asked John if he was doing it correctly, at one stage when John was out of the room the woman asked Maureen how she was made and whether or not she had any nude photographs of herself. When they stood to leave the man seemed unable to walk and his companion seemed unable to move around him and she asked John to “Please move him, I can't move him myself.” The couple then left without further comment.
Though some believe M.I.B.s to be a hallucination there is one case which would seem to put pay to that theory, and it is that of Fireman Jim Templeton. On May 24th, 1964 Jim had been photographing his daughter on a marsh in Cumbria, England and at the time saw nothing unusual, but when he got his pictures back from developing he saw the figure of a man in a spacesuit behind his daughter. The pictures were analysed and the verdict was that the man was either very tall or was floating above the ground. Double exposure was ruled out as the girls head obscured part of the man, and the prize of free film for anyone who could explain the picture was never claimed. Years later, in 1990, the picture was blown up for use in an advertising gimmick by a local copying firm, and clearly visible were a clear visor over breathing tubes and ears. It was in that same year that the first connection with the figure to U.F.O.s was made after Templeton was visited by Men In Black, interestingly not as soon as the picture was taken or developed but only when it was connected with U.F.O.s after being blown up twenty six years later.
Templeton was driven in a black Jaguar car by two men carrying I.D. cards who claimed to be government agents. They took him back to the marsh and asked him many questions including a lot about the behaviour of any animals that had been in the area on the day that he had taken the photograph. He refused to believe their story that he had merely photographed an ordinary man on the marsh at which point they became annoyed and drove away, leaving him to walk the five miles back to his home.
Whatever the cause or origin of M.I.B.s they are certainly very peculiar. They have access to personal information long before anyone else, some of it not available by “normal” means. Their behaviour suggests a non-human origin as though they are merely imitating humans and some suggest teleportation and extra sensory perception. They prove never to be who they say they are and they drive immaculate though old cars with false number plates and make no apparent attempts at covering their lies and false documents, and their threats to witnesses and their families are never carried out. One such threat was: “If you want your wife to stay as pretty as she is....” Some people claim to have been almost run over by cars after a visit from M.I.B.s but then anybody regularly walking down a busy high street could make the same claim.
It is interesting to note that no M.I.B.s have ever been experienced by somebody who hasn't seen a U.F.O. beforehand or had some kind of close encounter, and for possibly this reason alone, like cattle mutilations they will be forever linked with U.F.O.s whether it is justified or not.
So now we have clearly seen that U.F.O.s exist, but what are they and where do they come from? There have been an estimated 14 million U.F.O. sightings in the last forty years, surely some of these have been, or will be explained away, but that would still leave an enormous number of so called visits from outer space. One conservative estimate is that one in twenty sightings cannot be put down to natural causes such as planes, balloons and the like, so out of 14 million sightings, that leaves 700,000 to be explained.
An interesting possible explanation for abductions, and one which comes from an unusual angle, is offered by Peter Brookesmith in his book “U.F.O.s Where Do They Come From?” Brookesmith suggests that aliens seen in abduction cases are an image created by the mind which have their origin in the womb. In the book he compares both a U.F.O. shape with the disc shape of the six day old human ovum attached to the uterus wall, and a typical humanoid figure with a child in the fetal stage, showing that the figure is diminutive in size with a frail appearance, the head is large in proportion to the body, and in turn the eyes are large in proportion to the head. Some sightings mention under-developed or webbed hands, the ears, nose and mouth are small and there are no obvious genitalia, nor is there any body hair and the skin is pallid. If we bear these facts in mind and then add the fact that child birth is one of, if not, the most traumatic times in our lives for both mother and child, and could easily cause a mental scar which stays with us all our lives, then we add what Dr. Benjamin Simon said when regressing Betty and Barney Hill.
He said that abductees may well encounter a U.F.O., but the abduction stage may be caused by some unsettling moment during the encounter, and maybe the encounter itself. Could this be the cause of the vision of a humanoid figure, along of course with medical equipment and embarrassing tests? This would assume though that we can remember, possibly subconsciously our time in the womb, we do know however that we have a certain awareness whilst inside our mothers, and that this is a part of our conditioning, enabling us to recognise and respond to our mothers voice, and when we see her face for the first time to put the two together and treat them as our mother.
The other, and more common, theory is that we are being visited by those who share the vast universe with us, and if we are to consider whether or not U.F.O.s are the craft of alien beings from other planets, we must put things into perspective and try to appreciate what a mammoth task travelling across space would be.
In our solar system alone there are around 10 billion stars and, like our sun, itself a star, some have planets in orbit around them, our sun having nine or possibly more orbiting planets, though we know that none of these nine contain or could support life. It is certainly possible that ours is the only planet in the whole universe which does support life, though the odds for this must surely be as high as those against. Even if we do accept that it is possible for there to be other inhabited planets, we must look at the distances one would have to cover to travel from one to another in a space craft. We can get some idea of the scale of the universe just by looking at the immense size of our own solar system alone.
If we imagine that the sun is the size of an average grapefruit, about 110 mm (4 inches), then in comparison our earth would be the size of a pin head at a distance of about 12 metres (39 ft) away (larger than the width of a tennis court). The largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter, would be the size of a small marble at just 11 mm (0.4 inches) across and about 61 metres (200 ft) away. The furthest known planet from the sun is Pluto, which in our scale would be the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence and could be found 460 metres (1,510 ft) away (the length of four football fields). So we can gain some impression of the vast distances that are involved in space travel and we automatically assume that if aliens did possess the ability to travel such distances, they would want to come and visit us, possibly time and time again.
People on earth have been searching for, and trying to contact, alien beings for years, the first man to propose such an idea was Charles Cross (1842 - 88) who suggested sending a message to Mars using flashing lights, though nowadays we use the S.E.T.I. Programme (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) and its successor Project Pheonix. These projects used, and we continue to use, radio telescopes to send out and receive aliens' signals on up to 240 million channels simultaneously. It is possible that aliens don't communicate as we do but by some other means, and if the victims of Close Encounters are to be believed then telepathy is a distinct possibility, or it may just be that we are impatient and we haven't been waiting long enough. The truth is actually quite depressing.
The most advanced way that we have at present of sending messages through space is by radio waves which travel at the same speed as light, that being 186,000 miles per second, or 670,647,600 mph, but rather than measure it in these terms with such large numbers we use light years, that is the distance that a ray of light travels in a year, which is roughly 6 million million miles. Long before we thought of sending radio messages to alien beings, indeed long before Kenneth Arnold started the modern U.F.O. era, we had been unwittingly sending radio waves out into space in the form of the very first radio programs to be broadcast to those fortunate enough to have a radio set to receive them on about seventy years ago. This means that the first ever radio signals from earth are still only seventy light years away from us. If we then consider that the centre of our own galaxy is three hundred light years away then it is not at all surprising that we have yet to receive a reply to our attempts at communicating, that is assuming that our signals are understood and then replied to in the first place.
Once we had started deliberately attempting communication by radio we began to listen to the universe in 1960, and Dr. Frank Drake of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia began by listening to the two nearest stars most like our own sun, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, with the observatory's 87 ft radio telescope. On the wavelength he was listening to, he heard nothing, but now larger telescopes are used to monitor wavelengths throughout the spectrum from radio to ultra violet and from distant galaxies. When we first started sending our own communications from earth we didn't aim at one spot in space but transmitters sent out signals as the earth rotated and so the signals swept the universe like lighthouse beam. There are estimates that in order to make contact with anybody in space we will have to search as far as 1,000 light years away or search 100,000 stars, but so far we have only covered less than 1,000 stars. To help to make the search for life a little quicker, on March 2nd, 1972 we launched a communication in the form of Pioneer 10 which was a probe sent through the orbit of Mars to rendezvous with Jupiter before heading out of our solar system. It will continue its journey for 2,000,000 years before it reaches the star Aldebaran and for another 10,000,000 years before it reaches the planetary system of another star, unless of course it is found first. On board Pioneer 10 is a gold-anodised aluminium disc that shows a map of our solar system and also pictures of a naked man and woman so that anyone who should find it in space will know where it has come from and who sent it. It also contains instructions on how to play it, and when it is played, whoever finds it will hear sounds from earth including hello in several languages.
We are always led to believe that the powers that be are skeptical about finding life elsewhere or being visited by other life forms, but why is it that people are so reluctant to believe that it is possible? Why do we come up against a wall of ignorance about visits from aliens when we ourselves are trying to visit other places in space. We have already visited the moon, and Mars is set to be the next target, but what if somebody else out there is trying to do the same? What if we were to find a similar probe sent by somebody else into the deep recesses of space in the vain hope that somebody may find it and know that they are not alone? It is pure hypocrisy to reject the notion of extra-terrestrial life and visits from such, when we are striving to do that exact same thing ourselves. Are we fearful of discovering once and for all that we are not as intelligent as we like to think we are? What would it do to us to discover that we are not the most advanced civilisation in the universe? This is a genuine phenomenon when modern man on his journeys of discovery around the world came across primitive tribes and civilisations which immediately spelt the end for them. This is known as the “Conquistador Syndrome” and it has been seen to exist many times.
For example what would happen if we were to be shown a new source of energy by an alien race that meant that we were no longer dependent on oil resources? The economic structure throughout the whole world would collapse overnight, but despite our fears, the search for life goes on, and we have been sending out radio messages to various star clusters, in particular to the M13 cluster in the constellation of Hercules which contains many hundreds of thousands of stars, so it is a fair bet that if there is indeed life out there then it may well exist here. There is however one setback, M13 is 25,000 light years away, so the signal will take until the year 26, 974 to get there, and if there is a reply forthcoming, of which there is no guarantee, then it will reach us another 25,000 years later. It is for this reason that S.E.T.I. and Pheonix were set up as we would stand a greater chance of communication if we try to receive signals which are already on their way to us from elsewhere. Disappointingly though in its 10 years so far, S.E.T.I. has only ever received one possible transmission that has passed all the “acid tests.” It was received between September 9th and 11th, 1988 and it was far more powerful than anything else we have received but it has not been repeated, which is unfortunately one of the criteria necessary before we can officially class it as an intentional signal from another race.
There is a school of thought that believes we have been visited by alien beings, not just recently, but also way back into the far reaches of time, and one such proposer of this theory is the author of a book published in 1968 entitled “Remembrance of the Future” which was translated into English and called “Chariots of the Gods.” The book sold more copies than any other book apart from the bible with over seven million sales worldwide making its author a millionaire. The author was Erich Von Daniken, and he proposed that Earth was visited thousands of years ago and many times and that ancient civilisations were influenced by these visitations. Von Daniken looked at the different types of pyramids being built around the world by different races, some of which were strikingly similar, yet these races were previously thought to have been primitive, and he looked at many examples of ancient art engraved in stone and suggested that these engravings contained pictures of space men and their craft. These interpretations by Von Daniken were a little far-fetched to say the least and many people condemned him and his work as flights of fantasy, hardly surprising really when you consider one suggestion he put forward for contacting extra-terrestrials. He said:
“One audacious but perfectly reasonable idea: A gigantic equilateral triangle would have its 600 mile long sides sown with potatoes; in this enormous triangle a circle would be sown with wheat. In this way a vast yellow circle, surrounded by a green equilateral triangle, would appear every summer. Incidentally, a most useful and productive experiment.”
When Von Daniken was imprisoned after being found guilty of fraud and embezzlement while running a hotel in Switzerland his reputation was done untold damage, and even more so when some of the stone tablets that he had claimed had come from biblical times were found to have been faked, and the American science program “Nova” tracked down the man who had made them. Von Daniken also claimed that the Mayan civilisation had known that the Venusian year lasted for 584 days due to information they received from extra-terrestrials, but in fact it lasts only 225 days and only appears longer when the planet is observed from the earth, so obviously the Maya had merely observed the planet themselves and counted the days until they saw it again.
Von Daniken also wrote about the Egyptian pyramids and how they may have been built by an alien race as the constructions were so complicated as to be beyond the capabilities of a human race at that time. He is certainly not alone in this argument, even today, but in his argument he somehow managed to come to the conclusion that rope didn't exist in Egyptian times, yet many tomb paintings depict men using ropes and he also managed to multiply the weight of the blocks in the pyramids by five. He theorised that the famous lines on the floor of the desert in Peru, the Nazca Lines, were used as landing strips and parking spaces for spacecraft, but he fails to mention that the lines are barely scratched onto the loose surface of the desert floor and would be blown away by any wind caused by aircraft turbulence, and they have only remained undamaged since 500 AD because the desert is windless. When facts like this were put to Von Daniken he said that in fact it was alright to tell lies about things if you were merely trying to convince people of the truth.
Though for the large part his theories were discredited along with him, there are many who believe the basic theory that Von Daniken based his work on was a sound one, and there are other good examples of ancient close encounters. One such example is reported by Robert Temple, an American with a degree in Oriental Studies and Sanskrit.
Temple made a detailed study of the African Dogon tribe from the Republic of Mali, 300 miles south of Timbuktu in the former French Sudan. The Dogon people have many traditions and most of them are centred around a star which they call “Po Tolo” (the seed that forms the staple part of their diet and whose botanical name is “Digitaria”). Po Tolo lies in the constellation “Canis” - which is why it is also referred to as the Dog Star - and its name of Digitaria is significant in that this is the smallest seed known to the Dogon.
Temple found an account of the Dogon people published in 1950 in the “Journal De La Sociate Des Africainistes” called “A Sudanese Sirius.” It was written by two French anthropologists, Marcelle Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who had lived with the Dogon from 1931 for a number of years and had learned the truth behind many of their traditions. In 1941 Griaule was initiated into their religious secrets and told that fish like creatures called “Nomo” had come to Earth from Sirius to civilise earth's people. In the detailed account Temple found the following passage:
“The starting point of creation is the star which revolves around Sirius and is actually named the Digitaria Star, (Sirius is visible in the winter as the brightest star in the southern sky and is often called the Dog Star while its smaller companion is often referred to as The Pup) it is regarded by the Dogon as the smallest and heaviest of all the stars; it contains the germs of all things. Its movement on its own axis and around Sirius upholds all creation in space, we shall see that its orbit determines the calendar.”
If the fact that the Dogon knew that the stars revolved on both an axis and an orbit and that the orbit took fifty years to complete is not startling enough, then consider the fact that Sirius B - Sirius' orbiting star - is not visible to the naked eye and was only discovered in the last century. It is 8.7 light years away and was thought to exist from the middle of the 19th Century but it was not actually discovered until 1862, and was not described in detail until the 1920s. In fact it was only in 1928 that Sir Arthur Eddington proposed the theory of the existence of white dwarves, but it wasn't until 1970 that Sirius B was photographed and astronomers found that it was almost concealed by the brighter Sirius and that it was actually a white dwarf, which is the smallest visible star in the universe, and it was also historic in that it was the first white dwarf to be discovered.
Just as the Dogon said, Sirius B is the smallest seed in the universe which is why the name Digitaria is so fitting as a white dwarf is extremely dense, it is the size of the earth but the weight of the sun, and one cubic foot of matter from it would weigh 2,000 tons. The Dogon said that it was made of a metal and is so heavy “that all earthly beings combined cannot lift it.” They were also correct about the elliptical orbit of Sirius' dark companion that takes fifty years to complete. It is possible that the Pup was much brighter 5,000 years ago and there are ancient records of it being described as red, and though it is true that red giants will eventually become white dwarfs, this process is an extremely long one and could not take place over the time scale of 5,000 years.
Sirius is the brightest star in the sky and was the basis of the Egyptian calendar so it is understandable that the Dogon, among other civilisations, would have traditions and myths based around it, but it is interesting that they consider Sirius to be less important than its almost invisible companion Sirius B, but how could they come to know so much about it long before it was discovered, and yet be so accurate in their information?
As can be expected there are arguments about just how this “primitive” tribe could have come by this information, and it is suggested that the Dogon merely gained their knowledge from their ancestors which were the Egyptians from before 3200 BC. It is also argued that the evidence of Sirius B being red seems to be over 5,000 years old and that it infers contact in the past between earth and beings from another planet, and there are estimates that this contact could have been made between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago.
Dogon tradition also names “Nommo” as the founder of civilisation who came from Sirius B to set up society on earth, and the Nommos, they say, are similar to “Oannes” who in Sumerian and Babylonian tradition is the demigod leader of the amphibious “Annedoti” creatures that brought civilisation to earth.
The opposing argument is that the Dogon themselves were visited, and it is true to say that they also knew of details about our own solar system, such as the sun being dry and dead, that Saturn had rings, that the planets revolved around the sun, that the earth spun on an axis and that Jupiter had its own moons. They refer to the home of the Nommo as a star but they must mean a planet, they referred to them as Gods and they drew diagrams of the craft they arrived in and say that they landed in a place north west of where they now live, incidentally this is where the Dogon originate from.
If either of these arguments are to be believed, then just 8.7 light years away is a planet in the region of Sirius that is host to amphibious creatures far in advance of ourselves that have visited earth and possibly still observe us. What is interesting about this account is that where Von Daniken was proposing his own ideas, Temple was merely quoting the accounts of the two anthropologists that had lived with the Dogon, been initiated into their religious rites and learned their traditions from them personally.
Astronomers have so far failed to locate a planet in orbit around Sirius, but if there is one there it would need to be a long way from the star as the Dog Star is many, many times brighter than our own sun, so any planet too close to it would be too hot to support life, but our own telescopes may not be able to see it as we only spotted Sirius B because it causes perturbations in the orbit of Sirius. If life did exist on a planet near a sun as hot as Sirius then it would probably be a hot and steamy planet, so any life which evolved there would be most likely to do so in its seas, should they have any that have not evaporated, and which would be much cooler than the air. Though these potential life forms may be able to spend time on land, they would have to remain close to water to keep their skin moist and help to maintain their body temperature.
The fact that we are only so far able to send and receive radio signals over vast distances and not manned space craft is perhaps quite depressing, and we are obviously many years from manned missions heading for the far reaches of space as the technology that we possess at the moment will not even carry us to the furthest planet in our own solar system, and even if one of our craft would make it as far as Pluto, then a new born baby placed inside at launch would die of old age long before the planet Pluto was in sight, but should we eventually make it to a distant planet, how would we feel if we were to find it devoid of life?
When a friend of Arthur C. Clark became the Deputy Director of the C.I.A. he gathered his scientists together on his very first day in office and said to them: “What's the truth about U.F.O.s?” They told him: They were positive that there is lots of intelligent life out there in space, but they don't have a shred of evidence that proves it. There is a way however that we can calculate the probability of there being life elsewhere in the universe, and that is by using what is known as the Drake Equation, and the equation is as follows:
- N = RpN1ieLN = The number of life forms out there.
- R = The rate of star formation, i.e. more stars = more potential for life.
- p = The fraction of those stars that have orbiting planets.
- N1 = The number of those planets that are potential abodes for life.
- i = The fraction of living things that give rise to intelligence.
- e = The fraction of intelligent life forms that create technology.
- L = The length of time that these life forms last (i.e. are they destroyed by cosmic events, war etc. Are they detectable? Do they waste energy in emittance or are they too intelligent?)
i.e. N = 100,000,000,000,000.
Let's take a few steps forward; we've got to a planet and we've found other forms of life, what form would they take? Nobody talks of Close Encounters with beings other than vaguely humanoid ones, be they green, grey, blue or Reptoid. It is a fact though that life will always try to adapt and evolve in its continual struggle to survive. For instance if a creature has the ability to communicate by telepathy and so has little or no use for ears, then their ears will be small and under developed or maybe even non-existent. Many aliens are described as having large oval eyes, could this be the result of living in a world with little or no light? If a planet has a gravity much greater than our own, then the creatures who live there would possibly be quite flat in appearance with strong internal bone structures, external shells or exoskeletons, whereas a world with a very low gravity would spawn creatures which are often airborne and must have ways of controlling their movements during their long periods of flight and would also have little use for strong bones and shells but more need for highly developed muscular tissue. Many people believe that we on earth have a largely dormant capability for telepathic communication which we sometimes hear of people using, but we rather use our mouths and ears and eyes to communicate with each other, and it is curious how aliens are able to cope with conditions on earth, i.e. temperature, air content and gravity with apparently no great difficulty.
There are problems with accepting that U.F.O.s are of an extra-terrestrial nature, for instance even if they could make it to earth and back, why would they continue to visit us and then leave without making apparently proper contact? There are many reports of beings seen taking samples of plant life, rocks, soil and even sea water, and however credible it may sound, animal organs and human bodily fluids, but why go to all that trouble if they don't want to make contact with us? Could they be afraid of the Conquistador Syndrome?
Another interesting feature of U.F.O.s is that in abduction cases, and also when Adamski spoke to the Venusians and they explained where they came from, it is always just beyond the bounds of our own technology and knowledge, never too far ahead so as to leave us behind and bemused, but never too close for us to fully grasp, and if we were to compare the learning curve of our own technology and knowledge with that of our visitors then we would find them very similar, though ours would always be one step behind and never quite catching up, though we do try. Could they be trying to guide us by seeing that we are nearly on the verge of a discovery and they then give us just enough information to help us along?
Despite our feeble attempts at space travel, it is widely believed that astronauts on space missions have encountered alien craft, and should extra-terrestrials be aware of our efforts to travel across space then it would surely be in their interest to monitor our progress. There is a school of thought which believes that lunar landings didn't continue, not because of lack of funding or the rechannelling of funds into other ventures, but because the astronauts encountered other life forms during these missions. There have also been numerous reports of manned space craft merely orbiting the earth encountering alien vessels.
The details of the former Soviet Union's attempts at space flight are clouded in secrecy as it is thought that in their haste to beat the U.S. into space, a feat which they achieved, they cut corners and many cosmonauts died in their quest on missions doomed to fail before they even left the ground. One craft which did make it into space and back again was Voskhod 1, whose crew of three had requested that they be allowed to stay in orbit because they wanted to investigate further some things which they had seen from their craft. Indeed their journey around earth was intended to last longer than it did, and many believe that it was forced down by U.F.O.s but the official story is that the cosmonauts had wanted to look further at the Aurora around the Antarctic, however they are unlikely to admit to a technical failure so perhaps we will never know.
There are also in existence many photographs taken from outer space aboard our own craft of what usually appears as “strange lights.” The rational explanation is that they are reflections of the sun caused by the craft themselves, either by their structure or the windows. One such photograph though is shrouded in mystery, it was taken by James Mcdivitt aboard Gemini 4 on June 4th, 1965 while he was passing over Hawaii. The picture, which was released by N.A.S.A., shows two fuzzy sources of light, and he was told that he had seen his own booster rocket in orbit but he doubted this and was adamant that the pictures he was shown and the one released, were not the same ones which he had taken. He added that his pictures showed a large object shaped like a beer can, and it also seems that N.A.S.A. were aware of this swap. Mcdivitt then looked through all the pictures which had been taken during the flight and he could see none which showed the object he had photographed.
Another photograph which was taken from space, but this time not by an astronaut, was of the Martian surface and it appeared to show a mountain in the shape of a human face, and this argument is used by some who say that a civilised race must have made it. The image though is not a “natural” one as it has been beamed back to earth and enhanced many times, so if the computer sees an image it will make it clear. There is a counter argument which says that the face isn't there at all as the human mind will always try to see symmetry where there isn't any, so we look at it and see something that isn't necessarily there. Even if there is a feature which looks like a face on Mars there are many to be found on Earth as well and these are perfectly natural occurrences. The best one is a Canadian Island called Point Bernard Shaw which, when viewed from the air, looks uncannily like the famous writer, including the hair line, beard, nose, mouth and eye sockets, and this don't forget is a completely natural feature formed by the winds and the rains over many years.
Evidence which cannot be easily substituted as photographs are the radio communications between the astronauts and the men on the ground, many of which are picked up and recorded by radio hams and enthusiasts as they occur and make very interesting listening. One example is from the crew of the Apollo 11 mission who were asked by N.A.S.A. “You sure you don't have anyone else in there with you?” after they received mysterious sounds over the radio. An Apollo 12 crew saw what they thought to be lunar module panels moving away from them but were puzzled by this as one seemed to be moving much faster than the others. They were told by mission control “Well let's assume it's friendly anyway OK.” Though N.A.S.A. insists that comments like this are made in jest and are aimed to relieve the great amount of stress and tension involved in space flight, it is also certain that any compelling evidence that what is being said isn't a joke would be edited out of the transcript that is released to the public.
A recent alleged close encounter by astronauts occurred after the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. The shuttle involved was Discovery on flight No. STS 29 on March 14th, 1989, and it wasn't until a fortnight later that the story was broken by the press. Reporter Donald Ratsch was listening via the Goddard Amateur Radio Club to the transmissions between Houston and the shuttle, and at 06-35 he could clearly hear the words “We have a problem.... we have a fire” and indeed it was later found that there had been a fire on this flight and some electrical problems. Seven minutes later, at 06:42, Ratsch heard the sentence “Houston, Discovery... we still have the alien space craft under observance.” Ratsch was recording these transmissions and the tape clearly contains the above communication, but what is not clear though is whether or not the tape itself is genuine, N.A.S.A. are not saying that they said these things in jest, they are simply denying that they ever said them at all.
There are many people and U.F.O. researchers who think that the U.S. “Star Wars” Program was designed to warn us of not a military invasion on earth but an invasion from beyond the Earth, and the shuttle Discovery again had a close encounter two years later, in September 1991, when N.A.S.A. cameras aboard the shuttle filmed what is said to be a Star Wars weapon being fired at a U.F.O.. The film shows a U.F.O. emerging out of the Earth's atmosphere and flying towards the top left hand side of the picture when there is a bright flash from the bottom left and, as the U.F.O. takes evasive action and flies out into space, a bright streak shoots across the screen from the bottom left and passes by the spot where the U.F.O. had been. Dr. John C. Kasher is a Professor of Physics who worked on the Star Wars Program and he says that the footage does indeed show a Star Wars weapon being fired, while N.A.S.A. say that it shows ice particles affected by the rockets on the shuttle, or perhaps waste being jettisoned from it. Kasher responds by asking: “Could either of these move slowly in one direction and then suddenly stop for half a second before moving away quickly in another?”
Earlier we have looked at the scale of the universe and some of the problems we have with travelling the vast distances involved at the speeds we are capable of at the moment, so we would obviously need to be able to travel much faster in order to reach the parts of space where we may find other forms of life, but we have no proof that it is possible to travel at such massive speeds as they would need to be at least equal to light speed.
The great expert on such matters has long thought to be Albert Einstein whose “Theory of Relativity” is considered to be correct according to all the evidence we have amassed thus far. Einstein said that “near” light speed is the highest attainable because when an object approaches light speed, its energy is no longer converted to kinetic energy but to mass, so an object travelling at light speed would have infinite mass. Once again however there is an exception to the rule. What if a particle were to have no mass, then it must surely be able to surpass light speed? Massless particles are known as “Tachyons” but whether they exist or not is not known for certain, but it is highly possible when you consider the very complex laws of quantum physics. The other big factor is “time dilation” i.e. the faster you go the slower that time will run, so a clock on a craft travelling at light speed will run slower than a clock elsewhere.
We have equipment called particle accelerators; low energy accelerators can hurl objects around at 0.44 of light speed, and high energy accelerators which have a circumference of seventeen miles or more - the largest being in Geneva, Switzerland - can hurl electrons and anti-electrons much more quickly than this, in fact at 0.99999999995 of light speed. Objects travelling at this speed have been found to have a mass 100,000 times greater than when they are at rest, and one particular particle, a “meson,” with a life span of 2 millionths of a second was accelerated to half-light speed in 1961, and its life span was increased by 50%. This is obviously only a small amount but it goes to show that so far Einstein is indeed correct, but even if we were able to send a manned space craft through space at these speeds, it is still far too slow for our purposes.
We often hear talk of parallel dimensions to our own, that there is more than one universe and that all exist together but on different “planes” and that U.F.O.s could come from these parallel universes, a possibility which would seem to be supported by the coin which was made to disappear in front of Herbert Hopkins' eyes to another plane. If this were the case would the U.F.O.s as they appear do so in a cloud of gas, as described by some witnesses rather than being seen to fly to a particular spot? And could it also explain how M.I.B.s can appear so suddenly, again as witnessed by Hopkins.
Stranger still is the theory that U.F.O.s and their occupants are in fact an evolved state of man as we know him today, and that they, or in fact we, have mastered the art of time travel and are visiting ourselves in the past.
A more rational possibility is the “Tectonic Stress” theory, and it is the brain child of Professor Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist, who theorises that tension and stress below the surface of the earth can create, due to electromagnetism, distant lights in the sky, and can also interfere with the electromagnetic activity in the human mind. He theorises that apparitions of U.F.O.s could be caused in this way, and similarly so too could apparitions that appear as ghosts. The brain tries to make sense of these apparitions and so they appear as space craft, aliens, angels and of course ghosts.
It seems that electromagnetism, radiation and microwaves play a large part in U.F.O. theory, and a physicist / engineer James McCampbell who used to work at N.A.S.A. has examined thousands of U.F.O. reports and notes that these energies are present in almost all. Interference with car engines, electrical interference, heat and burning and radiation sickness are all consistent with high levels of microwave radiation. Also consistent with this is the humming and high pitched sounds, strange odours and a metallic taste. Disturbingly some witnesses who have got a little too close to U.F.O.s have been found during autopsy to have been cooked on the inside, consistent with microwaves, and less extreme cases of this are cars becoming hot to the touch and minor sun burns.
Working with Dr. John Derr, Persinger looked at a spate of U.F.O. sightings in Colorado to try to prove his theory, and he went a long way towards doing just that. In 1963 a munitions factory pumped hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic waste in to a two mile deep well, and in doing so they unwittingly lubricated a fault system, and over the five years that the pumping went on, there were over 1500 earthquakes reported as the plates rubbed together. This created a slow ripple effect of minor tremors which emanated out from the factory at speeds of 30 to 80 miles per month. These tremors were monitored as they spread out, and it was found that just before they entered an area there were reports of U.F.O.s in that area, and a clear cycle was spotted which ran; injection - lights in the sky - earthquake.
The process of creating lights by friction is called “Triboluminescence” and has been studied by Dr. Alan Mills of the University of Leicester. Light can be created by simply rubbing two pieces of quartz together in a darkened room and many other minerals also achieve the same results. Another way is to crush the crystals, and this can be done with something as simple as a sugar lump. There is one problem however, the light is only created at source, that is, in the exact spot where the friction occurs, so when two pieces of quartz are rubbed together, the light appears in between them, and when the sugar lump is crushed it gives off a light as it disintegrates. Nobody knows how this light could manifest itself above ground but that is not to say however that it does not do so, and there is obviously a clear connection between lights in the sky and earthquakes, but again nobody knows why one should precede the other. We now move to Washington State, U.S.A. where this whole U.F.O. episode started with Kenneth Arnold in 1947, but this time however we go particularly to the Yakima region where there have been many reports of various phenomenon such as Bigfoot, strange sounds but most commonly balls of light.
The reports come from the lookouts who work in the area watching for forest fires, and as such they have to report every light they see, even those in the sky. One such lookout is Dorothea Sturm who, in her thirty five years there, has seen over a hundred lights and strange objects in the sky, and it is here that Persinger and Derr again used their theory to explain them. The pair found the area to have many faults in the ground, and studying the sightings they found that lights were most often seen over these local faults. More interestingly they found that the sightings were more frequent in the time before a local tremor took place, but this explanation does not explain all U.F.O. sightings, and probably not even all the reports of lights in the sky, but it could well explain many of them.
Persinger also looked at abduction cases to see if these experiences could be created by some kind of strange electromagnetic field, possibly also caused by the same Tectonic Stress. To do this he built a dark, sound proof chamber in which the patient would sit while wearing a special helmet. This helmet would generate a weak magnetic field which can be controlled by a computer so that Persinger is able to control the shape of the electromagnetic wave that it transmits through the brain. During his experiments the kind of thing that the patients would report feeling were. The feeling that they were floating through a tube, floating in a cave, feeling detached or feeling that another mind was talking through their own. They would feel as if they were spinning, their body was vibrating or something were moving through their body. Some would experience a sudden recall of childhood memories while one particular wave pattern caused them to feel as if they were dying and some of them would see the “white light.” Throughout the experiment they would know that they were alone in the room but would still feel as if somebody was in with them, and they would feel as if they were being pulled, pushed and prodded. Could people in a state of semi sleep confuse these feeling and images with an alien abduction?
Whereas Persinger used his tectonic stress to account for the electromagnetic field that could cause these feelings outdoors, paranormal researcher, Albert Budden, looked for a link with high tension power lines and radio waves. He feels that certain people may be more sensitive to these than others, and of the fifty cases he has researched he has found that most of the people involved have had, at one time or another, some sort of electrical experience such as being hit by lightning, being near a lightning strike or they have been electrocuted, and he says this may cause some kind of permanent damage to the body and the mind (the permanent damage could explain why abductees feel that they are taken many times and monitored constantly). Budden has found that this is not only true for alien abductions but for other psychic or electrical phenomenon as well, such as a television switching itself on when a person is near it or tingling sensations in the body. Again this could explain some of the cases that have so far gone unanswered, but surely not all of them.
Theorists on the propulsion methods of U.F.O.s have a very difficult task as U.F.O.s are seldom seen to be propelled by “engines” and are often noiseless. A common theory is that they may harness the power of gravity, and Dr. Frederick Alzofon proposed that such a theory is the more likely.
Scientist Kenneth Behrendt from New Jersey has been investigating the propulsion systems of U.F.O.s since the early 1980s and has been trying to quantify the forces needed to propel a craft at the speeds that have been related to him by witnesses. His calculations are as follows:
If a craft thirty two feet in diameter hovering near ground level rises and disappears out of sight in ten seconds in a clear sky it would need to reach an altitude of 20.83 miles. If it accelerated uniformly, any crew on board would experience an inertial force of 68.38 Gs and would reach a speed of 15,000 mph. If the 32 feet wide craft weighed a mere ten tons its engines would need to produce a force of 1,368 million pounds at 27.36 million horsepower or 20,000 megawatts, this is equivalent to twenty 1,000 megawatt power plants at peak output. Behrendt says that a craft of this size would be unable to produce such power, therefore he surmises that any craft moving at these speeds must be a massless craft, or free of the forces normally imposed by gravity.
In 1951 at Draakensteen Mountain, South Africa a close encounter took place and the witness, an engineer, was told how the craft he saw was powered. The beings he spoke with told him that their craft didn't have an engine but used a system which nullified gravity. To do this they used a tube which contained a heavy fluid that circulated around it creating a magnetic field. At the speed of light this fluid is subjected to radiation so that when the fluid is leaving the tube, it is already entering again at the other end.... its relative speed is infinite.
Another propulsion system was explained during an abduction case in October 1974 in Aveley, Essex where the man of the family was told that the ship had two propulsion systems, one for use in space which fired vortices of ionized particles via an ion drive, but this was too dangerous to use inside an atmosphere, so they would use an older and safer method that converted the magnetic poles of particles outside the craft to the same as those inside the craft's core. This process creates a thrust, and a rapid cycling of the process creates a drive force. One side effect of this, he was told, is that it can create unusual visual distortions to an outside observer, these include a pulsating craft, a shape changing craft and even invisibility by filtering light from the surrounding objects through a field and creating a hologram of the scenery.
If we take a giant leap and suppose that such propulsion systems can be achieved with the right technology, and that aliens have already found us and continue to visit us, then the big question which begs an answer then becomes: Why?
One theory is that they are taking samples from earth, and indeed many have been seen digging earth, taking rocks and even pumping sea water, in fact a U.F.O. was seen in 1980 off the coast of Brazil descending toward a second craft on the surface of the sea, these two craft then joined after apparently signalling to each other by changing colours and then moved upwards into the sky as one. There are many tales of sample taking aliens who rush away when discovered, in 1919 in Iowa an entity rushed back to its craft and flew away in such a haste that it collided with the tree tops. In Canada in 1914, a craft apparently syphoning sea water through a hose flew away almost leaving behind one of its crew which clung to the side of the craft.
It is not just rocks and water that they seem to be interested in but also animals seem to hold a certain fascination for them. In Cheshire, England in 1978, beings were seen taking a cow's measurements, and in Sussex, England a dog was the object of their interest but the owner palmed them off with a china model rather than part with his pet. However they were apparently more successful in Yorkshire, England in 1980 when policeman Alan Godfrey said that during his abduction he saw a black dog on board the craft. Stranger still is the testimony of a man in Spain in 1978 who was told by alien beings that they wished to examine his dog, but while he was there they may as well take a look at him also.
Another theory for the attentions of alien craft is that their craft are in need of repair as was telepathically communicated to ambulance driver Reg from Yorkshire, England when he woke to find tall beings in his bedroom. He was told to lie on his bed and when he did he had a feeling of floating upwards until he felt he was inside an object. He was then examined by a probe and told not to ask any questions as he was an “insignificant being.... like a worm.” He was also told that, to them, time was different, and a thousand years were to them “but a day.” There was no further mention of repairing the craft and it is thought that this was just a ruse to get him to cooperate with them as shortly afterward he was returned to his bed.
Witnesses have watched beings repairing their craft at, among other places, Brazil and New York, and it is believed by some that the craft at Rendlesham Forest was damaged as it hit the trees and the entities in the shafts of light in the woods were carrying out repairs, and of course let us not forget the crash at Roswell, though it was obviously a little too late to repair “that” craft after it had landed.
There is a school of thought however that these repairs are set up to make the beings seem fallible and therefore less “frightening” to us, as a race which could build a craft to travel to earth from wherever they come from would surely not need to seek human help to mend it, beside which, the ratio of U.F.O. landings to breakdowns is much higher than one would expect.
Another theory is that they are curious about us and wish to observe us and find out just what makes us tick. This was apparently the case when Herb Schirmer, a Police Officer (later Police Chief), was in his patrol car in December 1967 in Ashland, Nebraska.
At around 2-30am on December 3rd Schirmer went to investigate when he heard a commotion coming from some cattle and saw an object in the road in front of him. Thinking that it was a broken down truck he switched on his spotlight, and caught in the beam was a disc shaped object. Schirmer drove toward it and it took off. Thirty minutes later at 3 am, Schirmer's report stated that he “saw a flying saucer at junction of Highways 6 and 63, believe it or not!” After making his report he felt thirsty and tired and could feel a buzzing in the back of his neck where there was a strange red mark. At the time Schirmer was unaware that fifteen or twenty minutes had passed which were unaccounted for, and investigations into the missing time led to hypnosis sessions which seemed to explain, as far as Schirmer was concerned, the missing minutes.
Apparently when Schirmer had shone his spotlight on the object in the road it lifted off the ground and landed again near some electricity pylons. He now suffered some sort of interference as his spotlight, engine and radio failed to work. When he looked up he saw a group of beings walking towards him, they were “typical” in appearance being under five feet tall with grey white faces, large eyes and thin lips. One of them operated a device in its hand which gave off a beam of light and the patrol car was surrounded by a green mist. Schirmer passed out and awoke again outside his car and spoke to the beings.
They asked him if he was a watchman and if there was a power station or a reservoir nearby, he declined their offer to shoot at their craft which they now lead him over to, and both asked and answered questions about each other. Some of the things they told him were that their craft was an observation ship and they had been watching humans for a long time, they said it was made of magnesium and was powered by harnessing the forces of “Reversible Electromagnetism” which in turn harnessed the power of gravity. They told him that they were sucking power from the overhead electricity cables which they used to create a defensive force field when close to the ground, and it was this that caused interference with car radios and engines. They then showed him an object, about the same size and shape as a car wheel hub cap, which was a remote flying sensor that relayed pictures back to the craft and was used to look at an area before they landed. The reason for this particular visit was to collect animal samples for a breeding analysis program. A possible precursor to the many human samples later taken in the many abduction cases and, as mentioned earlier, alien technology not making leaps ahead of ours, as animal genetics was less of a mystery to us than human genetics in 1967.
They then told Schirmer that they were worried about how hostile we humans were as they had been shot at by military aircraft. They would try to act randomly when visiting earth as they knew that world powers and governments would try to look for patterns in their operations and try to predict their next move, obviously they didn't want this and did not appreciate being shot at. They would also erase human memories of encounters with them to ensure that they, and their actions, remain shrouded in mystery so we knew that they existed but did not know enough to interfere with their observations and experiments. It is well within their capabilities to destroy us as a race but this is not their intent and they wish to continue observing us long term. Indeed they said that they would contact Schirmer a further two times. The interesting thing about his encounter is that it was apparently duplicated in detail thirteen years plater in Todmorden, West Yorkshire in 1980, and this time it occurred again to a police officer, the earlier mentioned Alan Godfrey, who, like Schirmer, was checking on livestock, suffered engine and radio failure, saw a beam of light and was told that he would be visited again and “lost” fifteen or twenty minutes in time.
As well as observation and research it seems that our guests are even going so far as to apparently cure witnesses of disease, in one case even treating a diagnosed terminal stomach cancer. The case occurred in Rio De Janeiro to the daughter of a rich man who, in August 1957, had failed to respond to treatment. She was moved to Petropolis, a place in the country air, and on October 25th was lying in bed in great pain under the influence of the painkiller morphine. However she was not alone in the room and all those present saw the room lit with a bright light as a disc hovered outside. Two beings emerged from the craft and entered the room where one touched the head of the girl's father and apparently received information from him on his daughter's illness. They moved over the girl's stomach which began to glow with a blue light and illuminate her insides like an x-ray. They pointed an implement at the infected area and some minutes later turned the machine off and left the girl in a deep sleep. The implement they used looked a little like a laser, which of course did not exist in 1957. The same being then again communicated with the girl's father using telepathy and told him that they would leave a small hollow object with thirty small white balls inside. They were to give her one of these balls every day until they were all gone, and all they asked for in return was that all those present in the room kept quiet about what they had seen, to which they all agreed, and in due course the girl made a full recovery. The story was later told by one of the family's servants who was present at the time but who would not give the name of the family.
It would seem in some cases that the alien beings wish to help us in some way, though not always as directly as in the above case, one predominant message seems to be our destruction of the planet by industry, car exhaust fumes and other abuses of the atmosphere by nuclear energy, both in bombs and in the production of electricity. One farmer, Gary Wilcox from Newark Valley, New York, encountered two alien beings who warned him of the dangers of global warming and told him about the hole in the ozone layer. This may not seem so extraordinary, but the encounter occurred in April 1964 when no scientist had even given a thought to the ozone layer. Earlier warnings of danger received from alien beings throughout the 1950s had been predominantly concerning the nuclear holocaust, and it is almost as if the beings wish to help us preserve the earth as much as we do so that they can continue to monitor us, and a recurring feature of close encounters is the further visits that the witness or witnesses will receive.
Witnesses have been told many tales by alien beings and they can be as unusual as an offer to inject a special glue into cracks in the earth’s crust, or as mundane as introducing viruses and diseases to us which would cause confusion among the us and slow down our advancements in certain technological fields in which we were making progress too quickly. They are concerned that we must be fully aware, and have full knowledge, of what we are doing. Whatever their reason for wanting to help us preserve the earth it seems apparent that this is certainly one of their intentions. One witness in Edinburgh in 1980 was told that: “This was our planet before you and we will not allow you to destroy it. If you try we will send a warning that will shudder the earth. Only the innocent will survive.” Maybe it is for no reason as complicated as these, but only a wish to preserve a part of the universe they share with us, and they want to help their neighbours to survive and nurture it. One witness was told that he “didn't know how lucky he was to live here” as the earth was one of the universe's treasures as it supported myriad life forms which few other planets could sustain.
Apart from some of these reasons for us to warrant alien attention, by far the most predominant is the testing and sample taking of human subjects, some as unlucky as Carl Higdon from Wyoming who was told by his abductors that he was unsuitable for their purposes. He felt that it was because of his forty one years of age and his vasectomy making him unable to breed, in fact any abduction case which doesn't feature the taking of samples or breeding may be viewed as unusual and certainly in the minority.
So who takes U.F.O.s seriously? It would appear that not only do some members of the public and witnesses to sightings but various world leaders as well. For example, imagine the possibilities available to the first nation to gain access to, and be able to use, alien technology. The scope is almost unimaginable, and certainly it looks as though the U.S. Government has no intention of letting anybody but themselves gain this knowledge first, that is if they don't already possess it. Call it what you will. The Pig Farm, Paradise Ranch, The Box, Groom Lake or, more common on aviation radio frequencies, Dreamland, but its most common name however is Area 51.
Area 51 does not appear on any map, military or otherwise, and even if you did manage to find it, you would not be able to get anywhere near it and certainly not close enough to see it. Even military pilots are forbidden from entering its airspace, and though its existence is denied there are signs around the boundary which read “RESTRICTED AREA,” “U.S. AIR FORCE INSTALLATION,” “PHOTOGRAPHY OF THIS AREA IS PROHIBITED” and “USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORISED.”
In truth it lies where it has been for over forty years, along a discreet trail beside Highway 375, ninety five miles north of Las Vegas on the desert shores of the dried up Groom Lake and it consists of barracks, hangars and of course an airstrip. It is at this airstrip that six unmarked jets known as “Janets” land every day carrying around 600 employees from Las Vegas. It is believed that the installation was developed so that the Government could secretly work on technology it had obtained from crashed flying saucers without anybody troubling them and it forms a part of Nellis Air Force Base, the other three parts being the Tonopa and Nevada test sites (where top secret nuclear tests are carried out), Nellis bombing range (where planes and weapon systems are tested), and Nellis Military Airport. If top secret “saucers” are being tested here, then Nellis air traffic controllers would certainly know about it.
One radar operator says that she witnessed a classified flying disc test at night in the desert a few miles from the base along with a group of other people, who didn't know each other, and who weren't wearing any name tags or insignia, so nobody was talking to anybody else. There were ten to fifteen discs which glowed orange on their underside and performed many manoeuvres which she describes as sophisticated, so much so in fact that she felt that the pilots must have been extra-terrestrials. After the tests she was taken to a medical facility she felt must have been at Area 51, and there she was laid down on a stainless steel table and told in a dead pan voice to “Keep calm” by a man who was walking around the room holding a hypodermic needle, and very quickly he had injected something into her neck.
It has taken her over ten years to come forward with her story as she could never talk about it before, but the more she does the easier it becomes, and she feels that this is because she was given a very strong “suggestion” not to talk about it and this worked for a long time.
Area 51 was the birth place of top secret U.S. military projects such as the U2 spy plane, the Blackbird spy plane, the SR71 and of course the F-117A or Stealth Bomber. It is now believed that tests are under way on Project Aurora, an aircraft whose existence is officially denied yet was accidentally mentioned in a Pentagon report. Aurora is an aircraft alleged to be capable of reaching speeds of up to 5,000 mph or Mach 8.
Another example of the secret testing, and possibly the best one, is the Avro Car which was launched in total secrecy in 1965. The Avro Car was, to all intents and purposes, a flying saucer. It was a manned, disc shaped craft which was first tested in Canada in 1960 and the film footage of it being flown is now declassified after the project was scrapped in the late 1960s after swallowing up millions of dollars with no reason given. What is interesting about the Avro Car is that these tests and developments were happening at the same time that Project Blue Book said that they were not, and Nick Pope, formerly of the Ministry of Defence, says that the technology we are in possession of is always five to ten years ahead of that which is on public display, but he also says that any new aircraft is not flown over public areas but over classified ranges, so any U.F.O. seen by the public is not our own. Chris Carter of “The X Files” fame has heard many of these new aircraft being tested from his home, he says “I've tracked their sonic booms.... the Government won't tell you where they come from....”
The testing and other research is paid for by the “Black Budget,” which doesn't appear in any federal allocations so that it can't be traced, but the United States is by no means alone in the practise of running a black budget. The budget for Area 51 is rumoured to be somewhere between 1 and 1.5 billion dollars every year, and in the year 1996-97 the U.S. will spend over 11 billion dollars on research, development and testing of secret weapon systems of all kinds, far more than any other country. The budget for Area 51 is boosted, allegedly, by the expensive tastes and eating habits of the staff who indulge in such delicacies as frogs legs, king crab and filet mignon washed down with mineral water at $50,000 per month. One Colonel is believed to have his own Isreali grapefruit flown in at a cost of $25 each. These facts fade almost into insignificance when compared to the mother of all rumours, that Area 51 is home to no fewer than nine recovered U.F.O.s which are studied, and more importantly, tested at a facility on the base called S-4.
Eye witnesses to these tests in the skies over the desert tell of seeing strange lights in the sky, disc and triangle shaped craft performing unearthly manoeuvres such as travelling at great speeds, mid-air halts and exceptional acceleration. In 1988 aviation writer James Goodall quoted a retired Air Force Colonel in “Gung Ho” (an American military magazine) by saying that the Colonel had told him “We have things that are so far beyond the comprehension of the average aviation authority as to be really alien to our way of thinking.” Clearly a most unfortunate use of the word “alien.”
George Knapp, a local newsman and Ufologist, says that rumours of recovered alien craft have persisted around the base since the 1950s and most of them were only rumours, though two of the many which persist are one in 1953 of a recovered disc shaped craft whose cockpit was too small to accommodate a man, and one of a disc shaped object in the sky being escorted by helicopters in 1978.
Both rumours were refuelled in 1989 by a technical engineer called Robert Lazar who claimed that he had worked at the S-4 part of Area 51 for a few months in 1988, he said that he had held a position thirty eight levels above the Top Secret “Q” Clearance that he had held at Los Alamos Laboratory while working on Defence. Lazar appeared on K.L.A.S. TV. News and shocked the world when he claimed that he had been working on Reverse Engineering one of nine recovered alien craft to see how its propulsion system operated. He did not know how or when the craft had arrived at the base but thought that it was not the victim of a crash, and he said that it had actually been test flown. Its nickname on the base was “The Sport Model.” Lazar cannot prove his academic record as he says that it has been destroyed by the Government, but he can produce Government pay slips for the time that he claimed he was at Area 51.
The recovered craft's existence wasn't common knowledge around the base and was only on a need to know basis, and may not even have been brought to the attention of Congress and the President himself, although Dwight D. Eisenhower was believed to have been shown extra-terrestrial technology, and Ronald Reagan had also been heard to make references to it. Jimmy Carter however was denied access to U.F.O. data after his election campaign in which he had vowed to pursue the U.F.O. mystery after having seen several himself. One source said on the matter: “Guests in the White House come and go every four to eight years, but the C.I.A. goes on forever.”
Lazar's claims were not technically impossible but later became somewhat discredited when he was found to be involved in a brothel, and some of his academic credentials failed to check out. British Ufologist Timothy Good feels that Lazar's story is basically true, and said “that he needed to make the story more credible, but of course, once people realise that he's exaggerated about something, they tend to throw the baby out with the bath water.” Lazar claims that his employers knew of his background and his contacts within the U.F.O. community, and possibly of his creative C.V., but were interested in his capabilities as an employee, and then of course should he go A.W.O.L. he would be easy to discredit, yet at the same time he would be credible enough to be believed, thus carrying on the confusion and mystery. This would of course be unnecessary if the base didn't exist, but then again if it didn't exist, how could a former employee take legal action against their former employers there.
The process has proven difficult and has been ongoing since 1994 when a total of five former employees, and the widow of a sixth, all represented legally by Jonathan Turley, initiated legal action against the Pentagon and the Environmental Protection Agency. They are suing over exposure to burning toxic waste which took place throughout the 1980s. The waste, they allege, was burned in open pits and was classified material. The symptoms that they all suffered from were a skin rash which could only be removed with sand paper, and the man who died, Robert Frost, had suffered from this same rash. A hazardous chemical expert Professor Peter Kahn was given a tissue sample from the body of Frost and commented “My only reaction is, what on earth has this man been exposed to?”
One of the victims appeared on an ABC World News bulletin with his face in silhouette and his voice disguised, and concluded his interview by saying “The running joke was, the place didn't exist so consequently anything could occur there.” The danger of course was that all are facing imprisonment if found guilty of breaching national security, so they aren't allowed to tell doctors of their place of work or the nature of the work they do or did.
The government admitted that they did indeed have “an operating location near Groom Lake“ but that it was nameless, and they took steps to ban the use of the terms “Area 51” and “Dreamland” from all court proceedings, though Turley noted that the name Area 51 appeared both in the Pentagon's in-house newspaper and in the congressional record.
The case is ongoing but it was severely hampered by Sheila Widnal, U.S. Secretary of the Air Force, whose affidavit stated that any details revealed in court would be of grave consequence to national security, thus destroying the case for the prosecution, and then Turley was prohibited from owning a copy of the operating location's security manual, despite the press, the justice department and anybody surfing the Internet being able to gain access to it. Turley is quoted as saying “The Soviets have pictures of it, kids in Nevada play with the planes that fly from it.... but it doesn't exist.”
At around the time that this case came to light, the pentagon reclaimed a 4,000 acre patch of land which had offered the best and most accessible vantage point of the site, and this added to the land they had already previously bought up around the area. They then released a statement saying that they needed this extra land to ensure the safety and security of operations, but that they “don't have U.F.O.s out there, what goes on out there is classified.” Whatever classified means, it is obviously very sensitive, and anybody foolish enough to climb for ninety minutes to the top of a hill side with a telescope will be met by armed private security patrolmen in white jeeps bearing government plates, wearing camouflaged uniforms with no insignia and carrying walkie-talkies. The lucky ones just face a fine of up to $5,000 or a prison term. Some people however will not be put off by these minor details and many make the trip, stopping just short of the boundaries. The nearest town to the site, Rachel, nothing more than a few trailers, has a population of only one hundred people, and one hostelry called The Little A' le' Inn which houses thousands upon thousands of such visitors every year.
Rumours continue to abound regarding Area 51 and the work carried out there, the latest of which concerns the B52 Stealth Bomber which is rumoured to possess anti-gravity capabilities, these particular rumours being started by scientists whom the powers that be had tried to silence. Even scientists who hadn't worked on the Stealth project claim that the aircraft possesses a strange design and some equally strange capabilities. So are the U.S. Military in possession of recovered U.F.O.s and their technology, or are all the rumours exactly that, just rumours? The saying that there's no smoke without fire springs to mind. If not then why the need for such drastic measures to ensure security, and why the apparent obstruction of justice in the high courts?
So we've looked in detail at many tales of U.F.O. sightings, close encounters and the ensuing chaos, secrecy or denial, but are we any nearer to solving the problem than we were before, have we learnt anything, or have the facts simply become too muddled to fathom?
In similarity to the ghosts questions there is likewise no doubt that U.F.O.s do exist, and this is plainly clear in the context of them being objects in the sky which are, at least at one time or another, unidentified, but like the misconception with ghosts being the spirits of the dead, are U.F.O.s actually space ships of alien life forms from other worlds, and is the admittance to the existence of U.F.O.s to admit that we are being visited by little green men? As Mac Brazel's character said in the film “Roswell:” “They ain’t green.” The evidence for and against is before us, so we must now sum up, draw our conclusions and make up our minds about one of, if not the most fascinating questions the world has yet to properly answer.
The question is not really whether or not U.F.O.s exist because they clearly do as we have seen testified by many witnesses, men, women and children alike, and of all ages from all walks of life, surely all of these people can't be wrong, nor can they all have an ulterior motive for lying about it. Obviously what a lot of the cases are, are merely M.F.O.s, Misidentified Flying Objects, but as we saw earlier we have some 700,000 cases to explain away from just the last forty years. The fact that U.F.O.s are with us and have been for many years is clear to see, so what we must look at is what they are, we are not concerned here though with those which may be balloons, planes, tricks of the light or cloud formations, the ones we are concerned with are those 700,000 that can't be explained away as such.
The possibilities are several, though we can narrow them down, especially if we consider that U.F.O.s are not a random phenomenon, they do not move with a random pattern though they are sometimes erratic, they are seen to hover, to land, to take off and to avoid military aircraft sent to intercept them. These are clearly not the reactions of a random force of some kind but of a controlled object, so who or what is controlling them? Presumably, and it is by no means a huge presumption, they are being controlled by the beings which are seen inside or in the vicinity of the craft themselves, an alien race of some kind.
So what we now have is a manned craft flying around in our skies, the origin of which we do not know. Not all are apparently manned, for example the U.F.O. seen at Rendlesham Forest seemed to drip smaller ones from it which later rejoined it, and a Russian pilot had his aircraft “buzzed” by a small object which had separated from the larger one he had been sent to identify, and when he avoided it he saw it “re-enter” the mother ship. Could these be monitoring probes of some sort like the ones that Herb Schirmer was shown, or a smaller version of the craft Adamski claimed to have seen but on a smaller scale? This would explain some of the other sightings of U.F.O.s where just a small unidentified light source is seen rather than a larger craft of some sort, and might suggest that the area is being checked out before the craft themselves come, or the beings risk being seen taking their samples.
The problem now is where do they come from? Are they humans from the future, our descendents come back to see us in the ultimate history lesson? Unlikely as we would surely see many more similarities between us and them rather than the humanoid figures we now see. Are they beings from another planet in our own solar system? This is certainly the most popular theory and the one which receives most attention.
The chances of there being other life forms in the universe, bearing in mind the number of solar systems, stars and possible planets, have to be at least a safe bet if not a mathematical certainty, and there cannot be a problem with the thought that we are not the only form of life in the universe. The problem we have with these other life forms being the answer to U.F.O.s is just how do they manage to travel all the way to earth across space. The problem is not only with the actual journey itself, but at least one expert is of the opinion that if a craft were to approach earth, there are so many people and so much technology watching the skies, both amateur star gazers and professional organisations, that the approach and arrival of such a craft would be immediately seen once it got in the near vicinity, and could not remain secret from the public for more than twelve minutes, and certainly no longer than fifteen.
Of course this would be if they were to be visible during their approach and using conventional propulsion systems which some have been seen to do, for instance by Officer Zamora, but only during landing and taking off, not in mid-flight, during which they seem to possess no apparent engines as such. Could they possibly “leap” through space by harnessing the powers of natural sources such as gravity, or perhaps a more controversial theory is that they may use what is known as wormholes, which are not yet proven to exist, but are believed by scientists to be a possibility. Wormholes are a phenomenon proposed by New Zealand mathematician, Roy Kerr, who, using Einstein's theory of relativity showed that a spinning black hole could contain a wormhole which is a space-time bridge that joins different places in space and time in the universe. The problem with using these as a regular means of travel is that by their very nature they are unstable, emitting vast amounts of radiation which would fry any object unfortunate enough to get too close, and they then have a nasty habit of closing, trapping anything caught inside. Therefore any craft that was brave, or foolish, enough to try and utilise a wormhole would need two things:
- Some way to counter the radiation.
- Anti Gravity capabilities to prevent the wormhole from closing.
So should we manage to overcome these minor problems, would we be allowed to use wormholes by the laws of nature, time travel being full of potential paradoxes? For example going back in time and killing your mother on the night before you were conceived. As with everything though this has also been accounted for by theorists and experts such as David Deutsch and Michael Lockwood who suggest that Quantum Theory would allow time travel but only to a parallel universe in which any actions taken would have no bearing on our own universe.
This is the other main possibility for the origin of U.F.O.s, a parallel universe, though it is one which receives less press than the “universal brothers” theory. The suggestion is that U.F.O.s and their inhabitants are from such an alternative universe and are able to commute between theirs and our own at will. It has been theorised many times that there may be an infinite number of universes in which every eventuality is played out, for example in our own universe we may have got out of bed on time, but in another we may have overslept. In another we may have just been in time to catch the bus to work, but in yet another we may have missed it and had to walk.
Many people have attempted to come up with theories about how parallel universes exist and the conditions to be satisfied to travel between them but none have really come up with anything solid, though by the very nature of the material any theory is bound to sound incredible to the point of being beyond belief. If scientists, theorists and philosophers are giving it so much time is there a modicum of truth in it? It is likely that one of these two possibilities holds the key to U.F.O.s, the fact that craft can visit us and then apparently disappear afterwards shows us that the technology they use is far superior to our own, and whether they come from outer space or from a parallel universe, we the public are still a long, long way from knowing the truth. There are almost certainly people on earth who do know the truth and have no apparent intention of divulging their knowledge. Possibly some of these people are the staff at Area 51 or, perhaps more accurately, some of these people are some of the staff at Area 51. The fact that there is a military installation there is advertised by the signs telling us to keep out and has been admitted by the military themselves, but this is not what we are interested in and what we want to know is just what goes on there.
The facts are that many new military aircraft have been developed at Area 51, so obviously research into genuine new projects is conducted there, and those new aircraft would need to be tested in the skies above the base, so no doubt this work is genuine and bona fide, but is that as far as it goes? Having legitimate research and development would certainly be an excellent cover for more covert work and would help to divert attention from U.F.O.s should they be housed there as well as the U2 spy plane, the B52 and the stealth bomber.
It is an obvious fact that rumours will always start, escalate and be passed on and added to until their source is undetectable, and it eventually becomes indistinguishable from the truth, but it is also a fact that there is no smoke without fire, and there are certainly no court proceedings, even in the adoptive home of litigation, without somebody feeling that they have a strong case, especially when that case is against the whole back bone of a nation as large as America.
Why would a military base be built in such an inaccessible part of the country and then the land for miles all around it be bought up and patrolled so heavily if not to conceal something extremely sensitive? Other operating installations can make do without all these precautions so what makes Area 51 so special? It has been rumoured many times that the Majestic 12 wished to build such an installation to use for their objectives in researching U.F.O. technology, and of course there are myriad rumours that this is indeed what takes place there, and given half a chance the six former employees would testify in court to that effect were they not facing a possible jail term for breaching the official secrets act.
The latest rumours about Area 51 are those which concern “Project Aurora”, said to be Americas latest super plane, which, as mentioned earlier, does not officially exist, but we have heard mention of it in official documents, we have heard of some of its alleged capabilities and we have even seen sketches of what it is supposed to look like. This latest development is said to use U.F.O. technology in order to be able to achieve some of these unique qualities, and to a greater extent than the F-117 Stealth Bomber. Of course most of what we hear is just rumours but that has been the name of the Governments game over the years, releasing information every so often, but the tactics they employ are to release false information from reputable sources and genuine information from easily discredited sources with “questionable” backgrounds and vice versa so that they can't be accused of not releasing information. We are unable to decipher what is the truth and what is lies, but if the U.S. Government are in possession of recovered U.F.O.s then it is almost certain that Area 51 would be where they are kept and tested.
There is a popular theory that in time the authorities will reveal what they know to the public and that they have already begun to do so by giving us information from disreputable sources and false information from reputable sources, both of which are as good as one another in their view, and that this is part of their plan to allow us to get used to the idea of not being alone. Once they feel they have achieved this they will start to release more information from more and more reputable sources when they feel that the public is able to handle such knowledge, and if this is the case then it is certainly taking them a long time to gently prepare us for the confirmation of what we already suspect. This would seem to be borne out by the experience of twenty seven year old Robert Suffern, and later his wife, of Bracebridge, Ontario which began on Tuesday October 7th, 1975 when Robert received a phone call from his sister who lived nearby. She wanted him to investigate a strange glow that she could see inside a barn, which he duly went to do in his car, though when he got there he could see nothing out of the ordinary. Deciding to put his sisters mind at ease he began to drive toward her house, and on his way there he saw a dark disc shaped object about twelve or fourteen feet wide on the road in front of him, but before he had stopped his car the object “went straight up in the air and out of sight.”
Suffern decided to turn around and head home, in his own words “I was scared” but as he headed home he saw a humanoid figure about four feet tall with “very wide shoulders.... out of proportion to his body,” it was wearing a silver grey suit and a helmet. The figure walked out into the road in front of Suffern's car and he hit the brakes, causing the car to skid on the gravel road, narrowly avoiding a collision with the figure which then ran to the side of the road and jumped over the fence in such a manner as to give Suffern the impression that it was weightless before running into the field and out of sight.
He continued to drive home feeling very shaken by the incident, and he felt no better when he looked out of a window and saw that the U.F.O. had come back. It was now flying slowly along the road where it circled an electricity pylon before flying upwards again in to the night sky.
Suffern said of the affair “I know what I saw, but I don't care if I ever see that creature again” and he would have been happy to let the incident die down, but an investigator, Harry Tokarz, tracked him down in July 1976 while he was working on a documentary about U.F.O.s in Canada and paid the Sufferns a visit. They both agreed to talk to him as long as he used no recording equipment but merely spoke to them “man to man,” however, an account of the visit did later appear in CUFORN's Journal “The Pulse Analyser.” It was the journalist's opinion that Robert Suffern was “an individual who carefully measures his thoughts” and his wife was “a home bred country girl, quick to air her views.”
After the original October encounter with the craft the Sufferns received a telephone call in November during which they agreed to a meeting, and a police car arrived on December 12th carrying three men in uniform whose credentials showed that they were from the Canadian Forces, the U.S. Air Force, the Pentagon and Naval Intelligence, and once comfortable inside the house they proceeded to answer any questions that the Sufferns asked them about the U.F.O. sightings. Their answers were immediate and without faltering giving the impression that they were, as they said, answering in truth. They told the Sufferns what the U.F.O. was, where it had come from and why. The impression they gave was that the authorities had been working with the aliens since 1943 when, during an experiment commonly, though not officially, known as “The Philadelphia Experiment,” the Navy had accidentally bridged the gap between two dimensions using electromagnetic fields concentrated on the destroyer U.S.S. Eldridge (DE 173). Believed to be present was Albert Einstein whose “Unified Field” theory was the basis behind the principle of making objects invisible.
The men apologised to the Sufferns for the incident and said that it had been a mistake, Robert thought it must have been a secret military craft but no, they said that it was a saucer with a malfunction. Mrs. Suffern was still skeptical about the whole thing but her mind was put at rest when the men quoted the exact time to the minute at which all of their sightings had occurred, a detail that the Sufferns had told nobody about. Possibly the visitors could have been M.I.B.s, but rather than try to dissuade them from the U.F.O. theory they supported it and told them that this is indeed what they had seen, nor had they arrived in an old black classic car but a police car, nor did they wear black or act unusually and they gave the Sufferns no impression that they were anything but human. They also confirmed a third sighting of the craft on the Suffern's property again giving the precise time of the sighting, and again saying that this one had also been an accident.
One must wonder why the military would go to the trouble and risk of visiting the Sufferns and explaining it to them, could it be through a fear due to Robert almost running over the figure in the road and the serious repercussions that would have ensued if he had not managed to avoid it, or on the other hand could this be an example of them supplying genuine evidence through unreliable sources, after all the Sufferns were just “simple country folk?” Understandably though, in return for their frankness they asked the Sufferns to keep quiet about what they had been told, and Robert did so out of “moral reasons” and not because he is bound by the official secrets act, and they had only opened up to the investigator after a slip of the tongue by Mrs. Suffern, and then only casually got slowly around to discussing the incident as though it was no big deal.
As a footnote, the investigator claims to have evidence that shows the Canadian and U.S. Authorities had conducted medical and psychological checks on the Sufferns earlier than the December meeting to assess just how they would react when they were told just what they had seen. Whatever the purpose was behind the military's co-operation it was almost successful in putting the matter to rest, but not quite, and again we have a parallel universe as the “source” of U.F.O.s rather than another part of our own universe, and we are slowly seeing more evidence that the parallel universe holds the key to U.F.O.s, and they are able at will to “leap” between universes appearing, as seen by some witnesses, in a cloud of gas relatively undetected, but if they have the ability to do so why would they continue to do so without making much more contact with us. In the short term of course, the desire to explore and gather knowledge would be too great to ignore and this quest for knowledge would continue, possibly making a few trips and then trying to analyse what they have found. Could this also explain the waves of sightings we get over the years?
The main reason for their visits must be research such as taking samples of rocks, water and possibly even animals and human tissue rather than to get repairs done on their craft, or to preach to us about how we are destroying our planet. The question then is how much do the authorities know about, and assist, our visitors? We have seen evidence that the military, in America at least, have been escorting these craft, and we have also seen evidence that they deny all knowledge of them, but what exactly is their “working relationship?”
Some people believe that they have an “agreement” in which they give us some knowledge of their technology and in return we turn a blind eye to their abductions of humans and possibly even supply them with animals as well, but if the cooperation was that great, then they would surely be able to get all the samples they would need without them taking the risk of being seen by the public, so surely the relationship cannot be all that close. This is also borne out by the fact that we don't yet have a craft of our own which can perform aerial feats to match theirs, or is this just part of a joint plan to slowly bring us round to accepting the knowledge of their existence by letting us see their craft and the occupants, and planes like the Stealth Bomber and the unofficial Aurora using a little more of their technology than their predecessors?
This eventuality though doesn't seem very likely, especially if we have been known to shoot down their craft, and if bases like Woodbridge and Bentwaters at Rendlesham Forest are visited by crafts which mystify them, besides which could we really develop such a close relationship with an alien race if we can't even work with each race on our own planet, as the wars that rage all over the planet demonstrate? It is therefore hard to believe that we are as close to our visitors as we would like to think, and that whenever one of their craft crashes, we swarm all over it in an attempt to learn all we can from it and its occupants. This may have been the case for many years, and that over this time we have gleaned bits of information from such crashes and that research is under way to try to understand and operate the technology we discover, though it seems that we are still a long way from fully understanding it, and we are not fully aware of the implications of what we are doing. This would be why our guests are still seen by the public as they collect their samples and monitor and observe us, but do they actually abduct us or are abductions a scenario created by some “unsettling incident.”
What is certain is that they seem very real to the people who experience them and they truly believe that they have been experimented upon and examined medically. The reasons for these tests, if they do take place, are clear and the reasons that people are told they will be revisited are clear. It is so that they can be monitored over a period of time. Also clear are the reasons why the events are wiped from the memories of the victims, but what is not so clear is just why, if the events are to be wiped from their memories, do they get a guided tour of the craft, are showed how the craft are powered and told that they are worried for our environment and the way in which we treat it?
If the abduction is the creation of the distressed mind, then could the fears for the environment be the subconscious fears of the abductee? And if this is the case then also the tour of the craft and how they are powered must also be the creation of the mind, but these technical explanations are a little too close to the truth to be the creation of the distressed mind of a person with no apparent technical knowledge. Having said that, it is puzzling as to why a person would be told that they must try to help save the planet and then have the warning wiped from their memory.
The real difficulty when dealing with abductions is that they generally only become apparent when the victim is hypnotised, and as we said earlier this is a complicated and relatively misunderstood phenomenon in which the person will say what they perceive to be the truth, rather than what is the actual truth, though of course they will have no awareness that these are not one and the same.
As for cattle mutilations, they are certainly intriguing but on the evidence so far, it is less and less likely that they are the work of predators and scavengers that leave perfect surgical incisions and no signs of their ever having been at the scene.
One thing is for certain, we can't ignore the 40 million sightings that we have had of U.F.O.s and nor can we ignore the fact that there is one sighting every three minutes somewhere on earth. U.F.O.s are here now and they will be here for the foreseeable future, at least until “they” have got what they are looking for, just what that is, is unclear, but surely if they had some ulterior motive, they could have achieved their aims long before now. Perhaps they do only wish to observe us and our “strange” ways while examining our planet, and who’s to say, if some of the rumours are true, then maybe some people from earth have visited their world and perhaps are still there now, though for the foreseeable future we will simply never know and it will remain, as many stories are when connected with U.F.O.s, as speculation based on rumour.
Copyright © JamesOnline.net. All rights reserved.