Podcast UFO

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

While J. Allen Hynek was bringing the invisible college out into the open, he became involved with a documentary that has Rod Serling as its main host, along with Burgess Meredith, José Ferrer, and Vallée. The movie makes a compelling argument that UFOs should be taken seriously and includes appearances by former Blue Book heads Robert Friend and Hector Quintanilla.

In its release in 1974 it was titled UFOs: Past, Present, and Future, which was changed to UFOs: It Has Begun for its release in 1976 and 1979. Besides being informative and entertaining and preserving a bit of UFO history for future researchers, the story behind its production has become a part of UFO history as well, as its producers were reportedly misled by the Pentagon into believing they would receive classified footage of a UFO landing at Holloman AFB in May of 1971.

The footage was described as showing a meeting between the UFO occupants and Air Force officials. According to producer, main writer, and composer Robert Emenegger, it was going to be the finale of the documentary until the DoD withdrew the offer at the last minute.

Robert Emenegger was interviewed by Mel Fabregas in 2009. According to him, he and Allen Sandler had originally set out to produce a series of films about advanced military technology, but were diverted by an intriguing piece of information offered by their military contact at Norton Air Force Base, Paul Shartle. Shartle, Security Manager and Chief of Requirements for the Audio-Visual Program at the base, said that he had seen a film of an alien craft landing at Holloman AFB in 1971. As discussions about possible projects continued, the idea that one of them be about UFOs came up and was encouraged by military officials who offered the producers the use of the footage. Emenegger and Sandler decided to go ahead with a UFO documentary, and the film was made.[1] Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

Recently, there have been reports throughout the media that FBI files concerning a UFO sighting reported by three Anoka, Minnesota, police officers have been declassified and are available at the National Archives. Remarkably, almost none of the media outlets covering the story provide a link to the actual document with the exception one news outlet, KARE 11, which was kind enough to provide a pdf with one of the FBI documents and related material from Americans for Safe Aerospace and the National UFO Reporting Center.

There is an article by Conor Wight on the CBS News site (updated May 28, 2026) headlined “Newly declassified FBI documents detail UFO sighting by Anoka officers — and one of them filmed it.” Wight is with CBS Minnesota and starts his story with this: “Buried within the National Archives is an unexplained sighting from right here in Minnesota.”

Buried is an apt description, as the documents were quite hard to find in the National Archives Catalogue, but a search within “Group 16: Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection,” brought us to records from the FBI, which led us to the files related to the Anoka case, which are the top three in a series of six results. Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

By the time Project Blue Book was terminated, most UFO researchers, especially in the United States, were of the opinion that UFOs were nuts and bolts craft piloted by flesh and blood creatures from other planets. This is what has become known as the extraterrestrial hypothesis or ETH. At around the same time, as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, Jacques Vallée had one book published and John Keel had two published, that challenged the ETH, and caused many in the UFO community to consider other options.

Vallée had his first UFO book, Anatomy of a Phenomenon, published in 1965 and his second, Challenge to Science, co-written with his wife, Janine, published in 1966. Both books make the argument that the UFO mystery is worthy of scientific study and present the elements of the problem in an organized manner in an effort to facilitate such study. In what would become characteristic in Vallée’s books, he presents accounts going back to antiquity, and he presents a lot of them. The books are lengthy and dry and hold little appeal for the average UFO enthusiast looking for sensational accounts of sightings and encounters. Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

In 1977, in the midst of a good deal of UFO activity in Italy, there was a multiple witness case that was investigated not only by a private UFO group, but by the Carabinieri (Italian national police) as well. The witnesses reported seeing lights, a cylindrical object, and a humanoid over a period of around three hours, during which they, the witnesses, made multiple approaches and retreats. Verga Maurizio wrote an article (page 20 of the pdf) covering the events headlined “Seven Scared Witnesses and a Humanoid” that was published in the Volume 25, Number 1, May 1979 Flying Saucer Review.

According to Maurizio, there were enough reports of UFO sightings, “especially at low altitude” and including close encounter reports to constitute “a wave.” During this, “there was one particularly strange, and important, incident” that had several witnesses, two of which were hypnotically regressed. The case was investigated by Umberto Telarico and Giorgio Russolillo of the Naples-base Federazione Uoflogica Regionale Campania. Most of the report is based on interviews with 24-year-old students Rocco Cirullo and Michele Giovanniello, who were the two initial witnesses and not the ones who were hypnotically regressed. Read more →

Among the many possible explanations for UFOs is that some UFOs might be creatures that live in the sky. The person who became best known for this idea was Trevor James Constable who presented it, along with infrared photos of what he claimed were bioforms invisible to the naked eye, in his 1958 book (as Trevor James) They Live in the Sky. James wasn’t alone in his belief, and the concept of sky creatures goes back farther than 1958 in both speculative literature and science fiction.

A good starting point for the history of the sky-creatures hypothesis is the 1997 paper by Jerome Clark, Spacemen, Demons and Conspiracies, published by the Fund for UFO Research. Clark explores the many explanations for UFOs put forward throughout the years and looks at the SCH in the section “Secret Weapons and Space Animals.” After going into the speculation by people such as James Moseley, Leon Davidson, and Jacques Vallée that flying saucers/UFOs can be explained as classified secret weapons, Clark delves into the history of the sky-creature concept. Read more →