by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
In 2006, a report of strange creatures being encountered on a farm in North Dakota was looked into by a MUFON investigator who considered the witness to be credible. It was first covered on local radio and then picked up by the Fargo, North Dakota, Forum. The case came to the attention of Patrick Gross, who maintained the UFO Related Entities Catalog up until 2019 it seems (the year of the last update on his website), thanks to a reader who wrote him an email saying he heard about the case on KFYR Radio on October 25 and 26, 2006. The case is detailed with as many sources as Gross was able find and was entered in the catalog.
The e-mail reads as follows:
I was looking for info on a report of 2 or 3 aliens on a hog farm near Bismarck ND in or near Tappen ND attempting to take a hog, man confronted the strange people reported to be 6 to 7 feet tall and woke up some time later with a hog gone and markings of a space ship…reported on KFYR radio 10/25 and 26,2006 also several sonic booms were heard in the area.
Gross provides a transcript of the article by Dave Olson in the October 27, 2006, Fargo, North Dakota, Forum headlined “Creature Sightings Stir Talk,” which can be found on page 3 of the December 2006 UFO Newsclipping Service.
According to Olson, Torrey Briese, “a member of the Tappen School Board whose family operates a ranch outside of town,” and his wife, Myra, said that their family had experienced “three strange occurrences” that year, with two of them reported by their son, 16-year-old Evan. The first incident is said to have occurred in April when Evan was checking on cows during the calving season with his cattle dog, Buster. Seeing a glow, Evan walked up over a hill and saw an object on the ground that seemed to be “scanning a waterhole with an intense beam of light.” Evan and Buster are said to have just stood and stared until Buster broke the spell and ran barking at the object, which took off, causing a sonic boom. Torrey Briese reportedly said that it woke his wife up.
Briese added that while giving a neighbor a ride into town one night in July, they saw a bluish light in the sky that stopped when they stopped and moved when they moved. He said they watched it for a half hour and that at one point it went several miles in seconds. He is reported to have linked what he saw with what his son saw and to have added that “he’s never been given to flights of fancy.” He is quoted as saying, “Evan and I are very skeptical. We used to watch the UFO Files on TV and laugh out loud.”
We’ve saved the most dramatic report for last although it’s the first one detailed in the article as told by Myra Biese. According to her, Evan woke up early on September 12, and after getting up to get a glass of water, he looked out a window and saw something moving in the corral where several large hogs described as “basically family pets” were held. He grabbed his .22 rifle and headed out, thinking the intruder might be a coyote, and instead, came upon two 8 to 9-feet-tall creatures accosting one of the hogs.
Evan shot at one of the creatures and thought he probably hit it as it let loose an “unearthly scream.” “Another creature” is said to have grabbed him and thrown him to the ground, which caused him to black out. When he came to, he saw that a 450-pound sow named Ruthy who was ready to give birth was missing.
Evan ran to the nearby house of his older sister, Trista, who “made a frantic phone call to her parents,” and soon they and then the Kidder County Sheriff arrived at the scene. Evan’s shirt is described as being “in tatters” as he told his story, and the sheriff, Doug Howard, is said to have returned the next day but to have “come to no conclusions about what happened to the hog.” Evan is reported to have remembered more details “with the help of a hypnotist,” a few days later.
The extra details reported are that there were five creatures in the corral and two of them were dragging what seemed to have been a dead hog when Evan “interrupted them.”
According to Olson, the family was put in touch with a UFO investigator from Long Prairie, Minnesota, Richard Moss, who was in Tappen for a funeral. Moss is said to have been impressed with the Tappen incidents as “having the potential to be genuine.” He is quoted describing Evan prior to hypnosis: “He had a sort of unsure look on his face. He was still really wondering what had happened.” The quote goes on: “After the hypnotic regression, he knew. He was made to remember.”
Sheriff Howard was reportedly off duty and could not be reached for comment and Kidder County Deputy John Lemieux “said he did not believe the incident in September resulted in a written report.”
According to Olson, Torrey Biese said “strange things are still happening,” and described a case where a relative with a nearby farm reported a sheep dying with “no obvious reason for its death,” according to the vet who examined it, and added that one of the animal’s testicles was removed “with surgical precision.”
Gross includes a report from regular URECAT contributor Albert Rosales that is very similar to the Forum account and the sources given are KXMC-TV Bismark, North Dakota and MUFON Journal #463. He provides additional details from “Richard Moss of MUFON.” According to Rosales, Moss reported that Evan saw one of the creatures pick up the, here 400-pound, sow with one arm, transfer it to the other arm and then toss it to another creature. It is at this point that Evan, seeing the creatures in the moonlight, realized they were not “ordinary people” and shot the one that caught the sow.
At this point, Moss’s report takes on even more of a high-strangeness quality. The creature that had thrown the sow is said to have “floated” (quotes in the report) towards Evan, picked him up by his shirt with one arm, and thrown him back about 20 feet. While on his back, Evan reportedly heard a “boom sound.” He is said to have sat up and reloaded his rifle but to have seen that the creatures were gone. He reportedly said he got a sense of fear from the other creatures after the one had been shot and “described what might have been an empathetic telepathy between the beings and himself, with them indicating something like, ‘we mean you no harm…’”
Gross points out a “bothering aspect of the case,” which is that it’s not clear what part of the report came from conscious recall and what part came as a result of hypnotic regression. His evaluation is: “Extraterrestrial beings or confusion or hoax. Insufficient information.”