by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
Coming across contemporary UFO cases of interest these days when government-related UFO stories dominate the news is difficult. Fortunately, there are still some active civilian investigators out there who share their information (without a subscription) on their websites. Stan Gordon is one of those, and he helped bring attention to a case investigated by fellow researcher Jim Brown.
Stan Gordon maintains a website, Stan Gordon’s UFO Anomalies Zone. According to his bio on the site, he was a trained electronics technician who specialized in radio and “worked in the advanced consumer electronics sales field for over forty years.” He has lived his whole life in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, became interested in UFOs and strangeness in 1959 at the age of ten, was the investigations coordinator for telephone reports coming into the UFO Research Institute of Pittsburgh in the late 1960s, and became an active field investigator in 1965. That year he was the primary investigator for the “December 9, 1965, UFO crash-recovery incident that occurred near Kecksburg, Pennsylvania.” Gordon established a hotline in 1969 so he could receive UFO reports and formed his own organization, the Westmoreland County UFO Study Group, in 1970.
On his site, he provides details of a report shared with him by “research associate,” Jim Brown, who is also Pennsylvania based and has his own website, Destinations: Paranormal Library. The report involves what Gordon calls a “mini-UFO,” and he provides some background on that aspect of the phenomenon.
According to Gordon, he has received reports of “these smaller spherical objects on the ground or just above the ground” since the 1960s that are today “referred to as orbs or balls of light.” These range from golf ball to basketball sized, and shapes other than spherical have also been reported. The are described as solid, translucent, transparent, “light sources of assorted colors,” or spheres with a swirling mass inside. They have been reported to have paced cars and entered through their windows; to have hovered in front of the windows of homes, tapped on them, and entered through them; and to have appeared “inside of homes and only a feet away from witnesses.” Gordon considers such reports “one of the most important aspects of the UFO/UAP mystery that has been somewhat overlooked.”
Gordon then presents Brown’s report which he became aware of when they met up at the Kecksburg UFO Festival on July 19th. Brown told Gordon that he was contacted by a woman in the Pittsburgh area who reported a close encounter with a “solid luminous orb while in her yard.”
According to the report, which includes a transcript of a July 19th phone conversation between Brown and the witness, between 2:30 and 3:00 p.m. on July 17, 2025, the witness was heading out to her garden to do some weeding after a rain had softened the ground. The weather at the time was partly sunny and 80º with moderate humidity.
In her first contact with Brown via email on the 18th, the witness said that before she got to the garden, she was “pushed by a glowing white object.” She asked if Brown was interested in hearing her story and the phone call was arranged.
During the phone call, she said she came upon the object, which was blocking her way, hovering five feet over the sidewalk. According to her, because it was her yard, she “was not about to be intimidated” and stood her ground.
She said it then came towards her, stopped two inches from her, and then moved again and touched her. She said it started to push and she backed away. As she was doing so, she fell backwards and landed on her “backside.” The object then rose up over her, “floated there for a couple seconds then vanished.” She said she “had heard about these white balls of light on TV so I Googled it and your name came up. I checked it out and that’s when I called you.”
She said she then “assessed” her injuries and determined that the only thing she had suffered was a skinned elbow. She saw no evidence on her body of where the object had touched her.
She described the object as white and feeling “metallic” but said “it almost seemed like it would give a bit as it made contact.” She also said it felt cold as if it had just come out of a refrigerator. She added that she “didn’t notice any static electricity or anything like that either” and didn’t get any sort of electrical shock from it. As for her saying it “pushed” her, she said that it was more as if it was moving her along.
Brown says that he asked the witness if she had any emotional aftereffects from the encounter or “feelings of negativity,” and that she said she went back out to her garden to weed that day and had no “emotional distress.” When he asked her why the object might have been blocking her way, she replied “I don’t think it wanted me in my garden at this time,” but she didn’t know why.
According to Brown, after a follow-up call, the witness’s son provided him with aerial pictures taken with a drone-mounted camera, and he didn’t see any possible sources of “light reflections etc.” During a second follow-up call, he was told her elbow was healing well, and that her garden seemed unaffected. He says he is carrying the case as “unresolved.”