by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.” & a new book to be released!
The February-March 1977 issue of the UFO Newsclipping Service, has four articles describing what would become “classic” UFO cases. One looks into the report (page 12 of the pdf) of nine-year-old Jose Cantu who said he saw “two greenish creatures about three feet tall, who rotated on a base instead of having feet, and two ‘steely’ crafts in which 2 other creatures were sitting.” His drawing showing one of the creatures with only one eye has caused them to be dubbed “The Cycloptic Aliens of Harrah.” The other three articles describe two abduction cases that have become well-known, one involving Judy Kendall covered in two papers from California, and one involving three women: Elaine Thomas, Louise Smith, and Mona Stafford covered in a paper from their home state, Kentucky. By this time, abduction claims and creature reports had come out from under the umbrella of contactee reports and the stigma that came with this association thanks to cases such as the 1973 Pascagoula Incident and the 1975 Travis Walton Incident, and news agencies were more open to reporting on them. That being said, there is an obscure case reported (page 3) in the February 2, 1977, Clarkesville, Tennessee, Leaf Chronicle, that has aspects of a contactee case, and the story told by the man who said he had an encounter with otherworldly beings is strange to the point of being ridiculous. Even so, the reporter who covered it wrote about it with a good deal of objectivity and restraint.
The article, headlined “Greenville Farmer ‘Contacted’ by Beings From Outer Space?,” was written by Ron Taylor. According to him, Donald Fender, a farmer from Greenville, Tennessee, said that as he was driving towards Madisonville, Tennessee, on January 27, he got a feeling, 15 miles west of Clarksville, “like someone wanted to talk to me.” He turned off onto a side road and drove until he came upon a craft that he said looked like a pullet egg, and in Taylor’s words, “appeared to be a silky balloon or parachute.” Fender said that beings came out of the craft and spoke to him.
According to Taylor, the creatures told Fender they were “emissaries of peace” and that they had stopped there because it was the only place where they could enter Earth’s atmosphere. Taylor explains “Their mode of travel is restricted to a space vacuum that is aligned where the road runs north and south through Clarksville, Fender said they told him.”
According to Taylor, Fender said there were two of these vacuums: one on one side of the road for the creatures he spoke with, and another on the other side for, in Taylor’s words, “another planet.” Fender is said to have explained that there was no way to cross from one to the other and that the creatures he spoke with had created the one they used and were on their first visit in the midst of a test run.
Fender is quoted as saying “They said they were coming back. They didn’t say when, they just said they are coming back.” Taylor says that, according to Fender, that particular area was the only place where a vacuum of that type could be created and that, because of this, Clarksville would become, in Taylor’s words, “the place from which all space travel would originate.”
Taylor reports that Fender described himself as a bee farmer (who also raised tobacco, corn, cattle, and hogs), and a member of good standing in the Greenville Baptist Church. He points out that Fender was aware that his story was hard to believe and quotes him as saying, “If anyone told me a story like this, I’d tell them it is a crock of baloney.”
According to Taylor, a spokesman for Fort Campbell said there were no UFOs reported by air control officers there on the 27th. Fender is described as not being discouraged by this and planning to take a trip to Washington to, in Taylor’s words, “talk with whomever he is supposed to talk to.” He is quoted as saying, “I’ve often thought if anything happened to me like happened to those boys in Mississippi – who claimed to have been taken aboard an alien spaceship – I’d be ashamed to tell it, but I want to tell this.”
This case hasn’t quite been forgotten altogether and is described on at least two websites thanks to a mention of it (page 16 of pdf) in the January 1977 MUFON Journal. In the article headlined “New Close Encounter Cases Under Investigation” written by Leonard Stringfield, Stringfield briefly describes the case and notes that the “lone witness,” who preferred to remain anonymous, was reluctant to discuss the incident over the phone. It is noteworthy that there are 12 pages in that issue devoted to the abduction case in Kentucky, which Stringfield investigated along with others.