by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
According to his letter sent to “several people who’ve shown a particular interest in our UFO experiences,” on March 20, 1988, John Salter Jr., 54, and his almost 23-year-old son, John Salter III, set off for from their home in Grand Forks, North Dakota, headed for Mississippi and “ultimately New Orleans.” Along the way, as they were travelling between LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and Dubuque, Iowa, they experienced two episodes where they found themselves unable to remember long stretches of road they had just travelled on. After spending the night in Bettendorf, Iowa, and having breakfast in Peoria, Illinois, on March 21st at 10:14 a.m., they were confronted by a saucer-shaped UFO with a dome on top that came towards them and flew over them. Starting in June, Salter Jr. began to have dreams that developed into conscious recall of an encounter with humanoid creatures, several that were around 4 ½ feet tall and one that was around 6 feet tall, that took them onboard a craft. He says he recalled falling backwards on the way to the craft and being cushioned by what might have been telekinesis. He remembered being examined, injected in the neck and chest, and having an object inserted through his right nostril up into his sinus cavity. He describes his son being examined with a flashlight-like device with a soft head that was moved along his face with special attention being given to his jaw and chin. Salter III began recalling similar events starting in November.
John R. Salter Jr. had been a civil rights activist since the 1950s, and he was headed to New Orleans to present a paper titled “Civil Rights and Self-Defense” at an annual gathering. At the time, he was chair of American Indian Studies (his father was Micmac/Abenaki/Mohawk) at the University of North Dakota.
According to him in his account, he was driving his red 1987 Ford F-150 pickup. As they approached the Twin Cities “John III spelled me off on my driving.” Salter looked at the road maps and realized that the route he had chosen through LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and Dubuque, Iowa, wasn’t ideal, as the roads were “narrow and winding.” In retrospect he realized that, overall, his planned trip wasn’t logical, as it took them through out-of-the-way, rugged, and remote lower Wisconsin Mississippi River hill country that they had neither the time for or any particular interest in.
Salter decided to head towards Cedar Rapids and on into Davenport, Iowa, and as he started to change course, “Kookaburra,” a lullaby he and his family sang in the car together when he was living in Cedar Rapids from 1968 to 1969, came into his head:
Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree
Merry, merry king of the bush is he
Laugh Kookaburra, laugh Kookaburra
Gay your life must be.
This brought up an overwhelming wave of nostalgia that caused him to abandon his course change. He says he is “quite certain” that the song “was drawn somehow from my psyche by an external force and magnified.”
By the afternoon, they were on “the combined highways of 14 and 61,” and the plan was to continue on 61 after the roads divided at Readstown, Wisconsin, which would take them to Davenport. They stopped at a gas station in LaCrosse, and Salter says in a footnote that as they were getting ready to leave, “a strange-looking, little man bundled in a coat and with a ‘Greek Fisherman’s’ cap” ran from the station office to his car, locked eyes briefly with Salter, and ended up following them without passing, even when Salter slowed down “substantially,” and stayed with them until they got back on the highway.
At 6:25 p.m., they found themselves past Readstown, still on Highway 14, with no memory of their journey up to that point. The road here was four lanes wide, and in two miles, it went down to two lanes. Salter remembers saying “I’m slowing down a little and turning out the lights” just before another episode of memory loss. This time they found themselves going down a steep hill next to the highway. It was 7:45 p.m., and Salter and his son had no “particular sense of interruption.” Salter then had a clear memory of a moment when he was 23, driving in an isolated area of Arizona and thought “This was just like that time, then.”
They continued on 14 to Bettendorf, spent the night, went and had breakfast in Peoria, continued on, and then saw the UFO fly over them. Salter and his son both felt that this was a friendly display for them alone and that it somehow explained the periods of memory loss. Salter then remembered the “1961 interception of Betty and Barney Hill.” He notes that they were both civil rights activists, that Betty had “some Indian ancestry,” and that she “had had a positive, essentially friendly view of the UFO humanoid people.”
After Salter and his son recalled their own positive, essentially friendly encounter with the creatures and being brought onboard the craft (Salter describes the creatures as thin, with large heads and “conspicuously large, quasi-slanted eyes”), Salter started reading UFO literature, joined the Mutual UFO Network, and became its North Dakota state director in September 1989. He started a correspondence with Betty Hill and, along with his wife, spent a week with her in New Hampshire and “observed a number of UFOs at night with her.”
According to Salter, he experienced physical changes starting “as early as May, 1988,” that included his hair and nails growing “two to three times their normal rate,” thicker beard and eyebrows, body hair growing where it hadn’t before, unusually rapid healing, age spots and wrinkles disappearing, more energy, and increased immunity. Mental changes included him quitting smoking (four packs of cigarettes a day and a pound of pipe tobacco a week) without cravings, “strong creative urges,” and an increased commitment to social justice. He attributes all of this to the implant and the injection.
In June of 1989, Salter and his daughter, Josie, visited the area and saw that from about 2-3 miles beyond LaCrosse, there was a good 60 miles that included towns, and “unique hill formations” he had no memory of, which indicated to him that he and his son “had been under very pervasive mind control. Part of his recall included being psychically coaxed off the highway “onto a very narrow and extremely rough road,” and he determined during this revisiting that it was Pier Spring Road. He has a footnote explaining that his truck had needed a full alignment in May, which was a mystery at the time, as he drove it with care and was rarely on non-paved roads.
Salter speculates that he may have had encounters going back to 1941 and that these are part of a thought-out, coordinated effort on the part of the humanoids to help humanity along in its development.
Salter gave a speech at the November 14, 1992, Minnesota MUFON meeting, and it’s described by State Director William McNeff in the group’s November newsletter. According to McNeff, Salter told his listeners that he’d had four encounters, one each in 1941, 1952, 1957, and 1988. The one in 1941 is said to have been of a rectangular-shaped UFO at close range in Kansas. He had since found a sketch he made shortly afterwards, that he believed was related to the sighting, of a “man” giving a struggling young boy an injection. During the question-and-answer session after his speech, he said that the creatures came from Zeta Reticuli (this is where Betty Hill’s creatures were said to have come from), and that they were working to civilize humans like social workers striving to improve their community.
Salter taught a class on UFOs in 1990 at UND, and in an April 4, 2017, post on redditt, someone who says they had attended describes his demeaner: “Unfortunately, he was very quick to point at anything anomalous being ‘alien,’ while rejecting rational explanations out of hand.” One of the moments described is this: “A female student asked ‘If you have a device in your head, why don’t you get a CAT scan so you can prove this to the world?’ The answer (delivered in a meandering way): ‘They told us to stay the hell away from doctors.’”
Salter and his son can be seen telling their story in the 1991 TV special (starting at 32:57) Visitors from the Unknown – UFO Abductions.
Salter died on January 7, 2019.
We first came across this case in the article (page 3 of the pdf) by John H. Sims headlined “UFOs Of The Kickapoo II: A Wrong Turn Into Destiny At Readstown” published in the January 16, 1992, LaForge, Wisconsin, Epitaph-News.