by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
While UFO researcher/investigators came to accept abduction reports as being worthy of their time by the end of the 1970s, only a few, such as John Keel and Gray Barker, were open to contactee reports. Even so, contactee reports kept showing up, and sometimes they would even make it into the newspapers. One British case from 1980 involved creatures that resembled the Venusians reported by George Adamski starting in 1952, and the witness claimed he had physical trace evidence as proof of his encounter.
In the November 25, 1980 Lancashire Evening Post, there is an article (page 11 of the pdf) by David Jones headlined “Mario’s Close Encounter.” According to Jones, Mario Luisi, a 36-year-old paper mill worker and father of three, gave details of his reported encounter “with two beings from another planet.” No date is given in the article for the report, but a date of November 20, 1980 is given in a list titled “1980: November UFO & Alien Sightings” posted on thinkaboutitdocs.com. Luisi is quoted as saying, “I know I’ll be the laughing stock of the village for this. But, I’m not bothered, because I know what I saw.”
Luisi said he was walking his dog along the bank of the river beside Cropper’s paper mill. It must have been in the evening because he had a flashlight with him. He saw what he thought was a cow, but when he swung his flashlight on it, a beam of light “flashed back” and partially melted the flashlight. Luisi presented his flashlight to the reporter as evidence and there is a picture of him holding it printed next to the article.
At that point, Luisi realized he was looking at some sort of craft. He described it as hovering close to the ground and that it was “16 feet long and 8 feet deep.” He said there was a man and a woman standing next to it that “were the most beautiful people I have ever seen.” He described them as having light-colored hair “in a helmet-style down past their shoulders.” They were about 5 feet 6 inches tall and were wearing skin-tight black suits he described as having a “wet look.” He said the woman was also wearing a cloak. He said “their features were out of this world” and that they had “pale skin as though they were ill or something.”
Luisi said he was with the creatures for three minutes and that the woman “did all the talking in English.” He said she told him they wouldn’t hurt him, but that he “must not tell certain things, like the letters on the craft.” According to Jones, Luisi refused to talk about the letters and markings on the craft, and the emblems on the creatures’ clothing.
Luisi said he wanted to run, but he couldn’t. He said the creatures went up some “fold-down stairs” into their ship and that the ship then “shot straight up into the sky in a red glow.”
Luisi ran home and told his wife, Judith, and his next-door neighbor about his encounter. Judith said that Mario “never gets scared, but he was scared that night.” Luisi also gave a report to the Kendal Police. A spokesman for the department confirmed this and said they sent a man to investigate. He said: “He found nothing, so that is the end of the matter as far as we are concerned.” He added that there had been “one or two” other sighting reports in the area about two years previous but there had been nothing since.
One might think that a report like this in 1980 would have been dismissed by most researchers of that period given its similarity to 1950s contactee reports. However, British researcher Jenny Randles wrote about it in her 1983 book UFO Reality (according to the “1980: November UFO & Alien Sightings” list), and it shows up in a blog titled “Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind” posted on globalnet.co.uk. Of course it was perfect for a supermarket tabloid story and it made the March 3, 1981 Weekly World News, seemingly taken straight from the Lancashire Evening Post article.