by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
This is the third part of a series looking at a case from 1968 that involved sightings of UFOs on October 24, 1968, by ground observers stationed at the ICBM missile complex surrounding Minot AFB in North Dakota. A B-52 was flying in the area, and the pilot was requested to change course and investigate. The result was a UFO encounter that was caught on photographs of the B-52 radarscope, and the pilot, Maj. James A. Partin, and co-pilot, Captain Bradford Runyon, reported that they’d had a visual sighting of the object when it was on the ground. In addition to the sightings, it was reported that the outer and inner perimeter alarms of the missile site designated Oscar-7 went off and that a padlocked entry hatch there was found open with a plug-style gate secured by a combination lock removed from it. The case was officially examined by the officer in charge of UFO investigations at the base who provided details and evidence to Project Blue Book. The Blue Book conclusion was that what was seen was possibly a combination of “anomalous propagation” of radar returns, a plasma ball, and celestial bodies. It was also concluded that the break-in was unrelated. The case lay dormant for 30 years until Runyon contacted the Center for UFO Studies and filled out a sighting report form. The case caught the interest of members of the newly formed Sign Historical Group and they did a thorough investigation that included many interviews with witnesses. They’ve made material they gathered available as part of the Sign Oral History Project on a website devoted to the case. In Part III, we’ll look at the reports by the ground observers. Read more
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by Charles Lear, author of 
In 1986, Jim Speiser of Fountain Hills, Arizona, got the urge to create an electronic forum dedicated to a discussion of paranormal topics. He started a BBS (bulletin board system) using six personal computers located at various locations in the U.S. and Canada linked together with a Fidonet system. Speiser called his new BBS “The ParaNet.” In the summer of 1991, there was a “spin-off” of ParaNet named the Multi-national Investigations Cooperative on Aerial Phenomena, and ParaNet published a magazine called Continuum to get their investigations reports out to the public. The first case in the Volume 1, Number 1, September 1991 
In 1975, after the Travis Walton Incident on November 5, because of the attention it received in the press and among the UFO community, there were two flaps in Florida that fell through the cracks and have all but been forgotten. The first one was in the area of Miami- Dade County that started on the same day as the Walton incident, and the second was a little over a month later around 50 miles south of Jacksonville in the small farming community of Hastings. The Miami-Dade reports received a good amount of local press, as did the Hastings reports. The Hastings reports were looked into by the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, and there is an 
