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by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

In last week’s blog, we profiled General Alfredo Moacyr Uchoa, who became a UFO investigator after retiring from his over 30-year career in the Brazilian Army. While he spent most of his career at the Military Academy of Brazil where he was a professor of engineering mechanics, head of the math department, and deputy director, he’d had an interest in the paranormal and the esoteric since the age of 18. After his retirement in 1963, he moved to Brasilia in 1968, and his son, Paulo, told him about a plantation owned by Wilson da Silva 120 km to the southwest where regular UFO activity was reported. Uchoa put together a group of 7 people, including his son, and they began visiting the plantation repeatedly starting in March. Bob Pratt was able to interview Uchoa and wrote an article headlined “The UFO reports of Brazilian General Alfredo Moacyr Uchoa” which can be found in the online magazine Alternate Perceptions. Gordon Creighton wrote a 3-part series of articles based on information he got from a 9-part series of articles by Eduardo Santa Maria that appeared in the Rio de Janeiro paper O Dia from October 26, to November 4, 1972. Creighton’s articles were published in the Flying Saucer Review Case Histories Supplements 12, 15, and 16, December 1972, June and August 1973 respectively. When we left off, we were telling the story of the investigation as told by Creighton. Read more →

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by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

Brazilian UFOlogy goes back a long time. One of the first UFOlogists there to come to international attention was Dr. Olavo Fontes, who wrote regular reports in the late 1950s and into the 60s for the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization that were published in the APRO Bulletin. Fontes wrote the first report on the 1957 Antonio Villas Boas abduction case. He sent it to APRO, and it remained unpublished by that organization until 1966. Two years later, in 1968, a retired General from the Brazilian Army, Alfredo Moacyr Uchoa, got involved in his first case, and it brought him to international attention as well. Read more →

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by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

On November 9, 1965, a huge portion of the Eastern United States experienced a power outage that began at 5:17 p.m. and lasted until 7:00 a.m. the next day in most areas. According to an article on the New England Historical Society website, it happened because maintenance workers “set a protective relay too low on a power line to Ontario, which then tripped the relay. It then sent power to other lines, overloading them.”  At the time, the entire U.S. was in the midst of a UFO flap, and there was speculation that UFOs had something to do with the outage. As far-fetched as that might seem, this was considered seriously by Saturday Review columnist John Fuller in his 1966 book, Incident at Exeter and was discussed in Congress in 1968 during a UFO symposium. A high-strangeness aspect to all this is that Oscar-nominated actor Stuart Whitman, claimed he was given an explanation by the occupants of two UFOs he saw in New York City the night of the blackout. Read more →

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by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

UFO documentaries and television specials play a big part in introducing people to the subject. Sometimes they’re well researched and made with care by creators with a passionate interest in the subject, and sometimes they’re made mostly for the sake of making money. In the case of a television special made by the Walt Disney Company titled Alien Encounters from New Tomorrowland that was aired in 5 U.S. cities in February and March of 1995, it was created as a means to promote a new ride at Walt Disney World Resort. While fairly typical of the UFO-related television presentations of its day, the matter-of-fact statements by narrator Robert Urich to the effect that aliens are visiting Earth in spaceships and abducting its human inhabitants, and that there are government documents that prove this, caused some to speculate that the documentary was made in partnership with U.S. government officials as part of a disclosure process. Read more →

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by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

For some UFOlogists, as they go through many years of research and investigation, their opinions and beliefs shift and change. Such was the case for Ted Phillips, whose involvement spanned over five decades from 1964 until his death on March 10, 2020. For much of that time, he specialized in physical trace cases and considered UFOs to be nuts and bolts craft piloted by flesh and blood extraterrestrial creatures. His views changed, particularly due to his investigation of a paranormal hotspot in Missouri that he and fellow researchers called “The Marley Woods” in an effort to conceal its location. Towards the end of his life, he saw the UFO phenomenon as being more complex than he’d previously considered it to be. Read more →

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by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

People have probably been reporting strange things in the sky for as long as they’ve been able to communicate. Chris Aubeck is a researcher who reaches far back in the historical record searching for UFO cases and is a founder of the Magonia Exchange, which is a group dedicated to the collection and archiving of fortean reports. In the June 2015 issue (page 11 of pdf) of Edge Science magazine, he and National Aviation Reporting Center On Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP) associate Martin Shough detailed their investigation of a 1665 report from Barhöfft, Sweden (now part of Germany), near Stralsund, that received a lot of attention at the time. The article is an excerpt from their 2015 book, Return to Magonia. Read more →

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