By Charles Lear
In last week’s blog, we looked at a UFO encounter in Kentucky reported by three women, Louise Smith, Mona Stafford, and Elaine Thomas. According to them, they saw a craft that shone a blue light into their car and seemingly took control of it. They felt pain down through the tops of their heads and in their eyes, felt the car being pulled backwards and then suddenly found themselves almost eight miles away in what seemed like an instant. The UFO was gone. They continued on to Liberty, Kentucky and stopped at the trailer home of Smith, who had been the driver. They became aware that they all had a number of physical ailments, including burning and tearing eyes, skin that burned when in contact with water and one-inch-by-three-inch marks on the backs of their necks. There was also about 80 minutes they couldn’t account for. Smith looked to see if any of her neighbors were awake and she saw a light on in the trailer next-door belonging to Lowell Lee. The women went over to his house and Lee listened to their story. He looked at the marks on their necks, and then had them go to separate areas and draw what they said they saw. The drawings were almost identical. The story found its way into the press and it wasn’t long before interested UFO investigators approached the women to look into the case. Read more
For researchers, UFO trace cases make up a welcome, science-friendly aspect of a phenomenon that often eludes scientific study. Researcher Ted Phillips specialized in trace cases starting in the mid-1960s on the advice of Project Blue Book scientific consultant J. Allen Hynek. In the course of his investigations, Phillips was able to note commonalities, one of those being that soil samples taken from alleged UFO landing sites were unable to absorb water. While UFOs have been reported to leave physical traces on the environment, they’ve also been reported to leave physical traces on witnesses. A common report of this sort is what is medically known as “actinic conjunctivitis” or “klieg conjunctivitis.” This is a painful condition where the eyes become red and intensely irritated due to exposure to ultraviolet light. 
On September 12, 1952, a woman and six boys in the town of Flatwoods in Braxton County, West Virginia, reported that they’d had an encounter with a landed UFO and a strange creature. The woman, Mrs. Kathleen May, described the creature to a reporter as “a fire-breathing monster, ten-feet tall with a bright green body and a blood-red face.” She said the creature emitted an odor “like metal” that caused everyone to vomit for hours after the encounter. She added, “It looked worse than Frankenstein.” The witnesses all agreed that the figure had a red face with two openings like eyes that projected beams of greenish-orange light over their heads and that around the face there was a dark hood-like shape that came to a point like the ace of spades. The creature has become known as “The Flatwoods Monster.” By September 15, the case was reported in newspapers all over the country. It is likely that most readers are aware of this case, but many may not be aware of reports from nearby Wheeling, West Virginia, just a couple of days later. 
On June 24 of this year (World UFO Day), the International UFO Lab was established in Japan. It is housed in the UFO Fureaikan (UFO Friendship Center), a UFO center and museum that was built in 1992 in the town of linomachi (lower case spelling is apparently proper), which is now a prefecture of Fukushima. The facility is city owned and run by the Iinomachi Promotion Corporation. It was built using money from a regional development fund in an effort to help promote the area as a UFO hotspot after numerous sightings, starting in the 1970s, around nearby Mount Senganmori. The Lab is part of a new revitalization effort for Fukushima as a whole. Japan’s history of private UFO research goes back to the 1950s, but the official stance until 2020 was that UFOs weren’t worthy of consideration.
The material housed in the UFO Fureaikan comes from a donation of over 3000 items from early Japanese UFO researcher Kinichi Arai. Arai ran a bookstore in the early 1950s and developed an interest in flying saucers while reading books on the subject that were increasingly being published at the time. Arai felt there was need for serious discussion of the phenomenon and formed Japan’s first UFO organization, the Japanese Flying Saucer Research Association in 1955. Arai was a pacifist, and according to