Blog

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

Reports of people suffering physical effects after being zapped by UFOs appears often enough in UFO literature that an author could devote an entire book to them. In 1980, there was such a report out of Foxboro, Massachusetts, that was looked into by local investigators. A detailed account and analysis of the case by Ed Fogg and Joe Nyman appears in the January 1981 New England UFO Newsletter, put out by the New England UFO Study Group, under the front-page headline, “Light-Beam Paralysis, Possible Communication, and Physical Effects in Foxboro, Ma. Close Encounter.”

In a preface to the report, it is explained that while the witness, a 13-year-old boy, and his parents had given permission to have their names made public, the investigators chose to keep them anonymous to avoid “unthinking publicity” and “inquiry bordering on harassment” they’d seen with other cases. Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

In 1958, motorists in Elkton, Michigan, were alarmed by the sight of a blue creature with blinking lights and what looked to be a space helmet. Estimates of its size ranged from 2 to 10 feet tall, and mothers who spotted it while looking out the windows of their homes were reportedly worried about letting their children go out at night. The police got involved after a busload of junior high school students spotted it, and it wasn’t long before the mystery was solved.

In the October 31, 2008, Huron Daily Tribune there is an article (page 5 of the pdf) by Traci L. Weisenbach headlined, “50 Years Ago, ‘Little Blue Man’ Shook up Elkton.”  After the introduction in which the reader is asked to imagine driving down a country road and spotting “an illuminated, bluish figure moving very quickly, perhaps even dancing,” Weisenbach reveals that the creature was actually a young man dressed in a costume. He and two of his friends had come up with the idea, and with him in costume hidden in the trunk of a car, the other two would drive around and let him out in various locations.

According to Weisenbach, the three men involved were Jerry Sprague, LeRoy Shultz, and Don Weiss, who had just returned after serving in the military. Don Weiss was interviewed and said, “We were 22 or 23 years old and we were looking for work.” He added, “We had a little extra time on our hands.” Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

We often write about UFO cases that end up being neglected as other more dramatic cases grab the attention of investigators and the press. A case that was doomed to just this sort of treatment involved reports on October 22, 1973, out of Indiana. This was just after the October 12^th Pascagoula Incident and the October 18^th Coyne Helicopter Incident, and while all three cases share the front page of the September-October 1973 APRO Bulletin, the Indiana case faded into obscurity as the other two became classics.

We first came across this case in the 1975 Center for UFO Studies publication, Physical Traces Associated with UFO Sightings: A Preliminary Catalogue, compiled by Ted Phillips and edited by Mimi Hynek. The case shows up on page 95, and it’s included in the catalogue because there were traces found in a field the day after the sightings. The source for the report is given as the afore-mentioned issue of the APRO Bulletin. Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

It often happens that reported UFO incidents get lost when the media is focused on one of more reports that might be more sensational. This seems to have been the situation in Italy in 1979. There had been a flap in Italy throughout 1978 and a case in December involving a security guard in Torriglia, Fortunato Zanfretta, who claimed with corroboration from supervisors, coworkers, and the Carabinieri (Italian military police) that he had been abducted by huge yellow-eyed creatures on multiple occasions, dominated the news in Italy at that time. What seems like it should have received a good deal of attention from not only the press, but investigators as well, is a case that was reported in an Irish newspaper on January 3, 1979. An extensive search that included the publications of the major foreign and domestic UFO organizations in existence at the time, and even Italian UFO publications, found no other mentions of a case that involved the Interior Ministry and reports by several Rome police officers. Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

While J. Allen Hynek was bringing the invisible college out into the open, he became involved with a documentary that has Rod Serling as its main host, along with Burgess Meredith, José Ferrer, and Vallée. The movie makes a compelling argument that UFOs should be taken seriously and includes appearances by former Blue Book heads Robert Friend and Hector Quintanilla.

In its release in 1974 it was titled UFOs: Past, Present, and Future, which was changed to UFOs: It Has Begun for its release in 1976 and 1979. Besides being informative and entertaining and preserving a bit of UFO history for future researchers, the story behind its production has become a part of UFO history as well, as its producers were reportedly misled by the Pentagon into believing they would receive classified footage of a UFO landing at Holloman AFB in May of 1971.

The footage was described as showing a meeting between the UFO occupants and Air Force officials. According to producer, main writer, and composer Robert Emenegger, it was going to be the finale of the documentary until the DoD withdrew the offer at the last minute.

Robert Emenegger was interviewed by Mel Fabregas in 2009. According to him, he and Allen Sandler had originally set out to produce a series of films about advanced military technology, but were diverted by an intriguing piece of information offered by their military contact at Norton Air Force Base, Paul Shartle. Shartle, Security Manager and Chief of Requirements for the Audio-Visual Program at the base, said that he had seen a film of an alien craft landing at Holloman AFB in 1971. As discussions about possible projects continued, the idea that one of them be about UFOs came up and was encouraged by military officials who offered the producers the use of the footage. Emenegger and Sandler decided to go ahead with a UFO documentary, and the film was made.[1] Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

Recently, there have been reports throughout the media that FBI files concerning a UFO sighting reported by three Anoka, Minnesota, police officers have been declassified and are available at the National Archives. Remarkably, almost none of the media outlets covering the story provide a link to the actual document with the exception one news outlet, KARE 11, which was kind enough to provide a pdf with one of the FBI documents and related material from Americans for Safe Aerospace and the National UFO Reporting Center.

There is an article by Conor Wight on the CBS News site (updated May 28, 2026) headlined “Newly declassified FBI documents detail UFO sighting by Anoka officers — and one of them filmed it.” Wight is with CBS Minnesota and starts his story with this: “Buried within the National Archives is an unexplained sighting from right here in Minnesota.”

Buried is an apt description, as the documents were quite hard to find in the National Archives Catalogue, but a search within “Group 16: Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection,” brought us to records from the FBI, which led us to the files related to the Anoka case, which are the top three in a series of six results. Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

By the time Project Blue Book was terminated, most UFO researchers, especially in the United States, were of the opinion that UFOs were nuts and bolts craft piloted by flesh and blood creatures from other planets. This is what has become known as the extraterrestrial hypothesis or ETH. At around the same time, as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, Jacques Vallée had one book published and John Keel had two published, that challenged the ETH, and caused many in the UFO community to consider other options.

Vallée had his first UFO book, Anatomy of a Phenomenon, published in 1965 and his second, Challenge to Science, co-written with his wife, Janine, published in 1966. Both books make the argument that the UFO mystery is worthy of scientific study and present the elements of the problem in an organized manner in an effort to facilitate such study. In what would become characteristic in Vallée’s books, he presents accounts going back to antiquity, and he presents a lot of them. The books are lengthy and dry and hold little appeal for the average UFO enthusiast looking for sensational accounts of sightings and encounters. Read more →

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

In 1977, in the midst of a good deal of UFO activity in Italy, there was a multiple witness case that was investigated not only by a private UFO group, but by the Carabinieri (Italian national police) as well. The witnesses reported seeing lights, a cylindrical object, and a humanoid over a period of around three hours, during which they, the witnesses, made multiple approaches and retreats. Verga Maurizio wrote an article (page 20 of the pdf) covering the events headlined “Seven Scared Witnesses and a Humanoid” that was published in the Volume 25, Number 1, May 1979 Flying Saucer Review.

According to Maurizio, there were enough reports of UFO sightings, “especially at low altitude” and including close encounter reports to constitute “a wave.” During this, “there was one particularly strange, and important, incident” that had several witnesses, two of which were hypnotically regressed. The case was investigated by Umberto Telarico and Giorgio Russolillo of the Naples-base Federazione Uoflogica Regionale Campania. Most of the report is based on interviews with 24-year-old students Rocco Cirullo and Michele Giovanniello, who were the two initial witnesses and not the ones who were hypnotically regressed. Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

Among the many possible explanations for UFOs is that some UFOs might be creatures that live in the sky. The person who became best known for this idea was Trevor James Constable who presented it, along with infrared photos of what he claimed were bioforms invisible to the naked eye, in his 1958 book (as Trevor James) They Live in the Sky. James wasn’t alone in his belief, and the concept of sky creatures goes back farther than 1958 in both speculative literature and science fiction.

A good starting point for the history of the sky-creatures hypothesis is the 1997 paper by Jerome Clark, Spacemen, Demons and Conspiracies, published by the Fund for UFO Research. Clark explores the many explanations for UFOs put forward throughout the years and looks at the SCH in the section “Secret Weapons and Space Animals.” After going into the speculation by people such as James Moseley, Leon Davidson, and Jacques Vallée that flying saucers/UFOs can be explained as classified secret weapons, Clark delves into the history of the sky-creature concept. Read more →

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

In the early years of the flying saucer/UFO mystery, magazines played a significant part in the public perception of the phenomenon. One of the most popular magazines in that era was LIFE, which started covering saucer/UFO news at the very beginning during the 1947 summer of the saucers. For anyone interested in the early history of the phenomenon, Archives for the Unexplained has a collection of related magazine articles which includes LIFE articles from 1947 t0 1966.

In the article published in the July 1947 issue headlined “Speaking of Pictures… a Rash of Flying Disks Breaks Out Over the U.S.,” it is lamented that none of the many saucers seen that summer paused long enough to get its picture taken. There are pictures, however, of two fake saucers: one an obvious saw blade with what looks to be a capacitor attached to it held up by Reverend Joseph Brasky who claimed it hit the lightning rod of his church with an explosion, and the other an aluminum disk with what looks to be spent fireworks attached held up by a man from Shreveport, Louisiana, who said it flew out from behind a signboard. Read more →

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

Ted Bloecher, who passed away not too long ago at the age of 94, was a researcher/investigator who started out in the days of flying saucers as a founding member of Civilian Saucer Intelligence of New York and was active until the mid-1980s. He was an early researcher of humanoid reports starting in 1955, just after the 1954 French humanoid wave and the 1955 Kelly-Hopkinsville incident, and was the author of numerous publications on the subject. Tucked away in the United Kingdom file of the downloads section of the Archives for the Unexplained website is a report he wrote titled Close Encounters of the Third Kind that was published in 1977 by the British UFO Research Association. According to the introduction, the paper was prepared for a talk he gave at the BUFORA National UFO Conference at the Centre Hotel in Birmingham, England, in November 1976. The subtitle describes the paper as “The preliminary presentation of extensive study into UFO cases involving the reported sightings of humanoids and other alien beings.” In this blog, we’ll look at some of the highlights. Read more →

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

It’s always a plus when UFO cases come along with physical evidence to back them up. Sometimes this evidence is in the form of physiological effects on the witnesses, and cases involving these are numerous enough that investigators have been able to focus on them as a specific area of study. Conjunctivitis (burning red eyes), nausea, hair loss, numbness, paralysis, and burns are some of the symptoms commonly described, but a very unusual effect was reported in the following 1976 case from Bolton, England.

While the incident was said to have occurred in 1976, it didn’t show up in major media until 1987. In the March 1987 issue (page 19 of the pdf) of She magazine, there is an article by Peter Hough headlined “The UFO in Armadale Road.” According to Hough, at 5:15 p.m. on January 23, 1976, 17-year-old Shelley McLenaghan had just gotten off a bus and was 100 yards from home when she saw a UFO. She is quoted as saying, “Before that, I would have thought anybody who said they’d seen a UFO was crazy.” She added, “I think the government know far more than they let on.”

McLenaghan is then quoted describing her encounter: Read more →

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

Recently, footage taken of a video that has been described by documentarian James Fox as the holy grail of UFO videos has been shown online. The original video on VHS had been in the possession of one of the early Area 51 researchers, Chuck Clark, since 1995. Clark was reportedly offered a large sum of money to turn over the video, and he refused, whereupon underhanded means were employed to get what was on it out to the public.

This story goes all the way back to the 1990s when the United States was in the midst of its own special brand of paranoid UFOlogy, which emphasized government cover-ups and conspiracy theories fueled by the popularity of The X-Files. Area 51 had become the most famous secret base in the world after Bob Lazar, in silhouette using the name “Dennis,” was interviewed by George Knapp on KLAS in Las Vegas in May 1989. He claimed to have worked on reverse-engineering nine recovered alien space craft at a site he said was called “S-4” located in the southern section of Area 51.

The excitement stirred up by Lazar’s claim resulted in a flood of UFO tourists descending on the area. Many would stop at the only bar in the nearby small town of Rachel, Nevada, a population that usually numbers around 50 people. According to the “Rachel Timeline” section of A Short History of Rachel, Nevada by Glenn Campbell and Edith Grover, Pat and Joe Travis bought the Rachel Bar and Grill in 1988. They renamed it “The Little A’Le’Inn” and held the first annual UFO conference there in July of 1990. Read more →

Podcast: Play in new window | Download