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by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

On November 19, 1987, the Sentinel out of Gulf Breeze, Florida, published three pictures of a well-defined, lit-up UFO under the headline, “UFO Sighted Over Gulf Breeze.” The caption under the photo asks anyone who saw the object or had information about it to call the Sentinel. Along with the photos is a letter from the photographer that begins, “To whom it may concern.” The writer explains that the pictures were taken on November 11th and that he showed them to “Ed.” According to him, “Ed, in turn said the photos should be shown to the press.” He adds, “That is why he is showing them to you.” While he emphasizes that he is a “prominent citizen” and needs anonymity, he says he might come forward “if these photos and story spark any interest in your readership.” The photos became the subject of a long investigation led by the Mutual UFO Network. More photos and a videotape followed, and the photographer remained anonymous until just before the publication of his book. At around the same time, a discovery in the attic of his former house by the new owner cast serious doubt on his story.

The Sentinel stuck with the story for over two years due to Editor Duane Cook’s faith in the photographer’s credibility. The December 3, 1987, Sentinel has the article (page 6 of the pdf) headlined, “UFO – Follow Up – More Sightings Reported.” It begins with the background that the Sentinel has been keeping tabs on local UFO sightings since it published the photos taken on November 11th. It is reported that a photo of a “similar object” taken over a year earlier in June of 1986 had been submitted and it is printed below in the section headed “Letters to the Editor.” The November 11th photo is printed next to it for comparison, and the objects pictured in both are more identical than similar. The photographer of the 1986 photo wrote that he/she was “relieved to see the UFO photos” as they looked “just like the photos I took last June ‘86.” Even though there is only one photo from the writer published, he/she says that two photos were taken while facing south on Shoreline Drive. This photographer also wished to remain anonymous. Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

In last week’s blog, we looked at a case from the Canary Islands involving thousands of people reporting that at around 10:30 p.m. on June 22, 1976, they saw a huge sphere of light in the western sky. The Spanish Air Force investigated, and included in the case file (released on July 22, 1994) are testimonies from members of the crew of the Atrevida, a Spanish Navy corvette, and Dr. Francisco Julio Padrón. The captain of the Atrevida said that a “luminous point of intense bluish-yellow” came up from the ground and reached an altitude of 15-18 degrees where it stayed for about two minutes while “generating a large halo of intense bluish-yellow light that persisted in the same position for forty minutes.” This matches almost all of the other reports. Padrón, on the other hand, said that while in a taxi on his way to see a patient in the town of Gáldar, he saw a transparent sphere 60 yards away that had two red humanoids inside. Even though Padrón’s description was unique and dismissed by the Air Force investigator, many accounts of the case focus on it, from the first reports in the press up until the present day. The cause of the sightings remained a mystery until two Spanish investigators, Vincente-Juan Ballester Olmos and Ricardo Campo Pérez, looked into the case and came up with a likely explanation.

Campo wrote the article headlined “Dos Gigantes Rojos Cabalgando un Misil” (Two Red Giants Riding a Missile) that was posted on June 22, 2016 (the 40^th anniversary of the sightings), on the Naukas website. In it, he is highly critical of the press and others who promoted Padrón’s story to the extent that what was seen by people all over the Canary Islands became known as the “Gáldar UFO.” Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

On June 22, 1976, beginning at 10:15 p.m., offices of emergency responders throughout the Canary Islands were inundated with calls from citizens reporting a huge fireball in the western sky. Officials were able to see it for themselves as it remained visible for several minutes. The incident made international news and became a part of UFO lore with the main focus on a witness who claimed to have seen the cause of the reports yards away, which he described as a transparent sphere with two occupants inside.

We came across this story looking through a collection of clippings from the National Enquirer. It was covered in the August 28, 1976, edition in the article (page 62 of the pdf) by David Klein headlined ‘Transparent UFO Tall as a 3-Story Building.”

According to Klein, three astronomers from the Astrophysical Observatory on Monte Izana “watched in stunned amazement as the ‘giant brilliant sphere with a swirling center’ streaked directly toward their observatory.” One of them, Dr. Fernando Bello, is quoted saying that it paused during its approach and then made a 90-degree turn. According to him, “No flying machine made by man could have executed that maneuver.” Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

In 1969, just before the December 17^th press release that Project Blue Book was being terminated, Donald Keyhoe was removed from his position as director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. NICAP quickly became a shadow of its former formidable self, but it never fully ceased being active thanks to Fran Ridge, who passed away on January 20^th of this year. Ridge maintained the NICAP website, which is still operating as of this writing, and this week, we’ll look at one of the last cases Ridge investigated.

In the 2025 Chronology in the section of the site headed “The Chronos,” there is a file headed “2025-MADAR.htm.” This is the “Project Report: 2025” covering “Potential Sightings of Interest & MADAR Anomalies,” which is a joint effort between NICAP, the National UFO Reporting Center, and MADAR (Multiple Anomaly Detection and Automatic Recording).  MADAR was a project started by Ridge in 1970, and by 2023, there were 221 members operating 168 sites with systems designed to collect and record geomagnetic, electromagnetic, and background radiation anomalies. Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

The National UFO Reporting Center, started in 1976 by Robert Gribble, has been a mainstay in UFO research ever since. Its present director is Peter Davenport, who took on the position in 1994. As the name implies, NUFORC is primarily a reporting center, but there are four investigators, Keith Bickford, John Budrys, Ben Hansen, and Lynda Thompson, listed in the “About Us” section of the website. While browsing the “Posts” section, the November 28, 2025, post titled, “Mysterious Lights in Northern Michigan – A NUFORC Investigation” caught our eye. It covers a case investigated by Budrys and has a link to his report and the report of the primary witness.

According to the post, from September into October 2025, a couple in northern Michigan had “repeated encounters” with basketball-sized illuminated objects. The couple, a 75-year-old artist and her 87-year-old husband with a PhD in psychology live in an isolated area with no nearby light sources, which made the lighted objects they saw stand out. Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

Starting in December 1975 and continuing into the middle of 1976, there was a UFO flap in the area of Madoc, a village in Ontario, Canada, halfway between Toronto and Ottawa. Investigators from the Ontario-based Neptune Research Organization went to the area, interviewed witnesses, and were able to see for themselves what may be the most unique UFO-related trace evidence ever recorded.

Harry Tokarz, “affiliated with Neptune Research” and “editor and publisher” of UFO Pulse Analyzer wrote a report on the case and published it in the first issue of his journal, put out in April 1977. According to Tokarz, the flap came to the attention of the press when a farmer in an area north of Madoc found something unusual on his property and contacted Madoc Review reporter Ron Heiser. NRO found out about it and seven investigators, including Tokarz, “were dispatched.” Besides studying and analyzing what was in the farmer’s field, they found several witnesses who reported seeing UFOs throughout the Madoc area.

The earliest report described is that of Pauline Dudgeon who said that on December 11, 1975, a bright light caught her attention. She went to a window, looked out, and saw a large object that took up the width of Highway 12. A pulsing red light on top of it made her think she was looking at a traffic accident scene. She went outside and was, in Tokarz’s words, “awed by what she described (from 1000 ft. distance) as a disc or oval-shaped object with a dome or cupula on top and bright lights revolving around its periphery.” She was particularly fascinated by the bright light on top as she watched the object for 20 minutes. Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

On April 24, 1964, in Socorro, New Mexico, Sgt. Lonnie Zamora of the Socorro Police reported seeing an egg-shaped object and two small humanoids dressed in white coveralls. On April 24, 1964, in Newark Valley, New York, farmer Gary Wilcox reported seeing an egg-shaped object and two small humanoids dressed in white coveralls. The difference is, Wilcox claimed he talked with the creatures he saw.

The first investigator on the scene was Wilcox’s neighbor, Priscilla J. Baldwin. She had an interest in UFOs and spoke with Wilcox on April 28^th. National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena advisor Walter Webb interviewed Wilcox on November 8, 1964, and there is a NICAP file on the incident.

Dr. Berthold Eric Schwartz investigated this case extensively and wrote an article (page 20 of the pdf) about it headlined, “Gary Wilcox and the UFOnauts,” published in the September 1969 Flying Saucer Review Special Issue 3. According to him in his article, material from Baldwin and Webb was made available to him, and he interviewed Wilcox along with his wife, friends, neighbors, and members of his family. Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

At the top of the first page of National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena 1988 Chronology on the NICAP website, there is an illustration depicting what witnesses said they saw land on a frozen section of Lake Erie in March of that year. The report comes from Eastlake, Ohio, and witnesses include members of the Coast Guard. Under the illustration is a link to the NICAP Case Directory page covering the incident along with this brief description: “Coast Guard witnesses, large illuminated ellipse hovering over Lake Erie, landing on ice. Smaller triangular objects emerged, zipped around independently.”

The Case Directory page has a brief summary by webmaster Fran Ridge of events which began at 8:35 p.m.  According to Ridge, this case, which is “one of FUFOR’s (Fund for UFO Research) top cases,” had a possible “nuclear connection” (a nuclear power plant was nearby), and involved a “huge, gunmetal gray, football-shaped object that was rocking back and forth” which “was first observed by five people.”

Below the summary are links to “detailed reports and documents” which include the report from FUFOR, the partial transcript of an interview with the primary witnesses, the Coast Guard report, an email thread, and correspondence from the researchers. Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

UFOlogy has always attracted its fair share of academics, and some have managed to incorporate it into their fields of study. Fields such as astronomy, psychology, sociology, history and folklore studies lend themselves easily to the subject, and the literature is filled with books, papers, and articles, often in peer-reviewed journals, by professionals in those fields. Two famous examples are Dr. J. Allen Hynek and Dr. Jacques Vallée. Some were drawn to the subject because of a personal experience (Vallée had a sighting as a teenager) and one of those was Julliard professor of humanities and folklore, Peter Rojcewicz. He focused on Men in Black stories, wrote an article that was published in an academic journal in 1987, and then made the news when he lectured on the subject.

Rojcewicz wrote a 13-page article titled, “The ‘Men in Black’ Experience and Tradition: Analogues with the Traditional Devil Hypothesis,” that was published in the April-June 1987 (Vol. 100, No. 396, pp. 148-160) Journal of American Folklore.

In his article, Rojcewicz traces the origin of the modern Men in Black “tradition” to Albert K. Bender who shut down his organization, the International Flying Saucer Bureau, in 1953 after claiming he was visited by three MiBs. Rojcewicz describes the reported appearances and behaviors of the MiB that are familiar to many readers, provides first-hand accounts, compares the MiB tradition with the Devil tradition, and concludes that folklorists should entertain “the possibility that a real experience lies behind traditional belief.”

In 1990, Rojcewicz spoke in Minnesota, as part of a lecture series presented by Medtronic, which brought in people from the world of alternative science and the paranormal to speak about their work. Covering his talk is the article (page 1 of the pdf) by Gordon Slovut headlined, “Encounters With ‘Men in Black’: Fact or Fantasy?” published in the March 24, 199o, Minneapolis Star Tribune. Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

In our last blog, about a boy who claimed he’d been hit in the chest by a paralyzing beam of light from a UFO, we wrote, “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.” Proving our point, we stumbled upon a similar case involving a policeman as we were looking for material for this week’s blog. Whereas the former case only had a single witness, the case we’re looking at this week has multiple witnesses.

In the April 8, 1975, Stillwater Gazette, there is an article (page 5 of the pdf) by Jim McLaughlin headlined, “UFOs Spotted Near Ellsworth.” According to McLaughlin, Pierce County, Wisconsin, Sheriff Christianson “reported a rash of UFO’s [sic] near the Ellsworth area Monday night and early Tuesday.”  At 11:25 p.m., there was a report from Ellsworth farm resident James Koehler who said that he and his wife had seen three UFOs hovering over their trailer home. The responding officer “reported only a badly frightened German Shepherd dog at the site.” Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

In last week’s blog, we looked at a case involving a 13-year-old boy (the investigators chose to keep him and his family anonymous) who said that on December 4, 1980, he saw a UFO and was hit in the chest by a beam of light from it that temporarily paralyzed him. The case was investigated by Joe Nyman and Ed Fogg of the New England UFO Study Group, and they wrote a report that was published on the front page of the January 1981 issue of the group’s publication, the New England UFO Newsletter. After the investigators told him to look for any unusual marks, the boy discovered a red mark on his chest, which they saw and photographed. During questioning, it came out that during his encounter, he had heard squeaky mumbling noises in his head that varied in pitch “like a two-year-old would do.” He added that “they seemed educated” and that “something was trying to say something.” That night, he started talking in his sleep, his mother recorded it, and the case took on a new aspect. Read more →

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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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