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

In 1966, there was a series of UFO sightings in Michigan that got the attention of the press and the Air Force. There was a great deal of excitement and Project Blue Book (the code name for the Air Force’s UFO study) scientific consultant, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, was sent in to help calm things down. At a press conference, he offered some possible explanations. Due to sightings over a marsh, he speculated that people there had seen ignited balls of swamp gas, some going out and others igniting, and that this created the illusion of movement. The swamp gas explanation made the headlines and outraged many Michigan residents, including Michigan Representative and House Minority Leader Gerald Ford. He sent a letter dated March 28, 1966, to the chairmen of the Science and Astronautics Committee and the Armed Services Committee, suggesting that one of them schedule “hearings on the subject of UFO’s”.  He mentioned Hynek’s explanations in the letter and, in a press release that same day, it is noted that he described Hynek’s swamp gas explanation as “flippant.”  Documents relating to Ford’s efforts and the resultant open hearing are housed at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum. Read more →

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

Just before Stanton Friedman got Roswell fever, one of the earliest saucer researchers, Leonard Stringfield, was hard at work researching and investigating reports that involved military recovery of crashed flying saucers and alien bodies. He presented the results of his work in the form of a paper titled “Retrievals of the Third Kind” at the July 28, 1978 MUFON Symposium. A three-part series by Stringfield based on that paper was published under the same title in Volume 25, numbers 4, 5, and 6, in the British magazine, Flying Saucer Review, starting with the July-August 1979 issue.

Stringfield begins his paper by presenting the “facts” that the “world public at large” and the scientific community do not believe in UFOs. He then expresses the frustration of those in the UFO community who have “no doubt that a real interloper from somewhere exists.” Read more →

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

In 1966, John Keel, longtime fortean and author of several books on UFOs, including his most famous book published in 1975, The Mothman Prophecies, was just beginning to focus on the UFO phenomenon. At this time in his life, he was writing articles for the British publication, Flying Saucer Review and sharing his research with Jim and Coral Lorenzen of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization. He wrote an article (page 6 of pdf) about one case he looked into that year, headlined “New Landing and Creature Reports” that was published in the November-December 1966 Flying Saucer Review. The article’s main focus is on one incident that took place on July 31, 1966. Keel shared the details of the case with APRO, and they published their take on it (page 3 of pdf) headlined, “The Presque Isle Landing,” in the July-August 1966 APRO Bulletin.

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

While browsing through the archives of the UFO Newsclipping Service, we came across a headline that a co-worker commented would make a great T-shirt. We searched for other possible mentions of the story in periodicals of the time, and came across another headline that the reader might agree is also T-shirt worthy.

In the September 1988 UFO Newsclipping Service, there is an article on page 14 from the July 20, 1988 Eastbourne, England Gazette headlined, “UFO Kidnaps 26 Elephants.” According to the article, an African safari park in Lugo, Spain, lost 26 adult elephants. Read more →

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

This is the third part in a series looking at a case involving a woman who claimed she was with Einstein as his assistant in 1947 when he went to examine a crashed flying saucer and aliens at a military base in the American Southwest. The case was originally investigated in 1993 by Mutual UFO Network affiliated researchers Leonard Stringfield and Sheila Franklin. Franklin got the woman’s story on tape and Stringfield wrote about it in his 1994 Status Report titled UFO Crash/Retrievals: Search for Proof in a Hall of Mirrors. As Einstein supposedly made the trip in 1947, Stringfield speculated that it might have involved the saucer that allegedly crashed at Roswell, and the woman told him, “I did hear that name pop up during my trip.” The woman had agreed to provide photos of the saucer and the aliens as well as documentation to back up her story, but these never materialized. According to Franklin and Stringfield, the woman was either lying or the victim of a Men-in-Black type campaign of harassment, surveillance, search, and seizure. Read more →

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

In last week’s blog, we looked at the cottage industry that grew up around the Roswell incident. We noted that people continue to cash in on it by coming up with “new evidence” that is promised to be “the smoking gun” that ultimately fails to live up to that promise. In a pattern that has continued for decades, once one piece of “evidence” is knocked down, another one pops up in its place. This happened fairly recently in the case of the “Roswell Slides,” which were said to be pictures of an alien recovered from Roswell, but turned out to be pictures of a mummified two-year-old boy. One of the people involved, Anthony Bragalia, made his apologies and then got right back out there with more “new evidence.”

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

Rock musicians, like people from all walks of life, have reported encounters with UFOs. Famous examples include Jimi Hendrix, his former roadie and Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister, John Lennon, and Shaun Ryder of the Happy Mondays. However, unlike people with more average day jobs, rock musicians tend to be treated less seriously in the press, often due to their sometimes publicly acknowledged drug use. A good example is Dave Davies of The Kinks, who reported an experience stranger than most, but students of this subject should recognize that some of what he reported has been reported by others. Read more →

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

When it comes to helicopter UFO encounters, many people interested in this subject are familiar with what has become known as “The Coyne Incident,” named after the Army Reserve helicopter pilot, Captain Lawrence Coyne. There was another helicopter incident four years later that is lesser known, but investigators at the time were quite interested in it.

According to Coyne in the UPI story out of Cleveland, he and his crew were flying from Columbus to Cleveland, Ohio, at 11:00 p.m. on October 18, 1973, when the crew chief, Robert Yanacsek saw a red light approaching them. Coyne described it as, “shaped like an airfoil or a streamlined fat cigar.” He said it had a red light on the front, a dome in the center, and a green light on the rear. He said: “I’m a military commander. I don’t believe in UFOs, little green spacemen, and all that stuff. But I had to file an official report in detail to the Army on this thing.” Read more →

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

James W. Moseley was a part of the UFO scene from the days of the first private investigators in the early 1950s up until his death in 2012. He ran the longest running saucer group, the Saucer and Unexplained Celestial Events Research Society or S.A.U.C.E.R.S. (he and the group picked the acronym before they figured out what it could stand for) and steadily published a newsletter, known for most of its existence as Saucer Smear. Moseley has been called the Court Jester of UFOlogy due to his habit of poking fun at those who took themselves and the subject too seriously, and was involved in some hoaxes/pranks with his friend Gray Barker that became infamous. He wrote a book with Karl Pflock about his exploits in saucerdom that was published in 2002 titled Shockingly Close to the Truth: Confessions of a Grave-Robbing UFOlogist. In spite of his less-than-serious nature, he did do some serious investigation in his early days, and in one instance, looked into a saucer crash story and wrote an article about it that was published in the January 1955 issue of Gray Barker’s magazine, The Saucerian. Read more →

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

There are two cases out of France, around the time of the 1973 United States humanoid wave, that are remarkably similar in some aspects and occurred within a few months of each other. The first case, from 1973, shows up in the second edition of the Center for UFO Studies publication by David Webb, titled 1973—The Year of the Humanoids (page 16 of the pdf), and the second case, from 1974, shows up in the 1976 book by Jim and Coral Lorenzen, titled UFO Occupants (page 61 of the pdf.) Read more →