by Charles Lear
UFO abduction cases have been controversial ever since the very first cases were reported. The main factor working against them is that most of them are single witness reports. There are exceptions, of course, the most famous being the 1975 Travis Walton case. In this incident, six of Walton’s co-workers (they were working in Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona on an NFS Timber Stand Improvement contract) reported seeing Walton knocked back by a beam of light from a UFO and then lifted up by the beam. Walton was missing for five days and the Navajo County Sheriff suspected his co-workers of murder. They were subjected to lie-detector tests at the Navajo County Courthouse in Holbrook, Arizona, and all six of them passed. This case is still discussed and held up in support of abduction claims, but another abduction case with multiple witnesses that also seems worthy of consideration is nowhere near as well known.
We’ve written 
With UFO reports, there are common elements that give one a sense of the nature of the phenomenon. However, there are some reports that contain elements that are unique to the point that a researcher might be inclined to dismiss them. The case of Herbirito Garza is one of these.
In the 1950s, the first reports of cars shutting down in the proximity of UFOs started hitting the news, most memorably those from 
When a nine-year-old boy in Harrah, Washington, approximately 12 miles west of the city of Toppenish, told his mother a story about seeing strange creatures and their vehicles on the morning of a school day, she heard him out, and then sent him to school. His story would likely have gone no further, had it not been for a teacher’s aide who went with him back to his house during recess after hearing his story and believing him. This lead to the discovery of physical traces that backed up his story and an investigation by members of the Center for UFO Studies and a reporter from a local paper.
In mid December of last year, we wrote about a woman, Irma Rick, in the province of La Pampa in Argentina, who, after seeing a bright light outside her house, suddenly found herself the next morning almost 65 km (40 miles) away sitting on the side of the road in the town of Guatraché with no memory of how she got there. Most of us here in the United States got the news from 
The sources are listed as Luis Burgos and the online La Pampa news publication InfoHuella. InfoHuella posted an 
As mentioned last week, in 
In last week’s 
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.