by Charles Lear
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 him, “I told myself that if we knew for sure that the aliens were watching us, we would no longer fight. Therefore, I decided to see if I could prove that the aliens were real.”
These days, more and more researchers are considering the idea that there is a unified theory for all things paranormal from Bigfoot to ghosts to UFOs. The idea that all, or at least many, things paranormal derive from a common source was 
In last week’s blog, we looked at a recent report from the Pampas region of Argentina that involved a missing woman who was found the next day in a town around 65 km from where she was last seen. She reported being in her yard in Jacinto Aráuz, seeing a light, and then suddenly finding herself sitting on a road in the town of Guatraché with no memory of how she got there. The case caught the interest of a local UFO researcher, as it bore a resemblance to an alien abduction case reported in the area in 1983. The researcher was interviewed in connection with the story in the local paper La Arena and the woman’s disappearance was presented in the paper with the alien angle in mind. Since the last blog was posted, the woman has come forward and was i
Just weeks ago, there was an intriguing incident reported in Argentina involving a woman who went missing and was then found a day later, 65 km from where she was seen last. She had no memory of how she got there, and local residents and Argentinian officials were mystified. The case aroused the interest of a local UFO researcher who noted a similarity to an earlier alien abduction case in the area.
In 1973, there was a worldwide wave of UFO associated humanoid encounters. Arguably, the most famous of these was the alleged abduction in Pascagoula, Mississippi, of Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker. They reported being forcibly taken aboard a craft by three, approximately five-foot-tall, robot-like, elephant-skinned creatures with crab claw-like hands, no eyes, a slit for a mouth and cone-shaped protrusions where the nose and ears would be on an earthly creature. While the creatures described by Hickson and Parker are unique in UFO literature, what is common to the 1973 humanoid wave is that most of the creatures described were unique. One report that stands out came from the city of Vilvoorde in Belgium. It was investigated by the Societé Belge d’Etude des Phénomènes Spatiaux, and an article describing the reported encounter written by Jean-Luc Vertongen appears in the SOBEPS journal, 
In 1957, the same year the Soviets launched Sputnik, British authorities, media, and citizenry had their attention drawn back down to Earth as they attempted to unravel the mystery of a flying saucer said to have been found laying in a moor. It was dismantled, studied, and opinions were divided between its having come from space and its having been manufactured right here on Earth. Over time, the saucer went missing, but the mystery as to its origin remained. Then, in 2018, pieces of the saucer and its mysterious contents were found in the archives of the Science Museum in London.
One of the most famous early abduction cases is that of Travis Walton in late 1975, which received a lot of attention and still fascinates many people to this day. Walton’s case was investigated primarily by the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization. In the midst of that investigation, APRO was contacted by Johnny Sands, a country western singer who claimed he had encountered two humanoids in the desert outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. It is perhaps because of the attention given to the Walton case, that Sand’s case has all but been forgotten. I might also be because it’s seriously weird.
On August 21, 1955, there was an incident that took place on a farm located in the town of Kelly, 7 miles north of Hopkinsville, Kentucky that reads like it was straight out of a ‘50s sci-fi comic book. The story has been recounted in many books and all over the internet but, because of its comic book nature, that it involved real people who were deeply affected and real people who did earnest and laudable investigations tends to be overlooked.
Of all the private organizations devoted to UFO investigation, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena was arguably the most ambitious and tenacious. This was driven in large part by its director, Donald Keyhoe. Keyhoe held the beliefs that UFOs are extraterrestrial and that the U.S. Government, particularly the Air Force, was keeping information from the public that could possibly prove the ET hypothesis. As effective as NICAP was at hounding the Air Force and convincing many in the U.S. Congress that UFOs were deserving of scientific study, there are indications that the CIA was involved in both the beginning and the end of the organization.
Todd Zechel wrote about the CIA – NICAP connection in the January 1979 issue of 
In the hunt for proof that strange vehicles are flying through our atmosphere, possibly under the guidance of alien pilots, researchers have long looked to photographs. There are some, such as the 
by Charles Lear
From February 17 to February 24, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was in Palm Springs, California, on what was described to the public as a “vacation.” On February 20, he disappeared from public view and rumors spread to the point that the headline, “Pres. Eisenhower died tonight of a heart attack in Palm Springs.,” appeared on the Associated Press newswire. The story was removed two minutes later and the AP reported that he was still alive. UFOlogists have speculated on where he was that day, and some have come to the conclusion that Eisenhower went to Muroc Air Force Base for a secret meeting with alien visitors.