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by Charles Lear

Throughout the 1990s, the foremost authorities on UFO abduction research were Budd Hopkins, an artist who brought the subject to mainstream attention with the publication of his 1981 book, Missing Time, David Jacobs, an associate professor of history at Temple University who published Secret Life in 1992, and John Mack, head of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who published Abduction in 1994. Their books sold well, and they all spoke openly to the press and were largely responsible for getting the alien abduction phenomenon a good deal of media coverage. Even some in the scientific community, probably due to Mack’s efforts and tenure at Harvard, were willing to look at the phenomenon with an open mind, and an Abduction Study Conference was held in 1992 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sponsored by a physics professor there, David Pritchard, with the help of financial backing from Robert Bigelow. Hopkins, Mack, and Jacobs were featured speakers, and Hopkins faced some public criticism during the conference regarding his methods. It wouldn’t be long before he faced even harsher criticism from within the UFO community. Read more →

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

In 1981, a new narrative became firmly established as part of the UFO mystery with the publication of Budd Hopkins’s book Missing Time. A large part of the book consists of transcriptions of recordings made during hypnosis sessions where the subjects described being taken aboard craft by 3-4 feet tall creatures that performed medical procedures on them. The descriptions of the creatures were similar to descriptions of beings that would become known as “the greys,” which are the now iconic creatures with large black eyes that became commonly reported after Whitley Strieber’s 1987 book Communion. The eyes of the creatures reported in Hopkins’s book vary. The book came out in July of 1981 and Hopkins, along with Dr. Aphrodite Clamar, a psychotherapist hired to conduct some of the hypnosis sessions, gave interviews to the press. From this point on, the UFO Abduction phenomenon began to receive serious consideration from the mainstream press with Hopkins as the leading authority for the rest of the decade. Read more →

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

While UFO researcher/investigators came to accept abduction reports as being worthy of their time by the end of the 1970s, only a few, such as John Keel and Gray Barker, were open to contactee reports. Even so, contactee reports kept showing up, and sometimes they would even make it into the newspapers. One British case from 1980 involved creatures that resembled the Venusians reported by George Adamski starting in 1952, and the witness claimed he had physical trace evidence as proof of his encounter. Read more →

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

By the end of the 1970s, after the 1973 Pascagoula incident and the 1975 Travis Walton case, abduction claims were not only an accepted aspect of the UFO mystery by many investigators, they were considered worthy of attention by the news media, and there are many lengthy newspaper articles detailing reports throughout that decade. The narrative hadn’t yet been taken over by the now-common reports of being taken aboard a craft by creatures 3 to 4 feet tall with big, slanted, black eyes and being subjected to invasive medical procedures that seemed to have something to do with reproduction. The creatures and the natures of the encounters reported throughout the 70s were varied, but by the decade’s end, elements had emerged that would become common in the decades to come. What would also become common in such cases would be the use of regressive hypnosis, which was thought to be an effective means to recover lost memories. However, this technique has since came under criticism, particularly in its use to provide evidence in legal cases, as can be seen in the article titled “Hypnosis, Memory and Amnesia” which was published in the November 29, 1997 (pp. 1727-1732) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London B: Biological Sciences. Read more →

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

In 1973, the claims of Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker that they’d been abducted by elephant-skinned, robot-like creatures in Pascagoula, Mississippi, opened researchers up to what have become known as “high-strangeness” reports. The term comes from J. Allen Hynek’s efforts at creating a system of strangeness ratings in Chapter Four of his 1975 book, The UFO Experience. Hickson and Parker were taken seriously because they seemed genuinely traumatized by their experience while just the two of them were waiting in a room at the police station where they first reported their encounter. They just been interviewed, and unbeknownst to them, a tape recorder in the room was left running, which captured the bewildered men talking to each other about their experience. Their story was reported in newspapers and UFO publications worldwide. After that, abduction reports began to increasingly appear. In the midst of this new openness to high-strangeness reports, in 1979, there was a story told by a trucker that was highly unique, and highly strange, and yet was still given serious consideration by the local newspapers and investigators who examined it. Read more →

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

Many readers may not be aware that, at one point in time, the National Enquirer was associated with serious UFO research in spite of its reputation as a sensationalistic supermarket tabloid. In 1972, the Enquirer put together what they called “The National Enquirer Blue Ribbon UFO Panel,” which was made up of five UFO researchers, all of whom held PhDs. The Enquirer was offering a $50,000 reward for proof, by the end of the year, that UFOs came from space and were not a natural phenomenon. The panel was tasked with evaluating UFO cases to determine if any of them provided such proof. The panel members included four consultants for the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, and Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a scientific consultant for the Air Force’s UFO investigation for most of its existence. All of them had good reputations within the UFO community, and the reader may wonder why they would put those at risk by being associated with the Enquirer in such an endeavor. It’s likely that the prospect of getting some of their research funded by the Enquirer may have helped them to put aside any aversions, and the assignment in 1975 of Bob Pratt to the Enquirer UFO desk, who became respected as an investigator in his own right, may have encouraged them to continue their association. Read more →

By Charles Lear

1973 was a special year for UFO enthusiasts. Not only were there a huge number of reports in the newspapers as can be seen in the issues of the UFO News Clipping Service from that year, there were many that were especially strange. This was the year of the Coyne Incident involving a report that a U.S. Army Reserve helicopter in the sky over Cleveland was pulled up by a UFO while its controls were set to descend, and the Pascagoula Incident, involving a report by two men that they were taken aboard a craft by floating, elephant-skinned, robot-like creatures. These two cases made the front page of the September-October 1973 A.P.R.O. Bulletin, but a case that has been overshadowed by these two cases has the big headline, “Occupants in Indiana,” as the lead story in that issue. Read more →

by Charles Lear

In last week’s blog, we looked at researcher/investigator Hayden Hewes and some of the cases he looked into. One of those was in Aurora, Texas, where a UFO was reported to have crashed in 1897, killing its not-of-this-world pilot. The pilot was said to have been buried in the local cemetery, and an enthusiastic Hewes attempted and failed to get an exhumation order. The case has endured in the UFO mythos despite the likelihood that the story was made up by a reporter trying to raise some publicity for a dying town. In the midst of the publicity stirred up by Hewes and other investigators, Jim and Coral Lorenzen of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization expressed their doubts in their publication, the A.P.R.O. Bulletin. Read more →

by Charles Lear

When it comes to having an interest in the subject of UFOs, there are those who enjoy it casually, those study it more deeply, and those who become active as investigator/researchers. As for the latter type, some, such as Max B. Miller, start young. Miller was the president of the Junior Flying Saucer League at age 15 in 1952, and in 1953, was the editor of Saucers, a magazine he and his group, Flying Saucers International, put out until 1960. In 1953, Miller came up with the idea to organize a convention and FSI organized what was billed as “The World’s First Flying Saucer Convention.” It was held at the Hollywood Hotel from August 16–18, 1953, and was moderated by FSI member Jeron King Criswell, whom some readers may know as the narrator for Ed Wood’s masterpiece, Plan 9 From Outer Space. Another precocious UFOlogist, Hayden Hewes, started the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma at the age of 13 in 1957. Hewes may not be as well known as Miller is to some readers, but he and his group were involved in some cases that should be.

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By Charles Lear

When it comes to reporting UFO sightings, it often happens that local police departments are the first organizations witnesses turn to. Many times, the reports to police take place while the UFO is still active in the area and patrol officers are able to respond and verify witness accounts. Famous examples are the 1966 case involving Dale Spaur and his partner, Wilbur “Barney” Neff, who chased a UFO from Portage County, Ohio, all the way into Pennsylvania, and another Ohio case, this time in Trumbull County in 1994, involving multiple officers chasing and observing UFOs. Their radio interactions have been preserved in the form of a recording from the police dispatch that was turned over to researcher Kenny Young. This week, we’ll look at a 1972 case out of Colby, Kansas, that involved multiple police witnesses and multiple UFOs. Read more →

by Charles Lear

When the subject of UFO databases comes up, the National UFO Reporting Center is usually mentioned along with the name of its seemingly tireless director, Peter Davenport. What many may not know is who it was that got it started.

Washington State MUFON Director Maurene Morgan wrote an article titled “The Early Years of NUFORC – Bob Gribble and Wendy Connor,” which was published in the November 2021 Washington MUFON Newsletter. According to Morgan, Bob Gribble, a Seattle Firefighter, became fascinated by UFOs in 1954 when he read an article in True magazine. This could have been the article in the May 1954 issue titled, “What Our Air Force Found Out About UFOs,” written by Edward J. Ruppelt, the first director of Project Blue Book. Read more →

By Charles Lear

This is the last of what has turned into a five-part series looking into the events that led up to, and the people who would become involved with the television production UFO Cover-Up? Live!, which aired on October 14, 1988. It seems that the show’s producer, Michael Seligman, believed that it would be the vehicle for an earth-shaking  UFO disclosure. What resulted was a clumsy and awkward production where the only disclosure anyone remembers is that aliens like strawberry ice cream.

Robert Skvaria wrote a three-part series of articles titled, “The Cover-Up Behind UFO Cover-Up? Live!” for Diabolique magazine, the first of which was posted on May 17, 2022. Skvaria spoke to Curtis Brubaker, who came up with the idea for the show, and Tracy Tormé, who produced the segment of the show devoted to the Gulf Breeze, Florida, sightings and the pictures taken by Ed Walters.

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