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The 1973 Pascagoula Incident
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A Weekly Live Recorded Podcast and Blog on UFOs/UAP
by Charles Lear
In last week’s blog, we looked at a case that involved an encounter with a UFO occupant that didn’t fit the profile of the iconic Grey-type alien. There were many such cases reported in the press up until the 1980s. Then, the Greys, the Reptilians, and the occasional Insectoids seem to have pushed the others aside, but even these don’t show up too often in the papers. UFO occupants, especially those that don’t fit what has become the standard model, have become personae non gratae for most newspaper editors, and this seems to have created the impression that they haven’t been reported by witnesses.
From the 1950s into the 1970s, there are UFO occupant cases with extensive documentation including: newspaper articles containing first-hand witness accounts, affidavits, witness reports submitted to government and private investigators, police records, and sometimes medical reports when the encounters weren’t entirely friendly. The documents can be found in the files of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, the Center for UFO Studies, and other organizations that were open to such reports. The National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, headed by Donald Keyhoe, was noted for rejecting most occupant reports.
by Charles Lear
Back in the days before aliens took on the form of the standardized “Grey” model, they came in all shapes and sizes. UFOlogists called them “humanoids,” and there was a wave of them in France in 1954. In 1955 they started popping up in the United States and worldwide. Many UFOlogists, who were trying to convince the scientific community that the mystery was worth studying, tended to reject humanoid reports. Some, such as Coral and Jim Lorenzen of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, kept an open mind as long as the humanoids didn’t talk. If a witness reported they had had a conversation and were taken to another planet, that case was tossed into the contactee pile. However, there was a case in the seventies that made the Lorenzens and a lot of other researchers rethink their position.
On Oct. 25, 1974, Rawlins, Wyoming resident Carl Higdon decided to take the day off from his job as foreman for an oil drilling crew. One of his “key men” was sick with the flu and he didn’t think anything would be accomplished that day. It was the peak of elk hunting season, and he had just bought a 7mm Remington Magnum rifle, so he probably didn’t have to think for too long about how he would be spending the day. He loaded up his company’s two-wheel drive pickup truck and headed for McCarty Canyon in Carbon County.
According to him, he came to a fork in the road leading into the canyon and saw some fellow hunters having battery trouble with their truck. He stopped to give them a charge, and they started talking. Higdon told them he was headed into the canyon, and they told him that the hunting was better in a remote section of Medicine Bow National Forest. He changed his plans and headed east. The area they told him about was in the northern section of the forest, 40 miles south of Rawlins.
by Charles Lear
In 1966, there was a UFO case that involved a chase and sightings by multiple police witnesses. In addition to their testimonies, there was a reported radar confirmation and a possible pilot witness. Faced with all this evidence, the initial Air Force investigation consisted of two phone calls to a single witness. Based on interviews lasting a total of around four minutes, the conclusion was that the officers had seen a satellite and chased the planet Venus. The case was re-evaluated after a more thorough investigation, thanks to the efforts of an outraged congressman, and the conclusion was . . . that the officers had seen a satellite and chased the planet Venus.
On the morning of April 17, 1966, two sheriff deputies, Dale Spaur and Wilbur “Barney” Neff, chased a UFO from Portage County, Ohio, for 86 miles all the way into Pennsylvania. They chased the object at speeds ranging from 80 mph to 105 mph and, according to them, there were times when the object actually stopped and waited for them to catch up to it. Other law enforcement officers witnessed the object after being alerted by radio communications between the deputies and their dispatcher.
The strangeness began at 4:30 a.m. A call came over the radio informing the deputies that a woman in Summit County had reported seeing a bright object that flew low over her property. She said it was moving towards Portage County. Spaur and Neff laughed it off and went on with their schedule of spot-checks.
At around 5:00 a.m., they saw an abandoned vehicle on Route 224 near Ravenna, and got out of their car to investigate. According to Spaur, he was in the habit of looking behind him to make sure no one was sneaking up on him. He turned around and saw a light over the trees of a nearby hill. He alerted Neff, and as they watched, it moved over the police car and hovered. They could now see it was an object 35 to 40 feet wide, with a bright, white glow that lit up the area around the car. It hummed “like a loaded transformer.” Read more
by Charles Lear
This is the third in a series examining the rather grim subject of UFO related injuries. While we don’t want to dwell on this aspect of the mystery too extensively, it would be remiss to leave the subject without exploring what happened in Brazil in 1977. The events there were extraordinary, as was the investigation by the Brazilian Air Force. Fortunately, it was not the start of a trend in UFO contact, for had it been, many of us might be considerably more anxious.
From April 1977 into 1978, there was a flap over the Amazon Delta in the northeast section of Brazil. Because it involved reports of attacks and injuries, the Brazilian Air Force was moved to put together a special operation to deal with it. It was designated “Operação Prato”, which is Portuguese for “Operation Plate.”
The name was chosen by Captain Uyrangê Hollanda. He explained his choice to researchers Ademar José Gevaerd and Cynthia Luce. Because he was not able to use the expressions, “flying saucer” or “flying disk,” he “chose a cousin of a saucer, a plate.” According to him, the expression in Portugal is “flying plate.” The popular expression in Brazil is “discos voadors.”
Hollanda was head of operations for A2, the intelligence branch of the Air Force. The operation was lead by him, and he had a team of six sergeants. Their equipment consisted of a theodolite, tape recorders and cameras. They were sent to the city of Belém, after the mayors of several surrounding villages complained of UFO attacks on their citizens. Read more
by Charles Lear
Starting in the 1960’s, UFOs began to interact with witnesses in a most unpleasant manner. In part one of this series, we looked at cases where people were injured by UFOs, specifically by being burned. One case involved an eight-year-old boy in Hobbs, New Mexico in 1964. This week we’ll look at another episode from 1968 that has a lot of similarities. Two other cases will be examined as well. One comes from New York, and the other is a famous case from Canada. All are unexplained and may make one think twice before approaching anything unusual floating in the sky.
The first case comes from a report in the May-June 1966 APRO Bulletin. On April 24, 1966, in Fleming, New York, 45-year-old Viola Smartwood was in the passenger seat, riding in a car with her husband. A glowing ball appeared out of the rain and hovered close by. They heard a “loud snap,” and a shock went through Mrs. Smartwood’s right side. She was paralyzed on that side and was taken to the hospital where she slowly regained motor control. As it was raining, ball lightning seems like a plausible explanation. The trouble is, it has not been scientifically confirmed that ball lightning actually exists, despite hundreds of years of reports.
Next up is a well-covered classic, but it’s interesting to consider it within this larger context. On May 20, 1967, a celebrated incident occurred near Falcon Lake in Manitoba, Canada. Stefan Michalak was an amateur geologist and was prospecting in the area when he sighted two disc-shaped craft descending in the southwest. He described them as looking like they had been milled out of a solid piece of steel. As he watched, one of the discs stopped and hovered 15 feet above him. The other one ascended and moved away towards the southwest changing colors from red to orange to grey until it disappeared from sight. In the meantime, the remaining object landed about 160 feet away from him and was also changing colors from red to iridescent steel. Michalek got out a pad of paper and sketched the object while looking at it for nearly 30 minutes. He described it as being 40 feet in diameter and 10 feet thick.
by Charles Lear
Every year, around May 10, people from all over the country come together to celebrate the anniversary of a famous UFO encounter. They gather around a monument erected by a group dedicated to all things paranormal and listen to a local tour guide recount the event and the circumstances surrounding it. While this sounds like one of many celebrations in spots throughout the United States, this particular event occurs in Poland, in the little eastern village of Emilcin. The report of a local farmer there, 42 years ago, captured the imaginations of generations of Poles and stirred up a fair amount of speculation and conspiracy theories.
In the early morning, on May 10, 1978, Jan Wolski, a 71-year-old farmer, was heading home through the woods in a horse drawn cart. In a documentary film made that same year, “Odwiedziny, Czyli u Progu Tajemnicy” (A Visit, or on the Threshold of Mystery), Wolski describes what happened next. He saw two creatures, about five feet tall, ahead of him. As he got close, they split up so he could pass between them. They then jumped up into his cart and started babbling in a strange language. They had slanted eyes, green skin and webbed hands. They were wearing black one-piece outfits with hoods and had a hump just above their shoulders. According to Wolski, “they were polite when they jumped on, so why not let them sit down.”
Two journalists, Krystyna Adamska and Henryk Pomorski interviewed Wolski on tape in July and he gave them a detailed account of the events that followed. Wolski came to a clearing and he saw a white, rectangular craft with what looked rotating drills in tubes on each corner. It was hovering about five meters above the ground and close to the size of a bus. Using gestures, the creatures told him to stop. The horse was scared by the craft and one of them grabbed the reins. Once the carriage was stopped, the creatures jumped down and gestured for Wolski to follow.
by Charles Lear
Starting in 1947, UFOs seemed to be engaging humanity in a step-by-step process. In the first few years, only the UFOs were reported. Then, there were accounts of occupants showing themselves during what has become known as the 1954 French Wave. An intimate encounter was described by Brazilian farmer, Antônio Villas Boas, in 1957, and Betty and Barney Hill reported that, in 1961,they had been abducted. So far, no one was hurt during any of the encounters, but that would change in 1964.
On Tuesday, June 2, 1964, an eight-year-old boy named Charles was playing in a lot behind his grandmother’s laundromat. What happened next was described in the Nov. 1964 APRO Bulletin. Across an alleyway, a black, top-shaped object, which he described as being half as tall as he was at the time, appeared over a building.
According to Charles, he got the impression that it knew he was there. He moved to the left and it moved to the left. He moved to the right and it moved to the right. He crouched behind a block of concrete and then stood up and moved to the right. Once again, the object mirrored his movement. The object then shot towards him, causing him to brace for impact, but it moved up and hovered over him. According to Charles’ grandmother, as she watched through the door of the laundromat, flame came down from the object that completely engulfed him. The object then flew off and Charles ran towards her with his hair on fire. Read more
by Charles Lear
Throughout UFO history, a common explanation for sightings has been that the witness or witnesses saw a weather balloon. This explanation has often been used in a ludicrous manner by authorities seeking an easy means of dismissal, and this causes many UFOlogists to scoff at it in all cases. The truth is that it has been convincingly proven that weather balloons and balloons of all sorts have been mistaken as anomalous flying objects.
There is a classic Project Blue Book case known as, “The Gorman Dogfight.” This incident occurred on October 1, 1948 and involved North Dakota Air National Guardsman, Lt. Frank Gorman. Gorman described chasing a six to eight inch, white light with sharp edges that “was blinking on and off. He chased it in an F-51, getting up to a maximum speed of 400 miles per hour, and it eluded him. The explanation in the Blue Book file is that Gorman was chasing a lighted balloon but there are problems with that and even notorious skeptic, Donald Menzel took issue with it. What makes the balloon explanation doubtful is that two air traffic controllers saw the object from the ground and one described its speed as “excessive”. Adding to this, a pilot in the vicinity flying a Piper Cub also saw the object and described it as “moving very swiftly”. Menzel resolved the problem by concluding that Gorman was seeing a balloon and “a mirage of the planet Jupiter”.
Because this was at the very beginning of modern UFOlogy, the balloon explanation was off to a bad start and would continue to be used by the Air Force as a convenient way to dismiss a case. This was unfortunate because the explanation is often correct and if the Air Force could have been trusted it would have been able to remove a lot of noise from the signal.
A Blue Book case involving what appears to be a genuine misidentified balloon appears in a scanned document from the collection of Robert Mercer. The document can be viewed in the section, “From the Desks of Project Blue Book” on The Black Vault website. A .pdf labeled, “Balloons” has an undated description of the above- mentioned incident along with pictures. The report states that there had been “a rash of UFO sightings” reported from Golden, Colorado. The case was solved when police found a homemade hot air balloon made of thin clear plastic with a “saucer- shaped platform” that supported candles. Read more
by Charles Lear
In 1961, Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe, USMC (Ret.) was the director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. That year, he and his organization were making life difficult for the Air Force with criticism of their UFO investigation, Project Blue Book. This was nothing new, but now they were close to getting open hearings in Congress to address their criticisms.
Then, on April 18, 1961, Joe Simonton, a 54 year-old plumber, handyman and part-time chicken farmer, reported a UFO encounter involving humanoids and offered physical evidence not usually associated with extraterrestrials. This was a strange case with a single witness, but Blue Book Director Robert Friend thought the Air Force should get involved. He mistakenly thought that NICAP would turn the case into a big story and accuse the Air Force of shirking its duties.
Simonton first told his story to his friend, Vilas County Judge Franklin Carter. Carter had been a UFO enthusiast since Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 report. Carter interviewed Simonton and wrote an exclusive report for Gray Barker’s publication, the Saucerian Bulletin.
by Charles Lear
It was recently announced that the radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, the world’s largest until 2016, is beyond repair and will be demolished. It is an icon of modern astronomy on par with the Very Large Array (seen in the movie “Contact”) located in New Mexico, and the news has stirred an emotional response among many. For UFOlogists, the Arecibo telescope holds a special significance. It was from this telescope on November 16, 1974, that the first, scientist approved message intended for extraterrestrial intelligence was sent. It consists of a series of binary numbers that code for a graphic giving basic information about the chemistry of life on earth, human DNA, human form, and the telescope itself. The message was designed by Cornell astronomy professor Dr. Frank Drake, with input from others including Dr. Carl Sagan. If anyone ever responds, there are many out there listening, from radio astronomers to those specifically searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. But, there are those who believe the call has already been returned.
On Aug. 15, 1977, a strong intermittent signal was picked up by the Big Ear telescope in Delaware, Ohio. It lasted for 72 seconds and stood out in sharp contrast to the background noise. The signal was powerful and unusual and prompted astronomer Jerry Ehman to write “Wow!” next to the signal on a printout. The team focused on the area of the signal’s origin, but it never returned. Observatory Director John Krauss wrote to Carl Sagan that the “signal is highly suggestive of extraterrestrial intelligent origin, but little more can be said until it returns for further study.”
It never did return, but there has been a recent discovery in the area of our galaxy that produced it. Kraus and his team had looked for Sun-like stars there and found none. Now, thanks to Gaia, a European Space Agency space observatory, 1.3 billion stars have been mapped, enabling the creation of the most detailed 3D map of our galaxy to date. Amateur astronomer Alberto Cabellero used the map to re-examine the area and found a single potential Sun-like star named 2MASS 19281982-2640123. It sits in the constellation of Sagittarius and is 1800 light years away. The next step is to find an Earth-like planet next to it with a Wow! transmitter.
A few months later, on Nov. 26, 1977, another mysterious transmission got the attention of Southern Englanders. It was Saturday and, at five o’clock, people were sitting down and listening to the day’s headlines read by Andrew Gardner, news anchor for Southern Television. At six minutes past, the picture wobbled and Gardner was drowned out by a strange voice with an ominous message accompanied by a slow, electronic sounding, low tone rhythmic beat.
by Charles Lear
The year 1957 was a very interesting one in UFO history. In that year, UFO occupant reports were accepted as worthy of investigation by serious organizations such as the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization and Civilian Saucer Intelligence of New York; Contactees were in the spotlight thanks to the Long John Nebel Show; and Maj. Donald Keyhoe USMC ret. became the director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. The main question in the early days of flying saucers had been whether or not they came from outer space. The Air Force had assured the public that they were working to find the answers to the mystery, but now the public’s faith in the Air Force was waning and the mystery was more complex. Who to believe and what to believe were now complicated by competing factions and commercial interests. A person could get in there and diligently research and investigate, sit back and enjoy the circus or join the circus and cash in.
The editorial in the May, 1957 CSI News Letter No. 19, “The Price of Being Too Factual,” encapsulates the state of UFOlogy at that time. It begins with the announcement that Leonard Stringfield will no longer be issuing the periodical Orbit. This was the newsletter for his organization, Civilian Research Interplanetary Flying Objects. Stringfield had a reputation for being a no-nonsense investigator and was a trusted source for sightings reports. That he was unable to cover his printing costs while a “tongue-in cheek entertainer,” like John Nebel, and “a purveyor of a gospel,” such as George Adamski, were able to maintain a mass audience is noted as boding “ill for the future of UFO research.” Providing hope is the news that NICAP is under new management and the writer ends by encouraging readers to support the organization and that “it’s time to put up or shut up.”
NICAP was founded in 1956 by T. Townsend Brown, who claimed to have developed an anti-gravity device. Keyhoe had been instrumental in recruiting many prominent people, including Rear Adm. Delmar C. Fahrney USN ret., to sit on NICAP’s board of governors. NICAP had lofty ambitions and having a paid, full-time staff was one of them. An $85,000 a year payroll for that staff, which included Brown, was “suggested” and an argument ensued that resulted in Brown leaving and Keyhoe taking over as director. Read more