By Charles Lear
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.
Garza’s case was written about by Scott Corrales in his article “Abductions: The Crucible of Nightmares,” published in the May 2000 issue of Fate magazine (See page 5). According to Corrales, the case was investigated in 1972 by Jorge Reichert, Salvador Freixedo, and Ian Norris. Garza, a Mexican ceramics technician who lived in the city of Puebla, claimed to have been visited by an alien from the planet Auko and taken aboard a spaceship. According to him, he had just gotten into bed when he heard a noise in the living room. Thinking someone had broken in, he went to investigate. He came upon a “man” that was over two meters tall with a distinguished, almost-feminine-looking face. Read more
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. 
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 
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.