by Charles Lear

Capturing a UFO in a photo or video is the goal of many UFO enthusiasts, but wouldn’t it be great to physically capture a UFO and examine it? From Japan comes the story of a group of young boys who claimed to have done just that. According to them, it was a small hat-shaped object that eventually managed to escape from them, but not before they were able to make some detailed drawings of it. The story made international news and is still discussed today. Japanese researcher, Otakupapa, wrote a well-researched six-part series about the case titled, “Amazing Japanese Boys Who Captured a Small UFO in 1972,” and published on his site, otakupapa.net.

The story as told by Otakupapa begins with a report by eighth grade middle school student Michio Seo that at around sunset on August 25, 1972, he had seen a small, strange object flying around a rice field. According to him, it would move instantly from one position to another as if it were teleporting.

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There are many UFO reports that involve injuries to witnesses. A particularly dramatic case from Hobbs, New Mexico, in 1964 involved an eight-year-old boy named Charles who was reportedly burned by a black, top-shaped UFO. While his face swelled up to where his nose reportedly disappeared, he felt no pain. Injury reports come from all over the world, but Brazil seems to have had more than its fair share. Bob Pratt, a UFO investigator who had a long career as a journalist that included a stint as the head of the UFO desk at the National Enquirer, traveled extensively in Brazil and collected UFO and occupant reports that have a common thread of violence to the witnesses.

Pratt wrote a book titled, UFO Danger Zone: Terror and Death in Brazil – Where Next?, that was published in 1996. In his acknowledgements, he thanks the many Brazilian citizens and investigators who helped him. In his introduction, he describes making over ten visits to Brazil between May 1978 and July 1993. He lists the elements peculiarly common in Brazilian reports, including: the sudden appearance of a UFO over a witness’s head followed by “a burst of sunlight” and a subsequent chase by the UFO as the witness runs, attempts to pull the witness up into the UFO using an unseen source and sometimes grappling hooks, and UFO occupants dropping hot liquids on the witnesses to make them let go of whatever they might have grabbed in an attempt to resist being taken away. Read more →

by Charles Lear

Brazil has a unique place in UFO history, not only for the abundance of high-strangeness UFO reports that come from that region, but also for the fact that people have been reportedly injured and have even died as a result of their alleged encounters. One such case comes from the Brazilian city of Varginha. In this case, not only is there a report of a witness dying, there are also reports that one, and maybe more, extraterrestrials ended their days here on Earth.

Bob Pratt, a UFO researcher who manned the National Enquirer’s UFO desk for a period and covered South American UFO reports extensively, presented a narrative summary of the case in his 1996 book, UFO Danger Zone: Terror and Death in Brazil – Where Next? He was in Brazil shortly after the events and his summary is based on witness accounts and reports from the primary investigators. Read more →

Ariel Phenomenon

  Based on the true story of Zimbabwe’s Ariel School UFO sighting, witnessed by over sixty schoolchildren

Directed by Randall Nickerson

Premiering and for purchase at arielphenomenon.com

May 20, 2022 

More information click here: https://podcastufo.com/breaking-news-ariel-phenomenon-movie/

by Charles Lear

In last week’s blog, we took a look at a case from Kofu, Japan, that involved two seven-year-old boys, Masato Kono and Katushiro Yamahata, who reported seeing a saucer-shaped UFO and its occupants in a vineyard in 1975. The creatures were described as having brown heads with pinky-sized, horizontal wrinkles where a face would be; three silver, metallic, two-inch fang-like features where a mouth would be; and two rabbit-like ears with a hole in the middle of each one. One of the creatures confronted the boys and emitted a noise like a sped-up tape recorder in what seemed to be an attempt to communicate. They ran away to Kono’s home where their parents were having dinner and they excitedly told their story. Kono’s mother thought they had made it up as an excuse for being late, but the boys insisted it was true and pleaded with their mothers to go with them and see for themselves. The boys would soon be forgiven for being late and would become the center of attention for many interested parties.

Masako Kono and Hanae Yamahata followed their boys out to a road on the west side of the Hinode Complex where the Konos lived. With them were Hanae’s one-year-old son and four-year-old daughter. From there, they had a view of the vineyard where the boys said they’d seen the saucer and the creatures. Read more →

by Charles Lear

On November 26, 1979, police in the French agglomeration community of Cergy-Pontoise received a strange missing person report from two distressed young men. According to Jean-Pierre Prévost and Salomon N’Diaye, their friend, Franck Fontaine, disappeared after a ball of light that was accompanied by three or four luminous spheres engulfed the car he was in. This resulted in not only an investigation by the police but also GEPAN (Groupe d’Études des Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non-identifiés), the unit of CNES (Centre National D’études Spatiales) tasked with dealing with UFO reports.

According to an article on the case titled L’Affaire de Cergy-Pontoise, posted on rrO.org, Fontaine, 18, Prévost and N’Diaye, both 25, were loading a Ford station wagon with jeans they were going to try and sell at Gisors market. They saw a light heading towards the ground at a “not too fast speed.” Fontaine drove towards where he thought it might have made impact after telling the other two to meet him there. Prévost and N’Diaye went back to their nearby apartments, N’Diaye to get a camera and Prévost to get another load of jeans. Read more →

We’ve written two blogs following the story of Irma Rick, a woman from the Pampas region of Argentina. She went missing and 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. A local prosecutor opened an investigation into the case. Rick was interviewed by a researcher and a reporter, who both approached her case as if it was a possible alien abduction. Rick, notably, avoided that conclusion saying she didn’t know what had happened to her. Now she’s come forward saying she might be pregnant with an alien baby.

Rick was interviewed on Bahía Hoy, a program broadcast by La Brújula 24. According to an article on the La Brújula 24 website, at the beginning of the interview, Rick asked the interviewer to “throw a peso at me” because she was “a poor old woman working in the field.” She further explained:

I am doing studies because I can have an alien pregnancy. I don’t ask for much, I have to do a lot of things, I ask for a little help. Tomorrow I have to do ultrasounds and stuff. Supposedly I got pregnant when they took me away. I don’t have a belly yet, I feel discomfort, things that happen to me. I have to consult the prosecutor because she doesn’t want me to talk much yet.

We’ll be sure to keep the reader updated if there are any further developments.

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 →

by Charles Lear

In the 1950s, the first reports of cars shutting down in the proximity of UFOs started hitting the news, most memorably those from Levelland, Texas, in 1957. Then, in the 1960’s, there were reports of UFOs chasing cars, sometimes hitting them, and in fair turnabout, reports of cars chasing UFOs. Things didn’t escalate until 1978, when the first reports came out of UFOs lifting cars up in the air, carrying them for various distances and periods of time, and then returning them to the ground.

In 1978 alone, there were four reports that this writer was able to find. The first of these occurred in July of that year and is described on the website of the Missouri Investigators Group.

According to the report, there was a UFO flap in Ellsberry, Mo., at the time. On July 27, Mrs. Clora Winscher, was driving towards her home in Arnold, Mo., after visiting her brother in Beaufort. At around 12:30 a.m., she was coming out of Union, Mo., when she saw what she thought was a tractor trailer coming straight at her. As she braced for impact, her car filled up with white light.

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by Charles Lear

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.

According to the article “Harrah Youth Reports UFOs With ‘Greenish Creatures,’” written by Frances Story and published in the January 26, 1977 Toppenish Review, nine-year-old Jose Cantu woke his mother up at 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday, January 19, wanting her to explain a “little man” he’d seen outside. His mother, Martha, had had a rough night with her baby and sent him away so she could get some more sleep. Jose then went out to investigate on his own.

Jose came back in and told his mother what he’d seen. According to him, there were two greenish creatures in the yard that were about three feet tall, and instead of having feet, they rotated on round bases. He said he saw two “steely” craft, one sitting in the yard and one on a flat section of the roof, and that there was a creature in each one. He said he observed all this while hiding behind a washing machine outside next to a shed.

As he watched, the two creatures in the yard returned to the vehicles. He said they had “straight stairs” leading to doors that opened “in two parts, like a cross,” and that there were two chairs with tall bases inside. The vehicles then rose up and disappeared into some sort of vaporous cloud. Read more →

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