by Charles Lear
In last week’s blog, we wrote about an incident involving Filiberto Cárdenas, a Cuban exile living in Hialeah, Florida. Cárdenas was reportedly seen by his friend and his friend’s wife and daughter to float up in a beam of light into some sort of craft that then flew off. Two hours later, he was found 16 miles away on his hands and knees in the middle of the road. He was taken to a hospital and tested for radiation. The tests came up negative, but he experienced mysterious symptoms including an excessive thirst, shaking hands, and a sulfurous body odor. While this case might have been held up as an argument for the reality of the alien abduction phenomenon, it is rarely discussed and is overshadowed by more famous cases such as that involving Travis Walton. A possible reason for this is that Cárdenas, and then his wife, reported experiences that were similar to those of contactees, who have often been discounted by many in the UFO research community. Read more
We’ve written 
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.
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. 