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by Charles Lear

In the hunt for proof that strange vehicles are flying through our atmosphere, possibly under the guidance of alien pilots, researchers have long looked to photographs. There are some, such as the McMinnville photos, that have become classics that continue to spark debate. Many have been passed through time by newspaper articles, books, magazines, documentaries, and websites. Of course, along with the photo, there is the story of the photographer, though getting that story straight might prove difficult.

In October of 1952, a story went across the newswires that a man in Italy had claimed to have taken pictures of a flying saucer and its occupant while climbing in the Bernina section of the Italian Alps. He told reporters that he saw a flying saucer land on a glacier. According to him, “a human shape wearing some sort of diving suit” got out, walked around the ship, and then got back in. The saucer rose up and “it took off without a sound at breathtaking speed.” He said he sold the photos to a French magazine.

The man was 29-year-old Italian engineer Gianpietro Monguzzi. His story is told in detail and his pictures are presented in the Sept.-Oct. 1958 issue of Flying Saucer Review. According to the article “Monguzzi Takes Saucer Photos of the Century,” written by Lou Zinstag, Monguzzi (first name given as Giampiero by Zinstag) worked as an engineer in Monza, near Milan, and was a member of the Edison Society of Italy. On July 31, 1952, he was hiking in the Bernina Mountains with his wife when they came across an object, shaped like a flying saucer, sitting on a glacier. Moguzzi wanted to get closer, but his wife was frightened and insisted he stay with her. He did so and took a series of pictures showing the saucer on the ground, a humanoid walking around it, and two “excellent photos of the ship’s departure.” Monguzzi ended up with a total of seven photos. At the top of the article, in a photo with a number two written on it, the saucer and the humanoid are both seen to have antennas.

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by Charles Lear

UFO documentaries, besides being informative and entertaining, also serve to preserve UFO history for future researchers. However, one documentary, “UFOs: It Has Begun.” has itself become a part of UFO history. One of its producers has claimed that the U.S. Department of Defense offered him and his partner the use of some film footage taken by the Air Force at Holloman Air Force Base. According to him, it showed a UFO landing and a meeting between its occupants and Air Force officials, and it was going to be the finale of the documentary until the DoD withdrew the offer at the last minute.

The movie was originally released in 1974 as “UFOs: Past Present and Future.” It was written primarily by Robert Emenegger, who also produced it along with Allan Sandler. It has Rod Serling as its main narrator, and there are appearances by Burgess Meredith, Jose Ferrer, Jaques Vallée. and J. Allen Hynek. In 1976 and 1979 it was re-released under its new title.

The story of the film’s beginning is as follows: Emenegger and Sandler had originally set out to produce a series of films about advanced military technology but were diverted by an intriguing piece of information offered by their military contact, Paul Shartle, with whom they were working at Norton Air Force Base. Shartle, Security Manager and Chief of Requirements for the Audio-Visual Program at the base, said he had seen a film of an alien craft landing at Holloman AFB three years previous. As discussions about possible projects continued, the idea that one of them be about UFOs came up and was encouraged by military officials who offered the producers the use of the footage. Emenegger and Sandler decided to go ahead with a UFO documentary, and the film was made.

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by Michael Lauck

It has become almost cliché to point out that the Internet has changed the way Americans get information, but it is true. The average American has easy access to news, history, shopping and more. Vast virtual archives now exist that allow researchers, students and scholars to access books and other materials that was once difficult to find. This easy access to information makes it easy to forget that only a few years ago if someone developed an interest in something such as UFOs but their town did not have a bookstore or library that carried anything but the most basic books, the interested probably died. Now that tablets and smartphones have made the Internet portable it is easy for people to access even the most trivial information at their whim. What was the name of that girl who replaced Suzanne Somers for a season in Three’s Company? Check the IMDB app. Can you still get Sea Monkeys? Try Amazon. Who sings that song in that commercial right now? You don’t even need to know the title, just hold your phone up to the TV and there’s an app that will recognize the music and give you all the relevant information. Read more →

by Charles Lear

1967 was quite a year in UFO history. In Canada there was the Falcon Lake Incident, where a man with a grid pattern of circular burns on his torso claimed to have gotten them from an ascending UFO, and the Shag Harbour Incident, where a UFO was seen to plunge into the water by citizens and was subsequently searched for by Canadian officials. Meantime, here in the U.S., the Air Force funded UFO study at the University of Colorado headed by Dr. Edward Condon was underway as was a major flap, which included UFOs sighted around nuclear weapons facilities at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. A bit of history that’s been all but forgotten is an incident that year that involved six grounded flying saucer-shaped objects in England. They caused quite a stir and were examined by the British intelligence service, the Army, the RAF, a bomb disposal unit and police.

On September 4, 1967, British authorities became alarmed as six identical saucer-shaped objects, approximately four feet in diameter and making beeping and hissing noises, were reported to be lying on the ground across England. They were roughly equidistant and lying along the 51.5° parallel running from Kent to Somerset.

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by Charles Lear

Pilot UFO sightings have been a constant in the world of UFOlogy ever since the sighting in 1947, that started the public fascination with the subject, by Kenneth Arnold, who was flying in his own plane near Mount Rainier in Washington State. Even though these are often single witness sightings, researchers generally take them seriously, as pilots, especially a commercial pilots, risk their reputations and continued employment by coming forward. But, what about airplane passengers? In the case of passenger sightings, you often have multiple witnesses, or at least one witness that can corroborate the pilot report.

An instance where a passenger witness came forward to back up a pilot report occurred in 1948 in the case of the classic Chiles-Whitted UFO encounter. On July 24, 1948, pilot Clarence Chiles and co-pilot John Whitted, were flying a DC-3 over Alabama. At about 2:45 a.m., Chiles spotted a red glow up ahead and brought Whitted’s attention to what he assumed was an Army jet. It closed in on the DC-3 quickly, shot past the right side of the plane, and then, with a burst of flame coming out of its rear, climbed up into the clouds. The pilots reported that the object was torpedo-shaped, had no wings, was 100 feet long, and 25 to 30 feet in diameter. Passenger Clarence L. McKelvie added to the credibility of the sighting by reporting that he saw a bright light streak by his window at that time. He later appeared in the documentary, “UFOs: It Has Begun,” (A 1976 and 1979 re-release of the 1974 documentary “UFOs: Past, Present, and Future.”) and there he says he spoke with one of the pilots and his description matches theirs. Read more →

Charles Lear

Many readers may be familiar with the controversial case of the Gulf Breeze, Florida, UFO photographs taken in 1987 by local contractor Ed Walters. The photos were clear and detailed and stirred up a great deal of excitement within the UFO community. Some, such as former Navy optical physicist turned UFO researcher Dr. Bruce Maccabee, believed the photos were genuine, while others believed they were hoaxed.

Then, in 1990, after Walters and his family had moved from their home at the time, the new owners found a Styrofoam model of a UFO in the attic. Pensacola News Journal reporter Craig Meyers was able to closely duplicate Walters’s photos using the model, and Walters responded to hoax allegations by claiming the model had been planted after he left.

What readers may not be familiar with is a saga that unfolded around the Gulf Breeze incident involving six soldiers, all intelligence analysts, who went AWOL from a U.S. Army Intelligence unit in Augsburg, West Germany. They became known as “The Gulf Breeze Six,” and their story is… something.

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by Charles Lear

New Mexico is famous for its reports of landed (and crashed) UFOs and associated creatures. While many might think that these sorts of reports have long since ceased since the golden age of UFOs, there was a report just a couple of years ago of creatures and a huge landed craft in the mountains of Taos, NM.

According to an article by Staci Matlock in the September 5, 2019 Taos News, days before, on September 1, two bow hunters, Josh Brinkley, 41, and Daniel Lucero, 26, were looking for elk on Pot Mountain northwest of Taos. Brinkley had been coming to the mountain for fifteen years while it was the first visit for Lucero.

They set up on opposite sides of a field and waited for three hours with no luck. At around 9:30 a.m., Brinkley became restless and went walking through the woods looking for elk there. He got to the top of the mountain, which was the rim of a collapsed volcano known as a caldera. There, he saw what he thought were two fellow hunters about 35 yards away. He was preparing to speak to them when they disappeared. According to him, “They were gone, just gone.”

The more Brinkley thought about the figures he had seen, the less like hunters they seemed. He saw only their torsos above the brush that covered their lower half. They seemed to have been wearing large hoods that had what looked like pairs of ribbons on both sides that came to a point at the top and bottom. The left side was white and somewhat shiny and the right side was black. He described their torsos as “kind of black.”

Brinkley went back down the mountain and met up with Lucero. He didn’t tell Lucero what he’d seen until they were back at camp.

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by Charles Lear

From the days of flying saucers in the 1940s and 1950s, up until the present where many now prefer the term “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP), investigators and researchers have approached the mystery using scientific methods. However, this is not the case for all who have sought answers as to the source and purpose of the reported encounters with strange things in our skies. Many have turned to esotericism, in addition to science, as a means of inquiry. This approach has actually been present from the very beginning of modern UFOlogy and those interested in the subject might consider looking into it, even if only from a historical or sociological perspective.

Esoteric is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “designed for or understood by the specially initiated alone.” When one talks of esotericism in association with UFOs or the paranormal, one is usually referring to what has become known as “Western Esotericism” which is a term used to describe a loosely connected group of religious and philosophical ideas that deviate from Judeo-Christian beliefs and post-Enlightenment rationalism. By the late 19^th century, organized groups and secret societies had developed around these esoteric ideas, two of the most prominent being the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Theosophical Society. Both of these adhered to the belief that there is a group of cosmic beings that can be contacted by adepts who wish to receive ancient wisdom and advice. The Theosophical Society still exists today.

Arguably, the first group to investigate claims of a mysterious flying object, was the Borderland Sciences Research Association. Formed in Southern California by Meade Layne along with Max Freedom Long, BSRA was an association dedicated to paranormal research and included parapsychologists, spiritualists, and Theosophists. Their research methods included Yoga, Qabalistic technique, and spirit channeling. Their main spirit channeler was Mark Probert, the “Telegnostic from San Diego.” The group put out its first newsletter, the Round Robin, in February 1945. It wasn’t long before they were investigating what they called, “The Ether Ship Mystery.”

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