by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
A pioneer saucerologist/UFOlogist, Ted Bloecher, who mostly went uncelebrated except among his peers and a small number of enthusiasts, passed away on January 22 of this year at the age of 94. He was not known because of book sales, lectures, appearances on television or in documentaries, but for his research with and contributions to various organizations beginning in 1954 with Civilian Saucer Intelligence New York of which he was a founding member. He was mostly interested in cases involving humanoids, and his association with the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena seems to have helped Director Donald Keyhoe, who had an aversion to humanoid cases due to his hardened stance against contactee reports, become more open-minded. Besides this, he was a Broadway performer, and his credits include ensemble work in Oliver! and Hello, Dolly! He quit active research in the mid-1980s and donated his UFO files to the Center for UFO Studies and archives to the New York Public Library. Read more
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While the U.S. Air Force began its UFO investigation under the name of Project Sign in 1948, not long after Kenneth Arnold’s June 24, 1947, report of strange objects in the sky, private investigators didn’t get started until 1952. The first of these to rise to global attention was the International Flying Saucer Bureau, founded by Albert K. Bender. IFSB put out a quarterly publication called Space Review, and the group was taken seriously by fellow enthusiasts. The organization turned out to be short-lived. A little over a year after its creation, Bender mysteriously put an end to IFSB after telling the membership he had solved the mystery of flying saucers. He then announced that he’d been visited by three men wearing black suits and Homburg hats who’d threatened him into keeping silent about his discovery. The mythos of the Men in Black entered flying saucer lore and the Bender Mystery became a subject that is still being debated today. That is not the only legacy of Bender and his organization. To this day, after an attempt by Bender and his IFSB membership was made on March 15, 1953, to telepathically contact the occupants of the mystery craft being reported in the skies, March 15, is celebrated as “World Contact Day.” 
The FAA has been historically close-mouthed when it comes to pilot UFO sightings and pilots often avoid filing official reports, as they can be damaging to one’s career. However, with the availability of live air traffic control feeds such as 
by Charles Lear, author of 
This is the last in a three-part series of blogs looking at a case from 2023 that involved Ikitu tribe members in the village of San Antonio de Pintuyacu in Peru who reported nighttime attacks by 7-feet-tall aliens with elongated heads wearing black body armor and masks that had yellow or green eye lenses. They were said to stand on some sort of circular device like Green Goblin from the Spiderman movie that enabled them to fly and hover. Some villagers attributed the attacks to creatures from local folklore called Los Pelacaras (The Face-Peelers) said to feed on human faces and organs. Adding credence to this belief, a 15-year-old girl, identified as Talia, suffered an attack that resulted in her being taken to a hospital with lacerations on her neck. Witnesses reported that, as they came to her rescue, they saw the attackers flying away. Police came to investigate, and a spokesman for the Peruvian National Prosecutor’s office, Carlos Castro Quintanilla, came to the conclusion that illegal gold miners using jetpacks to explore deep into the jungle were responsible. This caused the story to die down in the news, but 
2023 was quite a year for aliens in the news which included reports of creatures in a backyard in 
