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by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

Throughout the history of flying saucers/UFOs, there have been characters that those being kind would describe as “colorful,” and those being blunt would describe as liars, hoaxers and con men. One of these characters was Fred Crisman, who became famous/infamous due to his involvement in the Maury Island case. Crisman was accused of hoaxing the case along with his business partner, Harold Dahl, and the two confessed as much to an FBI agent who investigated (page 20 of pdf) due to the deaths of two military intelligence officers associated with the case. Crisman faded from the public eye after this but showed up again on November 21, 1968 when he was called to testify at the trial of Clay Shaw looking into the JFK assassination. We have recently come across some correspondence between a UFO investigator, Crisman, and Dahl in the pages of a 1967 edition of a British UFO magazine that may be of interest to our readers. Read more →

by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

Gordon Cooper, youngest of the original Mercury astronauts, often spoke publicly about his UFO sightings and beliefs. He appeared in documentaries such as James Fox’s 2003 film Out of the Blue, and famously wrote a letter dated November 9, 1978, to Ambassador of Grenada to the United States George Ashley Griffith calling for the scientific collection and analysis of data taken from UFO encounters in order to “determine how best to interface with these visitors in a friendly fashion.” In Out of the Blue, he is heard telling a story about a flying saucer with three retractable legs that was filmed landing in 1957 at Edwards Air Force Base. He didn’t claim to have witnessed the landing himself, but did say he saw the footage. There was an incident involving the filming of a UFO at Edwards that year, and there is a Project Blue Book file on the case. James McDonald found the witnesses and interviewed them in the late 1960’s and wrote a report. Cooper’s name is not mentioned by McDonald and the incident as described by McDonald and in the Blue Book file didn’t involve a landing. Brad Sparks and Jan Aldrich, both heavily involved in UFO research for many years, had an email exchange discussing this, and a record of it can be found at nicap.org.

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by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

The story of the September 1961 case involving the possible abduction of Betty and Barney Hill by UFO occupants has been related and examined in numerous publications and formats. It’s an intriguing case and was the first of the late 20^th century UFO abduction reports to receive serious consideration (and publication) by investigators. This makes it a case worthy of attention because the story told by the Hills couldn’t have been influenced by previous abduction narratives. The main source for the abduction story that is focused on by most researchers, such as John Fuller who wrote the 1966 book about the case titled The Interrupted Journey, is the tapes from the hypnosis sessions the Hills went through in 1964 with Dr. Benjamin Simon. Before that, the case was considered to be merely a sighting report. That’s how it was presented by Walter Webb, the primary investigator who submitted a report dated October 26, 1961, to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. After news of the Hills possibly having been abducted got out, Webb was moved to submit an updated report, dated August 30, 1965, that contains the abduction account. Included in that report is a copy of the letter Betty Hill wrote to NICAP Director Donald Keyhoe dated September 26, 1961. This is the first document with a complete version the Hill’s sighting as it was consciously remembered. As for the abduction account, Webb included a copy of a five-page document, written by Betty a little over a month after the sighting, that shows that it actually originated in a series of dreams Betty had on consecutive nights shortly after the encounter. The letter and document are included in The Interrupted Journey, but their significance as the first recorded accounts of the Hills’ experience very close to the time of the event is not emphasized by Fuller.     Read more →

by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

In Marfa, Texas, there is a phenomenon known as “The Marfa Lights” that has been around for a long time and still remains a mystery. It’s been studied by members of the Society of Physics Students from the University of Dallas and a retired aerospace engineer, James Bunnell. The students thought people were seeing car headlights on U.S. 67. Bunnell thought there was more to the lights than mere misidentification.

According to the Texas State Historical Association website entry on the subject by Julia Cauble Smith, the first historical record of a mystery lights sighting dates back to 1883. According to Smith, Robert Reed Ellison, a young cowhand, saw a flickering light while driving cattle through an area known as Paisano Pass and thought it might be coming from an Apache campfire. Other settlers told him they had seen lights on other occasions and when they investigated, they found no signs of fires in the area. This has been used as an argument against the car lights on U.S. 67 explanation by defenders of the mysterious nature of the lights, such as Ariel Slick, who posted an article on the Deep South Magazine website headlined “Marfa Lights: The Spirit of Texas” on August 19, 2022. Read more →

by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

In 2010, an article by Jeremy Vaeni headlined “The Incredible Visitations of Emma Woods” appeared in the November issue of UFO Magazine. The story that was detailed therein caused people in the UFO community to take hard look at the methods and conclusions of the two most prominent people in alien abduction research at that time. “Emma Woods” was the pseudonym of a woman who lived in England, and she was one of David Jacobs’s research subjects. She had posted some tapes of her hypnosis sessions with him that contained some details that Jacobs probably would have preferred had not been made public. Woods provided more details in an interview she gave on March 29, 2010, on the Paratopia podcast hosted by Vaeni and Jeff Ritzman, which appear in the UFO Magazine article. The article prompted Budd Hopkins’s wife, Carol Rainey to write an article of her own headlined “The Priests of High Strangeness” published in 2011 in Volume 1, Number 1 of Paratopia magazine detailing some of Hopkins’s methods with his subjects as well. Last week we looked at the experiences of Woods during her interaction with Jacobs. This week we’ll look at the aftermath and the reaction of some in the UFO community to Woods’s story. Read more →

by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

In 2010, an article by Jeremy Vaeni headlined “The Incredible Visitations of Emma Woods” appeared in the November issue of UFO Magazine that caused people in the UFO community to take hard look at the methods and conclusions of the two most prominent people in alien abduction research. “Emma Woods” was the pseudonym of a woman who lived in England, and she was one of David Jacobs’s research subjects. She had posted some tapes of her hypnosis sessions with him that contained some details that Jacobs probably would have preferred had not been made public. Woods provided more details in an interview she gave on March 29, 2010, on the Paratopia podcast hosted by Vaeni and Jeff Ritzman, which appear in the UFO Magazine article. The article prompted Budd Hopkins’s wife, Carol Rainey to write an article of her own headlined “The Priests of High Strangeness” published in 2011 in Volume 1, Number 1 of Paratopia magazine detailing some of Hopkins’s methods with his subjects as well. Read more →

by Charles Lear

Throughout the 1990s, the foremost authorities on UFO abduction research were Budd Hopkins, an artist who brought the subject to mainstream attention with the publication of his 1981 book, Missing Time, David Jacobs, an associate professor of history at Temple University who published Secret Life in 1992, and John Mack, head of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who published Abduction in 1994. Their books sold well, and they all spoke openly to the press and were largely responsible for getting the alien abduction phenomenon a good deal of media coverage. Even some in the scientific community, probably due to Mack’s efforts and tenure at Harvard, were willing to look at the phenomenon with an open mind, and an Abduction Study Conference was held in 1992 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sponsored by a physics professor there, David Pritchard, with the help of financial backing from Robert Bigelow. Hopkins, Mack, and Jacobs were featured speakers, and Hopkins faced some public criticism during the conference regarding his methods. It wouldn’t be long before he faced even harsher criticism from within the UFO community. Read more →

by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

In 1981, a new narrative became firmly established as part of the UFO mystery with the publication of Budd Hopkins’s book Missing Time. A large part of the book consists of transcriptions of recordings made during hypnosis sessions where the subjects described being taken aboard craft by 3-4 feet tall creatures that performed medical procedures on them. The descriptions of the creatures were similar to descriptions of beings that would become known as “the greys,” which are the now iconic creatures with large black eyes that became commonly reported after Whitley Strieber’s 1987 book Communion. The eyes of the creatures reported in Hopkins’s book vary. The book came out in July of 1981 and Hopkins, along with Dr. Aphrodite Clamar, a psychotherapist hired to conduct some of the hypnosis sessions, gave interviews to the press. From this point on, the UFO Abduction phenomenon began to receive serious consideration from the mainstream press with Hopkins as the leading authority for the rest of the decade. Read more →

by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

While UFO researcher/investigators came to accept abduction reports as being worthy of their time by the end of the 1970s, only a few, such as John Keel and Gray Barker, were open to contactee reports. Even so, contactee reports kept showing up, and sometimes they would even make it into the newspapers. One British case from 1980 involved creatures that resembled the Venusians reported by George Adamski starting in 1952, and the witness claimed he had physical trace evidence as proof of his encounter. Read more →

by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

By the end of the 1970s, after the 1973 Pascagoula incident and the 1975 Travis Walton case, abduction claims were not only an accepted aspect of the UFO mystery by many investigators, they were considered worthy of attention by the news media, and there are many lengthy newspaper articles detailing reports throughout that decade. The narrative hadn’t yet been taken over by the now-common reports of being taken aboard a craft by creatures 3 to 4 feet tall with big, slanted, black eyes and being subjected to invasive medical procedures that seemed to have something to do with reproduction. The creatures and the natures of the encounters reported throughout the 70s were varied, but by the decade’s end, elements had emerged that would become common in the decades to come. What would also become common in such cases would be the use of regressive hypnosis, which was thought to be an effective means to recover lost memories. However, this technique has since came under criticism, particularly in its use to provide evidence in legal cases, as can be seen in the article titled “Hypnosis, Memory and Amnesia” which was published in the November 29, 1997 (pp. 1727-1732) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London B: Biological Sciences. Read more →