Podcast UFO

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

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 Timothy Alberino, a documentary film maker and paranormal enthusiast based in Bozeman, Montana, who had spent a good deal of time as a young man living in the jungles of Peru, returned to investigate the story first-hand and shared his findings on his YouTube site and on podcasts. While the descriptions of the creatures and the encounters were quite strange, there is a history of these sorts of reports linked to outsiders seeking to exploit natural resources in areas occupied by indigenous people, often with little concern for their rights. Read more →

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

In Last week’s blog, we looked 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 of 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 Timothy Alberino, a documentary film maker and paranormal enthusiast based in Bozeman, Montana, who had spent a good deal of time as a young man living in the jungles of Peru, returned to investigate the story first-hand and shared his findings on his YouTube site and on podcasts. While the descriptions of the creatures and the encounters were quite strange, there is a history of these sorts of reports linked to outsiders seeking to exploit natural resources in areas occupied by indigenous people, often with little concern for their rights. Read more →

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

2023 was quite a year for aliens in the news which included reports of creatures in a backyard in Las Vegas, alleged alien mummies being presented to the Mexican Congress, and an alien invasion of a shopping mall in Florida. In between, there were reports from a remote village in Peru of harrowing encounters with aliens that moved on hover boards. The story was first reported in Spanish by Radio Programas del Perú and quickly gained international coverage. The Daily Mail covered it with the same amount of detail as RPP for English speaking readers and published a follow-up article long after the story had seemingly been laid to rest by a somewhat implausible explanation by a spokesperson for the Peruvian National Prosecutor’s Office. A private paranormal investigator, Timothy Alberino, took it upon himself to look into the reports and found that they were widespread throughout the region. While the descriptions of the creatures and the encounters were quite strange and raised a lot of eyebrows, there is a history of these sorts of reports linked to outsiders seeking to exploit natural resources in areas occupied by indigenous people, often with little concern for their rights. Read more →

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

In 1968, the Condon Committee was wrapping up the UFO study at the University of Colorado that was commissioned by the Air Force. Coming too late for inclusion in that study was an incident in Gleeson, Arizona, that involved reported landings and possible traces left behind. It was investigated by Jim and Coral Lorenzen of the Tucson, Arizona, based Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, and the witnesses filled out report forms for the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. There is no report in the APRO Bulletin on the case, or in NICAP’S publication, The UFO Investigator, but there is an article by Cecil James headlined “Gleeson UFO Leaves Traces” in the October 19, 1968, Tucson Daily Citizen. Read more →

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

In last week’s blog, we profiled General Alfredo Moacyr Uchoa, who became a UFO investigator after retiring from his over 30-year career in the Brazilian Army. While he spent most of his career at the Military Academy of Brazil where he was a professor of engineering mechanics, head of the math department, and deputy director, he’d had an interest in the paranormal and the esoteric since the age of 18. After his retirement in 1963, he moved to Brasilia in 1968, and his son, Paulo, told him about a plantation owned by Wilson da Silva 120 km to the southwest where regular UFO activity was reported. Uchoa put together a group of 7 people, including his son, and they began visiting the plantation repeatedly starting in March. Bob Pratt was able to interview Uchoa and wrote an article headlined “The UFO reports of Brazilian General Alfredo Moacyr Uchoa” which can be found in the online magazine Alternate Perceptions. Gordon Creighton wrote a 3-part series of articles based on information he got from a 9-part series of articles by Eduardo Santa Maria that appeared in the Rio de Janeiro paper O Dia from October 26, to November 4, 1972. Creighton’s articles were published in the Flying Saucer Review Case Histories Supplements 12, 15, and 16, December 1972, June and August 1973 respectively. When we left off, we were telling the story of the investigation as told by Creighton. Read more →

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

Brazilian UFOlogy goes back a long time. One of the first UFOlogists there to come to international attention was Dr. Olavo Fontes, who wrote regular reports in the late 1950s and into the 60s for the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization that were published in the APRO Bulletin. Fontes wrote the first report on the 1957 Antonio Villas Boas abduction case. He sent it to APRO, and it remained unpublished by that organization until 1966. Two years later, in 1968, a retired General from the Brazilian Army, Alfredo Moacyr Uchoa, got involved in his first case, and it brought him to international attention as well. Read more →

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

On November 9, 1965, a huge portion of the Eastern United States experienced a power outage that began at 5:17 p.m. and lasted until 7:00 a.m. the next day in most areas. According to an article on the New England Historical Society website, it happened because maintenance workers “set a protective relay too low on a power line to Ontario, which then tripped the relay. It then sent power to other lines, overloading them.”  At the time, the entire U.S. was in the midst of a UFO flap, and there was speculation that UFOs had something to do with the outage. As far-fetched as that might seem, this was considered seriously by Saturday Review columnist John Fuller in his 1966 book, Incident at Exeter and was discussed in Congress in 1968 during a UFO symposium. A high-strangeness aspect to all this is that Oscar-nominated actor Stuart Whitman, claimed he was given an explanation by the occupants of two UFOs he saw in New York City the night of the blackout. Read more →

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

UFO documentaries and television specials play a big part in introducing people to the subject. Sometimes they’re well researched and made with care by creators with a passionate interest in the subject, and sometimes they’re made mostly for the sake of making money. In the case of a television special made by the Walt Disney Company titled Alien Encounters from New Tomorrowland that was aired in 5 U.S. cities in February and March of 1995, it was created as a means to promote a new ride at Walt Disney World Resort. While fairly typical of the UFO-related television presentations of its day, the matter-of-fact statements by narrator Robert Urich to the effect that aliens are visiting Earth in spaceships and abducting its human inhabitants, and that there are government documents that prove this, caused some to speculate that the documentary was made in partnership with U.S. government officials as part of a disclosure process. Read more →

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

For some UFOlogists, as they go through many years of research and investigation, their opinions and beliefs shift and change. Such was the case for Ted Phillips, whose involvement spanned over five decades from 1964 until his death on March 10, 2020. For much of that time, he specialized in physical trace cases and considered UFOs to be nuts and bolts craft piloted by flesh and blood extraterrestrial creatures. His views changed, particularly due to his investigation of a paranormal hotspot in Missouri that he and fellow researchers called “The Marley Woods” in an effort to conceal its location. Towards the end of his life, he saw the UFO phenomenon as being more complex than he’d previously considered it to be. Read more →

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

People have probably been reporting strange things in the sky for as long as they’ve been able to communicate. Chris Aubeck is a researcher who reaches far back in the historical record searching for UFO cases and is a founder of the Magonia Exchange, which is a group dedicated to the collection and archiving of fortean reports. In the June 2015 issue (page 11 of pdf) of Edge Science magazine, he and National Aviation Reporting Center On Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP) associate Martin Shough detailed their investigation of a 1665 report from Barhöfft, Sweden (now part of Germany), near Stralsund, that received a lot of attention at the time. The article is an excerpt from their 2015 book, Return to Magonia. Read more →

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

According to the sighting report forms (pages 2 and 4 of pdf) filled out by Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter for the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena and the International UFO Bureau on September 18, 1973, he and 10-12 other men observed a UFO he described as a light that was “at one time, as bright as the moon” for 10-12 minutes in Leary, Georgia. According to the form, they were outside waiting for a 7:30 p.m. Lions Club meeting to start. During Carter’s presidential campaign in 1976, a reporter from the National Enquirer asked him if he would release all the information the government had on UFOs if he was elected. He is quoted in the June 8, 1976 edition of the Enquirer as saying “If I become President, I’ll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists. I’m convinced that UFOs exist because I have seen one.” When he was elected, the White House began receiving letters from UFO enthusiasts who wanted to know when he was going to make good on his promise. One of these is included in the article by Philip J. Klass, headlined “NASA, the White House, and UFOs” published in the Spring/Summer 1978 Skeptical Inquirer: Read more →

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

Argentina, especially in the area of Bahía Blanca, has had its share of high-strangeness UFO reports ranging from cars being lifted up in the air to abductions. This week, we’re looking the 1973 case involving Dionisio Llanca, a truck driver who reported he’d had an encounter with a UFO and three creatures. When questioned under the influence of hypnosis and Pentothal, he recounted being taken aboard a spacecraft, but could not recall the details when in his regular, conscious state. Whatever criticisms one might have of abduction tales told by people under hypnosis, the circumstances around the case, as reported in newspapers in the region, were unusual and mysterious. Read more →

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