Podcast UFO

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

1984 was a serious year in UFOlogy. Researchers were taking advantage of a more efficient and accessible process for putting in FOIA requests and finding documents showing that agencies such as the FBI and CIA did have some involvement with UFOs despite statements to the contrary. The Hudson Valley wave was in full swing, and the British UFO Research Association got ahold of the tape recording made by Col. Charles Halt on one of the nights when UFOs were seen in Rendlesham Forest. With so much evidence that there was something to the mystery and official interest in it coming to light, the reporting on the UFO subject took a turn away from ridicule, and the press started being serious about UFOs as well. In the midst of this, there was a case that many researchers might find worthy of ridicule, and it’s probable that researchers of the day did as well because it came and went and remains obscure, but the reporting on it was straight forward and restrained. Read more →

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

Beginning on New Year’s Eve, 1982, there was a series of sightings throughout the Hudson River Valley north of New York City by hundreds of people willing to go on the record. They reported seeing boomerang-shaped craft the size of 1, 2, and 3 football fields, that moved slowly, hovered, and turned on an axis. This is according to the first comprehensive book on the sightings, Night Siege, which was co-authored by J. Allen Hynek, Philip J. Imbrogno, and Bob Pratt, and published in 1987. One of the standout incidents in the book, covered in Chapter Eleven titled, “Close Encounter at Indian Point,” is a sighting by what are said by the authors to be security guards (they are all un-named) over the nuclear power plant on Indian Point, on the shore of the Hudson River in Buchanan, NY, just south of Peekskill, NY. Read more →

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

In last week’s blog, we looked at some correspondence we came across in the January-February 1969 Merseyside UFO Bulletin between Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Research Association Director Gary Lesley and Maury Island principals, Fred Crisman and Harold Dahl. We started by looking at an exchange between Lesley and Dahl. In a letter dated July 23, 1967, Lesley asked Dahl for copies of photos that were allegedly taken of a flying saucer, a written statement from Dahl, and for Dahl to contact Crisman and get a written statement from him as well. Dahl replied in a letter dated August 22, 1967, that he would “allow” Lesley to have copies of the photos, would provide a statement that would have to be approved by Crisman, and would contact Crisman but added that it would be unlikely that Crisman would reply to Lesley. Dahl went on to paint a picture of Crisman that didn’t seem to fit the facts that researchers looking into Crisman’s life uncovered. In contrast to what Dahl told Lesley to expect, Lesley got a letter from Crisman, and this is what we’re looking at this week. Read more →

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 →