A UFO Falls to the Ground in Yorkshire, England

By Charles Lear

In 1957, the same year the Soviets launched Sputnik, British authorities, media, and citizenry had their attention drawn back down to Earth as they attempted to unravel the mystery of a flying saucer said to have been found laying in a moor. It was dismantled, studied, and opinions were divided between its having come from space and its having been manufactured right here on Earth. Over time, the saucer went missing, but the mystery as to its origin remained. Then, in 2018, pieces of the saucer and its mysterious contents were found in the archives of the Science Museum in London.

The case was first reported in the December 9, 1957 Yorkshire Post in an article headlined “Mystery Object Found on Scarborough Moors” with the sub-headline “Has Unusual Hieroglyphics.” It was written about in detail in the March-April 1958 issue of Flying Saucer Review.

According to the Flying Saucer Review article headlined “The Silpho Moor Mystery,” a man “who writes under the pen name Antony Avendel” had examined an object discovered lying in Silpho Moor near Scarborough. The object is described as being shaped like a top, weighing 35 pounds, having a diameter of 18 inches, and having hieroglyphics on its outside. It was made of a double skin of 3/16” copper. A “burnt powdery substance” was found inside along with a copper book rolled up and inserted into a coil of copper tubing. The book was made of 17 copper sheets containing over 2000 words “engraved in phonetic-type symbols.”

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UFOs Over Wytheville, Virginia

by Charles Lear

Danny Gordon

Beginning in October 1987, there was a UFO flap in Wytheville, Virginia. Thousands of people in the area reported seeing extraordinary things in the sky, but the most commonly told story that came out of the flap centers around a single witness who, it seems, was singled out for harassment by some unknown entity or organization.

On October 7, 1987, reporter Danny Gordon of radio station WYVE called the county sheriff, as he regularly did, to see if the sheriff had any news for him that day. The sheriff told Gordon that three deputies, all ex-military, had reported seeing a UFO that day. According to Gordon in the course of his appearance in a segment devoted to the Wytheville flap in Season 4, Episode 18 of Unsolved Mysteries, the story was used as what he calls a “ha-ha” piece at the end of that day’s newscast. Read more

A Country Singer, UFO Occupants, and Men in Black

By Charles Lear

One of the most famous early abduction cases is that of Travis Walton in late 1975, which received a lot of attention and still fascinates many people to this day. Walton’s case was investigated primarily by the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization. In the midst of that investigation, APRO was contacted by Johnny Sands, a country western singer who claimed he had encountered two humanoids in the desert outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. It is perhaps because of the attention given to the Walton case, that Sand’s case has all but been forgotten. I might also be because it’s seriously weird.

According to Sands, in his report to APRO and in subsequent interviews with researcher Timothy Green Beckley, he was in Vegas to promote a new record with some live shows. He had been visiting the towns surrounding Las Vegas to see how much his record was being played on local radio and how many jukeboxes it was in, and on January 29, 1976 (Sands didn’t recall the exact date with Beckley), he had been in Pahrump, Nevada.

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The Kelly, Kentucky UFO Goblins

By Charles Lear (Halloween re-post)

   On August 21, 1955, there was an incident that took place on a farm located in the town of Kelly, 7 miles north of Hopkinsville, Kentucky that reads like it was straight out of a ‘50s sci-fi comic book.  The story has been recounted in many books and all over the internet but, because of its comic book nature, that it involved real people who were deeply affected and real people who did earnest and laudable investigations tends to be overlooked.

In an old farmhouse on a tobacco farm along the east side of Old Madisonville Road, a two lane gravel turnpike, eleven people, eight adults and three children were relaxing as evening set in.  The house and farm were owned by Glennie Lankford, a 50 year-old widow with children from two marriages.  Full time residents of the house were: Glennie, her three children from her second husband ages 7-12, her 21 year-old son from her first marriage, J.C (John Charley) Sutton and his 27 year-old wife, Alene.  Glennie’s 25 year-old son, Elmer “Lucky” Sutton, his 29 year-old wife, Vera, and their friends, 21 year-old Billy Ray Taylor and his 18 year-old wife June, had been staying at the house for a couple of months.  Alene’s brother, O.P. Baker, also in the house that night was in his 30’s and stayed overnight on a regular basis as it was a convenient place for him to be picked up and driven to work.  The Taylor and Sutton couples were on a break from their work with a traveling carnival.

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UFOs, NICAP, and the CIA

by Charles Lear

Of all the private organizations devoted to UFO investigation, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena was arguably the most ambitious and tenacious. This was driven in large part by its director, Donald Keyhoe. Keyhoe held the beliefs that UFOs are extraterrestrial and that the U.S. Government, particularly the Air Force, was keeping information from the public that could possibly prove the ET hypothesis. As effective as NICAP was at hounding the Air Force and convincing many in the U.S. Congress that UFOs were deserving of scientific study, there are indications that the CIA was involved in both the beginning and the end of the organization.

Todd Zechel wrote about the CIA – NICAP connection in the January 1979 issue of Just Cause, the newsletter put out by Citizens Against UFO Secrecy. NICAP was incorporated in 1956, and two men Zechel argues were covert CIA operatives were put into chair positions within the organization. One of these men was Bernard J. O. Carvalho, who was made the chairman of NICAP’s membership subcommittee According to Zechel, Carvalho worked as a “front man” for companies secretly run by the CIA. The other was “Count” Nicolas de Rochefort, who was made Vice-Chairman of NICAP. According to Zechel, de Rochefort worked with the CIA’s Psychological Warfare Staff. Zechel tells the reader “there is more than ample evidence to conclusively establish both de Rochefort and Cavalho were at least during certain periods of their lives covert employees of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

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A UFO Photographed in the Italian Alps

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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UFOs Over Pine Bush, NY

by Charles Lear

In the 1980s, New York’s Hudson River Valley was home to a wave of extraordinary UFO encounters by thousands of people. It was explained away as a hoax perpetrated by a group of nighttime pilots in ultralights and this was enough to make it fade from the public consciousness, even among those in the UFO community. However, one town in the area has kept the memory of the events alive with a yearly fair and a recently opened UFO museum.

A book about the wave, “Night Siege” by J. Allen Hynek, Philip Imbrogno, and Bob Pratt, was published in 1998. Hynek died in 1986 before the book was published but actively investigated and contributed to the book. His wife, Mimi, helped edit the book after his death.

According to “Night Siege,” the wave began in Kent, New York, on New Year’s Eve 1982 with a sighting by a retired New York City police officer identified by the pseudonym,“Tony Vallor. He’d just christened his new house by smashing a champagne bottle against it, and his wife had sent him back outside to clean up the broken glass after he’d told her about it. As he was cleaning up the glass, he saw a group of red, green, and white lights to the south. At first he thought he was seeing a jet having trouble but it was moving too slowly to be a jet. Read more

A UFO Landing and a Meeting With Eisenhower

by Charles Lear

From February 17 to February 24, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was in Palm Springs, California, on what was described to the public as a “vacation.” On February 20, he disappeared from public view and rumors spread to the point that the headline, “Pres. Eisenhower died tonight of a heart attack in Palm Springs.,” appeared on the Associated Press newswire. The story was removed two minutes later and the AP reported that he was still alive. UFOlogists have speculated on where he was that day, and some have come to the conclusion that Eisenhower went to Muroc Air Force Base for a secret meeting with alien visitors.

The earliest mention of Eisenhower and aliens being at Muroc appears in a letter from Gerald Light to Meade Layne, founder of the Borderland Sciences Research Association. Now a foundation, BSRF has preserved the letter, and the date on the link is April 16, 1954. The letter opens with this:

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A UFO Landing at Holloman AFB?

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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UFOs Before The NET

by Michael Lauck

images-1It 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

A UFO Invasion in England

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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Airplane Passenger UFO Sightings

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

A UFO Over Tucson Arizona?

by Charles Lear

On February 9, 2021, at around 10:30 p.m., a helicopter pilot with U.S. Customs and Border Protection flying over Tucson, Arizona, reported to air traffic control that he had just had a near collision with a drone. A Tucson Police Department helicopter was sent into the area and the two helicopters followed the object and attempted to determine the location of whoever might be operating it. While it was described as a drone and a quad-copter, it was mostly tracked using night vision, and the only visual description was of a blinking green light. If it was indeed a drone, it attained an altitude well above the 400 foot limit set by the FAA, performed extraordinary evasive maneuvers, and had a power source that lasted far longer than a normal drone battery.

The story was first reported on May 20, 2021, by Dan Marries of KOLD News who described the “drone” as having attained an altitude of 14,000 feet, staying aloft for over an hour, and being “heavily modified.” A May 21, 2021, Associated Press article reports that the FBI had begun an investigation and was treating the incident as a case of illegal drone operation. It was thought that the “drone” had launched from an area about five miles south of Tucson.

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