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.
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 20th 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 
by Charles Lear, author of 
In 2010, an 
Out of the three most prominent people in UFO abduction research, Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs, and John Mack, only Mack had any formal training in psychology. Hopkins was an artist, Jacobs was an historian, and Mack was the head of the psychology department at Harvard Medical School. Mack’s interest in UFO abduction research first gained major media attention when he co-chaired the Abduction Study Conference at M.I.T. in June of 1992. His position at Harvard lent credibility to the subject, and he worked to convince other academics to consider it seriously. Harvard’s leadership didn’t interfere with Mack’s interest until he published a book in 1994 titled Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens based on his research with 13 subjects. Mack had had previous success as an author with a 1976 book on T. E. Lawrence, A Prince of Our Disorder, which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1977. Abduction was a hit and Mack was featured in many newspapers, television news shows, and talk shows. As Mack’s position at Harvard was part of the story, there were some there who felt it was necessary to examine the validity of Mack’s investigations.
In 1973, the claims of Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker that they’d been abducted by elephant-skinned, robot-like creatures in Pascagoula, Mississippi, opened researchers up to what have become known as “high-strangeness” reports. The term comes from J. Allen Hynek’s efforts at creating a system of strangeness ratings in Chapter Four of his 1975 book, The UFO Experience. Hickson and Parker were taken seriously because they seemed genuinely traumatized by their experience while just the two of them were waiting in a room at the police station where they first reported their encounter. They just been interviewed, and unbeknownst to them, a tape recorder in the room was left running, which captured the bewildered men talking to each other about their experience. Their story was reported in newspapers and UFO publications worldwide. After that, abduction reports began to increasingly appear. In the midst of this new openness to high-strangeness reports, in 1979, there was a story told by a trucker that was highly unique, and highly strange, and yet was still given serious consideration by the local newspapers and investigators who examined it.