Podcast UFO

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 
Brazil has a history of official UFO investigation almost as long as that of the United States. However, it has an official policy on disclosure that predates the U.S.’s by more than a decade. In 1954, the Brazilian Air Force started The First Confidential Inquiry into Unidentified Aerial Objects in response to the first major flap in that country. In 1969, the Sistema de Investigação de Objetos Aéreos Não Identificados (SIOANI) was established, and nearly 100 detailed case files were accumulated up until its termination in 1972. After this, in 1977, in response to reports of injuries and deaths as a result of UFO encounters in the area of Pará (mainly in Colores) Operação Prato was authorized by Colonel Protásio Lopes de Oliveira. This resulted in more than 2000 photos, 16 hours of film, and a 179-page report. The First Confidential Inquiry, SIOANI and Operação Prato files were classified for decades, but thanks to a freedom of information campaign begun in April of 2004 by the Brazilian UFOlogist and publisher of UFO Revista, Ademar José Gavaerd, many of the files were shown to him and other UFOlogists in 2005 as a prelude to releasing them to the general public. Then, in 2010, Brazil issued Ordinance 551/GC3, requiring every branch of the military and aviation sectors to collect and transfer all UFO reports to the Aerospace Defence Command in Brasilia along with any material proof by way of photos or video on a yearly basis. There, it is to be catalogued and made available to the public. Along with this, since 2012, the Air Force has periodically released declassified files through the Brazilian National Archives, and recently released 893 reports in May of this year. In this blog, we’ll look at the history of the Air Force investigation, the efforts of Gevaerd and other UFOlogists to gain access to the case files, and some of the most interesting (at least to us) cases (translated files can be found here) found within them. Read more →

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by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

In the course of researching UFO cases in Spanish speaking countries, one is bound to run into Scott Corrales and Inexplicata: The Journal of Hispanic UFOlogy. It exists today as a website, but in the fall of 1998, Corrales put out the first print version. In issue number 3, put out in the spring of 1999, Corrales celebrates the public reception of the first two issues and notes that there were 1800 visitors to the inexplicata.com website. In that issue is an article by Javier Garcia Blanco headlined “Roadside Encounters: UFOs, Aliens and Missing Time,” that Corrales promises, “does for driving what Spielberg’s Jaws did for swimming: you won’t want to get behind the wheel!” Blanco is credited with being the editor (along with Angel Briongos Martinez) of the Spain-based magazine Declasificado and the director of LACIP.

The first case Blanco goes into is that of “veteran radio personality” Pedro Mateo and his wife, Gloria Jiménez. According to him, Mateo described what he said happened to him and his wife on June 26, 1977, after explaining, “I have it etched upon my mind because we were flying to Dusseldorf that day, and most of what happens to me I write in a notebook.” He said that after leaving Zaragoza at around 5:00 a.m., they were just past the town of Los Garrigues after sunrise when they saw a disk-shaped object off in the distance. He wasn’t “overly concerned” at that point, but got scared when it proceeded to move quickly and silently towards them. Read more →

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by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

In the August 1975, APRO Bulletin, the front-page story, headlined “UFOs ‘Escort’ Mexican Aircraft” has details of a pilot’s reported UFO encounter. Backing him up is confirmation from the air traffic controller who was in contact at the time. What’s not included are details of the aftermath, which include reports by the witness of encounters with Men in Black. This part of the story can be found in the 1990 book, The UFO Silencers by Timothy Green Beckley, and in the 1997 British UFO Research publication (page 21 of the pdf) by Robert Bull, Men in Black: A Preliminary Report.

According to the Bulletin, at 10:30 a.m. on May 3, 1974, 23-year-old Carlos Antonio de los Santos Montiel, took off from Zihuatenajo, state of Guerrero, in his Piper Aztec 24 with the registration, XB-XAU. He was headed for Mexico City on a cloudy day with poor visibility and had to climb to 14,500 feet to get above it.

When he was over Tequesquitengo, he dropped down to try and get a look at Lake Tequesquitengo so he could verify his position. When he got below the clouds, fog and mist near the ground blocked his view of the lake, but his attention was quickly drawn to another matter altogether. To his right, he saw a 3-meter-diameter saucer with a cupula on top that had what looked like a small window and an antenna. He looked to his left and saw an identical object. Both were 20 centimeters above the wings and about 1 ^½ meters from the cabin. Read more →

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Let’s preserve this important UFO material for future generations!

 

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

On October 7, 1977, Prime Minister of Grenada Sir Eric Gairy gave a 90-minute speech during the 32^nd session of the General Assembly of the United Nations urging the organization to create an agency that would monitor UFOs. This led to a presentation and panel discussion over one year later, organized and produced by Lee Speigel, that included Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Dr. Jacques Vallée, and Col. Gordon Cooper. While this was considered a high point at the time in terms of gaining respectability for the UFO Waldheim Meeting. Credit: ICUFON Archives subject (Grenada issued a set of stamps in 1978 commemorating Gairy’s efforts) and still is today, not everyone was happy about it, particularly the directors of the Scientific Bureau of Investigation, formed in January of 1979. Read more →

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by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

In the January 12, 1982, New South Wales, Australia Pix-People, there is an article (page 11 of the pdf) by “Australia’s leading authority on UFOs and psychic phenomena,” John Pinkney, headlined “UFO terror grips a NSW township.” Pinkney’s weekly column for the publication is “The Pinkney Report–Investigating the Incredible.” It seems there was a flap in the town of Nowra, and one case in particular is reported to have been investigated by the Scientific Bureau of Investigation. SBI had its own publication at the time, and a report on the case was published in the Vol. 3, No. 6 SBI Report. SBI was based in Staten Island, NY, and one member readers might recognize was Peter Robbins, who is listed as art director for the magazine.

According to Pinkney, “dozens of people” were “caught up in bizarre events” in Nowra, which is 150 km south of Sydney: railway men reported they saw lights hovering over abandoned mineshafts; a foal was found with its leg cut off “neatly from its shoulder; a “huge, brightly lit object” paced a bus with 40 passengers “for seven minutes, before vanishing up a shaft of light in the clouds;” a newspaper man saw a mass of what looked like meteorites fly up from the ground into the air in 1978; a 12-meter-diameter ring was found burned into a field after a farmer told police that “a weird thing had crashed on his property, starting a bushfire;” and two hunters shot at a two-meter-tall, human-like entity that vanished and left an overpowering odor that made one of the hunters sick for several hours.  Pinkney’s main focus, however, is on a case involving not only some unusual trace evidence, but physical effects on the witness as well.

According to Pinkney, Frank Burke, a pastrycook, was driving through the Kangaroo Valley heading home from work at around 10:30 p.m. when a “blazing light” engulfed the car. Burke said it lit up the area in a radius of around 25 feet and “was so intense I could have read the fine print of a newspaper or counted the ants at the roadside.” He was listening to music coming from a cassette player/recorder sitting on the seat next to him, and it stopped playing as soon as the light came down. Read more →

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Near the end of the 20^th century, human abducting, cattle mutilating, Grey aliens flying sport-model saucers dominated the popular UFO narrative. However, there are reports that differ greatly from such accounts that offer insight into what might be an even stranger phenomenon. In the September 12, 1999, edition of the Trenque Lauquen paper, La Opinión, there is an article (page 16 of the pdf) headlined “Extraterrestrial Encounter?” It tells the tale, mostly in the words of the witness, Carlos Colón, a resident of Trenque Lauquen, who said he had a strange encounter on August 25^th. During a follow-up investigation by a Spanish UFOlogist almost 20 years later, Colón shared details of the aftereffects of his encounter which he had formerly chosen not to share with the press and other investigators.

According to the article, Colón was “a well-known mechanic of agricultural machinery” and often travelled on the roads around Trenque Lauquen in his pickup truck. He had originally wanted to keep his story to himself and was still concerned that he wouldn’t be taken seriously. Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear

In last week’s blog, we looked at a case from British Columbia that involved two witnesses who said they not only saw a UFO on the night of October 3, 1981, described as an upside-down flying saucer with its dome underneath surrounded by four lights that were in the 3,6,9, and 12 o’clock positions, but also had encounters with MiB types afterwards. The main witness, a 16-year-old who ran his own security company, Grant Breiland, reportedly took a photo that was not developed at the time of the article. The other witness, identified only as “N.B.” was a 19-year-old male who said he saw the same object. Breiland was interviewed extensively by former University of Victoria linguistics professor, Dr. P.M.H. Edwards. Edwards wrote a report that was published in the Vol. 27, No. 4, January 1982 Flying Saucer Review.

When we left off, Breiland had just been confronted in the glass-doored vestibule of a shopping mall by two men dressed in extremely dark blue clothing. They were stiff and robotic, had tanned faces and lips the same color, no eyebrows, and “Eton crop” haircuts. He was scared by not only their non-human appearance, but also by the fact that there were suddenly no people to be seen anywhere, which was the case during the entire encounter. According to Edwards, they asked him what his name was, where he lived, what his phone number was, and he refused to answer. After staring at him for five seconds, they turned on their heels “as one man,” walked outside (it was raining), crossed the sidewalk to the road, went left, and walked in sync in a military fashion. Breiland followed them and watched as they walked onto a muddy, excavated field and then vanished before his eyes. He ran to the spot where they disappeared and saw they had left no footprints. Read more →

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by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear

Men in Black stories are almost as old as the modern UFO mystery, starting with the 1947 Maury Island Incident. This aspect of the phenomenon became firmly cemented with Gray Barker’s 1956 book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, and it plays a big part in John Keel’s 1975 book, The Mothman Prophecies. Keel was of the mind that MiBs were not human beings from secret government organizations out to silence witnesses, but creatures of a much stranger origin. Supporting this is a 1981 report (page 8 of the pdf) out of Canada that is presented in the Vol. 27, No. 4, January 1982 Flying Saucer Review. Read more →

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by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear

Brazilian UFO cases have aspects to them that, while not unheard of in other countries, come up over and over again giving them a commonality that is unique to Brazil. Lost time, traveling long distances in trucks and cars in far less time and using far less fuel than it should take, humanoid encounters, and injuries are a few of these. A case from 1980 has all of these aspects except injury, and it is described in the cover story of the March 1982 APRO Bulletin.

According to the article headlined “1980 Brazilian Abduction,” the case came to light “during the question and answer period following a UFO lecture by APRO’s Brazilian Representative, Mrs. Irene Granchi.” Granchi later interviewed the people involved, Elias Seixas de Matos, 38; Guaraci Fernandes de Sousa, 47; and Alberto Seixas Vierra, 26. Granchi later wrote about the case in an article (link to original article broken at this time) published in the April 1995 issue of UFO Magazine. There, she says she was lecturing about the work of Rio de Janeiro-based “hypnologist,” Dr. Silvio Lago. According to her, the three men were introduced to her, and it was explained that they wanted to meet Lago as they all seemed to have experienced partial amnesia and couldn’t recall long stretches of time during a delivery run in a truck. Read more →

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by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear

Coming across contemporary UFO cases of interest these days when government-related UFO stories dominate the news is difficult. Fortunately, there are still some active civilian investigators out there who share their information (without a subscription) on their websites. Stan Gordon is one of those, and he helped bring attention to a case investigated by fellow researcher Jim Brown.

Stan Gordon maintains a website, Stan Gordon’s UFO Anomalies Zone. According to his bio on the site, he was a trained electronics technician who specialized in radio and “worked in the advanced consumer electronics sales field for over forty years.” He has lived his whole life in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, became interested in UFOs and strangeness in 1959 at the age of ten, was the investigations coordinator for telephone reports coming into the UFO Research Institute of Pittsburgh in the late 1960s, and became an active field investigator in 1965. That year he was the primary investigator for the “December 9, 1965, UFO crash-recovery incident that occurred near Kecksburg, Pennsylvania.” Gordon established a hotline in 1969 so he could receive UFO reports and formed his own organization, the Westmoreland County UFO Study Group, in 1970. Read more →

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear

In last week’s blog, we looked at a case involving a 1979 report by a forestry worker in Scotland who said he not only saw a mysterious domed object sitting on the ground, but that he was assaulted by two spherical objects with spike-like protrusions that rolled towards him rapidly, rolled over onto his sides, and seemed to be pulling on his pants. At this point he went unconscious. According to him, when he came to, he heard a “whooshing” noise and then saw that the object was gone. He was extremely thirsty, had a headache, pain in his chin and legs, and couldn’t walk or speak. He crawled back to his pickup truck, which was 300 meters away, found himself incapable of driving it, but was then able to make his way home on foot. Upon returning “with others” the next day, there were physical traces seen that gave support to his claims. This week, we’ll look at the aftermath and the physical evidence.

The case got the attention of Flying Saucer Review Editor Charles Bowen, who made arrangements to have it investigated by members of the UFO Investigators Network, an organization funded by FSR and formed in 1977 with the help of Jenny Randles who had proposed the idea. The resulting three-part report by UFOIN investigators Martin Keatman and Andrew Collins appears in the November-December 1979, Spring 1980, and September 1980 issues. Read more →

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by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear

When a single witness reports an episode of high strangeness involving a UFO encounter, having physical evidence in the form of traces left on the ground, or on the witness, really helps when arguing for the witness’s credibility. This was the case in the 1979 report by a forestry worker in Scotland who said he not only saw a mysterious domed object sitting on the ground, but that he was assaulted by two spherical objects with spike-like protrusions that rolled towards him. The case got the attention Flying Saucer Review Editor Charles Bowen, who made arrangements to have it investigated by members of the UFO Investigators Network, an organization funded by FSR and formed in 1977 with the help of Jenny Randles who had proposed the idea. The resulting three-part report by UFOIN investigators Martin Keatman and Andrew Collins appears in the November-December 1979, Spring 1980, and September 1980 issues. The case was also investigated by employees of the Livingston Development Corporation and local police from two stations. Read more →

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