Podcast UFO

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

While the U.S. Air Force began its UFO investigation under the name of Project Sign in 1948, not long after Kenneth Arnold’s June 24, 1947, report of strange objects in the sky, private investigators didn’t get started until 1952. The first of these to rise to global attention was the International Flying Saucer Bureau, founded by Albert K. Bender. IFSB put out a quarterly publication called Space Review, and the group was taken seriously by fellow enthusiasts. The organization turned out to be short-lived. A little over a year after its creation, Bender mysteriously put an end to IFSB after telling the membership he had solved the mystery of flying saucers. He then announced that he’d been visited by three men wearing black suits and Homburg hats who’d threatened him into keeping silent about his discovery. The mythos of the Men in Black entered flying saucer lore and the Bender Mystery became a subject that is still being debated today. That is not the only legacy of Bender and his organization. To this day, after an attempt by Bender and his IFSB membership was made on March 15, 1953, to telepathically contact the occupants of the mystery craft being reported in the skies, March 15, is celebrated as “World Contact Day.” Read more →

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

The FAA has been historically close-mouthed when it comes to pilot UFO sightings and pilots often avoid filing official reports, as they can be damaging to one’s career. However, with the availability of live air traffic control feeds such as liveatc.net, listeners have occasionally come upon pilots talking about a sighting in real time. This recently happened to the operator of the YouTube site, Flight Simulator Fantasy, who posted a short containing the audio in mid-February. Given the nature of the site, the audio is most likely genuine.

The posting on F.S.F. received limited news coverage. There is an article by Tom McGhie posted February 28, 2024, on the website of The Daily Star headlined “American Airlines Pilot’s Chilling UFO Radio Call as Mystery Craft “Went 180” in Seconds.” The article contains information from the F.S.F. site, including transcripts of key moments where the pilots describe what they’re seeing. According to McGhie, the news outlet reached out to Harrisburg Airport, the flight’s destination, for comment. Read more →

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

When it comes to official responses to UFO reports, police officers are on the front line and often become witnesses themselves. A famous example is the 1994 Trumbull County, Ohio, case. This case started out with calls to the local dispatch office from citizens who reported seeing a UFO and ended up with several officers not only sighting it, but chasing it, and the radio activity was caught on audio tape in the dispatch office. A case that was not as spectacular but has endured in local lore is a 1977 case from Flora, Mississippi.

There is an article in the February 17, 1977, Madison County Herald out of Canton, Mississippi, headlined “UFO Spotted Focuses on Deputy Creel.” According to the reporter, on a previous Thursday evening, Deputy Kenneth Creel and Constable James Luke were driving four miles west of Flora on Smith School Road when they saw what at first seemed to be, in Creel’s words, “an evening star or something” except that it “kept getting brighter and bigger.” Creel said that as a shape emerged he used the car radio to contact the Mississippi Highway Patrol. He told the reporter “I kind of thought it was an airplane flying low, or like it could have been.” Read more →

Launched on March 4 @ 5:05 PM EST, Song by Lee Speigel 

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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