by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.” & a new book to be released!
Just this week, video of a UFO taken by a passenger on a plane coming in for a landing at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, New York, made international news. Video footage of UFOs constantly appears online and more often than not leads to a dead end for researchers trying to identify witnesses or turns out to be faked. In this case, not only was the witness identified, but she appeared on News Nation for an interview, along with a researcher looking into the case who considered the video to be authentic.
The witness is Michelle Reyes, who was capturing video of the New York skyline while sitting next to her daughter, who had the window seat. The Verrazano Bridge is centered in the frame as a black, elongated, oval-shaped UFO goes whizzing by from right to left, which in this case is northeast to southwest. Reyes posted the video on Facebook, and researcher/investigator Ben Hansen (who was a guest on PodcastUFO on February 16, 2021) managed to find her and interview her. Read more
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The February-March 1977 
This week, we were intrigued by a recent video of a UFO over Scottsdale, Arizona, that received some news coverage. As we looked into it, we were struck by the contrast between the coverage of UFO reports in the days where print journalism was dominant and the present.
UFOs are often reported to have left behind evidence of their visits in the form of physical traces, but there are also reports of them taking something away and often it is water from tanks, pools, rivers, lakes, and oceans. There are enough of these sorts of reports that Linda Zimmermann and Michael Worden were able to devote an entire 
There is an article headlined “The Taradale Car Crash” in the March-April 1969 Flying Saucer Review, Vol. 15, No. 7. It is described as an “adapted version” of an article written by Henk Hinfelaar and Claude Elmes of New Zealand Scientific Space Research that appeared in that organization’s newsletter Spaceview. It concerns a car accident in Taradale, New Zealand, a suburb of the Northeastern city of Napier, involving two young men who reported that a UFO was the cause. According to Hinfelaar and Elmes, not only did the young men report this to police, but the owner/driver of the car gave the same story to his insurance company, and it was used as a defense by him in a court of law. 
A pioneer saucerologist/UFOlogist, Ted Bloecher, who mostly went uncelebrated except among his peers and a small number of enthusiasts, passed away on January 22 of this year at the age of 94. He was not known because of book sales, lectures, appearances on television or in documentaries, but for his research with and contributions to various organizations beginning in 1954 with Civilian Saucer Intelligence New York of which he was a founding member. He was mostly interested in cases involving humanoids, and his association with the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena seems to have helped Director Donald Keyhoe, who had an aversion to humanoid cases due to his hardened stance against contactee reports, become more open-minded. Besides this, he was a Broadway performer, and his credits include ensemble work in Oliver! and Hello, Dolly! He quit active research in the mid-1980s and donated his UFO files to the Center for UFO Studies and archives to the New York Public Library. 
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.” 
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 
by Charles Lear, author of