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 20th 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 
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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 
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.
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.
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.
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 
In the late 1960s, Dr. J. Allen Hynek was a key figure in getting members of the scientific community to take flying saucers/UFOs seriously. He was a prominent astronomer who was involved in the mystery at the very beginning as a consultant for the Air Force’s investigation, which operated for most of its existence as Project Blue Book until its termination in 1969. He was born in Chicago in 1910 and worked and lived in Ohio from 1935 until he became chair of the astronomy department at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in 1960. In 1973, he founded the Center for UFO Studies, which was based in Chicago. Then, in 1984, after spending his entire life in the Midwest, he rather suddenly moved with his family from Chicago to Scottsdale, Arizona. In this blog, we’ll explore what was going on behind the scenes. 
In August 1979, a case out of Minnesota that was chock full of trace evidence, including physical effects displayed by the witness in the aftermath, was investigated by Allen Hendry for the Center for UFO Studies. The incident and the related activity are described two days afterwards in the August 29, 1979, edition of the local Warren, Minnesota, Sheaf.
This is the last of a three-part series of blogs covering the case of an Italian security guard (with the company Val Bisagno), Piero Fortunato Zanfretta, who reported a number of encounters with UFOs and their occupants. After the first incident, he described in conscious recall being confronted by “an enormous green, ugly and frightful creature, with undulating skin, no less than ten feet tall.” Under hypnosis the story came out that he was taken up into a craft where he was interrogated and examined by as many as ten creatures “about 10 feet tall, with hairy green skin, yellow triangular eyes and red veins across the forehead” with metal strips over their mouths. He said they told him they were from the “third galaxy,” wanted to talk to the people of Earth, and would return soon in greater numbers. Italian journalist Rino Di Stefano became interested in the case, stuck with it, and wrote a book about it titled The Zanfretta Case, first published in Italian in 1984 and then in English in 2014. The reader can refer to his 
In last week’s 
In the last couple of