by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
Ted Bloecher, who passed away not too long ago at the age of 94, was a researcher/investigator who started out in the days of flying saucers as a founding member of Civilian Saucer Intelligence of New York and was active until the mid-1980s. He was an early researcher of humanoid reports starting in 1955, just after the 1954 French humanoid wave and the 1955 Kelly-Hopkinsville incident, and was the author of numerous publications on the subject. Tucked away in the United Kingdom file of the downloads section of the Archives for the Unexplained website is a report he wrote titled Close Encounters of the Third Kind that was published in 1977 by the British UFO Research Association. According to the introduction, the paper was prepared for a talk he gave at the BUFORA National UFO Conference at the Centre Hotel in Birmingham, England, in November 1976. The subtitle describes the paper as “The preliminary presentation of extensive study into UFO cases involving the reported sightings of humanoids and other alien beings.” In this blog, we’ll look at some of the highlights.
The publication starts off with a biography of Bloecher which includes his saucer/UFO involvement as a founding member of CSI-NY, a staff member of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, a member of the Mutual UFO Network (since 1972), and some of his publications. At the time, he was MUFON’s state section director for New York City and co-chairman with David Webb of MUFON’s Humanoid Study Group founded in 1974.
Bloecher begins his report saying that there had been “a number of unusual events that involved strange humanoid beings” reported throughout North America during the fall of 1975. He describes them as being the source of a great deal of “disbelief, confusion, and controversy,” and posits they may be the result of alien visitation or “as some researchers are suggesting, poorly understood manifestations of the human psyche about which there is much to discover.” According to him, CE III reports (from a classification system developed by J. Allen Hynek) had not only escalated, but their level of strangeness had as well.
Bloecher then summarizes specific cases, which are all footnoted with references. The first is a mother and daughter from Birmingham, Alabama, who, in November, reportedly saw two eight-foot-tall humanoids wearing tight-fitting silver suits, silver ankle-high shoes, and helmets that reflected their car’s headlights as they drove towards them. One of the figures held one arm over its head. The women were “startled” by the creatures’ appearance and swerved around them without stopping to investigate.
Next, a woman driving near Peers, Alberta (Canada), at 5:30 p.m. on October 14, reportedly saw what she first thought was a cattle truck parked with its lights on. It turned out to be some sort of object with two men, each holding a staff and wearing a helmet, standing motionless on top. The woman went to get two witnesses, but when they returned, the object and the men were gone.
A highly strange case involved an elderly couple in Wauwatosa near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. According to Bloecher, they were at home on the evening of November 10th. The doorbell rang, the wife answered it, and was confronted with a “man” wearing a narrow-brimmed hat. He had a brown face “like smoked meat,” with vertical grey lines, a narrow chin, a small opening for a mouth less than a quarter inch wide, and he was holding a white, five-foot-long rod.
He didn’t respond to “her queries,” and she called her husband over. When he saw the man, he said, “What the hell is this, something left over from trick or treat?” He went to grab the man, and the man hit the ground with the rod, which made an audible click, and he then glided backwards out of the husband’s reach. As he drifted across the lawn, he raised his arm and presented a bent hand to the witnesses. In spite of having seen the man up close, the husband was unable to recall the details of his face other than the small mouth.
The couple saw at least four other similar creatures on their lawn and in the street. They were all moving “like the astronauts on the Moon” in long, slow jumps. They all had rods and hit them on the ground and would then float a few inches above the lawn. The creatures are described as looking deformed “like gnomes” with bowed legs and claw-like hands. Bloecher notes there were no UFOs reported in the area.
The next case from Poland Springs, Maine, does involve a UFO. According to Bloecher, on October 27, at 2:30 a.m., “two youths” were driving and found themselves no longer controlling the car. The car proceeded down a back road near a lake, and they saw a UFO, described as a “large, cylindrical object,” as it rose up over a field.
A “number of strange events” are said to have occurred, which included a fog or mist enveloping the car. They were able to drive away, but later returned due to an “irresistible impulse,” and this time, they saw the original object as well as another one.
When they got home, there was a period of time they couldn’t account for, and one of them, identified as a young man, began to suffer “some odd physical effects.” The young man underwent hypnotic regression “weeks later” and recounted being taken from the car and then finding himself looking down at his car and companion through a porthole. According to him, he was confronted by a four-and-a-half-foot-tall creature that communicated telepathically and told him not to be afraid. He was led into a room, told to undress, and then underwent a physical exam which included blood being taken and him being scanned by a “machine with dials.” He was told to get dressed, that they’d see him again, and he then found himself back in the car where his companion seemed unaware that he’d been gone.
According to Bloecher, the young man and his family reported seeing UFOs afterwards “on numerous occasions.” He says they also reported other events of a strange nature that were “too complex and involved to be included in this summary…” and that everything had occurred during a “spate of reported UFO sightings in the area.”
The last case Bloecher summarizes is the Travis Walton incident. He notes that it was “widely publicized here and abroad” and out of all the cases summarized, “the most highly controversial” with too many “complications” to include in the summary.
After his summaries, Bloecher explains that due to the enormous number of UFO reports, for instance, the 90,000 case entries in the computerized UFO Catalogue (UFOCAT) set up by David Saunders, researchers are “obliged” to focus on the phenomenon “in microcosm,” and that this is what he is doing with humanoid reports.
Bloecher then makes note of the benefits of research into CE-III reports in terms of the amount of data they provide as compared to a light in the sky report. He introduces the term “entity” and goes on at length about the reports of their appearance, behavior, activities, association with vehicles, and communication with witnesses. He provides a chart of the yearly distribution of reports and a statistical breakdown, and introduces the Humanoid Study Group and Humanoid Catalogue (HUMCAT).
Bloecher was a pioneer in humanoid study at a time when most researchers, in his words, “dealt only gingerly with the subject.” After the Travis Walton incident and the Pascagoula incident just over three years before, at the time of his talk, Bloecher’s fringe research was on its way to becoming mainstream.