The Weird Entities of The UFO

by Charles Lear

In the article, “The UFO Contact Movement From the 1950’s to the Present”, written by Christoper  Bader, the author looks at the history of alien and UFO encounters as a social phenomenon. He shows how the focus of researchers changed as they felt increasingly compelled to explain the encounters in physical terms using modern physical science. Particularly interesting is Bader’s summation of the transformations that have occurred in the alien descriptions.

The history of encounters, as Bader presents it, is familiar to most of us.  In the mystery airship reports of the late 1800s, the occupants were, almost always, reported to be human and the airships themselves thought to be a human invention.  It wasn’t until the 1940’s that the ET hypothesis became widely considered as an explanation for strange aerial phenomena and the aliens themselves weren’t widely reported until the 1950s.  After his introduction, Bader focuses on the contactee movement, which is appropriate given the article’s title, devoting several paragraphs to George Adamski.  After taking us through the Betty and Barney Hill case, which he uses to represent the 60’s, he describes 70’s encounters with an assortment of strange web-footed, clawed and winged creatures.  He argues that these forced the UFO community to try and reach a consensus as to what an alien should look like.  This brings us to the 80’s abductee research, from which the “Greys” emerged as the acceptable alien form.

Notably, he states that it was American researchers who needed to reach a consensus and that French and English researchers instead equated alien encounters with those of the fairies of the past.  This leaves out quite a bit of the rest of the planet.  He concludes by saying that UFO researchers became divided into two camps striving for dominance, one believing Greys are evil and the other believing they are good.  This was pretty close to the truth in 1995 for abduction researchers but not all UFO researchers are abduction researchers.  His last sentence is a zinger: “The UFO subculture provides a unique opportunity to watch a pop-culture inspired religious group in a state of rapid evolution and change.”  It’s quite a leap from subculture to religious group and he overlooked quite a few cases, all of which received substantial press coverage.

The 1950’s had some notable weirdos of the non-human variety.  There were small goblins with big ears in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, a ten foot tall, round headed, clawed monster in Flatwoods, West Virginia and lots of odd proportioned humanoids wearing space suits all over the globe.  The 1960’s brought us West Virginia’s Mothman, Indrid Cold, and Men in Black along with Lonnie Zamora’s Socorro, New Mexico sighting of a craft with two small humanoids in white coveralls.

In the 1970’s the aliens did indeed greatly diversify, but they also became more cosmopolitan.  There were detached brains in Palos Verdes, California, three-inch space suited beings with ray guns in Malaysia, and nine foot, green, yellow-eyed beasts in Genoa, Italy.  The Genoa, Italy beings were encountered by Pier Zanfretta who was also abducted by them.  Other notable abductions include that of Calvin Parker and Charles Hickson of Pascagoula, Mississippi by elephant-skinned, crab clawed, robotic beings and Travis Walton, who reported seeing three small bald entities, possibly Greys, in orange suits and humans in blue.

The 1980’s is when the iconic aliens known as the “Greys” came to the general awareness thanks to the pioneering work of artist and abductee researcher, Bud Hopkins.  His work was furthered by Temple University Associate Professor of History, David Jacobs and head of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, John Mack.  All three dealt with hundreds of people who claimed they had been abducted by aliens, subjected to medical tests, and had ovum and sperm collected from them for what seemed to be some sort of alien reproductive project.  The subjects consistently described the three to four foot big headed, black-eyed, grey skinned beings with which we are all familiar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Greys were the dominant creatures well into the twenty-first century while the others were mostly ignored by researchers who felt that the Greys fit in well with the scientific approach most had adopted.  However, one gloriously strange 1989 encounter in Voronezh, Russia, broke up the monotony with a nine-foot tall, three eyed, no-necked, silver suited, bronze booted weirdo who had a pet robot.  This case was reported in TASS and picked up by The New York Times.

What about now?  Funny you should ask.  An article written by Chabeli Herrera, posted March 19, 2019 on the South Florida Sun Sentinel website, tells a great story.  Trish Bishop of Kissimmee, Florida had just returned home from work when she noticed something strange in the woods near the edge of her back yard.  A six-foot by eight-foot patch of air, 30 feet off the ground, was shimmering like water.  She mused that it might have been a weather effect until it moved towards her, then to her left and stopped.  In a matter of minutes, a humanoid materialized on the ground below.  He went from being transparent to solid as he climbed up an invisible staircase pulling himself along with his hands on an invisible rope.  He was muscular, between 6’3” and 6’5” tall, had off-white alligator skin, and was wearing a non-metal armor-like jumpsuit.  What made Ms. Bishop think he was non-human were his eyes and jaw.  His eyes were white with black pupils and bulging to the point that Bishop thought he might not be able to close them. Describing his jaw she said, “If you compare a human jawbone to his, we would be a chihuahua to a pit bull.”  When he got to the top of the “stairs” he switched to a rock climbing movement and seemed to pull himself up into the shimmering air and disappear.

Ms. Bishop reported this case to MUFON four years later and gave the date of the occurrence as March 16, 2013.  Her case file is 84886 with the Florida chapter.  MUFON advised Ms. Bishop to purchase a trail cam, which she did. She sent them pictures, some of which they describe as “unexplainable.”  Reading about this case in the aftermath of the Skinwalker Ranch investigations, it seems that today’s researchers may have become more open minded and an encounter’s straying from the Grey consensus may actually give it credibility.  Amen.