By Jason Offutt
The e-mail message was cryptic. “Hello. I might have some information you will want to hear.” No further explanation; just a telephone number.
“Any hints?” I wrote back.
Three hours later a second e-mail waited in my inbox. “What? Sorry. I thought you wanted information. UFO. No reply is necessary.” The man sent his telephone number again, and his name. At his request I haven’t used his real name; he’ll go by Marty.
Marty answered the telephone, his voice that once sang with a Navy choir was scratchy and weak. Doctors removed half of a lung from cancer and damaged his vocal chords removing a lump from his thyroid. Marty is 67 years old.
But he didn’t want to talk about himself; he wanted to share something he’d kept hidden for 59 years.
Marty was eight years old in 1949 when his father took him to the Pickwick Hotel at the corner of 10th and McGee Streets in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. The hotel sat next to a Trailways Bus Company station; a high school friend of his father was stopping there on his way through town.
Marty doesn’t remember the name of the man who walked into the hotel and greeted Marty’s father, but he remembers he was in uniform.
“This man was in the service,” he said. “I can’t tell you what branch.”
The three went to a room in the hotel and, as the adults sat at a table and talked, Marty sat on the bed and tried to entertain himself. After awhile, he started paying attention to the conversation, and the men noticed.
“They said, ‘whatever you hear, stop remembering,’” he said.
Then Marty heard things – classified things.
The man had worked at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico; site of the atomic bomb test. He said whenever the military tested a new missile there, Unidentified Flying Objects would appear to observe the launches.
“He said when they shot a missile up to test it this thing would come up to it and fly around it,” Marty said. “These things would come up, circle it and – swish – go away.”
Then Marty’s father asked a question and his friend’s voice dropped to just above a whisper. But Marty heard everything.
“Pretty soon my dad said, ‘I heard a rumor about Roswell and a (UFO) crash,’” Marty said. “My dad’s friend got real serious and he said, ‘I can’t talk about that.’ But he said it did happen and it was real. This man talking to my dad positively confirmed what crashed in Roswell was true and legitimate.”
Soon after, Marty and his father went home and didn’t discuss that night for months.
“After that my dad – six months later – said, ‘I want you to come with me tonight,’” he said.
Marty’s father took him to a UFO meeting in Kansas City.
“Those people were as squirrelly as squirrels,” Marty said. “My dad just sat there and chuckled. He said, ‘what you saw tonight was horse hockey. You know the truth and we can’t talk about it.’ And he never mentioned it again. He wanted me to know the truth and what isn’t the truth.”
Marty’s father died at 51 in 1961 and neither he, nor Marty, ever mentioned the strange conversation in the Pickwick Hotel.
“This happened years and years ago and I was sworn to secrecy,” Marty said. “I’ve never talked about it.”
Until now.
Copyright 2008 by Jason Offutt Used with permission
Thursday's Child
------------------------------------------
Jason's book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to the Show-Me State's Most Spirited Spots,” is available now: https://tsup.truman.edu/store/ViewBook.aspx?Book=849.
Visit his Web site at www.jasonoffutt.com for Jason's other books, and while you're there, why not subscribe to Jason's (more or less) monthly newsletter.
1 comments:
Kent McManigal said...
When I was in elementary school in Waco TX in the early 70s, I heard about the Roswell crash for the first time. I have seen writers claim that the story didn't exist in its "current form" until the mid 80s, but the story was essentially the same when I first heard it.
About Me
Jason Offutt
Jason Offutt is a syndicated columnist, author, college journalism instructor, and fan of all things strange. His book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri's Most Spirited Spots,” is available NOW. Jason is available for interviews, speaking engagements and beer festivals. E-mail all serious inquiries to: jasonoffutt@hotmail.com.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Thursday, August 28, 2008
A PARADIGM TO THINK ABOUT
By Thursday's Child
The other evening on Coast to Coast the topic was ETs and other dimensions. The last caller before they went off the air had been in the Coast Guard. He was telling about going to school in Indianapolis for his job in the Coast Guard. After the instructor had given all of the agenda for the class he added one thing that wasn't on the agenda. It was how to change the paradigm by denying, denying, denying and lying, lying, lying. In time the people would come to believe what they were told. He was told to be aware of what is happening. Then he got to thinking about Roswell. He had been a radio reporter there and heard all about what had happened in 1947. Then he had a new awareness, since that time a shift in thinking has taken place. It was programmed by things that had happened since then to bring a new consciousness to the world.
I got to thinking about that and all that has happened to "wake" up mankind. This is in the last 60 years which seems to be the block of time indicated. But I would add Tesla to the mix. He made man see a new technology even if they didn't understand it. At least they knew about it. Then Wilhelm Reich was next. He discovered orgone energy. No one understood that either, but at least it was again put into the consciousness of man. The Rife machine was next invented by Royal Raymond Rife. Now the debunkers were letting up a little where with Wilhelm Reich's case they put him in jail for being a fraud where he died. Now scientists are studying the "energy" that pervades everything, including space that Reich knew way back then. He wasn't a fraud after all. Did you know they burned his books! And broke up his Orgone accumulators and threw them in with the burning books. I hope we get beyond all that in the next paradigm. I would be amiss to not include Michu Kaku. He has enlightened us on the string theory and the different possible dimensions.
Next I started thinking about all the contacts that have been made with ETs and how they changed the thinking of the experiencers, further evolving their minds. They were changed forever.
A lot of different aspects went into the current "box" like spirits, ESP, EVP, politics, airplane crashes, new forms of energy, church doctrine, crop circles, the Collider, green energy, etc. Each thing led to another more enlightening aspect of the paradigm.
We wonder why a person with so much knowledge dies all of a sudden, like John Mack and Carl Sagan. But think about this; each one has added to the mix in their own way, whether they be layman or scientist to bring us up by our bootstraps to a higher and more evolved understanding. I believe the UFO sightings that have come closer and closer are causing man to think more extensively. It doesn't matter if you are a nobody but if you have one thing to add to the ever expanding wheel of enlightenment it makes sense why we learn and experience so much. I always have felt bad when a knowledgeable person dies without writing down what he knew but it is all there by his lectures, television appearances, and radio shows. We are small cogs in the current wheel. When we are gone there is another to take our place in ever expanding knowledge. I believe that will happen forever.
So what will the next paradigm hold? Are we into it now? If as much happens, as in the last 60 years, we cannot even imagine what the next 60 holds for Planet Earth. That is if we survive the unimaginable horror of wars. That is the one thing in the paradigm I cannot understand. Why does man continually hurt each other. We could have a beautiful planet of peace and goodwill but instead greed and avarice takes over and the persons with the most power continue to hurt the humble persons on this planet. Something has to happen for a new understanding. It is to everyone's good to live in peace, and that means the warmongers too! Perhaps the wars were to teach us too but that part is hard to understand. At least we know what we want and don't want.
Those are my thoughts that I wanted to share with you.
Thursday's Child
Here is an article by John Mack that enlarges on what I have said up above.
Interview with John Mack
Psychiatrist, Harvard University
NOVA: Let's talk about your own personal evolution from perhaps skepticism to belief ...
MACK: When I first encountered this phenomenon, or particularly even before I had actually seen the people themselves, I had very little place in my mind to take this seriously. I, like most of us, were raised to believe that if we were going to discover other intelligence, we'd do it through radio waves or through signals or something of that kind.
The idea that we could be reached by some other kind of being, creature, intelligence that could actually enter our world and have physical effects as well as emotional effects, was simply not part of the world view that I had been raised in. So that I came very reluctantly to the conclusion that this was a true mystery. In other words, that I -- I did everything I could to rule out other sources, or sexual abuse. Some of these people are abused. But they're able to tell, distinguish clearly the abduction trauma from other forms of abuse. Some forms of psychosis or people making up stories -- I could reject that on the basis that there was no gain in this for the vast majority of these people.
.... I've now worked with over a hundred experiencers intensively. Which involves an initial two-hour or so screening interview before I do anything else. And in case after case after case, I've been impressed with the consistency of the story, the sincerity with which people tell their stories, the power of feelings connected with this, the self-doubt -- all the appropriate responses that these people have to their experiences.
NOVA: So tell us, please, how literally you intend people to take this? Are you suggesting people are really being snatched from their beds by aliens and experiments on board a spaceship?
MACK: Just how literally to take this, is one of the most interesting and complex aspects of this. And I want to walk through that as clearly as I can. There are aspects of this which I believe we are justified in taking quite literally. That is, UFOs are in fact observed, filmed on camera at the same time that people are having their abduction experiences.
People, in fact, have been observed to be missing at the time that they are reporting their abduction experiences. They return from their experiences with cuts, ulcers on their bodies, triangular lesions, which follow the distribution of the experiences that they recover, of what was done to them in the craft by the surgical-like activity of these beings.
All of that has a literal physical aspect and is experienced and reported with appropriate feeling, by the abductees, with or without hypnosis or a relaxation exercise.
....There is a -- I believe, a gradation of experiences and that go from the most literal physical kinds of hurts, wounds, person removed, spacecraft that can be photographed, to experiences which are more psychological, spiritual, involve the extension of consciousness. The difficulty for our society and for our mentality is, we have a kind of either/or mentality. It's either, literally physical; or it's in the spiritual other realm, the unseen realm. What we seem to have no place for -- or we have lost the place for -- are phenomena that can begin in the unseen realm, and cross over and manifest and show up in our literal physical world.
So the simple answer would be: Yes, it's both. It's both literally, physically happening to a degree; and it's also some kind of psychological, spiritual experience occurring and originating perhaps in another dimension. And so the phenomenon stretches us, or it asks us to stretch to open to realities that are not simply the literal physical world, but to extend to the possibility that there are other unseen realities from which our consciousness, or, if you will, learning processes over the past several hundred years have closed us off.
NOVA: I wonder, if in that vein, you can speak to what you think this experience is about?
MACK: ....There are several effects that these experiences have for those who undergo alien abduction encounters. First is the most familiar aspect or fit, which is a traumatic event in which a blue light or some kind of energy paralyzes the person, whether they're in their home or they're driving a car. They can't move.
They feel themselves being removed from wherever they were. They floated through a wall or out a car, carried up on this beam of light into a craft and there subjected to a number of now familiar procedures which involve the beings staring at them; involves probing of their body, their body orifices; and a complex process whereby they sense in the case of men, sperm removed; in the women, eggs removed; some sort of hybrid offspring created which they're brought back to see in later abductions. That's the sort of literal experience.
Now, the effect of that is -- or what seems to be going on there, in a number of abductees -- not just people I see, but the ones Budd Hopkins and other people see -- is to produce some kind of new species to bring us together to produce a hybrid species which -- the abductees are sometimes told -- will populate the earth or will be there to carry evolution forward, after the human race has completed what it is now doing, namely the destruction of the earth as a living system. So it's a kind of later form. It's an awkward coming together of a less embodied species than we are, and us, for this evolutionary purpose.
However, that might not be literally true. It might be that that this is a communication to us. That perhaps we need to change our ways. It may not be that these are literally our babies. It may be a kind of expression of images of babies; or it may be that these hybrids we're told is what will have to be. It's a kind of insurance policy if the earth continues to be subjected to the exploitation of its living environment to the point where it can't sustain human and other life as it's now occurring. But it may not be literally what is going to happen. So that's one area.
Another area is the whole visual environmental and informational aspect of this in which people are shown on television screens a huge variety of scenes of environmental destruction of the earth polluted; of a kind of post-apocalyptic scene in which even the spirits have been routed from their environment because they live in the same physical and spiritual environment that we do; and canyons are shown with trees destroyed; pieces of the earth are seen as breaking away -- portions of the East Coast or West Coast.
NOVA: .....Alien hybrid. What does that mean?
MACK: Sometimes along the way, as you go deeper and deeper into the person's consciousness, into their experience, they will discover....what is called a dual identity. In other words, that they are both human -- in one dimension; but they also are themselves, have an alien identity. That they are participatory in this reproductive hybrid program, as if they were altogether part of it. And that they may, in fact, even experience themselves as aliens.
One of the men in my book actually was an active participant in taking a woman from Texas up into the ship and being, and acting the reproductive function of the alien being, and felt he was himself alien. And often the abductees will feel that their job, developmentally, is to integrate these two dimensions or these two aspects of themselves: the human and the alien. And that the alien dimension is a part of ourselves, our souls, if you will even, from which we were or have been cut off over the centuries of human beings living on this earth in this densely embodied form.
NOVA: You and others have said that there is no other psychological explanation. But that there is some reality to it. What do you think of the work of people like Michael Persinger and Robert Baker who have these complicated theories about neurology or they charge that hypnogogic hallucinations being at the root of these perceived -- these experiences?
MACK: These experiences often occur in literal consciousness. Not in a hypnogogic or dreamlike state. The person may be in their bedroom quite wide awake. The beings show up. And there they are and the experience begins. That they're not occurring in any dreamlike state. Now sometimes they do occur when a person is dozing off or in a hypnogogic state. But very frequently not.
Also, any theory that is going to look upon this as a purely endogenous phenomenon, by which I mean generated purely from the psyche of the person themselves. Which is a kind of arrogance too, really. Because it means that we just can't accept the notion there could be another intelligence at work here. Which is a much more economical explanation. But if we must find a theory within ourselves, then we should keep in mind that any theory that's going to even begin to address this, has to take into account five factors:
Number one, the extreme consistency of the stories from person after person. Which you would not get simply by stimulating the temporal lobes. You would get very variable idiosyncratic responses that would differ a great deal from person to person.
Number two, you would have to deal with the fact that there is no ordinary experiential basis for this. In other words, there's nothing in their life experience that could have given rise to this, other than what they say. In other words, there's no mental condition that could explain it.
Third, you have to account for the physical aspects: the cuts and the other lesions on their bodies, which do not follow any psychodynamic distribution, like the stigmata associated with the identification with the agony of Christ.
Fourth, the tight association with UFOs, which are often observed in the community, by the media, independent of the person having the abduction experience, who may not have seen the UFO at all, but reads or sees on the television the next day that a UFO passed near where they were when they had an abduction experience.
And finally, the phenomenon occurs in children as young as two, two and a half, three years old. And any theory that simply attributes this to the activity of the brain, does not take into account at least three of those five fundamental dimensions...
NOVA: Aren't you really at risk of losing quite a bit, personally and professionally, because of ...criticism?
MACK: I think that, in some ways, I've gained more than I've lost in terms of inviting people into this mystery, having a dialogue with all kinds of very wonderful, open, intelligent, brilliant people from many different fields. It's been quite exciting. I mean I've been attacked, but the attacks have not been really nearly as serious to me as the openness that I've found among many people throughout the culture and internationally, who are saying: Yeah, I always suspected something like this was going on, and I'm glad you were willing to come forward and report about it.
......It's often said that I'm a believer and sort of have gone and lost my objectivity. I really object to that. Because this is not about believing anything. I didn't believe anything when I started, I don't really believe anything now. I've come to where I've come to clinically. In other words, I worked with people over hundred and hundreds of hours and have done as careful a job as I could to listen, to sift out, to consider alternative explanations. And none have come forward. No one has found an alternative explanation in a single abduction case.
NOVA: Many say that this is just really a function of cultural images.
MACK: ...I have been looking at this phenomenon as it manifests in indigenous people, in Native Americans -- the Cherokee, the Hopi, who know these beings as the star people. We've looked at this in South Africa, particularly in interviewing in depth a leading South African sangoma, or medicine man, who calls these beings "mandingdas".
We've investigated it in Brazil with a farmer in -- outside Belo Horizante who had identical abduction experiences to what have been reported in this country. I'm getting recent -- I received a letter about abduction experiences from a person in Malaysia today. In other words, this is -- as far as we can tell -- a worldwide phenomenon. This is not restricted, as some people have thought, to Western or particularly American culture.
....I found that the higher or the greater the stake that a person has in this society, in their position or their job, the more reluctant they are to admit that they've had abduction experiences......When abductees went on television with me during the spring of 1994, during my book tours, and wanted to communicate and educate about it, a number of them received threats to their jobs. Some of them lost them....we have one man in management consultation, lost an important contract. A woman that worked for the federal government, who was an abductee, was threatened with loss of her job. In other words, this is not something that is regarded as acceptable. (In the current paradigm - T.C.)
I've interviewed airline pilots who have had sightings-- close up sightings of UFOs. They will not report it, because they will be removed from their work. Even if they've had abduction experience, they will not talk about it. And 25 to 30 percent of airline pilots, according to a survey that one of the people I've talked with did, have had close up sightings, but will not discuss it.
This simply is not something that is accepted as OK to talk about or -- And that may be changing. I recently saw a Harvard Divinity School student, and I asked him these questions. I said: Do you talk about this among your fellow students? And he said: 'Oh, yes.' And it turned out several of them had also had abduction experiences. And even the ones that had not, were fascinated, interested, didn't ridicule 'em. So maybe the climate is changing.
The other evening on Coast to Coast the topic was ETs and other dimensions. The last caller before they went off the air had been in the Coast Guard. He was telling about going to school in Indianapolis for his job in the Coast Guard. After the instructor had given all of the agenda for the class he added one thing that wasn't on the agenda. It was how to change the paradigm by denying, denying, denying and lying, lying, lying. In time the people would come to believe what they were told. He was told to be aware of what is happening. Then he got to thinking about Roswell. He had been a radio reporter there and heard all about what had happened in 1947. Then he had a new awareness, since that time a shift in thinking has taken place. It was programmed by things that had happened since then to bring a new consciousness to the world.
I got to thinking about that and all that has happened to "wake" up mankind. This is in the last 60 years which seems to be the block of time indicated. But I would add Tesla to the mix. He made man see a new technology even if they didn't understand it. At least they knew about it. Then Wilhelm Reich was next. He discovered orgone energy. No one understood that either, but at least it was again put into the consciousness of man. The Rife machine was next invented by Royal Raymond Rife. Now the debunkers were letting up a little where with Wilhelm Reich's case they put him in jail for being a fraud where he died. Now scientists are studying the "energy" that pervades everything, including space that Reich knew way back then. He wasn't a fraud after all. Did you know they burned his books! And broke up his Orgone accumulators and threw them in with the burning books. I hope we get beyond all that in the next paradigm. I would be amiss to not include Michu Kaku. He has enlightened us on the string theory and the different possible dimensions.
Next I started thinking about all the contacts that have been made with ETs and how they changed the thinking of the experiencers, further evolving their minds. They were changed forever.
A lot of different aspects went into the current "box" like spirits, ESP, EVP, politics, airplane crashes, new forms of energy, church doctrine, crop circles, the Collider, green energy, etc. Each thing led to another more enlightening aspect of the paradigm.
We wonder why a person with so much knowledge dies all of a sudden, like John Mack and Carl Sagan. But think about this; each one has added to the mix in their own way, whether they be layman or scientist to bring us up by our bootstraps to a higher and more evolved understanding. I believe the UFO sightings that have come closer and closer are causing man to think more extensively. It doesn't matter if you are a nobody but if you have one thing to add to the ever expanding wheel of enlightenment it makes sense why we learn and experience so much. I always have felt bad when a knowledgeable person dies without writing down what he knew but it is all there by his lectures, television appearances, and radio shows. We are small cogs in the current wheel. When we are gone there is another to take our place in ever expanding knowledge. I believe that will happen forever.
So what will the next paradigm hold? Are we into it now? If as much happens, as in the last 60 years, we cannot even imagine what the next 60 holds for Planet Earth. That is if we survive the unimaginable horror of wars. That is the one thing in the paradigm I cannot understand. Why does man continually hurt each other. We could have a beautiful planet of peace and goodwill but instead greed and avarice takes over and the persons with the most power continue to hurt the humble persons on this planet. Something has to happen for a new understanding. It is to everyone's good to live in peace, and that means the warmongers too! Perhaps the wars were to teach us too but that part is hard to understand. At least we know what we want and don't want.
Those are my thoughts that I wanted to share with you.
Thursday's Child
Here is an article by John Mack that enlarges on what I have said up above.
Interview with John Mack
Psychiatrist, Harvard University
NOVA: Let's talk about your own personal evolution from perhaps skepticism to belief ...
MACK: When I first encountered this phenomenon, or particularly even before I had actually seen the people themselves, I had very little place in my mind to take this seriously. I, like most of us, were raised to believe that if we were going to discover other intelligence, we'd do it through radio waves or through signals or something of that kind.
The idea that we could be reached by some other kind of being, creature, intelligence that could actually enter our world and have physical effects as well as emotional effects, was simply not part of the world view that I had been raised in. So that I came very reluctantly to the conclusion that this was a true mystery. In other words, that I -- I did everything I could to rule out other sources, or sexual abuse. Some of these people are abused. But they're able to tell, distinguish clearly the abduction trauma from other forms of abuse. Some forms of psychosis or people making up stories -- I could reject that on the basis that there was no gain in this for the vast majority of these people.
.... I've now worked with over a hundred experiencers intensively. Which involves an initial two-hour or so screening interview before I do anything else. And in case after case after case, I've been impressed with the consistency of the story, the sincerity with which people tell their stories, the power of feelings connected with this, the self-doubt -- all the appropriate responses that these people have to their experiences.
NOVA: So tell us, please, how literally you intend people to take this? Are you suggesting people are really being snatched from their beds by aliens and experiments on board a spaceship?
MACK: Just how literally to take this, is one of the most interesting and complex aspects of this. And I want to walk through that as clearly as I can. There are aspects of this which I believe we are justified in taking quite literally. That is, UFOs are in fact observed, filmed on camera at the same time that people are having their abduction experiences.
People, in fact, have been observed to be missing at the time that they are reporting their abduction experiences. They return from their experiences with cuts, ulcers on their bodies, triangular lesions, which follow the distribution of the experiences that they recover, of what was done to them in the craft by the surgical-like activity of these beings.
All of that has a literal physical aspect and is experienced and reported with appropriate feeling, by the abductees, with or without hypnosis or a relaxation exercise.
....There is a -- I believe, a gradation of experiences and that go from the most literal physical kinds of hurts, wounds, person removed, spacecraft that can be photographed, to experiences which are more psychological, spiritual, involve the extension of consciousness. The difficulty for our society and for our mentality is, we have a kind of either/or mentality. It's either, literally physical; or it's in the spiritual other realm, the unseen realm. What we seem to have no place for -- or we have lost the place for -- are phenomena that can begin in the unseen realm, and cross over and manifest and show up in our literal physical world.
So the simple answer would be: Yes, it's both. It's both literally, physically happening to a degree; and it's also some kind of psychological, spiritual experience occurring and originating perhaps in another dimension. And so the phenomenon stretches us, or it asks us to stretch to open to realities that are not simply the literal physical world, but to extend to the possibility that there are other unseen realities from which our consciousness, or, if you will, learning processes over the past several hundred years have closed us off.
NOVA: I wonder, if in that vein, you can speak to what you think this experience is about?
MACK: ....There are several effects that these experiences have for those who undergo alien abduction encounters. First is the most familiar aspect or fit, which is a traumatic event in which a blue light or some kind of energy paralyzes the person, whether they're in their home or they're driving a car. They can't move.
They feel themselves being removed from wherever they were. They floated through a wall or out a car, carried up on this beam of light into a craft and there subjected to a number of now familiar procedures which involve the beings staring at them; involves probing of their body, their body orifices; and a complex process whereby they sense in the case of men, sperm removed; in the women, eggs removed; some sort of hybrid offspring created which they're brought back to see in later abductions. That's the sort of literal experience.
Now, the effect of that is -- or what seems to be going on there, in a number of abductees -- not just people I see, but the ones Budd Hopkins and other people see -- is to produce some kind of new species to bring us together to produce a hybrid species which -- the abductees are sometimes told -- will populate the earth or will be there to carry evolution forward, after the human race has completed what it is now doing, namely the destruction of the earth as a living system. So it's a kind of later form. It's an awkward coming together of a less embodied species than we are, and us, for this evolutionary purpose.
However, that might not be literally true. It might be that that this is a communication to us. That perhaps we need to change our ways. It may not be that these are literally our babies. It may be a kind of expression of images of babies; or it may be that these hybrids we're told is what will have to be. It's a kind of insurance policy if the earth continues to be subjected to the exploitation of its living environment to the point where it can't sustain human and other life as it's now occurring. But it may not be literally what is going to happen. So that's one area.
Another area is the whole visual environmental and informational aspect of this in which people are shown on television screens a huge variety of scenes of environmental destruction of the earth polluted; of a kind of post-apocalyptic scene in which even the spirits have been routed from their environment because they live in the same physical and spiritual environment that we do; and canyons are shown with trees destroyed; pieces of the earth are seen as breaking away -- portions of the East Coast or West Coast.
NOVA: .....Alien hybrid. What does that mean?
MACK: Sometimes along the way, as you go deeper and deeper into the person's consciousness, into their experience, they will discover....what is called a dual identity. In other words, that they are both human -- in one dimension; but they also are themselves, have an alien identity. That they are participatory in this reproductive hybrid program, as if they were altogether part of it. And that they may, in fact, even experience themselves as aliens.
One of the men in my book actually was an active participant in taking a woman from Texas up into the ship and being, and acting the reproductive function of the alien being, and felt he was himself alien. And often the abductees will feel that their job, developmentally, is to integrate these two dimensions or these two aspects of themselves: the human and the alien. And that the alien dimension is a part of ourselves, our souls, if you will even, from which we were or have been cut off over the centuries of human beings living on this earth in this densely embodied form.
NOVA: You and others have said that there is no other psychological explanation. But that there is some reality to it. What do you think of the work of people like Michael Persinger and Robert Baker who have these complicated theories about neurology or they charge that hypnogogic hallucinations being at the root of these perceived -- these experiences?
MACK: These experiences often occur in literal consciousness. Not in a hypnogogic or dreamlike state. The person may be in their bedroom quite wide awake. The beings show up. And there they are and the experience begins. That they're not occurring in any dreamlike state. Now sometimes they do occur when a person is dozing off or in a hypnogogic state. But very frequently not.
Also, any theory that is going to look upon this as a purely endogenous phenomenon, by which I mean generated purely from the psyche of the person themselves. Which is a kind of arrogance too, really. Because it means that we just can't accept the notion there could be another intelligence at work here. Which is a much more economical explanation. But if we must find a theory within ourselves, then we should keep in mind that any theory that's going to even begin to address this, has to take into account five factors:
Number one, the extreme consistency of the stories from person after person. Which you would not get simply by stimulating the temporal lobes. You would get very variable idiosyncratic responses that would differ a great deal from person to person.
Number two, you would have to deal with the fact that there is no ordinary experiential basis for this. In other words, there's nothing in their life experience that could have given rise to this, other than what they say. In other words, there's no mental condition that could explain it.
Third, you have to account for the physical aspects: the cuts and the other lesions on their bodies, which do not follow any psychodynamic distribution, like the stigmata associated with the identification with the agony of Christ.
Fourth, the tight association with UFOs, which are often observed in the community, by the media, independent of the person having the abduction experience, who may not have seen the UFO at all, but reads or sees on the television the next day that a UFO passed near where they were when they had an abduction experience.
And finally, the phenomenon occurs in children as young as two, two and a half, three years old. And any theory that simply attributes this to the activity of the brain, does not take into account at least three of those five fundamental dimensions...
NOVA: Aren't you really at risk of losing quite a bit, personally and professionally, because of ...criticism?
MACK: I think that, in some ways, I've gained more than I've lost in terms of inviting people into this mystery, having a dialogue with all kinds of very wonderful, open, intelligent, brilliant people from many different fields. It's been quite exciting. I mean I've been attacked, but the attacks have not been really nearly as serious to me as the openness that I've found among many people throughout the culture and internationally, who are saying: Yeah, I always suspected something like this was going on, and I'm glad you were willing to come forward and report about it.
......It's often said that I'm a believer and sort of have gone and lost my objectivity. I really object to that. Because this is not about believing anything. I didn't believe anything when I started, I don't really believe anything now. I've come to where I've come to clinically. In other words, I worked with people over hundred and hundreds of hours and have done as careful a job as I could to listen, to sift out, to consider alternative explanations. And none have come forward. No one has found an alternative explanation in a single abduction case.
NOVA: Many say that this is just really a function of cultural images.
MACK: ...I have been looking at this phenomenon as it manifests in indigenous people, in Native Americans -- the Cherokee, the Hopi, who know these beings as the star people. We've looked at this in South Africa, particularly in interviewing in depth a leading South African sangoma, or medicine man, who calls these beings "mandingdas".
We've investigated it in Brazil with a farmer in -- outside Belo Horizante who had identical abduction experiences to what have been reported in this country. I'm getting recent -- I received a letter about abduction experiences from a person in Malaysia today. In other words, this is -- as far as we can tell -- a worldwide phenomenon. This is not restricted, as some people have thought, to Western or particularly American culture.
....I found that the higher or the greater the stake that a person has in this society, in their position or their job, the more reluctant they are to admit that they've had abduction experiences......When abductees went on television with me during the spring of 1994, during my book tours, and wanted to communicate and educate about it, a number of them received threats to their jobs. Some of them lost them....we have one man in management consultation, lost an important contract. A woman that worked for the federal government, who was an abductee, was threatened with loss of her job. In other words, this is not something that is regarded as acceptable. (In the current paradigm - T.C.)
I've interviewed airline pilots who have had sightings-- close up sightings of UFOs. They will not report it, because they will be removed from their work. Even if they've had abduction experience, they will not talk about it. And 25 to 30 percent of airline pilots, according to a survey that one of the people I've talked with did, have had close up sightings, but will not discuss it.
This simply is not something that is accepted as OK to talk about or -- And that may be changing. I recently saw a Harvard Divinity School student, and I asked him these questions. I said: Do you talk about this among your fellow students? And he said: 'Oh, yes.' And it turned out several of them had also had abduction experiences. And even the ones that had not, were fascinated, interested, didn't ridicule 'em. So maybe the climate is changing.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Who I Think the Visitors Are
By Anne Strieber
My theory about "the visitors" is different from that of most UFO investigators: I think they are either time travelers, visitors from a parallel universe, the dead—or all 3.
Over the years, we have received many letters connecting the spirits of the dead with visitors. This type of anecdote is anathema to old line UFO researchers, who want the whole thing to be about the conventional concept of encounters with aliens who have arrived in space ships from another planet.
I remember when we invited our secretary, Lorie Barnes (who had had a lifetime of Visitor contact) up to our cabin, she went for a walk along the road. There she met up with her brother, who had been missing (and presumed dead) for over 20 years. She was delighted to see him again and he told her to tell everyone "he was OK." This seems to be the usual message that the dead have for us.
After Whitley, in a last-minute inspiration, put our mail center address in "Communion," we began receiving huge bags of mail every day. I actually had to hire a secretary just to help me OPEN them, but I read every single one and replied to each one that contained an address.
I began keeping a list of the commonalties I found in them. I posted the list above my desk and added a new item to it whenever I noticed the same thing mentioned in several letters from different people. I wish I still had that list today.
The one item I remember most clearly is: "They have something to do with what we call death." I remember this so distinctly because I have never found it in any of the UFO literature I have read.
After Communion was published, Whitley got a call from his agent, who said he had received a frantic message from a government official who needed to ask Whitley a question. Usually Whitley would not want to deal with this type of thing, but this incident was so compelling that he returned the call. The man said, "I have to know what you think about this, I have to know if this is true," so Whitley heard him out.
The man described a typical evening at their suburban home. Their elderly dog had just been taken for a walk, but she suddenly began insisting on going out again, so the wife put on her leash. As she stepped out to take the dog on a second walk, a huge white light passed over the back yard, and their little boy came running down the stairs. He said, "Mommy, Daddy! Jeff came to me with two aliens, and he said to tell you he's all right."
Jeff was the older brother, who had died in an auto accident a short time before. With the help of the visitors, he had somehow managed to bring the message to his grieving family that he was all right. As you'll see from the rest of this essay, this is the same message that keeps being repeated, time and again, by the departed who are somehow interacting with the visitors.
One letter described a soul literally being torn from a body. The man who experienced this wrote a description of what happened after he went to bed one night: "My head had been on the pillow less than thirty seconds when, for want of a better word, it exploded—'it' being my head. The only way I can describe this shocking sensation was that I thought a bomb had blown me to pieces, and that 'I' was nowhere. I ceased to be." Eventually his wife woke up and they switched on the bedroom light and sat up in bed talking quietly about what might have happened. He knew the experience hadn't been a dream, because he'd never fallen asleep. They then heard a low humming that gradually changed into a loud, steady throbbing sound. A quick glance at the clock revealed it was 2:30 a.m. (note that the time was almost the same as when the friend in Austin was contacted in the last letter I'll mention here). The throbbing became deeper and faster, then seemed to stop right over the roof of their house, directly above the bedroom. Before he could go outside to see what was going on, he felt something invisible grab his chest and start pulling with amazing force. He wrote, "I felt like my soul, not my body, was being pulled up vertically towards the still loud throbbing noise, and although I thought it would be futile, I screamed out for my wife to lie on top of me. She did this, and the sensation of pulling eased a little. I was screaming and struggling against an 'invisible beam,' with my wife lying full length on top of me in my own bed at 2:30 a.m. What a sight we would have presented if someone had walked in!" This went on for two full hours. "They pulled, I resisted, my wife hung on and the engine throbbed, until finally it went away, and exhausted and badly shaken, even devastated, we fell asleep." We recently received a letter that suggests the Visitors may have something to do with time travel. "Susan" wrote: "I haven't told this to anyone outside of my close family until now. There is a road in France that we lived next to in 1994 that had been there since Roman times. It is called in English, Highway #1, the oldest road in France. It winds between farms, and there are a couple of villages nearby. The farmers come out early in the morning to shoot pheasant. Those are the only people you see on this road.
"The major users of that road were the Roman legions who built and used it in their conquests. It was also used in both World Wars. Just walking to market, I felt I was walking along a well-traveled way. According to my husband, a history buff, quite a bit of history happened on that road, which might explain the two unusual, unnerving people I saw walking along it about two weeks apart.
"As I was going to market one mid-day, walking with my sack and holding onto my dog's leash, I saw an odd sight walking towards me, a young man. This was odd because almost no one used that road, but what really caught my attention was the way he stared at me and the unusual clothing he was wearing. He was about 19 or 20, with olive-colored skin. He was dressed in a navy blue sweat shirt with a hood and blue jeans. Sounds normal, right? Not right. The clothes didn't seem to allow for his body depth. It was as if someone had seen a picture of a sweatshirt and jeans and sewn the clothing from just looking at the photo. They looked extremely uncomfortable, and they were dyed wrong. “As he and I approached each other on the road, I saw that he had the biggest eyes I have ever seen—bright, bright blue. As we came closer, I said hello in French and he put his hooded head down, but still tried to look up at me as if he was curious. He said nothing. We both walked on and after about 20 steps I looked back. He was gone. Just plain gone.
"About two weeks later, the same thing happened again, except it was a different person of about the same age—19 or 20 year old. He was wearing the same clothing as the other young man. His skin was white instead of olive, his eyes were huge, almond shaped and also bright, bright blue. When we were about to pass each other, I once again said hello, and he stuttered and said the same greeting back. I slowed down to talk with him, but he was blushing so much, I moved on. I again looked back, and once again he was gone.
"I asked in the village about these two, but no one had seen them. Here's my theory: what better place for a history student to study history than to walk the road through its various eras. Not to talk to anyone, not to be seen, just to walk the road to see conditions at various times throughout history. Could these have been time travelers on a history assignment?"
One of those poignant and heartbreaking letters we ever received starts like this: "In the early summer of 1968, my daughter and I drove to New Mexico to visit some friends who had a small ranch there, before going west to meet my husband.
"Leaving Taos, we drove to Flagstaff and waited there until the early evening, to cross the Mojave desert at night. About two hours outside of Flagstaff, my daughter began to shout that she saw a spaceship in the sky. How did she know what it was?
"The sky was unusually cloudy, and I looked to where she was pointing and saw first two and then three lights moving rapidly in the sky, turning at 90 degree angles, pulsating and disappearing. I decided to pull off the road onto a dirt trail I saw to the right, leading into the desert.
"We watched the sky together, she in the back seat and I in front, when suddenly in front of the car there appeared a huge, dark and glowing object with a partial row of lights in the middle.
"The next thing I remember is my breath being knocked out of me as I somehow went through the windshield of the car. I remember looking back for an instant and the car was completely empty of myself or my daughter, and I was stepping into an opening in a vehicle.
"I couldn't see my daughter, and I asked in terror about her. 'She's going to be all right,' was what I heard in the center of my mind, and I was strangely soothed and unusually happy.
"These beings were tall, about six and a half feet, their skin was silvery." This description sounds like the "tall whites" that the medium Glennys MacKay remembers healing her. "I had a feeling of love or long lost family; it was almost like a homecoming. They kept saying 'Welcome, welcome!' in my mind, and laughing. They started speaking to me about my individual history. There was such love flowing through them. This wasn't exactly like words, but were rather images or sound pictures that moved between us.
"Then they took me to a room that contained the ship's driving mechanism. In front of me was a huge crystal, perhaps three feet across in the middle. It looked like two pyramids placed base to base, although at times it seemed multifaceted and totally brilliant and jewel-like, suspended in the air. They told me to put my mind into the crystal and as I did, I’d be able to learn how to fly the ship."
It's interesting to note that a friend of ours who was also taken out of his moving car and suddenly found himself inside a UFO also saw this exact type of diamond-shaped structure there. He tried to duplicate it many times over the years.
"Then they said, 'Time to return to earth.' Frantically, I panicked and asked about my daughter and was soothed, again by them saying she was okay. Then they said they were sorry, but didn’t say why, and there was great love.
"As we moved to the exit, they said my name again several times, and something about 'soul lineage.' I was reluctant to go, but the next thing I knew I had gone through the car windshield again, and found myself hanging out of the window gasping for air. I had been crying and was covered with sweat.
"My daughter was in the back seat crying. She told me never to touch her again, and that she knew who I was and she hated me. I tried to calm her and ask what had happened to her and she shouted, 'I’ll never tell you! Leave me alone!'
"I had a notebook in the car, and before we left, I forced myself to write these things down as I remembered them. I looked at the stars in a daze. It was almost midnight, and we had lost about two and a half hours.
"I drove on to California then, as if nothing had happened. I couldn’t tell anyone ever, and swore to myself to never discuss it.
"One night my daughter woke up screaming and I went to her bed and she said very factually, 'Mommy, I'm going to die. The spaceship people told me so. They said little bugs had gotten into my body and they were sorry, but there was nothing they could do since I’m a little girl.' Then she went back to sleep.
"This frightened me beyond belief. That morning, she woke up with a high fever and had severe joint swelling. I took her to the hospital and she was diagnosed as having rheumatoid arthritis, yet they weren’t too sure. They wondered if she’d been exposed to radiation. She was in great pain.
"I drove back to Texas and put her in the hospital there, only to find out that she had a very rare cancer of the nervous system, neuroblastoma, and it had metastasized, and she had just a few months to live. She lived until September of 1969.
"Before her death, she began to draw extraordinary pictures that were compared to those of a ten year old, even though she was only three and a half. She began to compose poetry, which I sometimes wrote out for her. The doctors were amazed and thought it might be the chemotherapy, but were not sure.
"The day after her funeral, a friend of mine who was a graduate student at the University of Texas called me from Austin in hysterics, saying that she had to drive to Houston immediately and tell me something that had happened.
"Without glasses, she was legally blind, but she drove anyway. I didn't think I could handle another emotional crisis, since I was in such grief—however, she came that day.
"We went for pizza, and she told me what had happened. She said that two nights before at about 2:20 in the morning, she was awakened by a noise and then saw her roof begin to dissolve. In the air above, she saw a type of spaceship.
"Two tall beings appeared, and in between them was my daughter. They told her they hadn’t been able to get through to me because of something, but to let me know that my daughter was okay and was with them! She thought that she’d gone completely insane. At that point in her story, I broke my promise to myself and told her what had happened that night in the desert, and we both cried and cried."
_________
We want to thank Anne Strieber for permission to print this article. www.unknowncountry.com
THURSDAY'S CHILD
My theory about "the visitors" is different from that of most UFO investigators: I think they are either time travelers, visitors from a parallel universe, the dead—or all 3.
Over the years, we have received many letters connecting the spirits of the dead with visitors. This type of anecdote is anathema to old line UFO researchers, who want the whole thing to be about the conventional concept of encounters with aliens who have arrived in space ships from another planet.
I remember when we invited our secretary, Lorie Barnes (who had had a lifetime of Visitor contact) up to our cabin, she went for a walk along the road. There she met up with her brother, who had been missing (and presumed dead) for over 20 years. She was delighted to see him again and he told her to tell everyone "he was OK." This seems to be the usual message that the dead have for us.
After Whitley, in a last-minute inspiration, put our mail center address in "Communion," we began receiving huge bags of mail every day. I actually had to hire a secretary just to help me OPEN them, but I read every single one and replied to each one that contained an address.
I began keeping a list of the commonalties I found in them. I posted the list above my desk and added a new item to it whenever I noticed the same thing mentioned in several letters from different people. I wish I still had that list today.
The one item I remember most clearly is: "They have something to do with what we call death." I remember this so distinctly because I have never found it in any of the UFO literature I have read.
After Communion was published, Whitley got a call from his agent, who said he had received a frantic message from a government official who needed to ask Whitley a question. Usually Whitley would not want to deal with this type of thing, but this incident was so compelling that he returned the call. The man said, "I have to know what you think about this, I have to know if this is true," so Whitley heard him out.
The man described a typical evening at their suburban home. Their elderly dog had just been taken for a walk, but she suddenly began insisting on going out again, so the wife put on her leash. As she stepped out to take the dog on a second walk, a huge white light passed over the back yard, and their little boy came running down the stairs. He said, "Mommy, Daddy! Jeff came to me with two aliens, and he said to tell you he's all right."
Jeff was the older brother, who had died in an auto accident a short time before. With the help of the visitors, he had somehow managed to bring the message to his grieving family that he was all right. As you'll see from the rest of this essay, this is the same message that keeps being repeated, time and again, by the departed who are somehow interacting with the visitors.
One letter described a soul literally being torn from a body. The man who experienced this wrote a description of what happened after he went to bed one night: "My head had been on the pillow less than thirty seconds when, for want of a better word, it exploded—'it' being my head. The only way I can describe this shocking sensation was that I thought a bomb had blown me to pieces, and that 'I' was nowhere. I ceased to be." Eventually his wife woke up and they switched on the bedroom light and sat up in bed talking quietly about what might have happened. He knew the experience hadn't been a dream, because he'd never fallen asleep. They then heard a low humming that gradually changed into a loud, steady throbbing sound. A quick glance at the clock revealed it was 2:30 a.m. (note that the time was almost the same as when the friend in Austin was contacted in the last letter I'll mention here). The throbbing became deeper and faster, then seemed to stop right over the roof of their house, directly above the bedroom. Before he could go outside to see what was going on, he felt something invisible grab his chest and start pulling with amazing force. He wrote, "I felt like my soul, not my body, was being pulled up vertically towards the still loud throbbing noise, and although I thought it would be futile, I screamed out for my wife to lie on top of me. She did this, and the sensation of pulling eased a little. I was screaming and struggling against an 'invisible beam,' with my wife lying full length on top of me in my own bed at 2:30 a.m. What a sight we would have presented if someone had walked in!" This went on for two full hours. "They pulled, I resisted, my wife hung on and the engine throbbed, until finally it went away, and exhausted and badly shaken, even devastated, we fell asleep." We recently received a letter that suggests the Visitors may have something to do with time travel. "Susan" wrote: "I haven't told this to anyone outside of my close family until now. There is a road in France that we lived next to in 1994 that had been there since Roman times. It is called in English, Highway #1, the oldest road in France. It winds between farms, and there are a couple of villages nearby. The farmers come out early in the morning to shoot pheasant. Those are the only people you see on this road.
"The major users of that road were the Roman legions who built and used it in their conquests. It was also used in both World Wars. Just walking to market, I felt I was walking along a well-traveled way. According to my husband, a history buff, quite a bit of history happened on that road, which might explain the two unusual, unnerving people I saw walking along it about two weeks apart.
"As I was going to market one mid-day, walking with my sack and holding onto my dog's leash, I saw an odd sight walking towards me, a young man. This was odd because almost no one used that road, but what really caught my attention was the way he stared at me and the unusual clothing he was wearing. He was about 19 or 20, with olive-colored skin. He was dressed in a navy blue sweat shirt with a hood and blue jeans. Sounds normal, right? Not right. The clothes didn't seem to allow for his body depth. It was as if someone had seen a picture of a sweatshirt and jeans and sewn the clothing from just looking at the photo. They looked extremely uncomfortable, and they were dyed wrong. “As he and I approached each other on the road, I saw that he had the biggest eyes I have ever seen—bright, bright blue. As we came closer, I said hello in French and he put his hooded head down, but still tried to look up at me as if he was curious. He said nothing. We both walked on and after about 20 steps I looked back. He was gone. Just plain gone.
"About two weeks later, the same thing happened again, except it was a different person of about the same age—19 or 20 year old. He was wearing the same clothing as the other young man. His skin was white instead of olive, his eyes were huge, almond shaped and also bright, bright blue. When we were about to pass each other, I once again said hello, and he stuttered and said the same greeting back. I slowed down to talk with him, but he was blushing so much, I moved on. I again looked back, and once again he was gone.
"I asked in the village about these two, but no one had seen them. Here's my theory: what better place for a history student to study history than to walk the road through its various eras. Not to talk to anyone, not to be seen, just to walk the road to see conditions at various times throughout history. Could these have been time travelers on a history assignment?"
One of those poignant and heartbreaking letters we ever received starts like this: "In the early summer of 1968, my daughter and I drove to New Mexico to visit some friends who had a small ranch there, before going west to meet my husband.
"Leaving Taos, we drove to Flagstaff and waited there until the early evening, to cross the Mojave desert at night. About two hours outside of Flagstaff, my daughter began to shout that she saw a spaceship in the sky. How did she know what it was?
"The sky was unusually cloudy, and I looked to where she was pointing and saw first two and then three lights moving rapidly in the sky, turning at 90 degree angles, pulsating and disappearing. I decided to pull off the road onto a dirt trail I saw to the right, leading into the desert.
"We watched the sky together, she in the back seat and I in front, when suddenly in front of the car there appeared a huge, dark and glowing object with a partial row of lights in the middle.
"The next thing I remember is my breath being knocked out of me as I somehow went through the windshield of the car. I remember looking back for an instant and the car was completely empty of myself or my daughter, and I was stepping into an opening in a vehicle.
"I couldn't see my daughter, and I asked in terror about her. 'She's going to be all right,' was what I heard in the center of my mind, and I was strangely soothed and unusually happy.
"These beings were tall, about six and a half feet, their skin was silvery." This description sounds like the "tall whites" that the medium Glennys MacKay remembers healing her. "I had a feeling of love or long lost family; it was almost like a homecoming. They kept saying 'Welcome, welcome!' in my mind, and laughing. They started speaking to me about my individual history. There was such love flowing through them. This wasn't exactly like words, but were rather images or sound pictures that moved between us.
"Then they took me to a room that contained the ship's driving mechanism. In front of me was a huge crystal, perhaps three feet across in the middle. It looked like two pyramids placed base to base, although at times it seemed multifaceted and totally brilliant and jewel-like, suspended in the air. They told me to put my mind into the crystal and as I did, I’d be able to learn how to fly the ship."
It's interesting to note that a friend of ours who was also taken out of his moving car and suddenly found himself inside a UFO also saw this exact type of diamond-shaped structure there. He tried to duplicate it many times over the years.
"Then they said, 'Time to return to earth.' Frantically, I panicked and asked about my daughter and was soothed, again by them saying she was okay. Then they said they were sorry, but didn’t say why, and there was great love.
"As we moved to the exit, they said my name again several times, and something about 'soul lineage.' I was reluctant to go, but the next thing I knew I had gone through the car windshield again, and found myself hanging out of the window gasping for air. I had been crying and was covered with sweat.
"My daughter was in the back seat crying. She told me never to touch her again, and that she knew who I was and she hated me. I tried to calm her and ask what had happened to her and she shouted, 'I’ll never tell you! Leave me alone!'
"I had a notebook in the car, and before we left, I forced myself to write these things down as I remembered them. I looked at the stars in a daze. It was almost midnight, and we had lost about two and a half hours.
"I drove on to California then, as if nothing had happened. I couldn’t tell anyone ever, and swore to myself to never discuss it.
"One night my daughter woke up screaming and I went to her bed and she said very factually, 'Mommy, I'm going to die. The spaceship people told me so. They said little bugs had gotten into my body and they were sorry, but there was nothing they could do since I’m a little girl.' Then she went back to sleep.
"This frightened me beyond belief. That morning, she woke up with a high fever and had severe joint swelling. I took her to the hospital and she was diagnosed as having rheumatoid arthritis, yet they weren’t too sure. They wondered if she’d been exposed to radiation. She was in great pain.
"I drove back to Texas and put her in the hospital there, only to find out that she had a very rare cancer of the nervous system, neuroblastoma, and it had metastasized, and she had just a few months to live. She lived until September of 1969.
"Before her death, she began to draw extraordinary pictures that were compared to those of a ten year old, even though she was only three and a half. She began to compose poetry, which I sometimes wrote out for her. The doctors were amazed and thought it might be the chemotherapy, but were not sure.
"The day after her funeral, a friend of mine who was a graduate student at the University of Texas called me from Austin in hysterics, saying that she had to drive to Houston immediately and tell me something that had happened.
"Without glasses, she was legally blind, but she drove anyway. I didn't think I could handle another emotional crisis, since I was in such grief—however, she came that day.
"We went for pizza, and she told me what had happened. She said that two nights before at about 2:20 in the morning, she was awakened by a noise and then saw her roof begin to dissolve. In the air above, she saw a type of spaceship.
"Two tall beings appeared, and in between them was my daughter. They told her they hadn’t been able to get through to me because of something, but to let me know that my daughter was okay and was with them! She thought that she’d gone completely insane. At that point in her story, I broke my promise to myself and told her what had happened that night in the desert, and we both cried and cried."
_________
We want to thank Anne Strieber for permission to print this article. www.unknowncountry.com
THURSDAY'S CHILD
Thursday, August 21, 2008
CHRIS BADER
Chris Bader produced a documentary on our organization, the UFOCCI (The UFO Contact Center International), for his doctoral thesis. He also had a great interest in Bigfoot and has written a book about him. Here is an extracted version of one of his articles which appeared in "Exploring Unexplained Phenomena". He is now Dr. Chris Bader and it was my pleasure to be his friend.
_________
The County Sheriff of Skamania Country (WA) was gruff, saying that he had been on many "wild goose chases." On one occasion a hunter brought in a very unclear picture of what he said was a Bigfoot body. The sheriff sent out a 35-man search team looking for the body fearing it might be human, but never found anything.
All in all, I found varying degrees of belief, disbelief and even disdain about the Bigfoot legend. Everyone I talked to, however, was agreed in one respect.... that I must see a man named David*.
David lives in a small town a few miles away from Stevenson, Washington. I arrived at his farm early one morning in February. Cars in all states of repair were scattered about the yard. Hundreds of chickens ran about the farm, while dogs tied to posts howled. Fences which came out of nowhere and confined nothing in particular ran into the distance.
As I got out of my car, David appeared and extended his hand to greet me. He wore what I found to be his customary garb; a "safari" hat, homemade pants held together by duct tape, and a green jacket with a patch that said "Bigfoot Country." His wrinkled face was framed by a pure white beard and his skinny arms were topped by enormous, leathery hands.
David is about eighty years old, and in the time he has lived in Skamania County, he has become quite notorious for his strong belief in Bigfoot. In fact, people in town told me that he was the only person who still talked about Bigfoot. Everyone knows him; he seems to be the fabric that holds the belief together.
David seems to enjoy and encourage his reputation and asserts his role as the local "Bigfoot authority." He has brought what he claims are Bigfoot droppings and hair to the newspaper and sheriff's offices, all of which reinforce the town's opinion of him as a "Bigfoot nut."
David claims over a dozen sightings of the creature. On one occasion, he was paddling down a "river in B.C." when he saw a Bigfoot on the riverbank which he was able to observe for twenty minutes. He has seen the creatures tracks many times, and often hears its screams. David, however, has widely different opinions about Bigfoot than most "mainstream" circles.
One Bigfoot witness, quoted in Janet and Colin Bord's "Alien Animals", gave a very common description of it:
"The creature... stood fully five feet high...disproportionately broad and square at the fore shoulders, with arms of great length...The head was small compared to the rest of the creature, and appeared to be set upon its shoulders without a neck. The whole was covered with dark brown and cinnamon colored hair... (pg. 144)."
Although Bigfoot is often described as being taller than five feet, and has been reported in a variety of colors, the above is a good "average" description.
David has his own ideas about Bigfoot's physical appearance and called every single purported Bigfoot photograph that I showed him a hoax. He vehemently claims that Bigfoot only has black fur, has a severely pointed head, and never, ever smells. Other reported hair colors are either cases of mistaken identity, or Bigfoot wearing an animal skin coat, and that Bigfoot's smell may arise from the creature "passing gas."
I immediately found it interesting that David makes such wild claims. He is already separated from mainstream society because of his talk of Bigfoot, but with his "unorthodox" claims about Bigfoot's appearance, he even separates himself from mainstream Bigfoot circles where he might find acceptance. He seemed to have a need to have a personal stake in the Bigfoot phenomenon; to own it as his own.
David has a wide assortment of Bigfoot material at his farm. In his barn is a 9 1/2 foot tall, "life size" (says David) model of Bigfoot. It is covered with dark, black hair and has a triangular head. In his living room he has a large tablet filled with Bigfoot clippings and drawings.
On my second trip to visit David, I was able to look through his notebook at some length. Among the assorted articles were some of David's pastel sketches of Bigfoot, all of which had writing on them. These writings were always statements which were supposed to be from the creature itself. For example, on a drawing of Bigfoot's head are the following phrases:
"I was here first... I am real... don't pick on me little man. Throw me a fish."
David seems to reinforce his "ownership" of Bigfoot by actually attempting to step inside the creatures psyche; he thinks for Bigfoot. There are several other sketches in which David appears to be identifying with and becoming the sketch. In fact, in a local newspaper article about him, David is quoted as saying that he wears his hair long and has a beard to "identify with the creature."
At the end of a letter concerning Bigfoot, written to the Skamania Country Pioneer, David wrote the following:
"...deceiving people is not my game. I want truth and I want everyone to have it. Only the truth will make us FREE (sic)".
It was obvious to me at this point that Bigfoot was more than a mystery animal to David. He was a zealot of sorts; standing on a mountain yelling at everyone to come to the "truth"; that truth being a nine-foot tall, hairy monster.
On my third trip to visit David, I began to receive hints as to the role Bigfoot plays in his psyche.
After I arrived at his farm, David ushered me inside and immediately began talking about the environment and how people must respect it. He explained in the finest detail how to make a smokeless stove, drawing a chart and describing it's inner workings. Then came the clincher...
Bigfoot, he said, knows when campers are being ecologically aware and likes such people. He also said that Bigfoot hates guns and avoids people who carry them.
It goes without saying that, excluding the possibility of David "mind-melding" with Bigfoot, he has no way of knowing what the creature thinks about environmentally aware people. He has no way of knowing if Bigfoot is even capable of such thoughts. The creature seems to have become an outside projection of David's values. Since he "owns" Bigfoot, he can dictate its thoughts. David does not like guns; neither does Bigfoot.
I found that David's connections with Bigfoot ran even deeper, for after he finished discussing wood stoves, he began to discuss "social cycles."
According to David, humans are living in a social cycle which is ultimately self-destructive for our greed and exploitation of the environment will bring our ruin. When explaining Bigfoot's way of life, however, David spoke of a being who is closer to nature, more environmentally conscious and aware than humans; a noble savage.
The noble savage, often discussed in conjunction with Bigfoot phenomena, has been a figure in art and folk tales for many hundreds of years. Described as a man who lives in the wilds, devoid of civilization, the noble savage lives off the land and yet he does not destroy. He takes what he needs and is never greedy. Most of all, he lives in harmony with his surroundings; a commentary on our greedy, destructive society.
I saw Bigfoot as David's noble savage. David attempted to "own" the creature by describing it in his own, unorthodox way, and calling all others hoaxes. He is then able to utilize his ownership and project his fears about the downfall of civilization only a creature that may or may not be real.
I have continued to spend time with David and he is a friendly and fascinating individual. I make no judgments about the reality of his Bigfoot sightings as he was extremely sincere and I have no reasons to doubt his veracity. But, so far as David is concerned, the "real" existence of the creature is probably a moot point anyway, for it has inextricably shaped his beliefs and behavior.
*...David is not his real name.
_________
Lyle, Washington also has Bigfoot reports. It is not far from Stevenson. As representatives of the UFOCCI we went to a farm up above Lyle where the persons who lived there saw Bigfoot quite often. Outside their house they had huge yard lights and they would see him standing there looking at their house. In fact one evening a "Mama" Bigfoot brought her child and held it up to the windows of the house so it could see in and observe "humans". We climbed up a hill where they purportedly hung out. On our way back down we heard a loud "humph" and knew we were being observed. It didn't take long to get back to the house and safety!
THURSDAY'S CHILD
_________
The County Sheriff of Skamania Country (WA) was gruff, saying that he had been on many "wild goose chases." On one occasion a hunter brought in a very unclear picture of what he said was a Bigfoot body. The sheriff sent out a 35-man search team looking for the body fearing it might be human, but never found anything.
All in all, I found varying degrees of belief, disbelief and even disdain about the Bigfoot legend. Everyone I talked to, however, was agreed in one respect.... that I must see a man named David*.
David lives in a small town a few miles away from Stevenson, Washington. I arrived at his farm early one morning in February. Cars in all states of repair were scattered about the yard. Hundreds of chickens ran about the farm, while dogs tied to posts howled. Fences which came out of nowhere and confined nothing in particular ran into the distance.
As I got out of my car, David appeared and extended his hand to greet me. He wore what I found to be his customary garb; a "safari" hat, homemade pants held together by duct tape, and a green jacket with a patch that said "Bigfoot Country." His wrinkled face was framed by a pure white beard and his skinny arms were topped by enormous, leathery hands.
David is about eighty years old, and in the time he has lived in Skamania County, he has become quite notorious for his strong belief in Bigfoot. In fact, people in town told me that he was the only person who still talked about Bigfoot. Everyone knows him; he seems to be the fabric that holds the belief together.
David seems to enjoy and encourage his reputation and asserts his role as the local "Bigfoot authority." He has brought what he claims are Bigfoot droppings and hair to the newspaper and sheriff's offices, all of which reinforce the town's opinion of him as a "Bigfoot nut."
David claims over a dozen sightings of the creature. On one occasion, he was paddling down a "river in B.C." when he saw a Bigfoot on the riverbank which he was able to observe for twenty minutes. He has seen the creatures tracks many times, and often hears its screams. David, however, has widely different opinions about Bigfoot than most "mainstream" circles.
One Bigfoot witness, quoted in Janet and Colin Bord's "Alien Animals", gave a very common description of it:
"The creature... stood fully five feet high...disproportionately broad and square at the fore shoulders, with arms of great length...The head was small compared to the rest of the creature, and appeared to be set upon its shoulders without a neck. The whole was covered with dark brown and cinnamon colored hair... (pg. 144)."
Although Bigfoot is often described as being taller than five feet, and has been reported in a variety of colors, the above is a good "average" description.
David has his own ideas about Bigfoot's physical appearance and called every single purported Bigfoot photograph that I showed him a hoax. He vehemently claims that Bigfoot only has black fur, has a severely pointed head, and never, ever smells. Other reported hair colors are either cases of mistaken identity, or Bigfoot wearing an animal skin coat, and that Bigfoot's smell may arise from the creature "passing gas."
I immediately found it interesting that David makes such wild claims. He is already separated from mainstream society because of his talk of Bigfoot, but with his "unorthodox" claims about Bigfoot's appearance, he even separates himself from mainstream Bigfoot circles where he might find acceptance. He seemed to have a need to have a personal stake in the Bigfoot phenomenon; to own it as his own.
David has a wide assortment of Bigfoot material at his farm. In his barn is a 9 1/2 foot tall, "life size" (says David) model of Bigfoot. It is covered with dark, black hair and has a triangular head. In his living room he has a large tablet filled with Bigfoot clippings and drawings.
On my second trip to visit David, I was able to look through his notebook at some length. Among the assorted articles were some of David's pastel sketches of Bigfoot, all of which had writing on them. These writings were always statements which were supposed to be from the creature itself. For example, on a drawing of Bigfoot's head are the following phrases:
"I was here first... I am real... don't pick on me little man. Throw me a fish."
David seems to reinforce his "ownership" of Bigfoot by actually attempting to step inside the creatures psyche; he thinks for Bigfoot. There are several other sketches in which David appears to be identifying with and becoming the sketch. In fact, in a local newspaper article about him, David is quoted as saying that he wears his hair long and has a beard to "identify with the creature."
At the end of a letter concerning Bigfoot, written to the Skamania Country Pioneer, David wrote the following:
"...deceiving people is not my game. I want truth and I want everyone to have it. Only the truth will make us FREE (sic)".
It was obvious to me at this point that Bigfoot was more than a mystery animal to David. He was a zealot of sorts; standing on a mountain yelling at everyone to come to the "truth"; that truth being a nine-foot tall, hairy monster.
On my third trip to visit David, I began to receive hints as to the role Bigfoot plays in his psyche.
After I arrived at his farm, David ushered me inside and immediately began talking about the environment and how people must respect it. He explained in the finest detail how to make a smokeless stove, drawing a chart and describing it's inner workings. Then came the clincher...
Bigfoot, he said, knows when campers are being ecologically aware and likes such people. He also said that Bigfoot hates guns and avoids people who carry them.
It goes without saying that, excluding the possibility of David "mind-melding" with Bigfoot, he has no way of knowing what the creature thinks about environmentally aware people. He has no way of knowing if Bigfoot is even capable of such thoughts. The creature seems to have become an outside projection of David's values. Since he "owns" Bigfoot, he can dictate its thoughts. David does not like guns; neither does Bigfoot.
I found that David's connections with Bigfoot ran even deeper, for after he finished discussing wood stoves, he began to discuss "social cycles."
According to David, humans are living in a social cycle which is ultimately self-destructive for our greed and exploitation of the environment will bring our ruin. When explaining Bigfoot's way of life, however, David spoke of a being who is closer to nature, more environmentally conscious and aware than humans; a noble savage.
The noble savage, often discussed in conjunction with Bigfoot phenomena, has been a figure in art and folk tales for many hundreds of years. Described as a man who lives in the wilds, devoid of civilization, the noble savage lives off the land and yet he does not destroy. He takes what he needs and is never greedy. Most of all, he lives in harmony with his surroundings; a commentary on our greedy, destructive society.
I saw Bigfoot as David's noble savage. David attempted to "own" the creature by describing it in his own, unorthodox way, and calling all others hoaxes. He is then able to utilize his ownership and project his fears about the downfall of civilization only a creature that may or may not be real.
I have continued to spend time with David and he is a friendly and fascinating individual. I make no judgments about the reality of his Bigfoot sightings as he was extremely sincere and I have no reasons to doubt his veracity. But, so far as David is concerned, the "real" existence of the creature is probably a moot point anyway, for it has inextricably shaped his beliefs and behavior.
*...David is not his real name.
_________
Lyle, Washington also has Bigfoot reports. It is not far from Stevenson. As representatives of the UFOCCI we went to a farm up above Lyle where the persons who lived there saw Bigfoot quite often. Outside their house they had huge yard lights and they would see him standing there looking at their house. In fact one evening a "Mama" Bigfoot brought her child and held it up to the windows of the house so it could see in and observe "humans". We climbed up a hill where they purportedly hung out. On our way back down we heard a loud "humph" and knew we were being observed. It didn't take long to get back to the house and safety!
THURSDAY'S CHILD
Sunday, August 17, 2008
A LIFETIME OF ENCOUNTERS
I remember an incident when I was about two years old. Due to my mother's illness, my paternal grandmother took my father, older sister and me to live in her house. My sister slept in my deceased grandfather's bed. I slept in my sister's bed that had ropes, to create a bed rail to confine me. On this day I was standing in bed holding on to the rope when a "playmate" came into the room.
During my childhood my family tried to convince me that the beings I saw and played with were figments of my imagination. They teased me about my invisible friends. My sister told her friends who had siblings my age about the imaginary playmates. Since I was the only one to see the creatures, I became the laughing stock of the school. I was born 12/29/40, so you can gather what the situation did to my self image and self esteem. When I was five and ten years old, I saw child psychiatrists who proclaimed me sane. I have felt that one of the Visitors was watching over and protecting me since I was five. In my fantasy dreams, I called him my "brother."
My first marriage produced a daughter. I left my first husband when our child was a year old. We moved from St. Louis to Jonesboro, Arkansas so I could get a divorce. After that, the beings' visits must have increased, as there are more frequent blank spots in my memory. At times, my daughter became difficult for my second husband and I to wake, and we both had unexplainable problems with our right nostrils. I noticed that the "holes in my memory" seemed to precede periods of unexplainable agitation. The agitation has occurred from our move to Memphis to this date. One incident that I recall in Memphis may have some relevance. On a particular morning, my daughter awoke and suddenly announced that she wanted to start a collection of owls. She had previously had no interest in them. At the time I thought it was strange.
A few months later I became fascinated with the Pyramids of Egypt. I looked for a pyramid necklace. A few years later I found a pyramid with a circle inside it, but never did find the one I really wanted. It had the pyramid inside of a square, with the circle inside of it. whenever I asked for this design I received strange looks. Now I understand the significance of it.
There were several recurrences of a nose problem. Similarly, my husband began to have the same affliction. When his persisted, he went to the doctor. One nostril was an unusual robin's egg blue. The doctor said it was strange and prescribed a medication that worked, much to the doctor's surprise. Did the visitors cause the agitation and the nose problem?
Another incident was when I woke up near dawn dripping wet with perspiration and in an uncontrollable, raw, crude, animal-like terror. In the center of my head I heard a voice say that everything was all right, and to calm down and go to sleep. I took a few deep breaths, lay back down and went to sleep until the alarm woke me. Years later my husband had a similar dream about what he described as a gun pointed just above his eyes on his forehead. He heard a similar voice. On two different occasions I woke in the middle of the night with extreme burning below my ribs and above my diaphragm. Several doses of Pepto-Bismol eased the burning, but not the diarrhea that followed.
Two years ago, the last child married and moved out. That's the next time I have a memory of visitors: My husband had left for work, and I was also preparing to leave. This is the first time I experienced a compelling urge to take a nap. As I was lying in bed, I saw a human-like figure enter the room. I felt total terror, but I felt as if I knew this entity. The feeling began to calm me down. The being seemed surprised at my reaction. It, or she, asked me why I was afraid, as it had been many years since I'd acted that way. I asked if this had happened to me often, and the answer was "Yes." I was a "chosen" one for them and the Supreme Being. It was then that I made an agreement with the creature. The deal was that it would completely answer all my questions, now and in the future; for this I would cooperate with them totally and completely. With negotiations completed, we proceeded.
The first question I asked was, "How long have you been visiting me?" The reply was both before and after I was in the womb. My sister was born in 1934, and during that pregnancy, my mother suffered with uremic toxemia. The doctor advised that mother have no more children. The entity explained that they had been seeing my mother and monitoring her pregnancy with me. They made tests on me while I was in the womb. The visitor revealed that one of the tests caused my six-week early arrival. It was not her illness, as previously thought.
Next I asked the being if they were the things that my aunts told me my mother sees. To explain, mother's sisters decided it was time I knew the truth about my mother. They thought I was old enough to understand, now that I had completed my freshman year at college. They told me about the beings that mother reportedly kept seeing, and the things they allegedly did. Could these events have caused her to lose her sanity and be hospitalized, not brain damage from the toxemia? She kept seeing those things in the hospital until she died, much to the family's dismay. Answering these questions, the being confirmed my suspicions.
One other question I remember asking was why I was told that I'm a "chosen one," and what does that mean? All I remember is something about being trained to do something for the "hierarchy" and the "Supreme One." I will know the rest "when the time comes." Who is the Supreme One? The one that we say is the All Knowing One God. As far as I know, this was not from my imagination.
When I was reading the section of your book (Whitley's book) regarding the triad, there was a voice in the center of my head. Quite simply, it said, "The triad is simple. The Saints form one side of the triad; others call them the Ascended Masters, or Spiritual Guides. We, the visitors, form another. When the Masters and the Supreme One came together, we (visitors) were the resisters. When the time comes for all of us to work together, the resisters will be involved in our work together."
What is the goal? The answer continued: "The ultimate aim of the work is to save Earth. This is part of the message that the two of you must work as a team and deliver to the people."
Unlike your experiences (Whitley's), I'm not able to obtain confirmations of mine. Everyone from my childhood is either dead or I've lost contact with them. The exceptions are my sister and two senile aunts. My aunts say that they recall nothing regarding my mother's "hallucinations." My sister says that I am the strangest thing that she recalls from those years. She says she remembers no single incident. None of my children nor my husband recall anything unusual.
_________
This case was excerpted from "The Communion Letters" by Whitley Strieber
THURSDAY'S CHILD
During my childhood my family tried to convince me that the beings I saw and played with were figments of my imagination. They teased me about my invisible friends. My sister told her friends who had siblings my age about the imaginary playmates. Since I was the only one to see the creatures, I became the laughing stock of the school. I was born 12/29/40, so you can gather what the situation did to my self image and self esteem. When I was five and ten years old, I saw child psychiatrists who proclaimed me sane. I have felt that one of the Visitors was watching over and protecting me since I was five. In my fantasy dreams, I called him my "brother."
My first marriage produced a daughter. I left my first husband when our child was a year old. We moved from St. Louis to Jonesboro, Arkansas so I could get a divorce. After that, the beings' visits must have increased, as there are more frequent blank spots in my memory. At times, my daughter became difficult for my second husband and I to wake, and we both had unexplainable problems with our right nostrils. I noticed that the "holes in my memory" seemed to precede periods of unexplainable agitation. The agitation has occurred from our move to Memphis to this date. One incident that I recall in Memphis may have some relevance. On a particular morning, my daughter awoke and suddenly announced that she wanted to start a collection of owls. She had previously had no interest in them. At the time I thought it was strange.
A few months later I became fascinated with the Pyramids of Egypt. I looked for a pyramid necklace. A few years later I found a pyramid with a circle inside it, but never did find the one I really wanted. It had the pyramid inside of a square, with the circle inside of it. whenever I asked for this design I received strange looks. Now I understand the significance of it.
There were several recurrences of a nose problem. Similarly, my husband began to have the same affliction. When his persisted, he went to the doctor. One nostril was an unusual robin's egg blue. The doctor said it was strange and prescribed a medication that worked, much to the doctor's surprise. Did the visitors cause the agitation and the nose problem?
Another incident was when I woke up near dawn dripping wet with perspiration and in an uncontrollable, raw, crude, animal-like terror. In the center of my head I heard a voice say that everything was all right, and to calm down and go to sleep. I took a few deep breaths, lay back down and went to sleep until the alarm woke me. Years later my husband had a similar dream about what he described as a gun pointed just above his eyes on his forehead. He heard a similar voice. On two different occasions I woke in the middle of the night with extreme burning below my ribs and above my diaphragm. Several doses of Pepto-Bismol eased the burning, but not the diarrhea that followed.
Two years ago, the last child married and moved out. That's the next time I have a memory of visitors: My husband had left for work, and I was also preparing to leave. This is the first time I experienced a compelling urge to take a nap. As I was lying in bed, I saw a human-like figure enter the room. I felt total terror, but I felt as if I knew this entity. The feeling began to calm me down. The being seemed surprised at my reaction. It, or she, asked me why I was afraid, as it had been many years since I'd acted that way. I asked if this had happened to me often, and the answer was "Yes." I was a "chosen" one for them and the Supreme Being. It was then that I made an agreement with the creature. The deal was that it would completely answer all my questions, now and in the future; for this I would cooperate with them totally and completely. With negotiations completed, we proceeded.
The first question I asked was, "How long have you been visiting me?" The reply was both before and after I was in the womb. My sister was born in 1934, and during that pregnancy, my mother suffered with uremic toxemia. The doctor advised that mother have no more children. The entity explained that they had been seeing my mother and monitoring her pregnancy with me. They made tests on me while I was in the womb. The visitor revealed that one of the tests caused my six-week early arrival. It was not her illness, as previously thought.
Next I asked the being if they were the things that my aunts told me my mother sees. To explain, mother's sisters decided it was time I knew the truth about my mother. They thought I was old enough to understand, now that I had completed my freshman year at college. They told me about the beings that mother reportedly kept seeing, and the things they allegedly did. Could these events have caused her to lose her sanity and be hospitalized, not brain damage from the toxemia? She kept seeing those things in the hospital until she died, much to the family's dismay. Answering these questions, the being confirmed my suspicions.
One other question I remember asking was why I was told that I'm a "chosen one," and what does that mean? All I remember is something about being trained to do something for the "hierarchy" and the "Supreme One." I will know the rest "when the time comes." Who is the Supreme One? The one that we say is the All Knowing One God. As far as I know, this was not from my imagination.
When I was reading the section of your book (Whitley's book) regarding the triad, there was a voice in the center of my head. Quite simply, it said, "The triad is simple. The Saints form one side of the triad; others call them the Ascended Masters, or Spiritual Guides. We, the visitors, form another. When the Masters and the Supreme One came together, we (visitors) were the resisters. When the time comes for all of us to work together, the resisters will be involved in our work together."
What is the goal? The answer continued: "The ultimate aim of the work is to save Earth. This is part of the message that the two of you must work as a team and deliver to the people."
Unlike your experiences (Whitley's), I'm not able to obtain confirmations of mine. Everyone from my childhood is either dead or I've lost contact with them. The exceptions are my sister and two senile aunts. My aunts say that they recall nothing regarding my mother's "hallucinations." My sister says that I am the strangest thing that she recalls from those years. She says she remembers no single incident. None of my children nor my husband recall anything unusual.
_________
This case was excerpted from "The Communion Letters" by Whitley Strieber
THURSDAY'S CHILD
Thursday, August 14, 2008
SCOTT CORRALES
Pedal to the Metal: UFO Car Chases
By Scott Corrales
INEXPLICATA Journal of Hispanic UFOlogy
While we marvel at the flood of new cases (and visual evidence) that reaches us every day through a variety of websites and YouTube, it’s hard not to forget the simpler cases of the past, such as one which occurred in a summer much like this one, but thirty years ago and in a country far, far away...
It was July 24, 1978--mid-winter in South American landmass—when a cab driver picked up a fare that would change his life forever. At around 3 o’clock in the morning, Carlos Brandi,19, called for a cab to get him back to his home in Guaymallén, a community in the Argentinean province of Mendoza. As fate would have it, Aldo Nieves, scarcely older than his passenger and driving a white Peugeot 404, was dispatched to pick up the waiting passenger.
Brandi boarded the car and after exchanging the usual pleasantries, sat back in seat in silence. Nieves drove along the empty streets until they came to a crossroads near the Belgrano Train Station in the town of San Jose. Completely unaware of the importance of crossroads in the esoteric tradition, passenger and driver both noticed a white source of light moving along at an estimated altitude of 500 meters. They exchanged words as to what the nature of the light could be, and then dismissed the matter...until both noticed that the white light was shadowing them, much like a feline matching the pace of its prey.
Perhaps it was their youth, perhaps it was the excitement that the UFO phenomenon has always caused in Argentina, but the passenger made the cabbie a bold proposal: to steer toward the object to have a better view. Stranger still was that the cabbie should accept, turning off the meter and heading his Peugeot in the object’s direction. Aldo Nieves dutifully radioed this back to Leonardo Argañaraz, his dispatcher, who in turn told all his other units to rendezvous with Nieves and his passenger at the location in question, taking care to contact the authorities as well. The young driver gave a blow-by-blow account over his car radio to all the other vehicles as he approached the glowing unknown.
Meanwhile Carlos Brandi, the passenger, had his torso halfway out the window as he stared at the object, which now acquired more defined proportions and resembled “ a giant mushroom”. Suddenly inspired, the driver began flashing his lights at the unknown presence in a form of improvised semaphore, hoping to make contact. His improvised signals were more successful than he could have anticipated; as the object appeared to take notice, speeding up ahead of the taxicab and then slowing down to remain still at a distance of roughly a thousand meters. At this point, Brandi and Nieves were in a position to make out some details: the object, whose diameter was guesstimated at ten meters with a height of 5-6 meters, had a white light on its upper section and four “navigation lights” around its edge.
The craft – for it was now possible to speak of it in terms of a structured vehicle – moved side to side across the road, pausing briefly over a service station and then weaving out sight into a residential area and becoming visible again. And it was at this location – the Santa Ana district – that pedestrian onlookers became witnesses to the otherworldly presence. Two women waiting for the bus gazed skyward at the erratic object; one of them was seized by a sudden panic that made her cling to the trunk of a nearby tree and scream in terror at the unknown
But the game was afoot, and the young hunters pursued their prize with gusto. Upon reaching the road linking the villages of Corralitos and Rodeo de la Cruz, the Peugeot’s engine began to sputter. The taxicab’s headlights dimmed, then died out completely, as did the radio link to the other units and the dispatcher’s base station. Brandi and Nieves suddenly found their roles reversed – the hunters unwittingly turned into prey – as the object wheeled around towards them. Brandi opened the rear passenger door and ran out of the cab into the darkness, seeking shelter behind a nearby house. Nieves was frozen in his seat, unable to move his legs, until he managed to overcome this paralysis and desert his Peugeot, taking shelter next to his companion at a distance of some thirty meters from the car.
The craft was now in sight: seized by fear, both humans could do little else but keep their eyes riveted on the unearthly structure. Featuring large windows or portholes, the presence of occupants – tall, slender humanoid silhouettes – could be made out clearly enough for a detailed description to be made. The figures were described as hooded and wearing close-fitting garments; one of them appeared to operate some kind of instrument panel that was suspended in the air. No noise issued from the vehicle as the figures scurried around inside.
Thoughts raced furiously through Nieves’s head, as he feared harm from these presences, which looked down from above at the Peugeot “much like doctors observing a surgical procedure from the gallery above,” as he described it. But any fears that the slender, hooded figures would whisk him away to an uncertain fate were dissipated when the object pulled away into the distance. After a while, still in the clutches of terror, passenger and driver returned to the taxicab, whose engine turned over normally, but with a curious detail: the intensity of the car’s lights was so strong that the dome light burst; the lights of the car radio short-circuited as well.
Perhaps feeling a modicum of relief, the erstwhile hunters returned their attention to the craft, which was now motionless and at quite a distance. There was a flash and an explosion – perhaps a sonic boom? – and the vehicle vanished from sight. It was at this point that Nieves passed out, overcome by the sound. At this point, some of the other livery vehicles arrived at the scene, offering assistance to the unconscious driver and to Brandi, the distraught passenger. Nieves was taken to Mendoza’s General Hospital, where he awoke in such a state of nervous excitement that it became necessary to put him in restraints. The explosion and subsequent disappearance of the strange object was confirmed by three other cab drivers, the same ones who took Aldo Nieves to the hospital.
Veteran Argentinean researcher Carlos Banchs, who interviewed both witnesses and wrote a report on the case, notes that the Argentinean Air Force dismissed this case as “a mistaken observation of its nocturnal training exercises over the area.”
Calling Mr. Goodwrench
The belief that UFOs were able to cause "electromagnetic interference" (alternatively known as EM effects) on Earth goes back to the early days of the phenomenon, when it was noticed that the proximity of these unknown forms could cause car headlights to dim or turn off completely, produce radio interference and cause wide-scale blackouts in different parts of the world. Whether this effect is a deliberate test of man-made devices or a purely accidental remains unanswered, naturally.
Researchers interested in the "vehicle interference" aspect of the phenomenon believed at first that only gasoline-fueled internal combustion engines were prone to being affected by UFO electromagnetism. Then cases involving diesel engines succumbing to the proximity of an unknown object became known.
Spanish UFO researcher Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos devotes a comprehensive chapter to EM effects in his landmark Enciclopedia de los encuentros cercanos con ovnis (Barcelona: Plaza y Janes, 1987). Ballester describes the effects produced by a UFO as following a fairly standard pattern with certain variations: engine failure followed by a dimming or darkening of headlights; diesel engines continue running but their operation becomes haphazard, stopping and starting. "It frequently becomes necessary," he observes, "to restart gasoline-fueled engines altogether [...] this succession of effects appears to correspond, at least from the theoretical standpoint, to the presence of strong ionization. This could account for failures in the electrical system by hindering the proper operation of spark plugs and draining batteries."
Endless Summer – The Marx Incident
The American love affair with the car – featured in such cinematic experiences as George Lucas’ “American Graffiti” – usually conjures up images of long hot summer nights and days, convertible coupes and sedans and young men and women enjoying each other’s company to the sounds of an AM radio. But what holds true for the silver screen often falls flat in real life, and this is certainly true for the following case.
Pennsylvania, a state with a long history of UFO sightings, boasts a vehicular persecution case that has not been widely discussed at all, and is in fact known only to a few. It involves a person known to this author and to others Pennsylvania UFO and paranormal researchers; at his own request, we have identified him with the pseudonym of "Jeff Marx" and the names of the other parties involved in his hair-raising story are aliases as well.
In June 1965, Jeff Marx and three companions--his best friend Alan and their respective girlfriends, Mary and Lily--were driving at night aboard a brand new convertible in Cranberry Township, north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Tooling around in the warm summer evening, only a week after graduating from high school and with the prospect of the future before them, the foursome had no idea that the unknown was about to execute an unwelcome intrusion into their lives.
"I had a convertible that plays a major part in this sighting," adds Jeff Marx, "what one would call...evidence."
That evening, he recalls, he stopped by to collect his friends and they went off to enjoy a few rounds of miniature golf followed by a visit to a pizza parlor. Given the lateness of the hour, they decided to begin the return home. Alan, however, asked his friend to drive down a few country roads to partake of a bottle of beer he'd placed in the car. "I was northbound on Route 19 and I turned onto Freedom-Cryder Road. Back in 1965 it was a very rural area. You had farmhouses further down the road toward Freedom. We turned down this road about ten or twenty five minutes after ten [o'clock]."
As convertible made its way down the country road, Alan asked Jeff to pull over, since something very unusual was going on. "That light's been following us for a while," he explained, after the car had halted on the curb. "That light up there. It's getting awful close and I don't hear anything."
Jeff Marx admits that he could not hear anything either, but the size of the light in the black sky appeared to be increasing, coming toward them. "We decided to get out of there," Marx recalls, "but I couldn't get the engine started. We jumped out of the car, ran across the road into a field, and hid under a [fallen] tree. By now the object was over the car, illuminating the area. As dark as it was, I could see my car. Alan said the object reminded him of a teardrop, and to me it looked like an upside-down ice cream cone."
Nearly forty years after the events, Marx is still amazed by one particular aspect of the uncanny unknown object: "It was white hot, really bright, brighter than anything I've ever seen in my life. It wobbled and swayed back and forth. I wanted to get a better look at it, and I stood up to take a better look. Then I felt this wave of heat hit my face."
His passengers weren't as awestruck as he: Mary was on the verge of terror, shouting that they were all going to die; Alan and Lily had to pull Jeff down behind the apparent safety of the fallen tree after his effort to examine the phenomenon more closely.
"Mary was really upset," adds Marx. "It really freaked her out."
What seemed like an hour went by before the pellucid object finished its inspection of the convertible. It drifted away from the car and into the night sky, moving upward and picking up speed, vanishing out of sight in a matter of seconds. Marx remembers that the object acquired a reddish cast as it disappeared.
"We were pretty shaken by the incident," says Marx. "Another car came down the road in the opposite direction, stopped by my car and looked at it, and then sped away. I don't know if he was a witnessed to what happened, but after looking at my car, he didn't waste much time getting away from it."
Walking over to the car, the shaken teenagers tried to get back inside, only to find that the door handles were hot. Once inside, the young women in the rear remarked that the seats were warm; the same strange warmth emanated from the dashboard and the steering wheel. "The chrome strip around the windshield was so hot I couldn't even touch it--it burned my hand."
The convertible started up normally and the four witnesses to the unusual luminous phenomenon returned home in silence. "Alan and I dropped the girls off...they said they never wanted to discuss this again, and that we shouldn't say anything to anybody, since who would believe four teenagers with alcohol on their breaths," explains Marx. "Mary said she never wanted to talk about it--it didn't happen, and if anyone ever said anything, she would deny having ever been there."
Marx and his friend spoke about the incident, wondering what the light could have been. Alan replied that it could have been "something from another world." To this day, Jeff Marx has no idea or explanation to what the luminous intruder could have been.
But his experiences were not over. Not by a long shot.
"I got home feeling real warm, as though I had a temperature, but after checking with the thermometer it was normal. I looked at my face in the bathroom mirror and I looked sunburned, but it didn't hurt." His parents would ask him about the sunburn during breakfast, but Marx dismissed it as the result of driving with the convertible roof down.
"Then my dad walked," says Marx, "says: you'd better take a look at your car, something happened to it."
Thinking that the convertible could have been rear-ended during the night by a careless motorist, Marx stepped outside to inspect the damage. "I was really shocked. My car was white; the hood and the trunk lid had bubbles all over them; the chrome around the windshield was burned to a bluish color." The car's red upholstery had been faded to an orangish hue.
Taking the vehicle to an auto body repair shop, the mechanic asked if Marx had spilled acid over the car, since the paint was flaking off easily. "I didn't want to explain anything to him," notes the driver of the hapless convertible, "because he might have thought I was some sort of nut."
The automobile was sanded down, primed and painted with two coats of paint, and Jeff drove it around for a whole day. On the following day, the bubbles appeared on the paint again, resulting in two further visits to the body shop that week. "He didn't know what to make of it," says Marx, remembering the auto body mechanic's bewilderment. "he thought it might be a defect in the metal from the factory, since the paint wouldn't stay on the car. I kept the car for about two more months, then I got rid of it--I just couldn't stand being in the car."
Several months after the incident, the four experiencers got together to discuss the event, but the women balked at recalling the strange summer night. "Alan went on to become a UFO investigator," says Marx, "and also was involved with governmental cover-ups. Lily got married and moved out to the Midwest; Mary I saw about a year ago and we spoke about old times. When the sighting came up, she repeated that she didn't want to know about it, it never happened."
"That night in 1965 changed Mary, Lily, Alan and myself," Jeff Marx concludes with an unmistakable air of sadness. "Our lives would never be the same...I have a lot of questions about life on Earth as it is, as how we know it, as how we were raised to know it. I've talked to a lot of people who've had encounters with UFOs and it has changed their lives, and put questions in their minds about life on Earth. I may never know the answer, I don't know."
Jeff Marx's candid story, and his assertions about not knowing exactly what it was changed the course of his life in mid-1960's, could have been echoed a year later by other Pennsylvanian drivers who had their own brushes with the unknown.
On April 17, 1966 Anthony Matteo and John Roth, with their respective spouses, were driving along Route 422 between the communities of Sharon and New Castle in the pre-dawn hours. One of the two women became aware of what she first thought might be a "reflection" of another light source, but suddenly realized that it was an object paralleling of the car's movement down the road. The vehicle stopped on two separate occasions to confirm this suspicion. The object, whose brightness was compared to that of a spotlight, had been on the right side of the car and had later shifted to the left, always staying an estimated 1/4 of mile up in the air. This shadowing continued for a number of miles until the vehicle and its nervous occupants reached New Castle. The object then grew faint and vanished.
Two days later, four boys from Clarion, Pennsylvania, claimed that their car's radio had been subjected to interference allegedly originating from a bright light in the sky, which engaged in the rapid maneuvers for which the UFO phenomenon has become know.
The four youngsters pulled their vehicle over to get a better look at the nimble celestial object, which remained in view for some five minutes before vanishing altogether. Not unexpectedly, the radio static disappeared and the local station could now be heard normally. The most unusual feature to color their experience was that they were subjected to an unusual "rainfall" produced by the object as it hovered above them. There was no word if they or the vehicle were harmed by it.
UFO Pursuit in Spain
A UFO/automobile close encounter, which was reported by the newspaper La Voz de Galicia in November 1985, pitted a 34-year-old newspaper layout specialist who was heading home from La Coruña to his home village of Piadela. While driving along the Cecebre Reservoir, he suddenly became aware of a greenish, rectangular vehicle hovering above him in the night sky. The boxlike object descended vertically some 50 feet away from his car, causing the witness to bring his car to a halt. Quietly, the UFO flew over his car, disappearing shortly thereafter. The witness claimed to have experienced symptoms akin to hypnosis immediately after his experience.
On January 25, 1996, at during the heated days of the Galician UFO wave in northwestern Spain, Bartolomé Vázquez of the town of As Pontes, filmed a triangular UFO as two Spanish Air Force fighters pursued it. He would be treated to the sight of other strange objects in his native skies and undergo a harrowing close encounter: on one occasion, a UFO hovered directly over his vehicle while he traveled along with his wife and children. The unknown craft allegedly damaged the car's roof. Vázquez also claims that his brother had a similar encounter around the same time, but in that incident, "his car's engine died when the UFO flew over it, and all the car doors opened at once..."
Another landmark case involving vehicular interference occurred during the same UFO wave: Andrés Landeira had no idea he was about to become the star of UFO drama on the night of February 26, 1996, when he discovered that his sedan was unable to climb the steep hill which led back to his home in the city of Lugo.
Shifting gears with a perplexed expression on his features, Landeira noticed that the sedan refused to budge. It was only then that he realized that his car was rising into the air.
Panicking, he opened the door, hoping to jump to safety from whatever nameless fate awaited him, but he realized he was well over thirty feet in the air. "I held on to the steering wheel with all my might," Landeira would later tell UFO investigator Manuel Carballal, "I forced my back into the driver's seat and thought I was going to die, being taken to God knows where...Hell! I was really scared."
But the car was not spirited off into the black skies. Landeira observed that whatever had picked him up deposited him back onto the road just slightly ahead of his original position, but sideways. Aside from being badly frightened by the experience, the driver wasn't negatively affected. The only reminder of the event was the car's dashboard clock, which froze at precisely ten minutes before two o'clock in the morning.
Andrés is a "trustworthy man," in the words of his friends and neighbors, who argue that there is no reason whatsoever to believe that he is lying or otherwise dissembling.
Conclusion
In August 2008, this author spoke to “Jeff Marx” about UFO activity and research in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the conversation eventually drifted to Marx’s unforgettable incident in the summer of 1965 – the “endless summer” that still troubles him to this day. Not knowing the exact nature of the phenomenon – whether extra or ultraterrestrial, military or even meteorological – is only part of the equation. He feels that the strange object stole something from him -- maybe a feeling of innocence about the world, trust in government, or even his faith. In spite of the considerable dose of radiation he took from the object, leaving him as sunburned as the protagonists of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, his health never suffered from it. Perhaps what troubles him the most forty-three years later is that he is the only one who actively remembers the incident and worries about it.
“This summer,” he told me, “I ran into one of the girls from the incident, and after we exchanged our hellos, I asked her when we were going to talk about that night. She simply stared at me and said: “That night never happened.”
There is no closure for Jeff Marx. The summer of ’65 will haunt him to the end of his days. posted by Inexplicata at 6:15 AM
THURSDAY'S CHILD
By Scott Corrales
INEXPLICATA Journal of Hispanic UFOlogy
While we marvel at the flood of new cases (and visual evidence) that reaches us every day through a variety of websites and YouTube, it’s hard not to forget the simpler cases of the past, such as one which occurred in a summer much like this one, but thirty years ago and in a country far, far away...
It was July 24, 1978--mid-winter in South American landmass—when a cab driver picked up a fare that would change his life forever. At around 3 o’clock in the morning, Carlos Brandi,19, called for a cab to get him back to his home in Guaymallén, a community in the Argentinean province of Mendoza. As fate would have it, Aldo Nieves, scarcely older than his passenger and driving a white Peugeot 404, was dispatched to pick up the waiting passenger.
Brandi boarded the car and after exchanging the usual pleasantries, sat back in seat in silence. Nieves drove along the empty streets until they came to a crossroads near the Belgrano Train Station in the town of San Jose. Completely unaware of the importance of crossroads in the esoteric tradition, passenger and driver both noticed a white source of light moving along at an estimated altitude of 500 meters. They exchanged words as to what the nature of the light could be, and then dismissed the matter...until both noticed that the white light was shadowing them, much like a feline matching the pace of its prey.
Perhaps it was their youth, perhaps it was the excitement that the UFO phenomenon has always caused in Argentina, but the passenger made the cabbie a bold proposal: to steer toward the object to have a better view. Stranger still was that the cabbie should accept, turning off the meter and heading his Peugeot in the object’s direction. Aldo Nieves dutifully radioed this back to Leonardo Argañaraz, his dispatcher, who in turn told all his other units to rendezvous with Nieves and his passenger at the location in question, taking care to contact the authorities as well. The young driver gave a blow-by-blow account over his car radio to all the other vehicles as he approached the glowing unknown.
Meanwhile Carlos Brandi, the passenger, had his torso halfway out the window as he stared at the object, which now acquired more defined proportions and resembled “ a giant mushroom”. Suddenly inspired, the driver began flashing his lights at the unknown presence in a form of improvised semaphore, hoping to make contact. His improvised signals were more successful than he could have anticipated; as the object appeared to take notice, speeding up ahead of the taxicab and then slowing down to remain still at a distance of roughly a thousand meters. At this point, Brandi and Nieves were in a position to make out some details: the object, whose diameter was guesstimated at ten meters with a height of 5-6 meters, had a white light on its upper section and four “navigation lights” around its edge.
The craft – for it was now possible to speak of it in terms of a structured vehicle – moved side to side across the road, pausing briefly over a service station and then weaving out sight into a residential area and becoming visible again. And it was at this location – the Santa Ana district – that pedestrian onlookers became witnesses to the otherworldly presence. Two women waiting for the bus gazed skyward at the erratic object; one of them was seized by a sudden panic that made her cling to the trunk of a nearby tree and scream in terror at the unknown
But the game was afoot, and the young hunters pursued their prize with gusto. Upon reaching the road linking the villages of Corralitos and Rodeo de la Cruz, the Peugeot’s engine began to sputter. The taxicab’s headlights dimmed, then died out completely, as did the radio link to the other units and the dispatcher’s base station. Brandi and Nieves suddenly found their roles reversed – the hunters unwittingly turned into prey – as the object wheeled around towards them. Brandi opened the rear passenger door and ran out of the cab into the darkness, seeking shelter behind a nearby house. Nieves was frozen in his seat, unable to move his legs, until he managed to overcome this paralysis and desert his Peugeot, taking shelter next to his companion at a distance of some thirty meters from the car.
The craft was now in sight: seized by fear, both humans could do little else but keep their eyes riveted on the unearthly structure. Featuring large windows or portholes, the presence of occupants – tall, slender humanoid silhouettes – could be made out clearly enough for a detailed description to be made. The figures were described as hooded and wearing close-fitting garments; one of them appeared to operate some kind of instrument panel that was suspended in the air. No noise issued from the vehicle as the figures scurried around inside.
Thoughts raced furiously through Nieves’s head, as he feared harm from these presences, which looked down from above at the Peugeot “much like doctors observing a surgical procedure from the gallery above,” as he described it. But any fears that the slender, hooded figures would whisk him away to an uncertain fate were dissipated when the object pulled away into the distance. After a while, still in the clutches of terror, passenger and driver returned to the taxicab, whose engine turned over normally, but with a curious detail: the intensity of the car’s lights was so strong that the dome light burst; the lights of the car radio short-circuited as well.
Perhaps feeling a modicum of relief, the erstwhile hunters returned their attention to the craft, which was now motionless and at quite a distance. There was a flash and an explosion – perhaps a sonic boom? – and the vehicle vanished from sight. It was at this point that Nieves passed out, overcome by the sound. At this point, some of the other livery vehicles arrived at the scene, offering assistance to the unconscious driver and to Brandi, the distraught passenger. Nieves was taken to Mendoza’s General Hospital, where he awoke in such a state of nervous excitement that it became necessary to put him in restraints. The explosion and subsequent disappearance of the strange object was confirmed by three other cab drivers, the same ones who took Aldo Nieves to the hospital.
Veteran Argentinean researcher Carlos Banchs, who interviewed both witnesses and wrote a report on the case, notes that the Argentinean Air Force dismissed this case as “a mistaken observation of its nocturnal training exercises over the area.”
Calling Mr. Goodwrench
The belief that UFOs were able to cause "electromagnetic interference" (alternatively known as EM effects) on Earth goes back to the early days of the phenomenon, when it was noticed that the proximity of these unknown forms could cause car headlights to dim or turn off completely, produce radio interference and cause wide-scale blackouts in different parts of the world. Whether this effect is a deliberate test of man-made devices or a purely accidental remains unanswered, naturally.
Researchers interested in the "vehicle interference" aspect of the phenomenon believed at first that only gasoline-fueled internal combustion engines were prone to being affected by UFO electromagnetism. Then cases involving diesel engines succumbing to the proximity of an unknown object became known.
Spanish UFO researcher Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos devotes a comprehensive chapter to EM effects in his landmark Enciclopedia de los encuentros cercanos con ovnis (Barcelona: Plaza y Janes, 1987). Ballester describes the effects produced by a UFO as following a fairly standard pattern with certain variations: engine failure followed by a dimming or darkening of headlights; diesel engines continue running but their operation becomes haphazard, stopping and starting. "It frequently becomes necessary," he observes, "to restart gasoline-fueled engines altogether [...] this succession of effects appears to correspond, at least from the theoretical standpoint, to the presence of strong ionization. This could account for failures in the electrical system by hindering the proper operation of spark plugs and draining batteries."
Endless Summer – The Marx Incident
The American love affair with the car – featured in such cinematic experiences as George Lucas’ “American Graffiti” – usually conjures up images of long hot summer nights and days, convertible coupes and sedans and young men and women enjoying each other’s company to the sounds of an AM radio. But what holds true for the silver screen often falls flat in real life, and this is certainly true for the following case.
Pennsylvania, a state with a long history of UFO sightings, boasts a vehicular persecution case that has not been widely discussed at all, and is in fact known only to a few. It involves a person known to this author and to others Pennsylvania UFO and paranormal researchers; at his own request, we have identified him with the pseudonym of "Jeff Marx" and the names of the other parties involved in his hair-raising story are aliases as well.
In June 1965, Jeff Marx and three companions--his best friend Alan and their respective girlfriends, Mary and Lily--were driving at night aboard a brand new convertible in Cranberry Township, north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Tooling around in the warm summer evening, only a week after graduating from high school and with the prospect of the future before them, the foursome had no idea that the unknown was about to execute an unwelcome intrusion into their lives.
"I had a convertible that plays a major part in this sighting," adds Jeff Marx, "what one would call...evidence."
That evening, he recalls, he stopped by to collect his friends and they went off to enjoy a few rounds of miniature golf followed by a visit to a pizza parlor. Given the lateness of the hour, they decided to begin the return home. Alan, however, asked his friend to drive down a few country roads to partake of a bottle of beer he'd placed in the car. "I was northbound on Route 19 and I turned onto Freedom-Cryder Road. Back in 1965 it was a very rural area. You had farmhouses further down the road toward Freedom. We turned down this road about ten or twenty five minutes after ten [o'clock]."
As convertible made its way down the country road, Alan asked Jeff to pull over, since something very unusual was going on. "That light's been following us for a while," he explained, after the car had halted on the curb. "That light up there. It's getting awful close and I don't hear anything."
Jeff Marx admits that he could not hear anything either, but the size of the light in the black sky appeared to be increasing, coming toward them. "We decided to get out of there," Marx recalls, "but I couldn't get the engine started. We jumped out of the car, ran across the road into a field, and hid under a [fallen] tree. By now the object was over the car, illuminating the area. As dark as it was, I could see my car. Alan said the object reminded him of a teardrop, and to me it looked like an upside-down ice cream cone."
Nearly forty years after the events, Marx is still amazed by one particular aspect of the uncanny unknown object: "It was white hot, really bright, brighter than anything I've ever seen in my life. It wobbled and swayed back and forth. I wanted to get a better look at it, and I stood up to take a better look. Then I felt this wave of heat hit my face."
His passengers weren't as awestruck as he: Mary was on the verge of terror, shouting that they were all going to die; Alan and Lily had to pull Jeff down behind the apparent safety of the fallen tree after his effort to examine the phenomenon more closely.
"Mary was really upset," adds Marx. "It really freaked her out."
What seemed like an hour went by before the pellucid object finished its inspection of the convertible. It drifted away from the car and into the night sky, moving upward and picking up speed, vanishing out of sight in a matter of seconds. Marx remembers that the object acquired a reddish cast as it disappeared.
"We were pretty shaken by the incident," says Marx. "Another car came down the road in the opposite direction, stopped by my car and looked at it, and then sped away. I don't know if he was a witnessed to what happened, but after looking at my car, he didn't waste much time getting away from it."
Walking over to the car, the shaken teenagers tried to get back inside, only to find that the door handles were hot. Once inside, the young women in the rear remarked that the seats were warm; the same strange warmth emanated from the dashboard and the steering wheel. "The chrome strip around the windshield was so hot I couldn't even touch it--it burned my hand."
The convertible started up normally and the four witnesses to the unusual luminous phenomenon returned home in silence. "Alan and I dropped the girls off...they said they never wanted to discuss this again, and that we shouldn't say anything to anybody, since who would believe four teenagers with alcohol on their breaths," explains Marx. "Mary said she never wanted to talk about it--it didn't happen, and if anyone ever said anything, she would deny having ever been there."
Marx and his friend spoke about the incident, wondering what the light could have been. Alan replied that it could have been "something from another world." To this day, Jeff Marx has no idea or explanation to what the luminous intruder could have been.
But his experiences were not over. Not by a long shot.
"I got home feeling real warm, as though I had a temperature, but after checking with the thermometer it was normal. I looked at my face in the bathroom mirror and I looked sunburned, but it didn't hurt." His parents would ask him about the sunburn during breakfast, but Marx dismissed it as the result of driving with the convertible roof down.
"Then my dad walked," says Marx, "says: you'd better take a look at your car, something happened to it."
Thinking that the convertible could have been rear-ended during the night by a careless motorist, Marx stepped outside to inspect the damage. "I was really shocked. My car was white; the hood and the trunk lid had bubbles all over them; the chrome around the windshield was burned to a bluish color." The car's red upholstery had been faded to an orangish hue.
Taking the vehicle to an auto body repair shop, the mechanic asked if Marx had spilled acid over the car, since the paint was flaking off easily. "I didn't want to explain anything to him," notes the driver of the hapless convertible, "because he might have thought I was some sort of nut."
The automobile was sanded down, primed and painted with two coats of paint, and Jeff drove it around for a whole day. On the following day, the bubbles appeared on the paint again, resulting in two further visits to the body shop that week. "He didn't know what to make of it," says Marx, remembering the auto body mechanic's bewilderment. "he thought it might be a defect in the metal from the factory, since the paint wouldn't stay on the car. I kept the car for about two more months, then I got rid of it--I just couldn't stand being in the car."
Several months after the incident, the four experiencers got together to discuss the event, but the women balked at recalling the strange summer night. "Alan went on to become a UFO investigator," says Marx, "and also was involved with governmental cover-ups. Lily got married and moved out to the Midwest; Mary I saw about a year ago and we spoke about old times. When the sighting came up, she repeated that she didn't want to know about it, it never happened."
"That night in 1965 changed Mary, Lily, Alan and myself," Jeff Marx concludes with an unmistakable air of sadness. "Our lives would never be the same...I have a lot of questions about life on Earth as it is, as how we know it, as how we were raised to know it. I've talked to a lot of people who've had encounters with UFOs and it has changed their lives, and put questions in their minds about life on Earth. I may never know the answer, I don't know."
Jeff Marx's candid story, and his assertions about not knowing exactly what it was changed the course of his life in mid-1960's, could have been echoed a year later by other Pennsylvanian drivers who had their own brushes with the unknown.
On April 17, 1966 Anthony Matteo and John Roth, with their respective spouses, were driving along Route 422 between the communities of Sharon and New Castle in the pre-dawn hours. One of the two women became aware of what she first thought might be a "reflection" of another light source, but suddenly realized that it was an object paralleling of the car's movement down the road. The vehicle stopped on two separate occasions to confirm this suspicion. The object, whose brightness was compared to that of a spotlight, had been on the right side of the car and had later shifted to the left, always staying an estimated 1/4 of mile up in the air. This shadowing continued for a number of miles until the vehicle and its nervous occupants reached New Castle. The object then grew faint and vanished.
Two days later, four boys from Clarion, Pennsylvania, claimed that their car's radio had been subjected to interference allegedly originating from a bright light in the sky, which engaged in the rapid maneuvers for which the UFO phenomenon has become know.
The four youngsters pulled their vehicle over to get a better look at the nimble celestial object, which remained in view for some five minutes before vanishing altogether. Not unexpectedly, the radio static disappeared and the local station could now be heard normally. The most unusual feature to color their experience was that they were subjected to an unusual "rainfall" produced by the object as it hovered above them. There was no word if they or the vehicle were harmed by it.
UFO Pursuit in Spain
A UFO/automobile close encounter, which was reported by the newspaper La Voz de Galicia in November 1985, pitted a 34-year-old newspaper layout specialist who was heading home from La Coruña to his home village of Piadela. While driving along the Cecebre Reservoir, he suddenly became aware of a greenish, rectangular vehicle hovering above him in the night sky. The boxlike object descended vertically some 50 feet away from his car, causing the witness to bring his car to a halt. Quietly, the UFO flew over his car, disappearing shortly thereafter. The witness claimed to have experienced symptoms akin to hypnosis immediately after his experience.
On January 25, 1996, at during the heated days of the Galician UFO wave in northwestern Spain, Bartolomé Vázquez of the town of As Pontes, filmed a triangular UFO as two Spanish Air Force fighters pursued it. He would be treated to the sight of other strange objects in his native skies and undergo a harrowing close encounter: on one occasion, a UFO hovered directly over his vehicle while he traveled along with his wife and children. The unknown craft allegedly damaged the car's roof. Vázquez also claims that his brother had a similar encounter around the same time, but in that incident, "his car's engine died when the UFO flew over it, and all the car doors opened at once..."
Another landmark case involving vehicular interference occurred during the same UFO wave: Andrés Landeira had no idea he was about to become the star of UFO drama on the night of February 26, 1996, when he discovered that his sedan was unable to climb the steep hill which led back to his home in the city of Lugo.
Shifting gears with a perplexed expression on his features, Landeira noticed that the sedan refused to budge. It was only then that he realized that his car was rising into the air.
Panicking, he opened the door, hoping to jump to safety from whatever nameless fate awaited him, but he realized he was well over thirty feet in the air. "I held on to the steering wheel with all my might," Landeira would later tell UFO investigator Manuel Carballal, "I forced my back into the driver's seat and thought I was going to die, being taken to God knows where...Hell! I was really scared."
But the car was not spirited off into the black skies. Landeira observed that whatever had picked him up deposited him back onto the road just slightly ahead of his original position, but sideways. Aside from being badly frightened by the experience, the driver wasn't negatively affected. The only reminder of the event was the car's dashboard clock, which froze at precisely ten minutes before two o'clock in the morning.
Andrés is a "trustworthy man," in the words of his friends and neighbors, who argue that there is no reason whatsoever to believe that he is lying or otherwise dissembling.
Conclusion
In August 2008, this author spoke to “Jeff Marx” about UFO activity and research in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the conversation eventually drifted to Marx’s unforgettable incident in the summer of 1965 – the “endless summer” that still troubles him to this day. Not knowing the exact nature of the phenomenon – whether extra or ultraterrestrial, military or even meteorological – is only part of the equation. He feels that the strange object stole something from him -- maybe a feeling of innocence about the world, trust in government, or even his faith. In spite of the considerable dose of radiation he took from the object, leaving him as sunburned as the protagonists of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, his health never suffered from it. Perhaps what troubles him the most forty-three years later is that he is the only one who actively remembers the incident and worries about it.
“This summer,” he told me, “I ran into one of the girls from the incident, and after we exchanged our hellos, I asked her when we were going to talk about that night. She simply stared at me and said: “That night never happened.”
There is no closure for Jeff Marx. The summer of ’65 will haunt him to the end of his days. posted by Inexplicata at 6:15 AM
THURSDAY'S CHILD
Sunday, August 10, 2008
ALFRED BURTOO
1983-Alfred Burtoo Abduction
By Billy Booth, About.com
Alfred Burtoo Abduction
Timothy Good
Summary: In 1983, 77-year-old Alfred Burtoo was enjoying some fishing in the Basingstoke Canal in Aldershot, Hampshire, United Kingdom. Very early on August 12, it was a nice, quiet day for his favorite pastime. Suddenly his concentration on the water was interrupted by a bright light descending from the sky. Whatever this was, it landed not too far away from Burtoo. There was a Mod base in the vicinity, and he thought maybe he had seen a helicopter land.
Two Strange Beings: Burtoo had just poured himself a cup of tea, when his dog Tiny became very nervous. Two beings suddenly appeared out of the darkness. "They were about four foot high, dressed in pale green coveralls from head to foot," Burtoo told reporters. "And they had helmets of the same color with a visor that was blacked out." The two beings beckoned for him to follow them. He obliged. "I was 77 and didn't have much to lose," he later explained.
Black, Metallic Chamber: Burtoo followed the two strange beings until they arrived at a flying saucer landed on the ground. He ascended the stairs leading up to the flying machine until he could go no further. The ceiling was too short, and he had to bend over to continue. He was now inside of a black, metallic chamber. The room had a foul smell, like decaying meat.
Seamless Construction: "I did not see any signs of nuts or bolts, nor did I see any seams where the object had been put together," he recalled. "What did interest me most of all was a shaft that rose up from the floor to the ceiling. The shaft was about four feet in circumference, and on the right-hand side stood two forms similar to those that walked along the towpath with me."
Scanned by Orange Light: The curious old fisherman was then instructed to stand underneath an orange light. This light seemed to scan his body for several minutes. "What is your age?" asked one of the beings, in a voice which sounded like "a mixture of Chinese and Russian". When he told them his age, he was told that he could go. He was told he was too old and sick for their purposes. Burtoo then walked out of the ship, down the stairs and back to this fishing spot.
Greatest Experiences : "The first thing I did... was to pick up my cold cup of tea and drink it," he recalled. "And then I heard this whining noise, just as if an electric generator was starting up, and this thing lifted up then took off at a very high speed. I got into what I had come out for-the fishing!" He would later tell newsmen that it was one of the greatest experiences of his life.
Conclusions: What are we to think about this bizarre experience of Alfred Burtoo? To my knowledge, there was no physical evidence of the crafts landing, and no marks of any kind on Burtoo. This is one of those cases that we are not able to fully validate. Burtoo was the only witness, and we have to take his word, as he was not given to making up stories, and had no reason to perpetuate a hoax. He gained nothing from his experience except being in the local papers.
THURSDAY'S CHILD
By Billy Booth, About.com
Alfred Burtoo Abduction
Timothy Good
Summary: In 1983, 77-year-old Alfred Burtoo was enjoying some fishing in the Basingstoke Canal in Aldershot, Hampshire, United Kingdom. Very early on August 12, it was a nice, quiet day for his favorite pastime. Suddenly his concentration on the water was interrupted by a bright light descending from the sky. Whatever this was, it landed not too far away from Burtoo. There was a Mod base in the vicinity, and he thought maybe he had seen a helicopter land.
Two Strange Beings: Burtoo had just poured himself a cup of tea, when his dog Tiny became very nervous. Two beings suddenly appeared out of the darkness. "They were about four foot high, dressed in pale green coveralls from head to foot," Burtoo told reporters. "And they had helmets of the same color with a visor that was blacked out." The two beings beckoned for him to follow them. He obliged. "I was 77 and didn't have much to lose," he later explained.
Black, Metallic Chamber: Burtoo followed the two strange beings until they arrived at a flying saucer landed on the ground. He ascended the stairs leading up to the flying machine until he could go no further. The ceiling was too short, and he had to bend over to continue. He was now inside of a black, metallic chamber. The room had a foul smell, like decaying meat.
Seamless Construction: "I did not see any signs of nuts or bolts, nor did I see any seams where the object had been put together," he recalled. "What did interest me most of all was a shaft that rose up from the floor to the ceiling. The shaft was about four feet in circumference, and on the right-hand side stood two forms similar to those that walked along the towpath with me."
Scanned by Orange Light: The curious old fisherman was then instructed to stand underneath an orange light. This light seemed to scan his body for several minutes. "What is your age?" asked one of the beings, in a voice which sounded like "a mixture of Chinese and Russian". When he told them his age, he was told that he could go. He was told he was too old and sick for their purposes. Burtoo then walked out of the ship, down the stairs and back to this fishing spot.
Greatest Experiences : "The first thing I did... was to pick up my cold cup of tea and drink it," he recalled. "And then I heard this whining noise, just as if an electric generator was starting up, and this thing lifted up then took off at a very high speed. I got into what I had come out for-the fishing!" He would later tell newsmen that it was one of the greatest experiences of his life.
Conclusions: What are we to think about this bizarre experience of Alfred Burtoo? To my knowledge, there was no physical evidence of the crafts landing, and no marks of any kind on Burtoo. This is one of those cases that we are not able to fully validate. Burtoo was the only witness, and we have to take his word, as he was not given to making up stories, and had no reason to perpetuate a hoax. He gained nothing from his experience except being in the local papers.
THURSDAY'S CHILD
Thursday, August 7, 2008
D. C. GETZ
At the age of 12 a strange thing happened to me.
One night in May of 1967 - it was near 11:30 p.m. - when I was aroused by a blinding white light. I had thought at first that it was heat lightning, but the light seemed to fill my whole room.
I thought at first I should be afraid, but I wasn’t. I felt very relaxed and at peace. A strange feeling came over me, I was no longer alone in my room. I could feel the presence of something, or someone, moving around in the room.
That was all I really remember from my encounter.
That very same night I had a very detailed dream. I dreamed I was out walking somewhere and I found on the ground a 1906 Indian head penny.
When I awoke the next morning, I could remember my dream in great detail.
In the progression of that very same day, while on my paper route, I had sat down my heavy bag of papers on the first step at one of the houses I delivered to.
Well, when I reached down to pull out a paper from my bag, I saw something flat and round in a freshly tilled flower bed. After I had picked it up and wiped off the dirt, there was a 1906 Indian head penny I had only dreamed of the night before.
To this very day I can still remember the exact spot it was found.
Ever since that night of the blinding light I have had those kinds of dreams. I don’t have them all the time, just once in awhile.
I now dream of a full day’s events,, and in the same week I will find myself repeating that day in detail at work.
It is a very weird feeling to know what is going to happen before it does.
I know now that the aliens that visited me, did something to my mind.
I have heard voices at time when there was nobody around.
I have also acquired a type of cluster headaches that is very painful at times.
I had EEG’s and KAT scans and doctors say I have nothing to cause them.
From voices I have heard lately, I am to search for others like myself who have had encounters with aliens. I am to communicate with these people and record their names for future space colonies!
Those visitors that communicate with me have told me, we (meaning earthlings) are to be prepared for future evacuation of earth.
Another encounter occurred at the age of 14. A strange man walked up to me and sat down beside me at a lunch counter in a ten cent store.
The person started talking to me about UFOs: He told me that he knew that I had seen aliens in the past and that I would see more in the future. The person was holding tightly in his right hand an old, badly beaten paperback book called “Flying Saucers and the Bible.” He handed the book to me and told me to read it carefully and that its contents would open my eyes to a reality that others could not fathom.
The person patted my hand holding the tattered book and told me to hold on tightly to this book, it will help guide you toward a journey in the future.
I looked down at the book in my hand with amazing wonder then looked up to speak to him and he was gone!
After I had read through the book, I placed it among my other books and when I went back to get it to show to a friend, it was gone. It was nowhere to be found.
To this day I still search through my things hoping it will turn up.
I am hoping I might find another copy of that book through others that have had a similar encounter.
Recently I received a telepathic message from my visitors, whom I had not heard from for many years.
The message came to me while I was at work between the time of 2:30 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. The message came with sharp pains deep within my head.
I can only speculate an interpretation, but I feel my speculation will not be far wrong.
Many aliens from other worlds have made a stop on Earth to choose a human mate or companion that will soon accompany them on a journey. The journey is to that alien’s planet to mate with and begin a new race of beings to inhabit newly found planets in distant galaxies able to sustain a type of human life, because soon earth as we know it, will be no more.
Soon a great number of spacecraft will be coming to claim their new eternal companions.
Before the year 2000, two hundred thousand humans will be removed from the earth (!).
I myself have been chosen as a companion to an alien female.
A’yora is the name of the female,, her facial features remind me more so of an insect by the shape of her eyes and head. Even though her head may be different, the body is almost identical to a human, though they have longer toes and fingers and also they have a small five to six inch tail at the base of their spine.
My companion has only shown herself to me once.
My feelings toward this female were at first questionable. But now I find myself feeling compassion for this being. Her speech is foreign to my ear, but yet it translates in my mind as if it were spoken in the King’s English.
I now find myself feeling alien to my own world.
My wife has noticed changes in me, that she questions whether or not I am the same person she married.
The alien female is becoming more and more attractive to me, and my human wife less and less.
It doesn’t seem long till my life here on Earth will be wiped clean from my mind and a new life elsewhere will replace it.
I am now looking forward to my new life with my new companion.
D.C. Getz, Ashland, Ohio.
________
Used by permission of Tim Beckley, UFO Universe.
TODAY'S CLOSING POEM
THE STRANGERS AMONG US
By Betsy Warner
They come in saucers both large and small
wishing to make contact, on us they call.
They mean no harm and say they come in peace,
a part of our minds, they wish to lease.
As friendly as they seem, doubts do appear,
As they contact us year after year.
What exactly is the meaning of their presence?
Of life, are they the essence?
Do they promise us things they cannot deliver?
why does their presence make us scream and shiver?
How will we know in whom we can trust?
When they arrive, The Strangers Among us.
Stay tuned for another scintillating story next time. Until then "Peace".
Thursday's Child
One night in May of 1967 - it was near 11:30 p.m. - when I was aroused by a blinding white light. I had thought at first that it was heat lightning, but the light seemed to fill my whole room.
I thought at first I should be afraid, but I wasn’t. I felt very relaxed and at peace. A strange feeling came over me, I was no longer alone in my room. I could feel the presence of something, or someone, moving around in the room.
That was all I really remember from my encounter.
That very same night I had a very detailed dream. I dreamed I was out walking somewhere and I found on the ground a 1906 Indian head penny.
When I awoke the next morning, I could remember my dream in great detail.
In the progression of that very same day, while on my paper route, I had sat down my heavy bag of papers on the first step at one of the houses I delivered to.
Well, when I reached down to pull out a paper from my bag, I saw something flat and round in a freshly tilled flower bed. After I had picked it up and wiped off the dirt, there was a 1906 Indian head penny I had only dreamed of the night before.
To this very day I can still remember the exact spot it was found.
Ever since that night of the blinding light I have had those kinds of dreams. I don’t have them all the time, just once in awhile.
I now dream of a full day’s events,, and in the same week I will find myself repeating that day in detail at work.
It is a very weird feeling to know what is going to happen before it does.
I know now that the aliens that visited me, did something to my mind.
I have heard voices at time when there was nobody around.
I have also acquired a type of cluster headaches that is very painful at times.
I had EEG’s and KAT scans and doctors say I have nothing to cause them.
From voices I have heard lately, I am to search for others like myself who have had encounters with aliens. I am to communicate with these people and record their names for future space colonies!
Those visitors that communicate with me have told me, we (meaning earthlings) are to be prepared for future evacuation of earth.
Another encounter occurred at the age of 14. A strange man walked up to me and sat down beside me at a lunch counter in a ten cent store.
The person started talking to me about UFOs: He told me that he knew that I had seen aliens in the past and that I would see more in the future. The person was holding tightly in his right hand an old, badly beaten paperback book called “Flying Saucers and the Bible.” He handed the book to me and told me to read it carefully and that its contents would open my eyes to a reality that others could not fathom.
The person patted my hand holding the tattered book and told me to hold on tightly to this book, it will help guide you toward a journey in the future.
I looked down at the book in my hand with amazing wonder then looked up to speak to him and he was gone!
After I had read through the book, I placed it among my other books and when I went back to get it to show to a friend, it was gone. It was nowhere to be found.
To this day I still search through my things hoping it will turn up.
I am hoping I might find another copy of that book through others that have had a similar encounter.
Recently I received a telepathic message from my visitors, whom I had not heard from for many years.
The message came to me while I was at work between the time of 2:30 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. The message came with sharp pains deep within my head.
I can only speculate an interpretation, but I feel my speculation will not be far wrong.
Many aliens from other worlds have made a stop on Earth to choose a human mate or companion that will soon accompany them on a journey. The journey is to that alien’s planet to mate with and begin a new race of beings to inhabit newly found planets in distant galaxies able to sustain a type of human life, because soon earth as we know it, will be no more.
Soon a great number of spacecraft will be coming to claim their new eternal companions.
Before the year 2000, two hundred thousand humans will be removed from the earth (!).
I myself have been chosen as a companion to an alien female.
A’yora is the name of the female,, her facial features remind me more so of an insect by the shape of her eyes and head. Even though her head may be different, the body is almost identical to a human, though they have longer toes and fingers and also they have a small five to six inch tail at the base of their spine.
My companion has only shown herself to me once.
My feelings toward this female were at first questionable. But now I find myself feeling compassion for this being. Her speech is foreign to my ear, but yet it translates in my mind as if it were spoken in the King’s English.
I now find myself feeling alien to my own world.
My wife has noticed changes in me, that she questions whether or not I am the same person she married.
The alien female is becoming more and more attractive to me, and my human wife less and less.
It doesn’t seem long till my life here on Earth will be wiped clean from my mind and a new life elsewhere will replace it.
I am now looking forward to my new life with my new companion.
D.C. Getz, Ashland, Ohio.
________
Used by permission of Tim Beckley, UFO Universe.
TODAY'S CLOSING POEM
THE STRANGERS AMONG US
By Betsy Warner
They come in saucers both large and small
wishing to make contact, on us they call.
They mean no harm and say they come in peace,
a part of our minds, they wish to lease.
As friendly as they seem, doubts do appear,
As they contact us year after year.
What exactly is the meaning of their presence?
Of life, are they the essence?
Do they promise us things they cannot deliver?
why does their presence make us scream and shiver?
How will we know in whom we can trust?
When they arrive, The Strangers Among us.
Stay tuned for another scintillating story next time. Until then "Peace".
Thursday's Child
Sunday, August 3, 2008
FROM PHANTOMS AND MONSTERS BLOG
I received a correspondence today from an Irish fisherman who had an incredible close encounter. His name and specific location are being withheld for privacy and fear of ridicule. By permission, I have edited the original for comprehension reasons.
“Approximately one year ago, my mate and I went out to sea to fish at night. We left the port at 7:00 PM local time and planned to return at 9:00 AM the next morning in order to land our catch.
It was my watch at the time, around 3:00 AM, and I was sitting in the wheel house drinking some tea. My mate was in his bunk below getting some rest. We had been trawling about 2 hours and the horizon was just starting to brighten up a bit, enough that I could see the ocean surface.
As I sat watching the nets, I noticed that the seagulls that follow the boat were quiet which is unusual. It was obvious that something had spooked them. I walked out of the wheel house and looked along the side the boat and noticed a strange silhouette floating above the water surface that was moving at the same speed of the boat. When I took another look, it resembled a small human lying flat and floating. I was immediately stunned. I rushed back to the wheel house and slammed the door. I was paralyzed with fear and muttered uncontrollably.
I cautiously looked out the window and noticed the being float alongside the boat towards the bow. The navigation lights were on and I could see that the being now turned upright and was floating towards me, no more than 5 feet from the right side of the wheel house window. I just froze as this creature stared at me.
The being had an oval head, more round than most depictions of ‘greys’ in the media. It had large black oval eyes without pupils and a small mouth that looked like a frown. The skin was very pale, almost a sickly grayish white color. It was dressed in a black hooded robe that covered everything except the face. The being opened it's mouth for a few seconds then closed it again. Then it floated into the darkness and disappeared. My best estimation, the entire encounter lasted less than one minute.
This encounter has affected my life immensely. I have trouble sleeping and dream about the incident constantly. As well, I go out to sea less and less now and will probably stop soon.”
Note: This close encounter parallels one of my theories that extraterrestrials move ‘inter-dimensionally’ and don’t always need vehicles. There have been other stories of aliens showing up suddenly, though this account is definitely unique.
Thursday's Child
“Approximately one year ago, my mate and I went out to sea to fish at night. We left the port at 7:00 PM local time and planned to return at 9:00 AM the next morning in order to land our catch.
It was my watch at the time, around 3:00 AM, and I was sitting in the wheel house drinking some tea. My mate was in his bunk below getting some rest. We had been trawling about 2 hours and the horizon was just starting to brighten up a bit, enough that I could see the ocean surface.
As I sat watching the nets, I noticed that the seagulls that follow the boat were quiet which is unusual. It was obvious that something had spooked them. I walked out of the wheel house and looked along the side the boat and noticed a strange silhouette floating above the water surface that was moving at the same speed of the boat. When I took another look, it resembled a small human lying flat and floating. I was immediately stunned. I rushed back to the wheel house and slammed the door. I was paralyzed with fear and muttered uncontrollably.
I cautiously looked out the window and noticed the being float alongside the boat towards the bow. The navigation lights were on and I could see that the being now turned upright and was floating towards me, no more than 5 feet from the right side of the wheel house window. I just froze as this creature stared at me.
The being had an oval head, more round than most depictions of ‘greys’ in the media. It had large black oval eyes without pupils and a small mouth that looked like a frown. The skin was very pale, almost a sickly grayish white color. It was dressed in a black hooded robe that covered everything except the face. The being opened it's mouth for a few seconds then closed it again. Then it floated into the darkness and disappeared. My best estimation, the entire encounter lasted less than one minute.
This encounter has affected my life immensely. I have trouble sleeping and dream about the incident constantly. As well, I go out to sea less and less now and will probably stop soon.”
Note: This close encounter parallels one of my theories that extraterrestrials move ‘inter-dimensionally’ and don’t always need vehicles. There have been other stories of aliens showing up suddenly, though this account is definitely unique.
Thursday's Child
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